Anon

Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"
--Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own" (1929).

I first read Virginia Woolf's Room in 1972.

At that time I had worked my way, through ten years of unstinting labor, to a B.A. degree in English Literature. In the course of acquiring that degree, I had been asked to read exactly two women writers: Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson. There were almost no women writers in the anthologies I studied in the courses I took for that B.A. I had no exam questions on women writers, there were no classroom discussions about them, and I didn't know their names. I had determined to be a writer when I was seven, so I saw that I would have to leap gigantic hurdles in order to write and publish what is in me to write, and that I had best bond with other women and jump those hurdles in a movement.

Since 1972, enormous changes have taken place.

This morning Goatee Booknerd's blip led me to search out Virginia Woolf's essay and to read it again, and I am happy to say I find it dated. I am ecstatic to consider that as Bella grows up, she will have plenty of women writers as models: in blogs, blips, youtubes, tweets, online journals, and even (if she can find them) in books printed on paper. There are still hurdles left. Class, unequal education, access to technology, and the perception of race still need work. But her gender will not be as much a predictor of her fate as it was from the dawn of time to the dawn of that movement of women and pro-feminist men in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. We built a way of thinking, we created Women's Studies, we changed the meaning of literature, and we accomplished something.

None of this has anything to do with the picture, which was taken in the little town of Vernonia, Oregon, which is a town that was flooded and then rescued and re-built with government assistance, and yet it is bristling with right-wingers who complain about big government and taxes. There's no logic to human beings. Late-summer dandelions have not changed since my childhood, and that's fine with me.

For laughter that may take you through the next season, see Henri 2, Paw de Deux, as recommended by Booky Goatherd. I saw, I laughed, I faved, I subscribed.