fuck yeah Rebecca Solnit

Ode to Rebecca Solnit

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

Happy pub day to Rebecca Solnit. 

I have this on hold at my local library and on order from my local bookstore. I can’t wait to see what’s inside. xo 

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

“This culture loves stories where we make one narrative carry the weight of the entire culture, whether it’s OJ Simpson or Anita Hill testify against Clarence Thomas. Then we make it the verdict. This case has kind of succeeded, but we, as a society, will not have succeeded until the moment not just when men are afraid to do this because they might actually be punished, but when the desire to harm women and the entitlement to harm women disappears — when some kind of common humanism and common nonviolence becomes the norm. That’s the finish line I’m looking for.” -Rebecca Solnit, on the Harvey Weinstein ruling 

From: The Ezra Klein Show 

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

Read more from her interview in NewStatesmenAmerica.

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

A little joy for your day. From Solnit’s Facebook she writes: 

Where I was from.

(Grandparents' shoe store, Boyle Heights, L.A. Still a family shoe store--I think it's Aguirre Shoes, but they kept the terrazzo.)

[random-bookquotes]

Some people want kids but don’t have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don’t want kids, and that’s not anyone’s business either. Just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (via random-bookquotes)

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

Rebecca Solnit: Let This Flood of Women’s Stories Never Cease

There’s a problem with the way feminism moves forward in reaction to breaking news stories. It brings focus to a single predator, a single incident, and people who haven’t faced the pervasiveness o…

We treat the physical assault and the silencing after as two separate things, but they are the same, both bent on annihilation.

FYRS

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

How Rebecca Solnit Became the Voice of the Resistance

‘‘Change is often unpredictable and indirect. We don’t know the future. We’ve changed the world many times, and remembering that, that history, is really a source of power to continue and it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.’’

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

Call climate change what it is: VIOLENCE. 

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

FUCK YEAH REBECCA SOLNIT 

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

The light from Standing Rock: beautiful struggle shows the power of protest

It is not a final victory, and there is much to fear from pipeline investor Donald Trump, but much will come of this gathering and its vision, tactics and power

And that’s another thing that matters. Consequences are often indirect. The movement at Standing Rock may yet stop a pipeline. Whether it does or not, it has brought together perhaps the greatest single gathering of native North Americans (from Canada as well as the United States) ever, and that has been a profound and moving watershed for the affirmation of cultural identities and political rights. It has demonstrated yet again that the environmental movement and human rights campaigns are often inseparable, reminded us that worldwide, indigenous people are in the forefront of the climate movement. Many things we cannot foresee may come of this gathering and its vision, tactics and power.

[dedicated-to]

The Faraway Nearby / Rebecca Solnit

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

There is no way around this is horrible. There are things to do. Draw together with people you love, work hard at making spaces, times, networks in which our ideals and values prevail, reach out for the vulnerable, and pitch your tents big, because this ugliness is all about exclusion and narrowness and not wanting to deal with people who are different or even people who have slightly different ideas, and the left can be as fucked-up in this regard as anyone. Love is what you have, and generosity, and imagination. What we have. These are centers of resistance, and the resistance is what you go out into the world with the strength and vision you gather inside.

Thank you Rebecca Solnit 

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

me: glasses, denim shirt, beanie you: Rebecca Solnit you were wearing a hat walking north on Broadway around 115, and were Rebecca Solnit. big fan.

Big fans all over this globe. 

[metaphorformetaphor]

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we’ve been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

— Rebecca Solnit, from “Apricots,” The Faraway Nearby (Penguin Books, 2013)

[explore-blog]

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.

In her cover essay on silencing women in the October 2014 issue of Harper’s, Rebecca Solnit once again proves that she is one of our era’s greatest essayist – further evidence here and here. (via explore-blog)

ps - Her forthcoming book, THE MOTHER OF ALL QUESTIONS, comes out March 2017. Order through Haymarket. 

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

How to Be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit

9) What we call success is very nice and comes with useful byproducts, but success is not love, or at least it is at best the result of love of the work and not of you, so don’t confuse the two. Cultivating love for others and maybe receiving some for yourself is another job and an important one. The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

[fuckyeahrebeccasolnit]

Listen to Solnit’s fantastic playlist through Spotify: 

https://open.spotify.com/user/powellsbooks/playlist/6LrnpFP8zZaF2NDSQ4TOVV