rebgarof

[rebgarof]

(attended Quaker meeting today)

ANY COMMON DESOLATION

by Ellen Bass

can be enough to make you look up

at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few

that survived the rains and frost, shot

with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep

orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird

would rip it like silk. You may have to break

your heart, but it isn’t nothing

to know even one moment alive. The sound

of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant

animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.

The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.

Warm socks. You remember your mother,

her precision a ceremony, as she gathered

the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,

drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath

can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,

the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything

you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves

and, like a needle slipped into your vein —

that sudden rush of the world.

[rebgarof]

“In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger's act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again." Parker Palmer

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“Pumping milk is, for many women, a sharply private activity. It can also be physically and emotionally challenging, as it reminds the nursing mother of her animal status: just another mammal, milk being siphoned from its glands. Beyond photographs in breast pump manuals (and lactation porn), however, images of milk expression are really nowhere to be found. Phrases such as colostrum, letdown, and hindmilk arrive in one's life like hieroglyphs from the land of the lost. So the presence of Steiner's camera here—and the steadfast stare of her subject—feels jarring and exciting. This is especially so when you consider how photographers such as Goldin (or Ryan McGinley, or Richard Billingham, or Larry Clark, or Peter Hujar, or Zoe Strauss) often make us feel as though we have glimpsed something radically intimate by evoking danger, suffering, illness, nihilism, or abjection. In Steiner's intimate portrait of Childs, the proposed transmission of fluids is about nourishment. I almost can't imagine.

And yet—while pumping milk may be about nourishment, it isn't really about communion. A human mother expresses milk because sometimes she can't be there to nurse her baby, either by choice or by necessity. Pumping is thus an admission of dis-tance, of maternal finitude. But it is a separation, a finitude, suffused with best intentions. Milk or no milk, this is often the best we've got to give.”

[The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson]

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“With the land transfer finalized, Hazel Powless believes the land itself can now begin to heal.”

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“Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's "normal" state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from— one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I'm a special—a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook.

When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? (Judith Butler) How can you tell; or, rather, who's to tell?

…

To align oneself with the real while intimating that others an at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identiny, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks be is a king s mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

Perhaps this is why psychologist D. W. Winnicot's notion of “feeling real" is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real. one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real-a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, "the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the hear's action and breathing." which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott. feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation— a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.”

[The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson]

[rebgarof]

“The Thing Is,” by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

[rebgarof]

TRANSFORMING SCHOOL FOOD POLITICS AROUND THE WORLD, edited by Jennifer E Gaddis and Sarah A Robert

“Debates about school lunch are fundamentally about care: what it means to care well, how much care is worth, and whether caring for public goods like children and the environment should be the private responsibility of individuals in the home or a public responsibility that is collectivized and shared."

Care is an activity that includes "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as poss-ble. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. As a form of government-sponsored care infrastructure, public school meal programs are a vital arena to begin renegotiating both economic and ecolog!-cal relationships. One way to do this is by practicing care-at-a-distance, holding distant others in emotional closeness rather than physical closeness through values-based supply chains that connect buyers with producers who emphasize fair labor standards, healthy food access, communily empowerment, and ecological sustainability.

As a commodified form of care nested within a fiercely contested state institution, the labor of educating and feeding children at school is tethered to a legacy of feminization, racialization, and devaluation that is common across occupations that involve care work.* What's more, women do the majority of food work-often for low wages or in an unpaid capacity— in countries around the world, yet they control fewer resources and hold limited decision-making power over food policy or industry practices.

However, they are not without agency, and in this volume, we highlight numerous ways that women are leading efforts to remake social, economic, and environmental relationships through school food politics. We con-ceptualize their efforts within the broad umbrella of care-centered politics, which "has the capacity to provide values and ideas, and a perspective about change that not only challenges the neoliberal political consensus and its long-standing capitalist and market-centered underpinnings but the more extreme versions of the anticare politics that neoliberalism has bred too."

By using the verb "transforming" in our title, we assert a critical need to understand and do school food politics differently. We argue that a transformative school food politics is an inherently feminist politics of food and education. It is driven by inclusive policymaking processes that draw from the lived expertise of those most impacted. It is welcoming of collaborations that include a wide range of stakeholders-for example, students, their caregivers, teachers, cafeteria workers and other school support staff, labor unions, grassroots activists and nonprofit organizations, policymak-ers, and the private sector-while centering the voices and perspectives of the students and frontline workers who have historically held the least power in determining school food problems, policy, and practice. It pushes back against the economic devaluation of the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children. Lastly, we conceptualize transformative school food politics as a distributed, transnational movement capable of learning from local, state, regional, national, and international examples.”

[rebgarof]

“When prisoners are tasked with the food service, rather than everything being contracted out to private companies, the food is better.”

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Yaya Bey: Tiny Desk Concert <3