May Day

Workers of the world unite!

Like last year, I'm going to celebrate May Day by posting my own (in this case, very poor) amateur Spring photography.



The flowering of trees is probably, for me, the most hopeful thing that happens all year. When they come back and surprise us with a kind of color and texture and light that we had forgotten about all winter, it's both suprising and comforting. Our hearts leap up, to paraphrase Wordsworth, and we believe good things are possible. May Day is actually a mega-pagan holiday as well, and back in Cambridge, my roommates and I used to watch the local pagans do morris dances and swing their wreaths around the maypole early in the morning. It was kind of awesome.


The pagan stuff and union stuff are not that unrelated, really. May Day, and International Workers day, are about seizing the hope and renewal of the season and trying to make change in our society, and the way we are treated. This year in particular it's important to stand in solidarity with our immigrant brothers and sisters who have faced so much hate in the national arena.

So yep, solidarity! And if I dare say it in the middle of this depressing week, Yes we can.

Support the Writers' Strike!

Here are three separate HuffPo pieces explaining why it's important to stand behind our comrades-in-word-processing.

It's Labor Day

Unions, those pesky folks who brought us the weekend, health insurance, and other risky socialist elements.

Solidarity!

North and South--Book and BBC

Have made me give up American Pastoral, and work, and breathing, for a few days.

But how worth it it's been! What a fantastic story.
I'm in literary love.

...

I love it when a wonderful book and a wonderful movie adaptation are each wonderful in a different way. Although the Gaskell book exposed social ills, Victorian-style, and featured more romantic chemistry and less caricatures than a Dickens novels, the movie successfully managed to amp up the drama on both counts by taking us into the mill and casting the unconventionally gorgeous Daniela Denby-Ashe and the properly smouldering and rough-shod Richard Armitage.

I haven't been that absorbed in a book in ages; the edgy love story wasn't all that pushed me through it either. Margaret Hale is an incredible character; flawed but fiesty, kindly inclined but young and naive. Gaskell's style is properly Victorian without being difficult. I love her straightforwardness. She's like an Eliot for the working classes.

I also found the novel to be incredibly proto-feminist in the way that it advocates a union between female and male to bring about social change. Gaskell has presented us with a strong woman whose kindness influences a formerly male-run institution to move forward in a compassionate way, and to me that's not a cop-out, it's incredibly insightful for its time. And actually for ours. Because feminism isn't just about women being badasses and assuming power, it's also about formerly patriarchal institutions gaining a bit of gentleness. You know who understands that? Elizabeth Gaskell, that's who!

Hillary Clinton, are you listening?