Gerrymandering is not only designed to preserve majorities. It’s also designed to preserve cynicism and non-participation. When I’ve been out on the campaign trail, I’ve found one thing is reliably true. Regardless of party, nobody likes gerrymandering. I got confirmation of that when I recently put together a thread on Twitter showing how gerrymandering worked in my own district. It touched a nerve. Americans agree that, in a democracy, everyone ought to have an equal vote. And they are tired of living under a rigged system.
Books
God’s Oppressed Children
Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, which records the life of a Dalit family in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and spans nearly a century, significantly enriches the new Dalit literature in English. Gidla grew up in India and now works as a conductor on the New York City subway. She knew firsthand the poverty and discrimination that several generations of her family had suffered. Defiant in the face of endless cruelty and misery, and tender with its victims, she seems determined to render the truth of a historical experience in all its dimensions, complexity, and nuance. The result is a book that combines many different genres—memoir, history, ethnography, and literature—and is outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations.
Mark Dion: The Science of Art
“Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist” isn’t comprehensive, but it offers a good overview of Mark Dion’s art. Viewers get an introduction to his primary method: gathering objects—whether on a self-conducted excavation or through the more casual means of collecting—and arranging them according to varying logics to create meticulous tableaux, often in the form of cabinets. At the heart of this practice is a challenging but fruitful contradiction: Dion is a dedicated artist and environmentalist who repurposes older methods of museological and scientific inquiry, which are mired in colonialism and anthropocentric belief systems, in an effort to expose them.
The Rural Vision of Ravilious & Friends
There is a palpable mood of nostalgia in England at present. This may have been expressed politically in Brexit, but it is also visible in the popular taste for “heritage” and lost worlds. In particular, Britain is awash with books and films about World War II, which all these painters lived through and which became part of their artistic legacy. The England that Ravilious and Bawden evoked so powerfully reflected neither reactionary sentiment nor aimless aesthetic ideals. Their rural vision was not about an escapist rural retreat or nostalgic nationalism, but about a precious common heritage, something worth fighting for.
Democracy and the Machinations of Mind Control
In both the US and the UK, investigations into the deployment of these shadowy forces are still in progress. In close contests, every influence counts. There is, therefore, an understandable temptation to emphasize that without secretive billionaires, or the Russians, or Facebook, the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election would have been different. And as elections are likely to carry on being close-run, it is important to track down and expose systemic manipulation. But it does not follow that slush funds, algorithms, and alleged conspiracies were primary causes of the electoral shocks of 2016.
Voices Unbound
When I was growing up in San Francisco, singing choral music in the San Francisco Girls Chorus, I and my fellow choristers were, for the most part, learning to perform music that had, for most of its history, been sung by boys or men. One year, though, we were offered the chance to sing pieces from a rare collection of music written for the Venetian ospedali: a series of choral arrangements that had been composed in the seventeenth century, for unmarriageable or abandoned women living in convent-run group homes or orphanages. Inside the ospedali, which were meant to offer shelter and modest community to women who’d otherwise be destitute, the residents had formed choirs, which apparently had gotten so wonderful that composers like Vivaldi had traveled miles to compose for the women’s rich sound. The music, often set to cellos and violas, was sweeping and a joy to sing. But I also came to understand that this music — written if not by women, at least for women’s voices — was a rarity. The very fact of its presence was radical. Mostly, no one had ever heard women sing in public. Mostly, no one had heard women speak in public. Mostly, no one had allowed women to speak or sing in public, and mostly, women without proper attachments to men had been destitute. As we learned to carry these old songs forward, we also learned that we lifted our voices up against a much longer history of silence. Beyond the music were the centuries in which female voices, stories, perspectives, testimonies, poems, and truths were suppressed.
The strange weight of discovering this — of leaning into the heft of that absence — came back to me again as I read Rebecca Solnit’s passionate and haunting inquiry into the history of women’s silence, contained in her recent book The Mother of All Questions, which examines what it means for us now collectively to reshape the position of women’s speech. As we begin — in ways large and small — to chip away at these centuries of often violent silencing, Solnit reminds us of the many mechanisms by which women have been and continue to be denied voice, through time and in the present. Consider this, a quote from “The Public Voice of Women,” a noteworthy essay by classicist Mary Beard. “A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, not a woman.” If this is an ancient perspective about how women have been historically seen or not seen, heard or not heard, it also helps us ground and unpack the movement of daily life in American politics. It frames a world in which women who tell stories of abuse are dismissed; women who protest abuses of power are called shrill; and where women who claim positions of power on a public stage are demonized, sexualized, or threatened with violence.
Recently, when I wrote an editorial for CNN, talking about my own experience with gun violence, I received notes that threatened my life. One delightful letter that told me that because I differed with the letter writer on the terms of the Second Amendment, we as a nation should strip all women of the right to vote. Solnit herself routinely receives such letters and points out how often their writers want to re-silence women or to rob them of something: dignity, life, voice, civic rights.
The wonderful thing, though, is that Solnit reads these threats against and through a moment in which women, collectively, are breaking their silence, speaking and singing up and out and back — for and with one another. “If the right to speak, if having credibility, if being heard, is a kind of wealth, that wealth is now being redistributed,” she writes, noticing that this process itself could hardly be expected to be easy. “There has long been an elite with audibility and credibility, an underclass of the voiceless. As the wealth is redistributed, the stunned incomprehension of the elites erupts over and over again, a fury and disbelief that this or that child dared to speak up, that people deigned to believe her, that her voice counts for something.”
And yet in laying bare and historicizing the power relations concerning speech, in pointing out the scope of the violent histories that go into determining who has and who has not had the right to be heard, Solnit provides a road map by which we may begin righting ourselves, listening to each other, breaking through old traps and conspiracies. I have read many books about feminism; I chaired the high school chapter of NOW in the ’90s; my feminism made me the first woman in my family to attend what had been a men’s college. Sometimes I have felt that I have processed my feminism or that I live within it. This book made me feel urgent again, alive to this moment and its radical potential.
It made me honor what we are doing in chorus.
Image of Gala Concert in Old Procuratory for Czar’s Daughter (1780) by Francesco Guardi via Wikipedia.
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Modigliani: Fevered Life, Pure Line
These sensual images, with curving shoulders, breasts, and thighs outlined in black, with clever references to both old masters and contemporary styles, were a bald commercial venture. But these nudes overcome the cynical appeal to a male gaze. Their bodies are idealized, smooth shapes of sex, but their faces are those of individual women: some gaze out frankly, or peer teasingly, from beneath long lashes; others close their eyes or let their heads loll wearily, as if bored with the whole affair. It is as though Modigliani himself found peace in their calm stillness, away from his fevered life, away from the mass death and ravages of the war.
The Man from Red Vienna
What a splendid era this was going to be, with one remaining superpower spreading capitalism and liberal democracy around the world. Instead, democracy and capitalism seem increasingly incompatible. Global capitalism has escaped the bounds of the postwar mixed economy that had reconciled dynamism with security through the regulation of finance, the empowerment of labor, a welfare state, and elements of public ownership. Wealth has crowded out citizenship, producing greater concentration of both income and influence, as well as loss of faith in democracy. The result is an economy of extreme inequality and instability, organized less for the many than for the few.
Out of Control
Mary Shelley’s original three-volume novel Frankenstein was published quietly and anonymously in 1818 to little acclaim. The Quarterly Review stonily observed: “Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing…. The author leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero.” If they had guessed the author was in reality a young woman, only eighteen when she began her first draft, no doubt the critical chorus of disapproval would have been even more thunderous. It is astonishing that the book ever got written at all.
The B&N Podcast: Debbie Macomber Podcast
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
When Debbie Macomber decided to become a novelist in the late 1970s, she rented a typewriter and worked away at a kitchen table while raising four children at the same time. Four manuscripts and five years later, she sold her first romance — which would become the novel Heartsong — and started a career that would lead to a raft of bestsellers and over 200 million books in print, including the Cedar Cove and Rose Harbor novels, the knitting-themed series that began with The Shop on Blossom Street and many others. On this episode, Debbie Macomber talks with Amanda Cecil about her special love for the holidays and her latest heartwarming story, Merry and Bright.
Christmas is the season of the heart, and #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber is here to warm yours with a delightful holiday novel of first impressions and second chances.Merry Knight is pretty busy these days. She’s taking care of her family, baking cookies, decorating for the holidays, and hoping to stay out of the crosshairs of her stressed and by-the-book boss at the consulting firm where she temps. Her own social life is the last thing she has in mind, much less a man. Without her knowledge, Merry’s well-meaning mom and brother create an online dating profile for her—minus her photo—and the matches start rolling in. Initially, Merry is incredulous, but she reluctantly decides to give it a whirl.Soon Merry finds herself chatting with a charming stranger, a man with similar interests and an unmistakably kind soul. Their online exchanges become the brightest part of her day. But meeting face-to-face is altogether different, and her special friend is the last person Merry expects—or desires. Still, sometimes hearts can see what our eyes cannot. In this satisfying seasonal tale, unanticipated love is only a click away.
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Sig Nordal 