Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

[fflo]

That's a helluva title, isn't it? It's Grace Paley's title. A book of short stories. Seems Grace died the other day. I saw the news at the Pittsfield branch of the public library & wondered whether my houseguest was the only other person in the building who knew who she was. Seems quite possible.

Grace Paley wrote poetry, too. Was supposed to be at the poetry festival I went to last year, in fact, but was sick, we were told, in serious, hushed tones.

She was also a peacenik:

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now-- solar, wind-- for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

So men lead us to war for enough oil to continue to go to war for oil.

I'm now sure that these men can't stop themselves anymore-- even those who say they want to. There are too many interesting weapons. Besides, theirs is a habit of centuries, eons. They will not break that habit themselves.

For ourselves, for our girl and boy children, women will have to organize as we have done before-- and also as we have never done before-- to break that habit for them, once and for all.

"too many interesting weapons"--- that zings. "interesting"---so mild---as the force driving such a terrible & not mild thing.

but as far as us/women, at the moment i don't much believe we'll organize nuthin'.

Comments

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

The titles of all of her books are just so perfect.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

yeah, it doesn't feel like "women" will be "organizing" anything any time soon, or at least not as a gender-based group. i think that might be for the best--it would be horrible if all the work of showing the disparities had come to nothing so that all "women" were (and remained) the same thing.

but something needs doing. i just wonder what and who.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Fresh Air (noon on Michigan Radio, 91.7 FM) will broadcast an interview with her today.

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she was a major peacenik. I loved her titles, and her ideas were really interesting, and even quite radical. Her style owed a lot to spoken word, if I remember correctly, with much flavor of NY Jewish life. (I wrote a paper on her eons ago, in which I did something with that idea, and now I can't remember what!)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Here's something she said in this interview at Salon that stuck with me, after reading around about her here now that she's died:

Your stories feel as if they come out of daily conversations. Is that your main influence?

When I wrote poetry I was very keenly aware of being influenced. When I was very young, I wrote a lot like Auden. It's kind of comical, because after all, I didn't have a British accent. I took a class with Auden when I was 17 years old. Those poems meant a lot to me then, but later on they didn't mean a damn thing. But I did write exactly like Auden. I had no sense of my own language yet.

I look at all those poems now, and I see I didn't yet realize that you have two ears. One ear is that literary [Elsewhere in SALON: Seven months in bed]ear, and it's a good old ear. It's with us when we write in the tradition of English writing, or Western writing that includes Proust and Flaubert, and German writers and so on, and also Joyce.

But there was also something else that I had but I didn't know it. I only knew it in my own speech, and that is the ear of the language of home, and the language of your street and your own people.

When I started writing stories, I had a kind of a breakthrough. I had enough poetry from this ear, and I suddenly broke into the language that I then continued to write with. That was an important hour in my life. It was a sudden thing. I was sick and had a few weeks off, so I had the time to listen. I was able to use both ears suddenly.

There's another interview at Salon that's called "All My Habits Are Bad" --- does that count as one of her titles? :)

The subtitle to that one is "GRACE PALEY TALKS ABOUT THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS OF WRITERS, THE SUCCESS OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AND THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT GIVING A SHIT."