A few thoughts from today's paper
Hmmm: OK Boomer, tell us how to set up an underground abortion-provision network? ‘You have to stand up to illegitimate authority’: what veteran abortion activists can teach us in the Trump era: Last year, Heather Booth headed from her home in Washington to Georgia to tell, once again, the story of Jane. It was a disheartening moment, to consider that more than 50 years after she began her underground abortion service in Chicago, America might once again be returning to a more repressive time. Many fights are having to be refought. “There are more than 200 members of Senate and Congress, Republicans, who’ve just signed a statement saying they want the Supreme Court to revisit and potentially overturn Roe v Wade,” she says. That means vigilance and action from everyone, in and outside the government, who wants to defend it.
Booth talks about the restrictions to abortion access, and the cuts to funding for Planned Parenthood - brought about because the organisation continues to provide information about abortion.
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The unfortunate combination of being a woman pioneer in a medium considered, at the time of its inception, entirely ephemeral, and made on a substance itself dangerously evanescent (silver nitrate film go BOOM): This intriguing documentary shines a light on the astonishing career of the first woman to direct a film - and possibly the first director ever. There is a better article on this movie and Alice Guy-Blache in today's Guardian The Guide but doesn't seem to be online.
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Like he ever did any work anyway: Not Working by Josh Cohen - the benefits of idleness: In 1765 Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent two months on a Swiss island dedicating himself to “my precious far niente” (doing nothing). He loafed about, gathering plants, drifting in a boat, sitting for hours in a “delicious reverie … pleasurably aware of my existence without troubling myself with thought”: an idleness that he later described as the most “complete and perfect happiness” of his life.
Are we not, my darlings, reminded of Thoreau doing much the same at Walden Pond and taking his laundry home to Mama and having her make him a nice hot dinner into the bargain? I daresay I may be doing Mr (or it may even be Dr) Cohen an injustice but I am giving the side-eye to the fact that 'The cast is mostly male' and wondering whether he interrogates who ever is in the position to do nothing, or only what they find pleasurable? (Rousseau making laces while in company strikes me as being in the category of 'having something to do with one's hands/fiddle with'.)
This review is longer than the mere snippet in The Saturday Review I see, and the reviewer, at least, remarks: Emin and Dickinson are among the few women who appear in Not Working. We read about their artistic representation of female inertia but meet no female sluggards or layabouts. So what are women doing while men are lazing about? A closer look at Cohen’s favourite idlers - Rousseau, Thoreau, Homer Simpson - gives us a clue. Rousseau’s days of far niente were punctuated by meals prepared by his wife. Thoreau’s laundry was done by his mother. Marge Simpson does the housework while Homer swills beer in front of the TV.
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Grace Dent perhaps is aspiring to Jay Rayner's crown of foodie snark: Silo’s zero-waste concept is laudable, but they seem to have forgotten that eating out is meant to be fun: [F]eels like a 1985 Tomorrow’s World segment on “How we’ll eat out in the future”, in which Judith Hann shows us Silo’s magnetic table made out of recycled plastic packaging with the cutlery hidden within, and its aerobic digester, which is capable of turning 60kg of organic waste into compost, overnight. Mind you, I don’t have a clue what she’d make of the very burnt artichokes and the non-intervention wines that do not taste remotely of wine, yet can still get you so drunk, they’d numb the grief after all your loved ones had been squashed by a killer asteroid.
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There are chefs all over Britain, in rural pubs and tiny cafes, who are making a stiff effort to grow their own vegetables, source kindly, re-use and recycle, and who love the planet, but they’re doing so with a fraction of the fuss and po-facedness of Silo. I’ve seen the future of sustainable fine dining: I think many of us may well decide to stay at home.
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