#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]

[annacswenson]

« to garden is to make whole again what has been shattered » —Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

[cup-and-chaucer]

My Month in Books: November 2022

1. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit: This book is the definition of a book where the parts were greater than its sum. Rambling, meandering, and so well-written that I wanted to throttle her for it being so badly organized. I saw a GR review that put it perfect: “So exceptional on a line level that it’s easy to ignore that you don’t actually retain anything from it.” Some sections were fascinating, like on the modern Colombian rose market, and the parts about George Orwell himself were really fascinating. But just onerous to slog through—she did agree with me about the sensuality of 1984 so I guess it’s a five star read, regardless.

2. Deathless by Cathrynne M Valente: A misunderstood book, I think. Very memorable, beautifully written, wild as fuck. If you have a passion for interwar history, extended metaphors, criticisms of totalitarian communism, BDSM, and fairytales…this might be the book for you?

3. I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein: I enjoyed this! Particularly the earliest sections about the experimental theatre and off-off-Broadway movements which I really had no idea about. What really struck me about this book is a. how much failure is inherent in art and being a successful artist (it’s a lesson that I know but it always is a good reminder) and b. how much AIDS shaped the art of the 80s (again something I knew but it hit different in Harvey’s description). I just loved the audio of this.

4. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman: I listened to this on audio and Neil Gaiman is now the only fiction author allowed to read his own books. Everyone else go sit down.

I loved this loved this loved this. I’ve been wanting to really educated myself on Norse mythology for awhile and this was presented in such an accessible way. I really am at my happiest reading myth collections. The thing that I learned was how much symbolic overlap between Norse mythology and Christianity; how many woven threads. I have no idea how much this is related to the timing that the Prose Edda was written (I think post-Christianity and I know that heavily influenced how they were written). I’ve had the book Children of Elm and Ash sitting on my bookshelf for, like, five years and I need to sink my teeth into it now.

[blysse-and-blunder]

in lieu of a commonplace book

saturday, jan 27, 2024

*brennan lee mulligan voice* heeeeeeeelllllllllllllloooooooOOOOOOOOO one and all and welcome back for another thrilling episode of...whatever this is. thank you for being here.

It's 2024! Say hi, intrepid heroes!

reading recently finished:

-orwell's roses by rebecca solnit (audio) - glad I listened, ultimately very gratifying - history, criticism, extremely lush garden-filled prose and love for growing things - nona the ninth by tamsyn muir - felt so much about [redacted] it made me cry. i can unblock ALL THE TAGS NOW - the blue sword by robin mckinley (audio) - catching up on old school fantasy continues -when the angels left the old country by sacha lamb (audio) - beautiful. not not in conversation with good omens but doing something different.

recently begun: -the ministry of the future by kim stanley robinson - can't decide if it's a scifi novel or a policy brief about ways to combat climate change- reading on my mom's recommendation -babel: an arcane history by r.f.kuang - withholding judgment, but i know you probably want me to hate it and so far i don't, really! to my own surprise -the shadow of the wind by carlos ruiz zafrón (audio) - spooky, post-modern but incredibly good at sounding like it is of the time it depicts. many thoughts on the audio book narrator's accent work, most favorable -one corpse too many by ellis peters. wild that i have only just begun reading the cadfael mysteries

listening last week was about discovering and putting on continuous loop the group trousdale on the recommendation of @m2pixie (!) and other trusted friends; the energy, the harmonies! they fill a girl group void i didn't realize i had, it feels like the best kind of throwback, like old chicks or something, some desperately needed bops. exhibit a: bad blood.

today my daylist introduced me to joy oladokun and i'm so glad it did. love her vibe, love this cover art. had to take a picture of my desk, the visuals were so satisfying.

watching the newest series of netflix's lupin!! so far i'm really, really enjoying where this season has been spending most of its time-- the new characters, the new heists, the new stakes. especially fun to watch with friends where we can all shout about the mrs doubtfire of it all, the betrayals, the misdirection, the 'he can't keep getting away with this!.' the original lupin series will always bring back memories of watching it in early lockdown; i'm glad that there's this now to think about and remember instead.

playing hollow knight hollow knight hollow kniiiiiiight. bought it a few months ago when it was on sale, after hanging out and watching @dimir-charmer stream for us a bit, but playing it yourself is a different game. i'm having a blast. it's becoming a problem. i'm having to be so so good and mature in how much i let myself just get suckered in to a full day spent in my little buggy maze adventures. the temptation to keep going until i've made a meaningful advancement of some kind (today: got the longer nail! last time: beat hornet! saved zote the mighty, got the baldur shell charm, and beat the gruz mother!) is very, very real. have also gotten around this by listening to lots of lo-fi hollow knight beats to relax and study to while being 'productive.'

(found this screenshot online, and holy extra health batman)

making pancakes. lots and lots of weekend pancakes. sent a bunch of mail since new year's, and have some new arts and crafts (charcoal pencils!! those little paper cone blender guys! better paper) to fuck around with next time i want to get ~artistic. watch this space.

working on teaching is so all-consuming. it's great, i love it. the course (maps class! if you see that tag, this is that) is going well, i think! first three lectures down. the students i've gotten to know i really like, the material has yet to get old (see one - do one - teach one is so real. i understand this class now, finally, in a way i don't think i did just being the TA, even after three times). it takes so much longer to just copy-paste-change color and font on slides than it should! i've regularly been getting four-five hours of sleep on monday nights before teaching on tuesdays, but it has meant that i don't have the brain space to be self-conscious while i'm 'on', i just. go. having fun selecting teaching 'fits, having (less) fun handling all the students who joined in the second or third week and need help with catching up, but it's not their fault there was a waiting list and lots of turnover.

(petrus roselli - portolan chart of the mediterranean, 1466)

non-teaching: - student letter of recommendation for dental school (DONE) - conference panel proposal (due 1/31) -submit revised conference paper for that prize (due 1/30) -send draft of grant application to A for her to be able to write a letter of recommendation (due IMMEDIATELY WHY ARE YOU ON TUMBLR) (you have until 2/15 to fix it but she needs the draft!) -chapter 3 edits (lmao) -read for that other course you're meant to be the TA for (oops) - give i. feedback on her thing (tonight) -RAship hours (c'mon these are actually paid work, please do them)

[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.

[gardenerian]

rules: tag people who you want to get to know better. ty to @lalazeewrites @mmmichyyy @thisdivorce @squidyyy23 and @sleepyfacetoughguy ily!!!!

relationship status: engaged? kinda? we are planning the wedding...... we bought the ring.... he just hasn't GIVEN IT TO ME YET??? hand it over????? aslkfdh

favourite color: blues and greens 🌱

three favourite foods: currently digging pasta of all kinds, smoothies, peanut butter mmmmmm

top 3 tv shows: downton abbey, derry girls, schitt's creek (and shameless??? also i just finished grace and frankie - add it to the list)

top 3 characters: ian gallagher, sebastian flyte, mary crawley

what i’m currently reading: orwell's roses by rebecca solnit

song stuck in my head: selfish soul - sudan archives IT SLAPS

last movie watched: bend it like beckham!!!

last thing i googled: a nail salon near my office bc i want to take myself for a birthday manicure during my lunch tomorrow

last song i listened to: see song stuck in my head asdkjfh

dream trip: can i say ireland again? bc it's ireland again. otherwise i would love to do PEI with buddies

time: 3:55 pm

anything i really want right now: honestly? to skip through februrary. plop me down in may or something. i think that would be nice 🌸

tagging @celestialmickey @iansfreckles @greggster @gallawitchxx @heymrspatel @metalheadmickey @whatwouldmickeydo @you-are-so-much-better-than-that @sunoficarus @sickness-health-all-that-shit @whatthebodygraspsnotsnot @ian-galagher @tidalrace @7x10mickey @energievie and you! yes you!

[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.

[slightly]

2023

Best books I read for the first time:

Orwell's Roses - Rebecca Solnit

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes - Rob Wilkins

Guarded by Dragons - Rick Gekoski

The Blue Book of Nebo - Manon Steffan Ros

Bad Blood - John Carreyrou

Needle - Patrice Lawrence

Stateless - Elizabeth Wein

Best gigs I went to/music I got into:

Kris Drever

Siobhan Miller

BBC Radio 3 (especially when presented by Kate Molleson)

Other new favourite things:

If Books Could Kill (podcast)

Dropout TV

I joined an online quiz league!

[volkswagonblues]

2022 in review - my fave books I read this year:

[a subjective list]

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado

I was surprised when I flipped back in my notebooks and realised I really did only read it this year. A brief summary: Machado wrote this as a sort of autofiction about an ex-girlfriend. It was not a good relationship, to put it simply. It was a very bad one. The dream house that Machado imagined for herself became a prison. I think it captures the heart of abusive relationships, which is that it fucks with you so much that its nearly impossible piece it together in a clear narrative. Every incident of rage, cruelty, deceit -- it boils down to a “they said, I said” event, which Machado captures deftly by making every chapter a different genre. I wish I have the brilliance to do justice to how smart and how “crafty” this book is, but let me put it this way: I once lent this to a friend on vacation, and she blew off a day of waterfall watching and hiking in Yosemite to finish reading.

Sea of Poppies trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh

Trilogy of historical novels set around the First Opium War. Ghosh is an Indian writer with an interest in the lives of how the opium trade affected the lives of Indian and Chinese people at the time. It’s just -- really nice to read a historical novel that’s not from a white POV, but that’s also not afraid to paint the Indian and Chinese characters a comedic brush. There are crossdressing mystics and conniving merchants and campy oil painters, and so even though the subject matter is depressing as hell, but I would still describe it as a hilarious picaresque.

The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante

It’s one of those books that I didn’t really enjoy reading, yet I couldn’t put it down and thought about for a long time afterwards. Ferrante has a knack for creating this very specific type of female character who sits in their world like a massive planetary body, pulling everything else in the narrative into their gravitational field. I like that a lot. It’s one thing to write a strong/interesting/3d blah blah blah female character, but another to write a female character who moves the entire book’s people and events through her sheer force of presence.

Ducks, by Kate Beaton

Dude. Just read it. READ IT.

-- “Ambrose--were you a fisherman, before?”

-- “I’m still a fisherman. I’m just here.”

Landing, by Emma Donoghue

Very cute queer love story about a Dublin air hostess and a butch small-town Ontario museum curator. What can I say, I think Slammerkin or The Wonder are objectively better writing, but this one is just cuter and hits me with that fresh early 00′s nostalgia.

Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit

“Plants made the world, over and over...Think of the Carboniferous as a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago.”

The Woks of Life cookbook

Okay, first time that a cookbook made it to my top of the year list. But my god, it’s more than a cookbook -- the whole Leung family wrote it together, and there’s pages and pages of their family history, including the dad’s recollections of growing up working in a Chinese restaurant in the Catskills, driving home every week from New York as an adult to help with the weekend rush. I’ve made the stirfry cabbage and drypot cauliflower and the shrimp thing with the frozen peas and DAMN. no joke people think im a cooking genius

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa

It’s not a pyrotechnic novel, but a gentle, haunting one. On an unnamed island, things faded from the islanders’ memories: photographs, roses, perfume, birds, lighthouses. After awhile, people themselves start to fade away. I think of it as a COVID novel, even though it was written in the mid 90s.

[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

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“Feast day of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe today, 490 years since she gave Juan Diego that cloak filled with roses. A little over two years ago I went to her shrine in Mexico City. 

It was a profound experience, done as research for Orwell's Roses, the section on Tina Modotti and her photograph of roses (and 'bread and roses" and the Spanish Civil War and much more): 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 that 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 a shrine be built to her. 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, still so revered that to keep the crowds flowing, moving walkways transport people past it. 

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.She 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.”  

She became Mexico’s patron saint, and in 1810, when Father Miguel Hidalgo raised the cry for liberation from Spain, he did so in her name, and “Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe” became the indigenous and mestizo rallying cry, her image—the one from the miraculous cloak—the insurgent banner. When Modotti titled her photograph Roses, Mexico City, she was following the modernist style of neutrally descriptive naming, but the conjunction of those particular flowers and that particular place had its own resonance.”

[Rebecca Solnit]

[thepotentialof2007]

Orwell’s anarchist friend George Woodcock wrote, “The source of his self-regenerative power lay in his joy in the ordinary, common experiences of day-to-day existence and particularly of contact with nature. He fed from the earth, like Antaeus.”

The distinction between happiness, which is often imagined as a steady state, like endless sunshine, and joy, which flashes up like lightning, is important. Happiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord, while joy can show up anywhere, often unexpectedly.

- Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit [2021]

[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