Other news
Topic: Events
Alternate perspectives on events in Belgrade around Milosevic's funeral, from Belgrade Blog. I'd heard nothing about the 'Early Spring' gathering in the international media, which is unfortunate and unbalanced - I sure saw enough about the goings-on on the other side. Peaceful anti-Milosevic demonstrations featuring balloons don't fit the mainstream media's script about Serbia, I suppose.

Gentle Passage
I read obsessively. Especially when I need comfort or distraction. Although the things I find comforting to read might strike others as odd. For comfort and distraction this past week, I read Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of poems and short stories about everything from fallen angels to film stars. Gaiman writing is rather dark and his perspective on the world is off-kilter, but even his most grim stories were somehow soothing to me.

He mentioned in the book that one of the sources he finds inspiring is the scuplture of Lisa Snellings-Clark, and curious about it, I looked for her work on the web this afternoon. I can see why Gaiman finds her art compelling - it shares with his a certain affinity for the macabre, otherworldly, and unsettling. Ordinarily, I don't know that her work would appeal to me strongly, but I was moved and consoled by an affecting sculpture of death envisioned as a maternal angel, a mass of soft dark feathers and draperies and a luminous face, shepherding three children out of life. "Gentle Passage" is about halfway down this page, and I think it's remarkable for representing death without fearfulness, with a certain tenderness, but without any sort of sticky sentimentality. It's a beautiful and sombre piece, and looking at it eases something inside me.

Topic: Events
I am told it was a beautiful day there, a day that truly felt like the beginning of spring. 'Like a shot of comfort', as a friend described it.

I hope it was a day like yesterday was here, when even I, who have noticed so little outside of myself this week, took notice of the warmth of the sunshine and the blueness of the sky. I hope it helped to soothe the feelings of those who are missing him, and wanting to be with me.

I miss him, although I think I will miss him more on that day, sometime sooner or later, when I see something I want to e-mail to him, or think of something I want to tell him, and realize that I can't.

I miss knowing that I will see him again.

He was kind to animals, and he loved his family. The most banal and hoariest of eulogy clichés, and yet in his case, so very true. He was especially kind to animals that others had been cruel to, and would be glad that his parents' memorial to him will be at an animal shelter. Everything that his parents have done has been what I think he would've wanted. That closeness with his family, the way they knew each other, was something that I loved in him.

His family included me in his obituary, and the generosity of that gesture touched me deeply. They said he was my 'devoted friend', which is lovely and accurate, and as complete as any two-word description of our relationship could be. The obituary format does not lend itself to backstory, after all.

And that backstory? I think I will just say here that he loved me with incredible generosity and acceptance. Our relationship was not always easy, but we found much happiness with each other. He was an important person in my life, one whose impact on me was positive and lasting. And now I can only hope that I was able to show him that while he was alive.

I loved him, and I miss him.

I'm an expert?
Topic: Development
Paul tagged me in on the freshest meme to hit the internet: what five resources - online or otherwise - would you point people to, if you wanted to give them an entry into your field of expertise?

I've never really thought of myself as having a field of expertise. Maybe procrastination. I've honed my gift for it over many, many years. Similarly, I've been a student for many, many years. They fit together, those two fields. I suspect that's not quite what Paul had in mind, though.

Professionally, I never thought of myself as a microfinance 'expert', although it's the field I have the most experience in. A year of postgrad study is not sufficient to allow me to consider myself a 'gender expert', and I'm not sure what it takes to become one.

So, in the grand tradition of under-prepared students everywhere, I will take the original assignment, elide it to suit the minimal amount of work that I've done, and hope that I can write it all into an at least semi-coherent whole.

1. Grab attention in the intro: Best! URL! Ever! It can't win best non-e-mail web app until they fix the 'import bookmarks' problem issue, but all the same, I'm amazed at how quickly I've come to depend on del.icio.us. It's a helpful in any field of endeavor (including procrastination). Not only does it save all your bookmarks in one place and let you tag and search them, it also lets you see if anyone else has bookmarked the same page, and shows you their other bookmarks. This can be very helpful for discovering resources on a variety of topics - or just an entertaining distraction.

2. Lead in with a strong initial argument: A good all-purpose entry point into the field of microfinance is the Microfinance Gateway. It has an extensive on-line library, several discussion lists, a consultant database, listings of upcoming conferences and events - it's a solid effort at being a 'one-stop shop' for microfinance information, although the user interface and search functions can be a bit bewildering at first.

3. Introduce the topic you're not as strong on: For research in gender and development that is truly from a gender perspective, rather than a perspective in which 'gender'='women' (as is too often the case in practice), the Institute of Development Studies has some great resources (and interesting research in other fields, as well).

4. Tie your topics together to demonstrate that you're making intellectual connections: Linda Mayoux manages a suite of websites that are excellent resources for those who are interested in gender and microfinance beyond the argument that more credit=better lives for women. She's also known for her work on participatory approaches and impact evaluation, if microfinance isn't your thing. If gender isn't your thing, you're on the wrong blog.

5. Wrap it all up with a brilliant conclusion: Argh. This is always where I crap out. Informal polls of my friends indicate that I'm weird in finding the conclusion far more difficult to write than the introduction, but I've always found endings much more difficult than beginnings. I'm trying to think of a fifth resource, and I've got nothing.

But I want to get this posted, so I'm going to cheat. It doesn't really provide an entry into a particular field, but Chandra Mohanty's article 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses' (summary here, but be advised that the language is not plain and the page design is a bit eye-watering) has been a source I've returned to many times over the past year, because the attitude she critiques - that 'third world' women are victims who need to be saved, and that 'first world' women will save them - are still very much in evidence in feminism and in development. It's an attitude that disempowers women in the third world and uncritically promotes the superiority of 'Western' values. It's a valuable reminder of what I do not want my own work to be.

What are you an expert on: agnoiologist, DamselFish, k8teebug?

Beat me to it
Topic: Ranting
That post I mentioned I'd been wanting to write about Pink's new music video? Soft Graffiti got there first, and has done a really good job identifying both the positive and the negative aspects of the messages in the video.

Unfortunately, I can't find a live link to the video. Plasticbag.org pointed me to it a few weeks ago, but that link is no longer working. You can read the lyrics here, if you're interested. Or you might try YouTube for the video - I can't at the moment because the site is not available.

The song is a rant about 'stupid' girls: materialistic, body and image obsessed women. The video fairly pointedly sends up Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson, in particular. On the one hand, it's entertaining to see vapid, shallow, obnoxious behavior mocked. And I'm always happy to see a critique of image obsession in popular media, where it's possible it might reach a large enough audience to do some sort of good.

The video isn't any sort of radical critique, though - the alternative to being a 'stupid' girl that the video presents is to play football with the boys. The message seems to be that either you can play with the boys, or be played by them - male approval figures highly in what's valued about women either way, and there isn't a strong message that women are capable of being supportive of each other. That, to my mind, is a major omission.

It's something of a missed opportunity, as well. The media is able to play this as a catfight between Pink and the 'stupid girls', going straight for the salacious angle and ignoring the commentary on the scarcity (in the mainstream) of alternative models of femininity for girls and young women. I think it would have been better (although for Pink, as a participant in and product of the mainstream media, maybe not possible) to have attacked the media for pushing thinness, consumerism, and a pre-packaged blatant 'sexiness' as feminine ideals, rather than focusing on the 'girls' in question.


(Via the 9th Carnival of Feminists at Mind the Gap!)

Epistolary matters
Topic: Quotidiana

I got a real letter – three pages, handwritten in the middle of a blizzard.

It’s been ages since I got a letter all on its own – I have family members and friends who send proper cards for birthdays and holidays, and who send handwritten notes with packages and such, but I can’t remember the last time I got an letter all on its own. I like receiving cards and I love getting packages, but neither evokes the sense of nostalgia I felt when I opened up the envelope and found sheets of paper covered closely in graceful script.

I had somehow managed to forget how reading someone’s handwriting adds another level of personality to correspondence.  My friend expresses her personality well even through e-mail, but seeing her handwriting reminded me not only of college, when I would see her neat, lightly flourished script on legal pads left on desks and beds, but of layers of her personality that e-mail doesn’t always evoke – something about her writing brought to mind her love of Victoriana, decoupage, and elegantly, purposefully mis-matched tea services.

I read it on the tram, smiling at these recollections and enjoying the feel of good paper between my fingers. There was also a clear reminder of how things have changed in the intervening years – a page of the letter was covered with her one-year-old daughter’s pencil scribblings. After all, it’s never too early to begin encouraging the habit of good correspondence.

Today, I will buy an aerogram and do something that I haven’t done in ages – write a slightly disjointed letter, over the course of moments snatched from several days, in the smallest possible legible script. If I recall the sequence of events correctly, I will then spend a week meaning to mail it but forgetting about it, misplace it, and find it about a month or so later. I am suddenly reminded that one of the good things about e-mail is that it has encouraged me to be a much more timely correspondent.

1000 Women Exhibit in New York
Topic: Development
I posted about the 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize project several months back, and regrettably, haven't really been keeping up with it since then. But I just received a notice that there's an exhibit about it at the UN from 27 February, lasting for two weeks. It's open to the public, and it's free, and I know I have readers in the New York City area who might be interested. So if any of you are able to go, I'd love to hear what your impressions of the exhibit and project are.

Further details below:

Come Join Us

On
Monday, February 27, 2006
from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
for the Exhibit opening of
“1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize”

The reception celebrates the opening of the United Nation’s Conference on the Status of Women with an exhibit that features the work and stories of the 1,000 women worldwide nominated in 2005 for the Nobel Peace Prize

(Men very Welcome!)

The exhibit will be on display for two weeks in the Church Center located at: 777 UN Plaza (corner of 44th Street and 1st Avenue)
Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

This exhibit is free to the public and no UN passes are needed to attend.

Helene Leneveu
Program Associate
Hague Appeal for Peace
777 UN Plaza, Third Floor
New York, NY 10017
Tel: (+1) 212-687-2623
Fax: (+1) 212-661-2704
Website: www.haguepeace.org

" A culture of peace will be achieved when citizens of the world understand global problems; have the skills to resolve conflict constructively; know and live by international standards of human rights, gender and racial equality; appreciate cultural diversity; and respect the integrity of the Earth. Such learning can not be achieved without intentional, sustained and systematic education for peace." Global Campaign for Peace Education

I couldn't agree more
Topic: Development
The subject of 'empowerment' comes up a lot in development-speak, particularly where programs aimed specifically at women are concerned. And I have never cared for it, but have never really been able to articulate why. But Maia's post at Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty, crystallized the reasons for my resistance to the term for me. I couldn't agree more that it's smurfy, imprecise, individualistic, and that the idea that someone or something can 'empower' someone is seriously counterintuitive. And here a few other reasons why I think it's time to put 'empowerment' out to pasture. Once a word has been co-opted for use by the personal care industry, any power it might once have had is totally, utterly, completely gone.

Forgot one
Topic: Reading
Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, one of her early novels that I don't think I've read since my sophomore year English teacher let me raid her Atwood collection.

One of the things I enjoy about Atwood is the way that she plays with genres. Her books share certain qualities: narrators are predominantly female, a strong feminist awareness pervades her work, she likes to write about people who are on the edge in some way or another, and relationships between women are very important in her work. But she's written novels that arguably fall within science fiction, dystopian fiction, true crime/historical fiction, as well as 'literary' novels (which is how I classify those books that are stronger on wordplay and imagery than plot or character development, and/or don't fit within other categories). Atwood doesn't ignore genre conventions, but she doesn't blindly adhere to them, either.

Bodily Harm, for example, has overtones of the quest/travel novel. The protagonist, Rennie, is a young 'lifestyle' writer who goes on a last-minute vacation/assignment to a Caribbean island. Her life has taken an unexpected downturn, and she needs to get away. But her island escape turns out to be an impoverished country that has a certain strategic importance to its North American neighbors. So in the middle of a tropical travel story, a political thriller breaks out, as Rennie is unconsciously and unintentionally swept up into various intrigues that her island acquaintances are involved in. But the adventure/intrigue conventions are subverted by the book's close focus on Rennie's psychological state and her history. The 'bodily harm' that Rennie must come to terms with is not only that which can be inflicted upon her by others, but that which comes from internal sources, as well.

I found Bodily Harm much better than I remembered from my first reading of it. As usual, Atwood's characterizations are excellent, and I think I'm much more capable of sympathizing with and understanding Rennie now than I was at 15 or 16. I was surprised at how well Atwood captured the awkwardness of the self-aware tourist in a poor country - the uncomfortable awareness of standing out, the guilt that accompanies the recognition of one's privilege, the desire to be of help conflicting with a heightened sensitivity to the possibility of being taken advantage of. And I had forgotten, or hadn't noticed before, that there are critiques of hapless foreign aid and tourist development programs threaded through the book, which aren't common topics to stumble across in novels, and which provide further evidence towards my theory that I like Atwood so much, not just because I like her writing style, but because I'm interested in what she's interested in, and I like the way her mind works. (Yes, I'm aware I'm projecting. A lot. I don't usually feel the need to think that I'd like the authors of books I enjoy as people, or have much to say to them, but there's something about Atwood's writing that means she always turns up on my 'imaginary dinner party' guest list.)

50 Books
Topic: Reading
I hope it's not a condition of the 50 Book Challenge that one should post on books as they're finished, because I just totally disqualified myself, if that's the case. I've got a lot of books to catch up on.

I think I'm done with Lindsey Davis for awhile. It only took seven more Falco novels and a historical romance about the Emperor Vespasian and his mistress to finally put me over the edge, but I think I've had enough for the time being. I've enjoyed the series, though. There are lots of things to like: the Thin Man-style banter, the dry wit, the research, the intrigue, the way that Davis establishes cases for Falco that explore different parts of the Roman empire and different layers of Roman society.

The Iron Hand of Mars takes Falco to the edges of the European empire on a dangerous mission that involves investigating a troublesome legion and attempting to informally negotiate peace with restless Celtic tribes. And of course, even at the very fringe of Roman civilization, Falco can't escape family problems. In Poseidon's Gold, Falco's family's issues threaten to overwhelm him entirely, as his mother hires him to investigate allegations that his much-adored and unfortunately deceased older brother may have been involved in a dodgy scheme prior to his death. This draws Falco into working closely with his father, whom Falco has never forgiven for leaving his mother and their family. The world of fine and not-so-fine art proves both frustrating and rewarding for the Didius family.

Last Act in Palmyra sees Falco traveling again, needing an escape from Rome, and this time heading for the exotic landscape of Syria. The search for a missing performer leads Falco to fall in with an itinterant theater company that traveling with a murderer in its midst, and to try his hand at being a playwright. The result is a must-see performance of a play that is well ahead of its time.

Upon his return to Rome, Falco falls into a case that introduces him to the somewhat less shady and more reliably paid of the city's vigiles: the urban fire brigade that evolved into the closest thing the city has to a police force. Falco's best friend, Petro, has undone a major criminal empire, but then needs help coping with the formerly minor players attempting to fill the void. Time to Depart introduces all sorts of disasters into Falco's life, from being set upon by gangsters to being adopted by a street mutt, to family problems, fire, and an unanticipated pregnancy.

Although in need of a vacation, Falco doesn't get one when he ventures out to southern Spain with his very pregnant partner in A Dying Light in Corduba. Greed and corruption are possible threats to the vital olive oil trade, and it's up to Falco to get to the bottom of any conspiracies, as well as to find out who's responsible for a vicious attack that killed a fellow informer and nearly killed Falco's nemesis, the emperor's Chief Spy. And he has only weeks in which to do it, or two formidable grandmothers-in-waiting will have his hide for allowing their newest grandchild to be born outside of Rome.

Upon returning to Rome, Falco finds that Petro's unfortunate interest in a particular member of the criminal kingpin family introduced in Time to Depart has resulted in the break-up of Petro's family and the loss of his position in the vigiles. A family man himself now, Falco yields to his mother's pressure to take on a partner. She has the Chief Spy, Anacrites, in mind - while Falco was in Rome, she was nursing Anacrites back to health and becoming inexplicably convinced of his good qualities (which Falco has certainly never seen). In Three Hands in the Fountain Falco dodges that bullet by taking Petro on as a partner. The case they're faced with is a grisly one - they discover that for years, someone has been abducting women during festivals, killing them, dismembering their bodies, and depositing the gruesome evidence in the city's aqueducts. Not only is Petro difficult to work with, but Falco is wearing himself out worrying about all the people he can't protect unless he successfully solves the case before the killer strikes again.

In Two for the Lions, Falco and Petro's partnership has dissolved, and Falco has reluctantly partnered with Anacrites to put an end to his mother's nagging. The two think they've found the perfect way to fill their coffers - investigating suspiciously low property claims filed in the latest tax census. 'Falco & Partner' begin by investigating the owner of a menagerie and gladiator barracks who supplies various forms of entertainment to the infamously bloodthirsty Roman crowds. A corpse in the menagerie, a leopard loose in a bathhouse, a rare North African plant, and a lady with an unusual hobby feature in this mystery, which leads Falco to Libya and into the gladiatorial ring.

Finally, The Course of Honour, which is related to the Falco series by its focus on the early career of the future Emperor Vespasian, but is a romance, not a mystery, and has a female narrator. The snappy dialogue and modern sensibilities that feature in the Falco novels are familiar, but this novel stands entirely on its own. I was put in mind of the young Katherine Hepburn by the character of Caenis, the intelligent and ambitious slave secretary to Antonia ('Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia; Augustus' niece and sister-in-law of Tiberius; mother of the renowned Germanicus (mother too of the peculiar Claudius and the scandalous Livilla); grandmother of Caligula and Gemellus, who were to share the Empire one day'), who falls in love with the young Vespasian, an upstart from the country who has not yet achieved a seat in the Senate. While social conventions dictate that the relationship cannot last, the two remain friendly as they rise in the world, surviving and thriving in a particularly turbulent period of Roman history. And of course, even these two relentless realists can't escape a happy ending.

I have been doing thesis reading too, of course. Gender, Power and Organisation: A Psychological Perspective, by Paula Nicolson, looks at the many problems that professional women face in modern organizations, and the psychological impact that obstacles to their professional achievement have on women. Unfortunately, I read this book quite a few weeks ago, and don't recall much of the detail of it. Some of Nicolson's observations and insights about the lives of professional women were helpful, but perhaps a bit limited by her close focus on the medical and academic fields.

I also read Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia, by Louise Brown, which was really frustrating. First, because the problem of trafficking in women seems so insurmountable in Brown's analysis, and because of the way the book was written. Brown's focus on Asian men as commercial sex customers is helpful, since so many studies are concerned only with Western men, as is the fact that she focuses on men who purchase sex at all, because commercial sex customers are severely underresearched - most research on commercial sex has focused primarily on those who provide it. However, I had major problems with the language she used to describe Asian culture, the fact that her word choices sometimes objectified women who sell sex, and the fact that she quoted the women she interviewed very selectively. Brown was not at all successful in humanizing the women and girls she interviewed who were trafficked into the sex trade, which I found disappointing considering that she mentioned several times how much respect she had for the women she interviewed. There is a substantial lack of work in English that, in as much as its possible with translation, presents 'third world' sex workers stories in their own words, and I think this book missed an opportunity to help correct that problem.

Finally, I just finished Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm, a science fiction novel set in what is presumably Virginia of the near future (Wilhelm is coy about specific location, but situates the story near the Shenandoah River), on a family estate where the patriarchs of the Sumner family decide that the only way to preserve the human race from the incipient collapse of society due to environmental damage is to bring their large family together in their private valley. However, the damage done to human reproductive systems by pollution means that the only way the experiment will survive is to introduce human cloning. But the clones aren't entirely 'human' in certain ways - they are their own society, or perhaps, another species.

The novel was published in 1976, and reads like it, but it has aged with grace. It's solidly written, vague about exact time periods and technological innovation, and focuses on character development and the consequences of technology on human society. Wilhelm's speculation on what a clone society would be like, and what humanity would gain and lose by reproducing without sex, is original and compelling. And given the growing concerns about the consequences of pollution and global warming, and ongoing ethical debates about cloning, the topics the novel organizes itself around feel very immediate.