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We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.
eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having,
Sometimes the male protagonists protected women, particularly beautiful young white women, from other men, and protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face, and either one put your fate in their hands.
Later in my twenties, an older man I was seeing said, “Baby, you’re driven,” and in that age when I threw out sharp replies without thinking, I said all too accurately, “And you’re parked.”
There is no way out of the spiritual battle There is no way you can avoid taking sides There is no way you can not have a poetics no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher you do it in the consciousness of making or not making yr world
You cannot write a single line without a cosmology.
In journalism school I learned to write straightforward reports, though my first teacher there resented my inability to write the flat prose that was often taken for journalistic objectivity, which even then I saw as a masculine voice.
That is, I was arguing that the wars of the future and the past were overlapping in the present, and that they were largely unrecognized because of how we thought about things like war, and the West, and nature, and culture, and Native people.
Brilliantly, she ties together two wars that we think are not in the present, nuclear and Indian, and shows them to be here.
People watching is one of life’s great pleasures,
regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small-town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsals for the end-of-the-world
This is related to the other point and past and future wars.
we can distinguish the different points on the spectrum, but the point is that it’s one spectrum. Making black people drink out of separate drinking fountains and lynching them are different in degree and kind, but they both emerge from the same effort to enforce segregation and inequality, and almost no one has trouble understanding that.
She refutes those who say she makes too much of certain things.
there are two ways of making contributions that matter. One is to make work that stays visible before people’s eyes; the other is to make work that is so deeply absorbed that it ceases to be what people see and becomes how they see.
Amazing, brilliant again. It keeps getting better as we chug toward the end!
Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.
If I’m both feminist and hopeful it’s because I know how profoundly women’s rights and status have changed,
though damage is not necessarily permanent, neither is repair. What is won or changed or fixed has to be maintained and protected or it can be lost.
See, I told you so.
