#Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

[wherekizzialives]

July Reads

You can tell that I took a week off from writing and had a couple of days completely to myself in July since I’ve managed to finish 10 books this month. All of them have been interesting, some of them completely upended me in the best of ways, and a few left me better than they found me. As of today I only have two books left to read for the History Girl Summer challenge I’m participating in over…

[luxe-pauvre]

Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you. Walking or cooking or labouring on simple or repetitive tasks can also be a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

from Orwell's Roses: In Mexico, roses have a particular significance as the flower that cascaded forth from Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s coarse-woven cloak on December 12, 1531, only a decade after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. The legend relates a radiant young woman had appeared to this indigenous man near what is now Mexico City, identified herself as the Virgin Mary, and commanded that they build her a shrine. When the Spanish bishop of Mexico demanded proof, the Virgin caused the hilltop named Tepayac to bloom with out-of-season flowers—a variety of flowers in some accounts, non-native roses in the most common version—for Juan Diego to use in his quest to be believed. He returned to the bishop, the roses tumbled forth, and the inside of his cloak was revealed to bear her image, as if the roses themselves had drawn her or become her. The cloak with its image of a dark woman cloaked in a robe scattered with stars and standing atop a crescent moon still hangs in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe at the foot of Tepayac.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is sometimes regarded as an Aztec goddess reappearing in Christian guise, and she spoke Juan Diego’s language to him, Nahuatl. In D.A. Brading’s history of the origins and evolution of the image and its worship, he notes that “when Mary commanded Juan Diego to gather flowers, she rooted the Christian gospel deep within the soil of Aztec culture, since for the Indians flowers were both the equivalent of spiritual songs and by extension, symbols of divine life.” The largest Catholic pilgrimage in the world is to that shrine complex on the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast-day, December 12, and year-round the shrine is piled high with offerings of roses.

[Thank you Rebecca Solnit]

[discworldwitches]

24 . 20. 9 for the book asks

24. Did you DNF anything? Why? i DNFed outlaw by anna north because it was sooo boring but i also DNFed orwell's roses by rebecca solnit because it leaned towards the pastoral too much.

20. What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations? it was poor deer by claire oshetsky! it vastly exceeded my expectations. i read it in the beginning of the year and still think about it.

9. Did you get into any new genres? hard sci-fi if that counts! i now have a nice little hard sci fi tbr list in libby for next year :)

thank u !!

[symptomofloves]

2, 11, 20!❣️

2. did you reread anything? what?

i actually didn't reread a single book this year... for next year though, i would love to reread the golden notebook by doris lessing; i remember it as being very richly layered & definitely worth revisiting.

11. what was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

most of the books i read have been out for a while, so i'm going to interpret this as the oldest book i enjoyed - my answer for that would be the brothers karamazov (1879)!

20. what was your most anticipated release? did it meet your expectations?

i also didn't read a single new release this year... the most recent book i read was orwell's roses by rebecca solnit (2021) & i would say it did meet my expectations. it was a really interesting perspective on orwell's work & his political philosophy & made me want to read more from him.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Reading “Orwell’s Roses” by Rebecca Solnit and it’s so-so, some essays good, some essays so-so, and I found this anecdote that just knocked me clean out.

Orwell was writing the Tribune during World War II, and in response to an accusation that he was being too negative, said that there was a lot of things to be negative about but hey, why not write something nice, so he wrote a bit about his beloved rose garden and praising the Woolworth’s Rose for being inexpensive and yet surprising. A few weeks later he picked up the pen again to note that he had gotten some very nasty letters about it, with one letter claiming that “flowers are bourgeois”.

Which is preceded by a quote by Solnit herself: “The left has never been short on people who arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy oneself while others are suffering, and someone is always suffering [...]implying that one what has to offer is misery and joylessness, rather than some practical contribution towards their liberation.”

You donate to a fan campaign and that’s decadent. A woman posts a selfie with cystic acne, and is mocked because as a white “pretty” girl she obviously has nothing to complain about. Not five minutes after any major win, there are people rushing in to claim it’s not a victory, resting is bad, and don’t you dare celebrate. How can you enjoy flowers and tea while these terrible things are happening? Write about how you enjoy something on a rare moment of relief from chronic depression, and people will readily chime in on how we can’t all be neurotypical and how life sucks really and they hate you for saying otherwise. You’re not oppressed enough. You’re not in enough pain.

Flowers are bourgeois.

[sharpened--edges]

In the introduction to the thick Everyman’s edition of Orwell’s Collected Essays, John Carey declares, ‘He almost never praises beauty and when he does he locates it in rather scruffy and overlooked things . . . the eye of the common toad, a sixpenny rosebush from Woolworth’s.’ I’d argue that he praises beauty often, and those overlooked things become means of broadening the definition of beauty, finding versions that are not elite or established, finding loveliness in the quotidian, the plebeian, the neglected. That quest makes beauty itself insubordinate to convention. Even Nineteen Eighty-Four’s grimness is peppered with moments of reprieve in the things his lonely rebel admires, craves, enjoys, most notably an ordinary landscape and a glass paperweight encasing a bit of red coral.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses (Granta, 2021), pp. 189–90.

[lauvra]

Flowers are of course deployed to mean erotic, romantic, ceremonial, and spiritual things, as garlands draped across altars and hung around the necks of winning racehorses, and all the rest. But before a flower is used to do something else, to honour a human occasion, it is in itself an occasion for attention. We say that flowers are beautiful, but what we mean by the beauty of a flower is something more than appearance, which is why real flowers are so much more beautiful than artificial flowers (but perhaps images of flowers reference the real and all its resonances as imitation flowers do not). That beauty lies in part in what it references or connects to, as life and growth incarnate, as the annunciation of the fruit to follow. A flower is a node on a network of botanical systems of interconnection and regeneration. The visible flower is a marker of these complex systems, and some of the beauty attributed to the flower as an autonomous object may really be about the flower as a part of a larger whole. I have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendour that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organisation, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal. Sometimes pictures convey this, but the habit of seeing in pictures encourages us to lose sight of the dance.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

[rrevvolution]

luxe-pauvre:

“Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you. Walking or cooking or labouring on simple or repetitive tasks can also be a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it”.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

[projectourworld]

We can’t afford to be climate doomers.

It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win.

In a recent 2023 survey, “Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050” and in 2021 “three-quarters (75%) of adults in Great Britain said they were worried about the impact of climate change”

The problem is positive climate news doesn’t make dramatic headlines.

Rebecca Solnit. The Guardian Newspaper / Contributor image for: Rebecca Solnit / Rebecca Solnit’s most recent books are Orwell’s Roses and the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, co-edited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua #people #purpose #responsibility #possibility #solutions

[graywyvern]

( via / @gameauras )

Soon the May green will be upon us.

"You ever think about the fact that trans people were never once an issue until the far right couldn’t milk their rubes for anti-abortion money anymore? I think about that a lot." --@thatpetewoods (via @JordanDavisPoet)

The Call.

Watching that skit last night on SNL (rerun) about art critics who couldn't name a single work from the 2020s, i felt "seen": & decided to start accumulating my own list.

So far i have: movies from 2021- Last Night in Soho, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Respect, The Power of the Dog, & perhaps best of all, The Tragedy of Macbeth; from 2022 The Whale & Women Talking.

Books are harder, but i can say Elizabeth Hand- The Book of Lamps and Banners & Joyelle McSweeney- Toxicon and Arachne from 2020 (i very seldom buy books when they first come out). Lisa Robertson- The Baudelaire Fractal (2020). Susanna Clarke- Piranesi (2020). Rebecca Solnit published Orwell's Roses in 2021, which is good, but not, i think, the milestones that some of her earlier books were. And the works (mostly published on Twitter) of Anthony Etherin--surely the greatest palindromist who ever lived.

For visual art, i can think of nothing that compares to the AI art (many, many artists, most of whom i've been blogging here). Maybe oneday i'll try to make a 10-list... Sculpture-wise, Melanie has reminded me of The Vessel at Hudson Yards in New York City. And there's the experimental filmmaker Sapphire Goss...

And music? "Burning" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2022); "Îdolo" by Adrian Queasada & Angélica Garcia (2023); & Dabda's album But All the Shining Things Are (2020)... Artists i knew from before & all had new albums out in this period include: Tash Sultana, Gary Numan, Tanya Tagaq, & Mean Mary. Wolves in the Throne Room, Björk, Tori Amos too.

Butterflies by Maria Sibylla Merian.

"We don't desire a president, do we?" --@Anthony_Etherin

#PalindromeByPairs

Future Tower - 230425.

[luxe-pauvre]

Orwell wrote in 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future,” a framework that would morph into Big Brother’s “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorise people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes. The first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms from the domestic to the global. After all, authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

[callmewinged]

"There's an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone." ~ Rebecca Solnit, "Orwell's Roses"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Reasons Ukraine has grounds to fear Moscow's plans for it, continued, from Orwell's Roses: “In 1928, the Soviet Union was at the start of its first five-year plan to pursue an accelerated program of industrialization that drew many people to the cities and increased bread shortages. Bad weather and Stalin’s rural policies made the shortages far worse. Better-off and less cooperative peasants were denounced as “kulaks,” and at the outset of 1929 Stalin launched a 65-day “dekulakization” rampage to destroy members of this fluid category. Immense numbers of peasants, particularly in Ukraine, were executed, imprisoned, or shipped off to Siberia and other remote places.

The government seized the remaining peasants’ grain, by force, by torture, at gunpoint. Even after the population was starving, Stalin was convinced they were holding out and the brutality continued. Those who tried to leave the regions stripped of sustenence were prevented; those who tried to steal food were shot. The surviving peasantry was forced onto collective farms where conditions were often chaotic, brutal, and otherwise unconducive to productivity. Ideologues who knew nothing of agriculture were sent to run the farms. The conditions for a catastrophe piled up in the early 1930s.

In the resultant “terror famine” sometimes called the Holodomor, about five million human beings starved to death, mostly in Ukraine. Famished peasants came to the towns to beg for scraps, came to the train stations in hopes of escaping, or died en route. Their skeletal bodies were strewn along the roads. Deranged by hunger, some turned to cannibalism, even devouring their own children. The Soviet regime found the starved millions incompatible with its image of communism’s success and so concealed their fate, with the help of most of the western journalists in Russia, who faced censorship and expulsion for telling the truth, but who were in most cases all too willing to comply.

Public figures—notably the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who had been flattered extensively by the regime--denied the existence of the famine, as did the New York Times’s Walter Duranty, who used his prestige to discredit other reporters who tried to report the facts. They hadn’t been tortured; the process of making them go along with a lie had been more delicate. At the time, only a few journalists, including Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge, told the truth about the famine and its causes. Gareth Jones, who in 1933 did so more boldly than anyone else, was the victim, in 1935, of a still-unsolved murder.

Muggeridge wrote that showmanship was “the most characteristic product” of the Soviet Union, conjuring up illusions to conceal grim realities rather than ameliorate them. Party members assured him that bread was plentiful and the agricultural future promising. When he went to see for himself, he found “cattle and horses dead; fields, neglected: meagre harvest despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the Government; now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment.” He reported of a despondent peasant and his malnourished children on a collective farm, “His pay was seventy-five kopeks a day. At open market prices seventy-five kopeks would buy half a slice of bread.”

The American journalist Eugene Lyons repented afterwards that he’d gone along with the lies, in a 1937 book called Assignment in Utopia. Orwell observed in his review of the book, “Like many others who have gone there full of hope, he was gradually disillusioned, and unlike some others he finally chose to tell the truth about it. It is an unfortunate fact that any hostile criticism of the present Russian régime is liable to be taken as propaganda against Socialism; all socialists are aware of this, and it does not make for an honest discussion.” It may be Lyons’s book that called Orwell’s attention to what would become a famous part of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the psychological torture that breaks down Winston Smith until he agrees that 2 + 2 =5.

It was a real formula, a proposition to carry out the Soviet five-year plan in four years. Lyons wrote, “The formula 2 + 2 = 5 immediately riveted my attention. It seemed to me both bold and preposterous—the daring and the paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical simplicity, its defiance of logic. 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts, in foot-high letters on billboards...” Perhaps it was indoctrination in overriding one’s intelligence, and certainly lies were the one crop with a bumper yield year after year.”

Rebecca Solnit

Orwell’s Roses

[nprbooks]

If you only know George Orwell as the dyspeptic, dystopian creator of Animal Farm and 1984, you should absolutely pick up Rebecca Solnit's new Orwell's Roses, which takes the rose garden Orwell planted at a rented cottage in 1936 as a jumping-off point to explore all kinds of questions. "For example," writes reviewer Ilana Masad, "What was 1936 like politically, socially, and economically in England? Where was Orwell in his career then? Or: What did his given name signify and what history did it carry? What significance lay in his chosen nom de plume that over time was used by friends and family as well? And even: What does it mean to plant roses?"

Check out the full piece here!

-- Petra