Whose Story Is This? by Rebecca Solnit

Author:Rebecca Solnit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2019-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

*Starting around 2014, ISIS committed genocide among the Yazidis by killing men and sometimes boys and enslaving thousands of women and girls, often exploiting them sexually; what ISIS and incels share ideologically would be an interesting study.

On Women’s Work and the Myth of the Art Monster

The labor lawyer I know sees her work as an act of solidarity, though she collects a salary for it, and some of the climate organizers I know collect salaries and care about the fate of the world, and the doctors and nurses I know want to make a living and maybe have nice things and do it their way, as do we all, but also want to save lives when they can be saved and comfort the dying and improve their journeys when they can’t, and are so passionate about what they do they also do it for free, often, and offer their services and skills as a matter of course in emergencies.

Writing is also work that straddles this divide; we want to plunge into our own depths, and we want to make something beautiful that will change the world, and we hope that it will not only do that but also change it for the better, and if we’re lucky we make a living at it. Anyone reading this is almost certainly someone for whom a poem, an essay, or a book has been a life raft onto which they clambered in an emergency. Yet the selfishness of writers is a recurrent motif, one I wish I could tie lead weights to so it would never bob to the surface again.

I liked most of Claire Dederer’s Paris Review piece, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” sent to me by a woman friend, a brilliant and dedicated climate organizer. I liked it until most of the way through, until Dederer reflects on Jenny Offill’s idea of the “art monster”:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.… The female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: “I wish I had a wife.” What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.

Of course, lots of men who managed the accounting department or designed machine parts or watched TV all day were also selfish and had their wives do lots of things for them; selfishness is not particular to artists—or to men; there is no shortage of examples of selfish women. Maybe there’s a special kind of bohemian-dude selfishness, which the idea of the genius—the person who is more special and important than others—encourages.

Rosemary Hill recently wrote about Ida and Augustus John and their awful, early-twentieth-century marriage,

The bohemian man may have

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