Rebecca Solnit writes in The Nation (April 3, 2006 issue) on Three Who Made a Revolution:
Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson and Betty Friedan did it in books.
Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities appeared in 1961, Carson’s Silent Spring came out the following year and Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963. These three intellectual bombs collectively assailed almost every institution in American and indeed industrial and Western society. Jacobs ripped into the reinvented postwar city, urban planners’ obsession with segregating home from work, rich from poor, urban dwellings from the street and from commerce, business from residential, people from one another, making cities over in the new image of suburbia–and by implication, the belief in progress and technology and institutional control. Carson radically questioned the faith in big science and its disastrous new solutions to age-old problems, and maybe even the old Cartesian worldview of isolated fragments, which she replaced with a precocious vision of ecosystems in which contaminants like DDT and fallout kept traveling from their origins to touch and taint everything. Friedan took on the women’s half of the American dream, gender, patriarchy and the middle-class suburban family, bringing the assault full circle. After all, the suburbanization Jacobs excoriated was designed to produce the all-too-private lives Friedan investigated. Together, these three writers addressed major facets of the great modern project to control the world on every scale, locating it in the widespread attacks on nature, on women and on the chaotic, the diverse, the crowded and the poor. Their work transformed our perceptions of the indoor world of the home, the outdoor world of cities and the larger realm of the biosphere, opening vast new possibilities for social transformation.
…
“Only a book” is a popular epithet, implying that writing always takes place on the sidelines, but these three make it clear that books can change the world.
how she continued to write after being so heavily criticized by so many in the writing world. a true revolutionary. her writing style so strange and simple, she seemed to love the rythym of words, often repeating them over and over as if in a song.
(Go see the full illustration and entry, and be prepared to be inspired and fall in love with the spirit that is Keri Smith.)
The American Academy of Poets’ poem of the day is one from Croatian poet Tomaž Å alamun. (Aside: Read Robert Hass on Å alamun here.) It has taken almost the whole month of national poetry month, but finally today, here is a poem that risks. (How I wish I knew the language, though, and that it would not have to be a translation.)Young Cops
by Tomaz Salamun
All young cops have soft
mild eyes. Their upbringing is lavish.
They walk between blueberries and ferns,
rescuing grannies from rising waters.
With the motion of a hand they ask for
a snack from those plastic bags. They
sit down on tree stumps, looking at valleys
and thinking of their moms. But woe is me
if a young one gets mad. A Scourge
of God rings, with a club that later you can
borrow to blot your bare feet.
Every cop wears a cap, his head murmuring under it
A sled rushes down a slope in his dreams.
Whomever he kills, he brings spring to,
whomever he touches has a wound inscribed.
I would give my granny and my
grandpa, my mom and my pa, my wife
and my son to a cop to play with.
He would tie up my granny’s white hair,
but he’d probably chop up my son
on the stump of a tree. The cop himself would be sad
that his toy was broken. That’s the way they are
when smoking pot: melancholy. They take off
their caps and breathe their tears into them.
Actually, they’re like camels riding
in the desert, as if it were the wet palm of a hand.
It would change my world to write the words of the story I am struggling with telling. Somewhere that I now can’t remember, someone wrote this: I have wanted to paint this fellow and his valued possessions since I took the reference shots way back in the 1980s. Imagine having a painting stick in one’s head until one’s ability catches up to the task. I paint this one today… I saved these words as a comfort, as an articulation of what seems to be happening with me, with writing this story.