feminish

Thank you to Villa Villekulla for tagging me…

One book that changed your life:

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
I met a cool young bloke in a queue in Durham when I was somewhere between the pits of misery and heights of drunken delirium, aged about 16. I was just beginning to eat again, defiant, muddled and troubled (he didn’t know). A few days later I received in the post Hesse’s Siddhartha (and a ten page letter). Reading it I got hopeful, excited and light. It was a fresh way of looking at things, making the stuff of life stark and beautiful. There was no hiding.

One book you have read more than once:

20thC Photography: Museum Ludwig Cologne

I like pictures a thousand times more than I like words. I’m not sure there’s any book I’ve read more than once, let alone a feminish one. For me, finishing a book is such a major achievement I can’t bear to double-up my tally by repeating one. (I still recall with horror the time my sister finished Mathilda for the second time, and then - it was 10pm at night - proceeded to turn it over and start reading again at page 1. I realised then that there would be some things in life which I will never understand).
This fat, flickable book of 20thC photography, bought for a song at a remainders shop, is a real friend. It’s about bodies, joy, pain, beauty, glamour, suffering and the gritty reality of 20th Century human existence. It’s personal and it’s political and I can pore over the same photos for hours.
The one above is Tina Modotti’s Mother and Child

One book you would want on a desert island:

Well, it would depend on how deserted the island was. Assuming total isolation, I’d go for the world’s biggest, fattest, idiot-to-expert guide to astronomy, given that the stars would be the only ponderable things actually there with me. If there’s stuff going on on the island, like fauna and flora (and bugs), I’d like the world’s biggest natural history book. I wouldn’t worry about feminism if it was me alone with the cosmos.

One book that made you laugh:

Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
All of them, but especially this:

One book that made you cry:

Thich Nhat Hanh, Call Me By My True Names

This book of poetry may also be the one book I’d want on a desert island:

…I’ve dreamed of drinking dewdrops
that sparkle with the light of far-off galaxies.
I’ve left footprints on celestial mountains
and screamed from the depths of Avici Hell, exhausted, crazed with despair
because I was so hungry, so thirsty…

One book you wish had been written:

A light, engaging and grounded book about how to be a calm, clear feminist in 21st century daily life.

One book you wish had never been written:

Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-1800 (1979)
For me, this is the archetypal case of lazy, masculine history that gets status (in this case an unendingly in-print paperback Penguin edition) simply because the bloke in question is a Big Name and there’s a nice grand narrative which fits readers’ existing prejudices.

But it’s bad history, plain and simple. It’s so famous and so widely-read and -quoted, I think this book is part of the reason most people think we’ve ‘progressed’ from higgledy-piggledy extended families where parents didn’t care about their kids, half of whom died before they were five anyway, and much less about their partners - to a happy bliss of nuclear family intimacy, love and stability in the 20th Century.

It just wasn’t like that! Extended kinship groups as he describes were already gone by 1500, there’s evidence of deep family love even further back than that - and I stick my tongue out at anyone who claims nuclear families were a blissful norm in the 20th Century.

One book you are currently reading:

A very special copy of Alice Walker’s Living By The Word, signed by her after a talk at the Hackney Empire and given to me by Miss Morgan on, if I remember correctly, the top deck of the Number 11 bus to Liverpool Street. I’m impressed by the peacefulness of it, and by the fact A.W. can be so grittily incisive about so much. And I’m in awe of her fulsome ecofeminism.

One book you have been meaning to read:

A History of Women in the West (All five volumes)
After I’d already spent the cost of two volumes on photocopies in libraries, I realised it’d be cheaper to actually buy them: a myriad collection of awesome articles on women’s lives from the Greek Antiquity to the late 20th Century (with lots of good pictures). Even second-hand they were still pricey, but I ordered the shipping-by-sea option of the cheapest set from the States and broke into the higher echelons of mastercard debt. They eventually arrived in Westminster after I’d already left the newsroom for my sabbatical in Europe, in a fantastically huge grey canvas sack, weighing a tonne. They reached me in East London just in time for me to send my brother off with a tenner to get a wheely carry-case from Petticoat Lane. I plonked them in, with a couple of Luce Irigaray’s and the Patterner’s own meaning-to-read collection (which included Ulysses), and off we headed on Eurostar. We hefted and hulked the bag through the Paris Metro, but it didn’t survive the Patterner’s flying leap down a 10 metre flight of stairs, and so we had to continue our journey carrying the book-tonne by hand.

The sabbatical has become eternal and the meaning-to-read books sit ominously on our bodged oak-and-stone shelves. So far only two of the five volumes have made it out of their foam packing… so when I say I’ve been meaning to read them, I really mean I’ve been meaning to read them - actively, expensively and exhaustingly, for quite a while.

UPDATE:

Ah Yes! ….I tag: The folks over at the unconvention, Norvicensian, rgrp, Jolie at Confessions of a Blogwitch, and all the E1 Ladeeez.