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oh my god have you been following the blowback from the idiotic Economist review of Edward Baptist’s new book about slavery? I am not linking to the review, bc JFC, but Twitter has it covered:
Uhhh. “Almost all blacks in his book are victims, almost all whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.” http://t.co/nlMdzUSuLB
— Roxane Bey (@rgay) September 4, 2014
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Why, it’s not just US police officers who can behave dreadfully towards POC!
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The importance of sex worker advertising:
Katrina, who has been escorting in the Vancouver area for over 10 years, spends $200 of her $300 monthly marketing budget on print advertising in the free weekly Georgia Straight. “At $50 [a week], it’s more than I spend on online advertising, but it obviously pays off and is well worth it,” she explains. “The clients who come from the paper ads don’t use the Internet, or if they do, they don’t use it all the time. They include older guys who are used to paper ads and like to have a phone conversation.”
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Learned League gave me a consolation freebie yesterday:
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On the history of feminism and teaching.
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Five questions for police following the exoneration of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown:
4. Why did detectives write out confessions for both Brown, then 15, and McCollum, then 19, and ask them to sign the statements? Why did they do so knowing that the confessions were incriminating, that the boys were both intellectually disabled and that they were being interrogated in the absence of any legal representation?
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Nick’s chill ex-wife who did our cool “Support the Toast” animated toaster-buttons for us has a new site for her work, check it out!
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The five kinds of poems you hear at weddings:
1. The Poem That Explains Weddings
Even as “married” becomes an increasingly meaningless distinction, weddings are nevertheless expected to remain what the poet Robert Hass calls “a feast for the saying of a magic spell.” Perhaps this is precisely because marriage is so flexible. We need the bride, the groom, the officiant, and the king’s horses and all the king’s men to put together again what, exactly, is at stake at a wedding? Why are we here? Are you really going to use the ice-cream machine I bought off your registry? In ancient days, a type of poem called epithalamium blessed brides en route to the marital chamber (and instructed them on the obscene terrors waiting therein).
Drawback: Talking about the ceremony itself can be a little boring — where’s the romance? — but I find two wedding-explainer poems that I like: Jane Hirshfield’s “A Blessing for Wedding” replaces traditional chants with modern language and floral imagery; Peter Meinke’s “The First Marriage” explains how ceremonies help to codify love. The couple favors the latter.
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When you join a commune, everything is yours. When you leave, nothing is. Before my second birthday, we left with nothing. There was no breaking point, no one incident anyone could point to. But my parents were not impressed with the quality of life, and they wanted better for their kids. So my parents, two sisters, and I hitched a ride to Michigan to stay with my uncle. Even though my dad had handed over every paycheck, The Farm forwarded our medical bills—I’d once been rushed to an E.R. after a peanut was lodged in my one-year-old throat. My dad gave me that peanut in a heart-shaped locket on my 16th birthday, calling it the “most expensive jewelry” he would ever give anyone. “I had worked like a dog for The Farm and the basic agreement was that we were all in it together,” he’s told me. “It reminded me that something had been lost.”
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
That Economist review is already (sort of) down!
From their website, “There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We are therefore withdrawing the review but in the interests of transparency, anybody who wants to see the withdrawn review can click here.”
I actually think this is a good way of handling it… not as good as NOT HAVING PUBLISHED IT IN THE FIRST GODDAMN PLACE but, I appreciate that they’re not trying to hide it or make it disappear.
Also the #economistbookreviews hashtag on twitter is just a beautiful thing, thank you twitter.
Yeah, having already published it, I got to agree that this is the most correct action and response available to them.
I do wish they’d dox the guy that wrote it, though.
A “great majority” still sounds fucked up to me.
Exactly. To enslave a person is to do violence against them. You cannot be a “kind slaveowner.” Certainly there are degrees of awfulness and abuse, but you shouldn’t get an award for starting at the moral rock bottom and simply not digging deeper.
Ugh, I am very irritated at the Economist for this. I really do like the magazine – I’ve learned a lot over the years from reading it – but I always treat it like that slightly problematic uncle we all have. #NotAllSlightlyProblematicUncles
The Met are a famously awful Police Force.
I mean, none of them are free from that shit, but it is well know throughout the country that The Met are just… the worst. I’ve met Police Officers in my own home county who if you mention The Met actively try to choke down the swearing.
This story made me so furious. It looks like Psymon wanted the incident filmed by the cameras that Met Police are now required to wear. I’ve just been trying to do a little looking around online about the cameras — it seems like they were instituted after public outcry over a police shooting, but the fact that police get to decide when to turn them on means that they’re probably never going to actually be used to hold a police officer accountable.
Like, yeah, this is bullshit: “However, Mr Hart said: “No police officer will have their body-worn camera on continually because of the sheer amount of data storage required. (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-27313500)
The “Five Kinds of Poems” article led me to this poem, which I love: Tear It Down.
“We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”
Oh that’s a good one. I’m kind of mad they didn’t mention one of my favorites, Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” (probably because Gregory Corso was the only Beat actually worth reading but nobody remembers him anyhooooooo…)
Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky–
goosebumps!!
Jack Gilbert is the BEST. “A Brief for the Defense” is the single best “the world is awful and I can’t fix it” poem I know.
Just want to thank the kind-hearted, menstrual cramp-beleaguered Toastie who transferred her ticket to me for the show at Bell House last night. It had been a really shitty week ($750 in very unexpected car repairs, narrowly escaped getting taken for $2000 for said car repairs) (had to miss 2 1/2 days of work due to car repairs). When I saw the show was sold out I was so bummed /mad at myself for not buying a ticket right away. This Toast Angel really turned my week around, I hope you are feeling better today.
PS Mallory, you are a sexy evil genius and I am transfixed by your speaking voice.
I KIND OF get having The Velveteen Rabbit bit as a wedding reading, but “Guess How Much I Love You”? I dunno. Then again, Mr. BHam and I are planning to have a reading from a different children’s book at our nuptials so I suppose I’m being hypocritical.
Clearly, these people should be reading Mallory’s Velveteen Rabbit instead.
If people are crying at my wedding, I want it to be out of fear.
I wonder how much she would charge for a misandrist wedding poem? It’s almost enticing me to pretend my other half is serious whenever he proposes and say yes.
It weirds me out a little bit that grownups are so into “Guess How Much I Love You?” (c.f. one billion items for sale on Etsy emblazoned with “I love you to the moon and back” – I actually had to look up where this phrase came from while I was shopping for wedding stuff, because it came up so often.) Like, it’s a cute book, but it’s not exactly emotionally complex.
Until I googled it, I was mixing up “Guess How Much I Love You?” with “Love You Forever” and was HORRIFIED that people were using this book as a wedding piece considering it’s about a creepy woman who breaks into her son’s house to sing at him. AHHHHH.
TBH, kind of horrified to receive Love You Forever at my baby shower – yes, contemplating my death whilst very hormonal is just the right thing, thanks!
Ugh, the story of Love You Forever is simultaneously more horrifying and also so sympathetic that I feel bad about being creeped out – basically, it was the song the guy (I think the author is a guy?) sang to his stillborn baby.
Still better than some book my MIL just got my kid that has a cover illustration of a lady apparently making out with a giraffe.
My friends had a reading or two from Winnie The Pooh at their wedding and I fucking loved it. I think it was about the simple joy Pooh and Piglet find in each other’s company.
I really like the idea of commissioning poets for friends’ weddings.
Although I am tempted to run with the idea and say, MOAR private patronage for arts and letters! Did your kid’s soccer team win the league championship? Commision an epinician ode! Is your child graduating from college? Have someone write a propemptikon to send her off into the world!
I commissioned a poem (from a very talented friend) about an elaborate inside joke for my now-husband’s 21st birthday, and many years later it’s still one of the best gift ideas I’ve ever had. My sister also wrote me a poem for my wedding and it’s just ahhhhhhh, more poems everywhere, every day.
My DH’s best man is a poet (and novelist, but no one wants a wedding novel.)
He wrote a poem for our wedding, and if it weren’t for things like my DH dedicating novels to me, I’d still say it’s the most personally meaningful thing I’ve ever seen in print.
And damnit! I forgot to write my son a ‘going off to college’ poem. I totally meant to do that.
Guess he’ll get something soonish…..
I identify as a poet, but now I have to look up “propemptikon,” which sounds like a high-tech menstrual product. If you need one for a special occasion I’ll be fluent by COB today.
Ugh, it’s so boring when people use popular readings at weddings. Just be friends with Sharon Olds and have her compose and read a poem for you!
OR pull a Liz Lemon and play MASH with the Bible.
So The Toast Live was wonderful, as you’d expect. I saw Mallory arrive in a black car and was totally star-struck and whispered “That’s Mallory!” to my girlfriend (who likes The Toast fine but was really attending because I was so excited). Mallory’s reading was perfect and wonderful. I was so glad she did A Day In the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero, because that was the first Mallory piece I ever read and it hooked me at once.
But it was sad that Nicole couldn’t be there, and I hope someday to get the chance to see the two of them perform together.
Ancient wedding poems! I am quite partial to Catullus 61, which is beautiful and not so much about obscene terrors (but there is some mild nonsense about how it’s your duty to put out or your spouse will cheat on you):
Your husband will not,
lightly given to some wicked paramour,
and following shameful ways of dishonour,
wish to lie away
from your soft bosom.
but as the pliant vine entwines
the trees planted near it,
so will he be entwined in your
embrace.
…
See how your husband within,
reclining on a purple couch,
is all eagerness for you.
…
In his inmost heart
no less than in yours glows
the flame, but deeper within.
…
Let him first count up the number
of the dust of Africa
and of the glittering stars,
who would number
the many thousands of your joys.
HOWEVER, if for some reason you can only read one Catullus poem today, make it 97, which is my all-time fave.
WHOA, 97. definitely click through and be amazed, people.
somehow having the latin alongside the english for that first tantalizing stanza makes it even better. i imagine the young Latin student just in the moment of realizing what the ablative means Catullus is actually saying.
My Latin prof made me do a sight translation of 97 in class once. There was a lot of “Uh, I think this word means ___ but he couldn’t possibly be saying this… could he?” The last line has me in pieces. Catullus don’t give a fuck! Catullus writes what he wants!
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici
et quod pruriat incitare possunt
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt mouere lumbos
Chastity’s right in the pious poet
himself, but it’s not necessary in his verses,
which have only their wit,
if they’re full of pleasure and empty of modesty;
they’re able to move desire
not just in boys but in those hairy men
who can’t move their stiff thighs.
ha ha I always like to say loins for lumbos
lllllloiinnnnnnss
as the boa constrictor winds
its thick coils about the elephant
so will he be entwined in your
embrace.
[…]
as your fingers wrap their ivory
lengths
around his slender neck, tighter
and tighter grasping
all shameful ways of dishonor will be squeezed
from his heart
as the grapes groan in the winepress
so too will he let out soft moans as
you teach him the ways of silence
[sorry I am tired this morning I cannot fake up the latin]
They’re delightful! 69: “No one wants to sleep with you because you smell, Rufus. So there.” I’m imagining most of them with a ‘neener neener neener’ after them.
That book review was hilariously bad, and nobody should give the Economist their hate clicks (who am I kidding, go ahead, it’s not like the author gets any credit).
Can we talk about good history books though? What are all of your favorites (recent or otherwise)? I just got through Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years, and it is amazing in its scope and detail, and I recommend it highly to anybody interested in the colonization of America.
I don’t actually have a recommendation; just sneaking in on your thread because I want some good history books tooooooo
YUP SAME. Although I just read The Devil in the White City and quite liked it, a lot more than I thought I would because it’s mostly the history of The Columbian Exposition vs H.H. Holmes and I expected the architecture and fair stuff to be zzzzzz
Same. I’ve been making a concerted effort lately to read more about US race relations because a) important and b) what reading I’ve done on the issue makes me painfully aware of how little I know. I’m trying to take my cues from the various books that Ta-Nehisi Coates has recommended but there’s so many.
If you want an overview (not just of race relations, but of US history in general) I feel like Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen does a pretty good job.
MARY BEARD. Seriously, her book on the Roman Triumph is amazing: completely easy to read and non-technical, but also a really sharp & critical look at how a huge scholarly/popular industry of Things That Definitely Happened In Every Roman Triumph Since The Beginning of Time get constructed out of, like, two references in medieval grammarians and an off-hand remark in Augustine.
If anybody does not know Mary Beard, first of all, a pox on thee. Second of all, all three episodes of Meet the Romans are on Youtube in HD. Run don’t walk.
Dude, this is totally my wheelhouse. What are you interested in?
Some general recommendations: John Demos, The Heathen School; Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary; anything by Jill Lepore (she has a new book coming on the history of Superwoman!), Tyler Anbinder’s history of the Five Points neighborhood (has a long complicated title that I’m blanking on right now)…
Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum
That is in fact an amazing title, and I will be buying it immediately.
Amazon notes that it is #1 in tap dance, so you can’t possibly go wrong!
Alison Weir’s books on Henry VIII’s wives and children! For the most part, they are even-handed (I tend to disagree with her views of Anne Boleyn) and really well-researched using some cool sources. Plus, if you start with the book about the wives and then branch into the one about the children then the one about Elizabeth in particular, you will come away with a very thorough and impressive knowledge of the time period!
Which book would you recommend starting with?
Since I don’t really care about Henry VIII himself, I have only read the books about the women surrounding him: I started with The Six Wives, then The Children, then The Life of Elizabeth I.
Alison Weir has an author page on Amazon, and it looks like she’s written some fictionalized histories as well. I haven’t read any of those, but I’d love to hear whether they’re worth it or not!
Good history books! EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class is my ultimate favorite history book, despite its many flaws & blindspots. More recently…
Senia Paseta’s new book on Irish Nationalist Women 1900-18 is pretty great.
I’m still working my way through Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century but its historical depth is super compelling. I though I’d read it in a general interested-citizen kind of way but I’m really enjoying it as a(n) historian, too.
Also, erm, I wrote a book that came out this year… it’s priced absurdly high because academic publishing is weird but there’s some on google books and if you want a different chapter or something I can hook you up. “Ireland & the Irish in Interwar England” is the title.
Sold on anything about Irish history. You’re clearly doing modern history and I am going to check that out, but I’ve been looking for a good book broadly about Ireland in the Middle ages for a while now. Any suggestions?
I think some of the British Isles surveys do a good job of covering the Irish middle ages in the broader archipelagic context. Norman Davies’s The Isles is really beautifully written; there’s also Frank Welsh, The Four Nations, and Hugh Kearney, The British Isles. Then, this is probably later than you want, but I’ve been meaning to read Jane Ohlmeyer’s Making Ireland English (2012), which is mainly about the 17th century. Her work is great. Sorry, wish I had some better suggestions!
Ron Takaki’s A Different Mirror. Takaki was one of the founders of Ethnic Studies, and that book is one of my consistent go-tos for a book that encompass the histories of different communities of color.
I’m currently reading Seafaring Women and it is exactly as awesome as one could ever hope. So far, my favorite part was learning about William Brown because OH MY GOD just go read about William Brown.
I have read that! It’s so interested how wrong popular conceptions of everything from women-dressing-up-as-sailors to prostitution are.
I’m liking Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat so far. It’s an indictment of the French defeat in the second world war written very shortly after the fact by an historian/hero of the French Resistance who was executed by the Germans just after D-Day.
The last ones I have read are The Black Count (amazing), Four Queens (also amazing), and one about Cleopatra that I can’t remember who wrote it.
I just read The Black Count and it was awesome!
Judith Flanders, always. “Consuming passions” is brilliant and very funny (hilarious, even). I’ve loved lady Antonia Fraser’s “The Six Wives of Henry VIII ” (if that is the title in English) for more than 15 years. There are books more keen on tearing king Henry apart, but there is something about this that makes me read it over and over again.
I really enjoy David Halberstam’s work – definitely recommend The Fifties and The Coldest Winter. The Best and The Brightest came through for me constantly during my grad school career but it can be a little dense. The Coldest Winter is awesome for all the shade that Truman, Roosevelt, and even Eisenhower throw at MacArthur.
Harry S. Truman, Diary Entry – June 17, 1945
“Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur. He’s worse than the Cabots and the
Lodges – they at least talked with one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off.”
Oh boy oh boy. I’ll stick to U.S. History, so: Ed Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale, Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements; George Chauncy, Gay New York; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound; Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.
Gay New York is amazing!
Bailyn is amazing. Read everything!
But also: What kind of history? Because my shelves are going to fall into the sea so I can help with this.
In terms of African diaspora history, I really like Tom Reiss’ The Black Count (about Alexandre Dumas’ father, who ended up being the inspiration for the Count of Monte Cristo) and Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?, which covers the lives of women who were enslaved in the South before the Civil War.
In other areas (mostly women’s/LGBT history) Laurel Thatcher’s Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale about the life of a midwife in eighteenth-century America, David von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (warning: may make you cry in public if you’re reading it on a bus), Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women which is a great study of British lesbian culture in the early modern period and has the bonus of refuting a lot of Lillian Faderman’s bad history that she put forth in Surpassing the Love of Men (because Lillian Faderman is a BAD HISTORIAN) and Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs which I think should be required reading for Downton Abbey fans; Powell worked as a housemaid in the early 1920s, and her recollections are not quite as rosy as Julian Fellowes would have it.
Sarah Vowell. All of it.
This is amazing: a link to a live webcam of the Abbey Road zebra crossing. I have only been watching it for a short time but I have already seen so many people pose for pictures. Nobody seems to know how zebra crossings work. (Hint: drivers must stop for you in you’re on it; if you’re hovering on the pavement they will not do a damn thing. If you are halfway across it, see a car coming and freeze, waving it on, the driver will be hugely confused.) I am enjoying it greatly.
Oops. Based on your first sentence I expected it to be a webcam of zebras crossing Abbey Road.
Same. 🙁
Does America not have zebra crossings?
We just call them crosswalks. And they’re not always striped; sometimes they’re just two parallel lines going across the street.
In the UK, zebra crossings are only the striped ones – there are a range of different types of pedestrian crossings which have different names and different rules.
This is AMAZING. I’m watching one guy in a bowler and a long overcoat strut back and forth. Sometimes at the end, he pretends he’s on a tight rope.
I tend to think people choose the poems they think their wedding guests want to hear. My friends danced to “Fever” instead of “You say potayto, I say potahto”, and we had someone reading Shakespeare instead of doing a joint reading of our favorite flash fiction piece about a bank robber and a bank teller falling in love as everyone in the bank falls asleep around them. Regrets! On the other hand, we did have a friend read his own Onion-style satire (“area teenager miraculously finds soulmate in same small town”) and that was great.
Oh dear. I just read i carry your heart with me at a friend’s wedding.
I already stress about having cliche Pachelbel music at my own wedding, now I have to worry about poems too? Alas and alack.
Pfft, I used Pachelbel because I liked it and I didn’t even know it was a cliche! Fuck the haters. I’ve been married twenty years and I am still pissed at the friends who made fun of the song we used for our first dance.
Weddings are always cliched. They’re ritual magic! Struggling to make them wholly unique is a recipe for stress, so I wouldn’t worry.
(We had Song of Solomon and the last paragraph of Emma, which are probably cliches in our demographic. Read by our moms.)
Eh, to hell with it. As ginkgo says, they’re cliches for a reason, and anyone whose response is “Hahaha, that poem is so cliched!” is a jerk. (My own wedding cliche story: we did our “dance with the parents” thing to “Sunrise, Sunset,” in spite of that being the most cliched possible choice, because all of our parents liked it (and also because my dad has some kind of Dad Disorder wherein he can’t dance to anything in 4/4 time, he can only waltz). It was fine.)
The last stanza of “The Ivy Crown” by William Carlos Williams is my absolute favorite poetic description of married love:
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
We did not have this poem as a reading at our wedding, but I used the last 3 lines at the end of my wedding vows.
This is lovely! Thank you so much for sharing.
Agreed! I’m ugly-crying on the inside right now… Gorgeous.
I misread “Learned League gave me a consolation freebie yesterday” as consolation frisbee, which lead me to this: http://myhealthychef.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/…
“Almost all blacks in his book are victims, almost all whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.”
Yeah, but…advocacy against slavery. Surely there can be no less controversial a position.
It is… also history?
People get so used the the Good White Guy narrative from movies & stuff, they imagine the Good White Guy to Pathologically Evil Whip-Cracker ratio among white Southerners was like 50-50
I just can’t get my head around a dude who picks up a book all, “I’m just going to read a little about the history of the South!” and then throws the book down in disgust when he discovers that it makes the assertion that “slavery was awful.”
“I just want to read about the FACTS of history, not your RADICAL AGENDA.”
What? But, man, come on. Slavery.
But is it advocacy if it’s an objectively true statement?
That is what is so baffling about this! Because on the one hand, pretty much any history is automatically advocacy — it is impossible to describe history completely, and therefore all history must support one or more specific perspectives. And on the OTHER hand, surely a fact about the power imbalance between white Southern plantation owners and THEIR SLAVES is so mild a form of advocacy to even qualify as such, but ON A THIRD HAND, even if it IS advocacy it is advocacy against slavery! Slavery!
Like, I can see trying to make a point about distinguishing specific historical data from narratives that shape a moral reaction to that data in principle, but SLAVERY. Guys. Come on.
I really wonder who wrote this.
“Once upon a time, a bunch of white people owned a larger bunch of black people, and those black people were legally the property of the white people.”
“You say that like owning other human beings is wrong or something.”
This is, essentially, what people are saying.
Cheryl: Yes, I spent like every summer there listening to my creepy great grandmother bitch about Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, slavery was pretty awesome.
Malory Archer: Prove it.
Sterling Archer: What’s to prove? It’s free labor.
Malory Archer: Not THAT, ass!
I mean what he’s really saying is “stop demonizing white people!” It’s yet more of the same total inability of American white folks to grasp the evil of our history. It’s a hard thing to deal with, but you know what’s harder to deal with? Being a descendant of enslaved people who still deal with its legacy in entrenched institutionalized racism, every damn day. I say this as a descendant of Russian and German Jews who benefits from the white privilege Jews earned (yay?) in recent decades. I used to not identify as white (I may have written my college essay about this, stop it I was 17 and totally sheltered), but I realized pretty early on (upon getting to said college and befriending people who really don’t benefit from white privilege) that that was a total copout. Like an adult in touch with reality, apparently unlike The Economist. Oy.
Oh, man, don’t I know it. I went to a college with a really strong, vocal commitment to social justice, and I spent the whole time making those stubborn, petulant, “not all men,” “not all white people,” “WHAT privilege?” “*I* didn’t own slaves!” arguments all the time. In retrospect, I’m actually both embarrassed by it and pretty grateful for how patient everyone was when dealing with me.
I definitely feel like that attitude is the editorial mandate of The Economist, though, so I guess it makes sense.
This is where I admit that my reaction to my first reading of a sharp criticism of cis white males (in a Chicano Studies class in college) was to blurt out “that’s my DAD!” in a confused and hurt voice.
I sometimes listen to a fairly popular Game of Thrones podcast hosted by two San Francisco comedians because, although I gave up on watching GoT, they amuse me to no end, and I remember one of the hosts mentioning that he didn’t realize the poem read at his wedding was actually a Neil Gaiman blog post until months later.
The only response I can muster up is D:
Was the post “George RR Martin is not your bitch”?
I quit telling people what I planned to have read at my wedding after I mentioned one of the choices and someone said “Don’t you think that’s kind of antifeminist?”
You can go away now.
That’s terrible. It’s your wedding! You’re the only one it has to please.
I’ve read poems at a few weddings–never my own selection–and although I did not love all of the poems, by Joan I read them loud and proud and got a little choked up when I looked at the couple, because that’s what you do for the people you care about.
I do not expect to get married, but if I do–or if I have a non-legally-binding wedding, to a building for example–I’ll read the ceremony poem myself and it will be “We Will Judge You On Your Wedding”. : )
Ugh, this reminds me of hate-reading a piece at Slate or Salon (I always get them confused, because I don’t care) this week which claimed that getting married is never a feminist act, “full stop,” and AUGH, just, no.
Like, other people should be comfortable at your wedding, otherwise it doesn’t make sense to have them there, but they don’t get to critique the gorram ceremony.
Um, that is the worst. And so many wedding traditions can be “kind of antifeminist”
I had Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” read at my wedding in part to counterbalance the other “kind of antifeminist” bits I loved and wanted to include. (Also, including Wollstonecraft was my favourite way to include 18th century misandry)
Oh my stars, use whatever poems you want at your wedding, people. Or don’t use any. (I still love the 2nd poem read at my wedding. Delmore Schwartz, people.)
Well, apparently the Economist also argued against the Civil War being about slavery DURING THE CIVIL WAR, so it’s nice to know they’ve come so far in almost 200 years.
Consistency!
That panda article is RIGHTEOUS and I am giving it a standing ovation. If we defined “species worth keeping” as “species that can reproduce under any circumstances,” we’d be left with rats, cockroaches and pigeons. Oh, and humans, I guess. We’re pretty good at that. Anyway, more respect for the panda and its amazing adaption to its natural environment!
I found that article totally righteous as well (I stole your descriptor because it was perfect). And before someone says “but the Big Panda money subsidizes (insert zoo cause here)” just….nope. There are a myriad of ways to fundraise, find one and run with it.
PS. Love your tag (is that what the kid’s call it?).
Also, pandas can absolutely reproduce often enough to sustain the species when there are more than 1,700 of them, and they have enough food. It seems particularly cruel to wipe out most of a species through habitat destruction, then blame the remaining few for not being able to reproduce fast enough.
I read “born on a commune” as “born on a COMMUTE” and it radically altered my expectations and interpretation of that quote. Uhh.
You might prefer this excellent article about a woman who gave birth on an airplane: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/…
Ohhhh god. See also: baby born on the L’Enfant Metro platform in DC (GOD NO), the Hairpin did a great thing about the best DC metro stations to name your kid after: http://thehairpin.com/2013/08/best-d-c-metro-stat…
I’m so glad to hear someone else did the exact same thing I did. I had to read it twice.
My only wedding reading pet peeve is when people use 1 Corinithians 13. Yes, it’s a beautiful passage, but a) it’s not about romantic love and b) I don’t like anything at weddings that implies that love is the only thing you need to make a marriage work. “Love never fails” is about the worst relationship advice you could give.
Sooooo much side eye to people who use that, hand waves and “you do you!” to everyone else.
There’s a site called Do Not Link that lets you put links to terrible things without increasing their search ranking.
http://www.donotlink.com/
Great for hate-reads!
Oooooh I encourage everyone to use that when attempting to visit any Daily Fail pieces if you must.
That article about wedding poems taught me a marvelous new word: Epithalamium, a poem written for a bride on her way to the marital chamber (GO GET IT GURL). I commission Mallory to write a misandrist version, post-haste.
ALSO, “Hymen” was the greek God of marriage ceremonies. WHAAAT? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymen_(god)
“Hymen was supposed to attend every wedding. If he didn’t, then the marriage would supposedly prove disastrous, so the Greeks would run about calling his name aloud.”
I say we bring back this noble tradition. “HYMEN! HYYYYYYYYYMEN!!”
“O HYMEN! O HYMENEE.
O HYMEN! O Hymenee!
Why do you tantalize me thus?
O why sting me for a swift moment only?
Why can you not continue? O why do you now cease?
Is it because, if you continued beyond the swift mo-
ment, you would soon certainly kill me?”
-Walt Whitman
ALSO, and more in keeping, Catullus 61, quoted above by winterbymorning:
” And also you, upright virgins, for whom a like day is nearing, chant in cadence, singing “O Hymenaeus Hymen, O Hymen Hymenaeus!”
That more freely, hearing himself to his duty called, will he bear here his presence, Lord of honorable love, uniter of true lovers.
What god is worthier to be sought by anxious lovers? Whom of the celestials do men worship more greatly? O Hymenaeus Hymen, O Hymen Hymenaeus!” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Pers…
Ohhh we had a friend read the Jane Hirshfield poem at our wedding, and there is a great series of photos of me devolving into messier and messier tears as she reads. I also cry when I read the poem myself, and when I look at that series of pictures, AND as I am writing this comment. Jesus.
So, married folk: did you have readings? What were they? I’m interested!
We went with a bit from Song of Solomon and the last paragraph of Emma, read by our moms.
I am not married but my friends had a secular ceremony and got me to read Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, which I’d chosen to read for them at their engagement party.
Oh, that’s a nice one!
My mom had that at her wedding, too!
Rainer Maria Rilke, Excerpt from Letter 24 and Union by Robert Fulghum, which makes me cry every time.
*sniffles*
My step-pretend-brother read a poem he had written (he is a poet). That was it. I don’t remember much of it, though I have a copy around here somewhere. I think it was about the power of mundane experiences in a relationship? (Also my sister’s fiance played guitar for the walking up to the ceremony place bit, and he played a number of absolutely hilarious songs of his own writing – though without the words, they just sounded like some guitar music.)
I almost used a poem by a grad-school friend of mine (scroll down here), but it was too erotic. And we had a guitar-playing friend who played us out with “Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong,” because my husband is a cheeseball.
Part of Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot because I am difficult and stubborn.
I am one hundred percent in favor of this, which part?
We had an actor friend read Robert Hershon’s “Superbly Situated” (amazing poem), and my wife’s godmother read a bit from Madeleine L’Engle’s “The Irrational Season.” We also used part of Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” for our vows and put Rilke’s “Pathways” on the back of the program.
…Can you tell I like poems and also the theme of journeys.
I had a friend read an emblem from George Wither’s 1635 A Collection of Emblemes, which I also placed in the program. I’m an early modernist, so, you know…how could I not? (And I could not with Shakespeare, etc.)
XXVIII. Where Lovers fitly matched be, In mutuall-duties, they agree
The last 500 words or so of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy (my partner’s from Dublin and the friend who read it is a Joyce scholar, and I’d taught it as a postgrad, so… Yes we said yes we will yes.)
I read from the Song of Solomon for my brother’s wedding, but arranged with my sister-in-law that instead of reading the usual “I sat down under his shadow… Set me as a seal…”, I’d read the section beginning, “my beloved is white and ruddy”, because my brother is ginger. I got a laugh at, “yay, he is altogether LOVELY!” My brother is still in awe that I turned a Bible reading into a chance to take the mickey out of him. *pride*
Two very short readings! The first was Ruth’s reply to Naomi (which is the one that someone called me anti-feminist for, although it is very very meaningful to my husband and me), the second was out of Ecclesiastes. We had a reading from Song of Solomon over our rings (“Wear my locket around your neck, wear my ring on your finger. Love is invincible facing danger and death”) and a very obscure old Catholic prayer at the end.
But Ruth and Naomi are amazing feminist role models! Two women, who have no social obligation to one another, deciding to stick together and forge a beautiful relationship and successful life, despite the world not caring about them at all.
I am civilly united / civil unionized, and the officiant (my sister) read Ehrmann’s Desiderata at the party: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/desiderata_tex…. It was perfect.
My brother got married yesterday (!!), and these are the poems the dads read:
Read by my SIL’s dad
Read by my dad
Both of them almost broke down in tears during their readings. My brother cried a bunch (his fiancée wiped away his tears several times, which was adorable), and I cried a bunch as well (but my bridesmaid dress had pockets, so I was prepared with tissues). Mom was the stoic one of the family, and did not blubber all over everything.
I’m very excited; you may have noticed.
Awwww. My sister cried at my wedding as well–her dress didn’t have pockets, but she has bounteous cleavage instead!
We had bits from Union by Robert Fulgham, a part of the Goodridge Massachusetts decision on same-sex marriage, and a recitation of “I like you” by Sandol Stoddard Warburg.
I wanted SOMETHING read at our wedding but all the poems I could find ended up making me want to throw things across rooms for being either too saccharine, too over-done, or too obviously wedding-intended, somehow. I finally gave up on poems and told our officiant to figure it out. He ended up reading Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” and then doing the “There are five kisses in the world” bit from the Princess Bride, and it basically made my life. Friends still talk fondly of our Sagan wedding, so I think we came out all right.
That sounds awesome.
Your officiant sounds fantastic.
The Economist: #notallslaveowners
That Economist article (ew ew ew ew ew) is timely after seeing this article on Slate about outrage over AP History exams: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/p…
Weddings in my family usually boil down to the “Short SHORT version” from Spaceballs, followed by 12 hours of partying, so that’s my ideal wedding. We save the speeches and reciting Godfather monologues until we’re drinking.
I have ALSO always wanted to live in Allentown, so I would be so tempted by that!
I am civilly united / civil unionized, and the officiant (my sister) read Ehrmann's Desiderata at the party: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/desiderata_tex…. It was perfect.
I once saw a delightful Vine which consisted of 2 guys singing "go suck a dick, suck a dick, suck a motherfucking dick, suck a huge or smaaaall dick" to the tune of Pachelbel's Canon in D and ever since it's all I can think of whenever anyone mentions it.
Awwww. My sister cried at my wedding as well–her dress didn't have pockets, but she has bounteous cleavage instead!