Hey friends! I’m really excited about this dana (generosity) drive for one of my oldest blogging inspirations, brownfemipower of Flip Flopping Joy. Her latest computer has died on her, and after decades (in blog-years) of providing brilliant, soulful commentary in a dope synthesis of journal/journalistic blogging on radical mamis, motherhood, U.S. immigration, wisdom, resistance, healing, and community, it’s high time she got a decent machine worthy of her gifts. The target amount to secure a MacBook Pro: $2000.
The reason I’m fundraising for so big of an amount is because I have been working on second hand/hand me down computers for about six years now–the entirety of my time blogging. And that means that I’ve gone through a ton of computers. I’ve had one catch on fire, one of them the cat broke, another one the little mouse nob in the middle of the keyboard doesn’t work anymore (so I have no mouse), and of course, this last one–the keyboard is broken.
And as if the opportunity for awesome radical POC artist solidarity and sharing weren’t enough, BFP is giving away gifts corresponding to the amount donated. Cards! Zines! Sur-prizes! Fabulous.
I try not to do too many reading-list posts, mainly because I know that most of us have our own gigantic stacks of reading to get to. But! These pieces are simply dope and exciting, and written or shared with me by people I like. Plus, the collection represents, in a way, some key themes in my life right now: feminism, political work, and spirituality. So!
The lovely and talented author of This Moi (elder sister of ei powell) has a guest post up at Jezebel on the Man To Man (M2M) phenomenon — as experienced by herself, a keen and observant young woman of color, during a trip to a shooting range.
And! The Advance the Struggle collective (AS) published their analysis of the March 4th day of action (for public education in California + beyond), which breaks down, in very useful, insightful ways, the dis/advantages of two different tendencies among the anti-capitalist players involved, and how to combine their strengths into a “genuine class struggle left.” Personally, it helped me clarify and contextualize my experience participating in the SF March 4th committee, which I found pretty frustrating overall. In hindsight, I now understand a lot of the key ideological splits that I couldn’t articulate at the time. As AS puts it, “the [clashes] of approaches to radicalizing consciousness were key determinants in differentiating the political forces in the movement.” Also nifty to see analyzed summaries of all the different major actions in Cali, as well as efforts in Seattle. Check it out.
This poem, which my boss read to me during our latest reflection session (yes, I’m lucky enough to have good poetry in my work meetings!) immediately resonated with a fear that’s been haunting me ever since I started deepening my meditation practice last year.
Tree
by Jane Hirshfield
———
———
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books —
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Will it be possible for me to combine a lifelong commitment to practicing dharma (with the retreat experience and internal work required) while at the same time holding on to worldly commitments like partnerships and social justice work? Oftentimes I sense that someday, in this one lifetime, I’ll have to choose. Do you ever feel that way?
Finally, a little something by Ahmad Jamal, just because.
Happy Thursday, friends, and happy birthday Henry Mills!
I honestly don’t have much to say about this article from the NYT (lead photo taken directly in front of our home at Fools’ Court) on a potential new tourism trade in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (TL) district. The backward priorities, exploitation, and opportunism seem pretty obvious to me.
Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.
Appealing to whom? Not the people who live here, but outsiders — with money to spend. The bright side here, I suppose, is exposing the persistence of the trickle-down mentality that drives city planning. Promoting tourism will supposedly help businesses, which will supposedly help…homeless folks? Not likely. Most stores around here won’t even let you in to use the bathroom if you look like you’ve spent the night on the streets. Which might appear to be the case even if you do sleep inside, in a shelter or SRO: single-resident occupancy.
Just a couple days ago, at the feminist Marxist study group at the Faithful Fools, we talked with Diane, a longtime visitor to the Fools, about her experiences living in an SRO. It’s sort of like a jail, she said with a chuckle. You’re permitted a limited number of visits every month. (8 per month is the max at her place, she thinks.) Since you can’t have more than 3 people per room, a single mother with three children is out of luck. There are no kitchen facilities, turn-of-the-century wiring (making personal cooking devices surefire circuit overloaders), and one communal microwave for all 150 tenants. You’re supposed to get 24 hour’s notice before anyone comes to inspect your room, but managers rarely honor rules like that.
Diane teaching Ryan some dance moves.
Not to say that SROs are no better than sleeping in doorways. But investing in them as tourist attractions? How exactly is this helping to create, as Gavin Newsom claims, “a positive identity for the Tenderloin”? Why not tax rich people (a.k.a. wealthy tourists and corporations) and put funding directly into improving and expanding housing? Making it a human right in practice, not just in theory? Of course, the city instead assists landlords who evict low-income tenants in order to turn rental units into condominiums (through legislation like the Ellis Act, which Diane was explaining to us). Meanwhile, the thousands of housing units currently vacant could easily eliminate homelessness altogether.
Forget appealing to tourists. Personally, I’d rather the folks of the TL follow the lead of Homes Not Jails, who just a week ago occupied a vacant building, resisting eviction and declaring the duplex public property. Organizing in opposition to state-supported capitalist institutional violence would give the Tenderloin a much more “positive identity,” in my mind, than million-dollar slum museums and “hundreds of [fucking] plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood.”
Kind of like #followfriday, only more of a plain old celebration of the folks touching one Black girl’s heart this week.
Above, Miss Maxine, who slowly but surely welcomed me into her life after a rough start on Sunday. She’s almost as much of a delight as her owners, Chris and Donna.
Adrienne Maree Brown is just tremendous. Everybody should read her. You should read her. Like, starting now.
Aaron Tanaka is also tremendous. His blog is pretty much brand-new, but already one of my all-time favorites. Eclectic, on-point, funny, educational. Solid.
If you ever get the chance, spend some quality time with Carmen Barsody. Trust me on this one.
Last but not least, word has it that Advance the Struggle is about to publish a piece analyzing March 4th. Get excited!
Slowly making my way through the Faithful Fools’ canon. In a conversation about economics, Carmen recommended Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Not even 50 pages in, and it’s already transforming the way I see my everyday life.
Basically, Hyde is interested in the material and spiritual benefits of gifts and gift economies, as opposed to capitalism and economies of exchanged commodities.
Given material abundance, scarcity must be a function of boundaries. If there is plenty of air in the world but something blocks its passage to the lungs, the lungs do well to complain of scarcity. The assumptions of market exchange may not necessarily lead to the emergence of boundaries, but they do in practice. When trade is ‘clean’ and leaves people unconnected, when the merchant is free to sell when and where he will, when the market moves mostly for profit and the dominant myth is not ‘to possess is to give’ but ‘the fittest survive,’ then wealth will lose its motion and gather in isolated pools. Under the assumptions of exchange trade, property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases. 23
Having lived for more than a year now with no income, depending somewhat on my savings but largely on the generosity of others (including the major generosity of the foundation that paid for my undergrad degree, allowing me to graduate from Harvard debt-free), I’m beginning to see firsthand the ways in which scarcity, that fundamental rule of the economics preached in Cambridge, truly is myth and perspective, not fact. I’m becoming what Khalil Gibran calls, in The Prophet, a “believer in life and the bounty of life”:
There are those who give little of the much which they have–and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
And there are those who have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.
There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.
And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism.
And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue;
They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.
Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth.
At this very moment, for instance, I’m sitting on a big, lovely, suede couch in a big, lovely, 4th-floor condo in the big, lovely Embarcadero neighborhood, enjoying cranberry juice and Pellegrino, as well as the company of an adorable terrier-greyhound named Maxine. I’ve been invited to help myself to anything and everything in the condo, and to have friends and loved ones over during the week to partake, as well. And more importantly, I’ve been invited into the lives of a wonderful, loving, giving couple: Chris and Donna. How did I get all this?
I got it by giving. I gave of my love, support, and time to Lori, by taking care of Buster — overnight for a few days, and now once a week in the afternoons. There’s no business relationship, she hasn’t hired me or anything, but she’s a true friend and I’m happy to offer what I can. She, in turn, takes me out for breakfast and tea, gives writerly feedback and advice on my blogging efforts, and stocks the freezer with frozen raspberries (my favorite) when I’m sitting Buster through the night. And then, when she heard that her co-worker Chris was looking for someone to care for Maxine while she and Donna vacationed in Hawaii, Lori recommended me. Chris and Donna had Lori and me over for dinner, and the rest is history.
This is just one example, but there are so many blessings in my life right now that trace directly back through gifts. Gifts of donations sustain the Faithful Fools. Dana (generosity — through financial support and volunteer labor) sustains the East Bay Meditation Center. An exchange of kind letters (one of my favorite types of gift) planted seeds for my current relationship. My family (including my eighty-something-year-old Oma) footed the first semester’s bill for my Masters program at Goddard. Unpaid organizers continue investing their blood, sweat, and tears into building power for workers. Everywhere I look, it seems, people are giving.
And what makes gifts “erotic” as property, as opposed to rational exchange commodities, is that they connect life, rather than separating it. Gifts bind us to one another, with a web of invisible umbilical cords. Sure, they can be abused, offered with the intention of obligating someone else, creating a debt. But then they’re not really gifts at all — just exchanges in disguise.
Even this blog, I realize, is a gift in its own way. Offered freely to whomever might find it useful. And for me, that’s what makes it more than a diary, a scrapbook, or journal (none of which I was ever any good at keeping). In the giving there is real contact. And abundance, too. I’ve connected and reconnected with such lovely people through Kloncke, and many of you continue to offer me your own wonderful gifts through comments, emails, letters, conversations, and encouragement. Not to mention the greatest use of the gift: not reciprocation, but taking inspiration to give to someone else. I’m reminded of my friend Ashley, who watched my Stevie Wonder video blog way back in the day and decided to call her grandparents, just to say hello. I’ll always remember that, you know?
So thanks, y’all, as always. For reading, for commenting, for linking, passing on, and participating in what Hyde might call an erotic connection:
Gift exchange and erotic life are connected…The gift is an emanation of Eros, and therefore to speak of gifts that survive their use is to describe a natural fact: libido is not lost when it is given away. Eros never wastes his lovers. When we give ourselves in the spirit of that god, he does not leave off his attentions; it is only when we fall to calculation that he remains hidden and no body will satisfy. Satisfaction derives not merely from being filled but from being filled with a current that will not cease. With the gift, as in love, our satisfaction sets us at ease because we know that somehow its use at once assures its plenty. 22
————————
Happy Wednesday!
love,
katie
————————
————————
Ps: special thanks to Kyle Maurer, one of my first true surprise-blog-reader friends, for your encouragement and warmth, and also for the Hojicha, which has warmed the bellies of many people in Fool’s Court and dwindled down to one last teapot’s worth. :)
After the happy madness of last week (school deadlines, dog-sitting, asleep by midnight and up by 4 some mornings for work, the Fools’ annual fundraising dinner — which involved, among other delights, facepaint, paella, and what seemed like six hours of assembling empanaditas), I’m ready to welcome the relative calm and spaciousness of April. Off to a great start yesterday, with the second gathering of a super-solid and heartwarming Marxist feminist study group, right up in the Fools’ Court.
Today, I’m re-anchoring myself with a few staples.
Feasting on the veggie soup I made last night in a fit of domesticity following a week of no home cooking.
Maybe a little yoga.
And as a bonus, a lecture at Golden Gate Law School on bloggers’ rights. (Which is especially neat since I got a sweet little reminder/invite from a couple of friends I made when teaming up with the law school’s ACLU club in the buildup organizing for SF March 4th.)
From a Facebook Note I wrote last night. (Friend me if we’re not friends already!)
Dear lovely people,
I hope this note finds you well! I’m writing it at the end of an exhausting day of work — cooking, grocery shopping, driving, hosting, facilitating — when all my body wants to do is sleep, but my mind’s got other plans.
Since reading Selma James’ “Sex, Race, and Class” and another work of hers and Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s (“The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community“), both offered this week through a rad study group here in the Bay, I’ve been considering parallels between the role of nonprofits (like the one I work for, in exchange for room and board) and the un-waged domestic/reproductive/social labor of (mostly) women, as James and Della Costa explain it. Wanted to share my thoughts with y’all– as always, your insights are tremendously appreciated.
Arundhati Roy names a process by which NGO’s, in ministering to the needs created by gaps in both private and public capitalist enterprise, chill the potential for social resistance. “Non-profits’ real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.” Folks who work for non-profits often acknowledge that their efforts amount to a Band-Aid approach: covering up the problem, but failing to reach its root causes. But Roy seems to reject the Band-Aid analogy. A metaphor she’d choose might be more like: taking painkillers to ‘heal’ a broken leg. The immediate pain might be numbed, but by continuing to walk on the leg, you’re only worsening the injury.
Similarly, Della Costa and James argue that both trade unions and nuclear families trap us in this painkiller predicament:
Like the trade union [or non-profit, in this case], the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial.
Unlike trade unions, though, which address the conditions of masculinized wage labor, non-profits often seem to institutionalize the work traditionally associated with feminized labor performed within the family. Need a hot meal? A soup kitchen will serve you one. Sick? A clinic will treat you. Want to come home to a lovely garden? No need to rely on Grandma or the wife: your local eco-NGO will build a permaculture paradise for the whole neighborhood.
There are exceptions, of course, like hotel worker unions which may parallel feminized family housework, or media non-profits that are basically mainstream corporations with an opportunistic tax status. But overall, I’m struck by the resemblance. Is the non-profit an incorporated version of James’ and Della Costa’s working-class woman? Complete with moral imperatives to ‘nurture,’ or in this case, ‘serve the community,’ all the while scraping by on allowances wheedled from donor husbands and grantmaker sugar daddies?
I know a lot of us are thinking and living similar questions right now, and I just wanted to share my own musings. Thank you for all the inspiration and strength you give me! I love all of you and miss those I don’t get to see.
hugs and more hugs,
katie
And let’s not forget that NGO work doesn’t replace the “second shift” of unpaid housework! After coming home from the non-profit you still gotta wash dishes. (In my case, throughout the day at the non-profit. And we wash lots of people’s dishes.)
Friends, there’s so much goodness in my life that I don’t get to communicate here, and wish that I could. Every day, so many small moments, big questions. But this particular goodness, I’m very happy to be able to share.
The gist: a week or so ago, Abby, one of the Faithful Fools, got bedbugs. Not a fun enterprise. And though, to her enduring credit, she handled it like a champ, it’s still an enormous challenge for anyone to face — both logistically and emotionally.
So at a time like this, what do Fools do? Band together to completely clean out her entire studio apartment, carpeted with what looked like five years of cat hair. (From a very cute kitty, I might add.) Host her and said kitty while the place got fumigated. And then, tonight, throw a laundry party at her local coin-op, Amybelle’s Wash N Dry. How’s that for (unpaid) co-worker camaraderie?
The No Cuts movement in California, opposing the violence inherent in shifting the burden of the financial crisis to the working class (including students at public schools), is gaining steam all over, it seems. The next local fight I’m excited to focus on, after the March 4th day of strikes and actions to defend public education, is the oppressively expensive public transit system in the Bay Area — especially as higher-ups falsely pit riders against operators, claiming that since bus drivers don’t want to give up their pensions, users have no choice but to swallow higher fares and fewer routes. Gross.
More on that later, but in the meantime, check out this cheeky analysis of the UC Berkeley administration’s reactions (and non-reactions) to recent University of California controversies, including the street-dance-party action above.
Dear UCMeP Faithful,
We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization are morally outraged over recent events at the University of California.
We are talking about the band of terrorists disguised as students dancing to defend public education who, in the early morning hours of February 26, struck a vicious blow to everything UC Berkeley holds dear: its dumpsters and trash cans.
Within hours of this despicable event, Chancellor Bobby Birgeneau – writing from the same undisclosed location he has been bravely hiding in since December – sent an email to the entire campus community titled “Vandalism at Durant Hall.”
In this powerful missive, Birgeneau, “condemn[ed] in the strongest terms the overnight criminal vandalism in Durant Hall that spilled over onto Bancroft and Telegraph avenues.”
As increasingly belligerent acts of racism and homophobia shake UC Berkeley’s sister campuses, UCMeP would just like to commend the leaders of the UCB administration for their bold decision to not speak out against racism and homophobia this past Friday. We are proud that they have instead highlighted the real threat facing the UC: all those students, faculty, and employees vainly struggling to defend what’s left of public education.
That Chancellor Birgeneau has yet to publicly condemn the hanging of a noose in UCSD’s library or the vandalism of UC Davis’ LGBT center is more than appropriate. After all, why should the leader of UC Berkeley be concerned about goings-on at other campuses of the UC when he has burning trash cans on his own campus to contend with?
Friends, as Chancellor Birgeneau has recently demonstrated, racism, sexism, and hate speech are not the biggest enemies the University of California faces. The real foes are free speech, the right to dissent, and the tolerance of minority opinion.
We must battle these democratic evils with everything we’ve got.
It is toward dance parties and brief midnight occupations of construction sites that our moral outrage should be directed, not nooses and homophobia.
Some of you have probably heard of Ani Tenzin Palmo — a Britisher who left home at age 20 to spend the next quarter-century practicing Tibetan Buddhism as a nun in India. Twelve of those years she spent living in a cave, with walls and a door built onto it, in the valley of Lahoul in northern India. Kind of her bad-ass claim to faim — though the way she tells it, she just wanted some real solitude and was tremendously happy there: plus the cave was actually warmer than the traditional mud-wall houses everyone else lived in.
Anyhow, this paragraph from one of her books, Reflections On A Mountain Lake, caught my eye:
Many people ask how to get rid of anger, because it is an uncomfortable feeling. We don’t like feeling angry. We don’t like feeling hatred. But nobody has ever asked me, “How can I deal with my desire and my greed?” Yet greed and desire, along with ignorance, keep us trapped in samsara. But greed and desire are not really regarded as negative emotions in the West. After all, what would our consumer society be if we didn’t have desire? On the whole, desire is regarded as a positive thing, especially if you can satisfy it. Desire is seen as a motivating force. It propels people to go out and buy more and more and more, and that keeps the economy churning. This is the idea behind all this.
Imagine living in an economy based on contentment, compassion, and generosity, rather than desire.
Kloncke 