Today at TomDispatch, the classic Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things To Me. Heres how it begins: I still dont know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasions young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave when our host said, No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you. He was an imposing man whod made a lot of money. He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, So? I hear youve written a couple of books. I replied, Several, actually. He said, in the way you encourage your friends seven-year-old to describe flute practice, And what are they about? They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life. He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year? So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and Id somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority. Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said -- like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelens class on Chaucer -- gladly would he learn and gladly teach. Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, Thats her book. Or tried to interrupt him anyway. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, Thats her book three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 17:05:01 +0000
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