Transcripts For CSPAN2 Rebecca Solnit Recollections Of My No

CSPAN2 Rebecca Solnit Recollections Of My Nonexistence July 13, 2024

Readers. Good evening, welcome to murmur. I am stephanie valdes, coowner of humidity bookstore and m b, its also a hardcore indie bookstore crowd. Tonight were thrilled to welcome Rebecca Solnit on the publication date of her new book recollections of my nonexistence. She will be in conversation with Leslie Jamison area is no that there will not be assigning tonight after the event but Rebecca Solnit did arrive early to sign each and every one ofyour books. So Rebecca Solnit is the author of 20 books including a field guide to getting lost, the faraway nearby, a paradise built in hell, river shadows and wanderlust. A history of walking. She is also the author of essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope and also the climate crisis. A product of the California Public Education System in kindergarten to graduate school shes a regular contributor to the guardian. Leslie jamison is the author of the New York Times that sellers recovering and the empathy exam and the novel gin clock. Shes a contributing writer for New York Times right magazine and her work has appeared in publications including the atlantic, harpers, New York Times book review, oxford american and virginia quarterly review. She regret she lives in brooklyn with her family. Please help me welcome Rebecca Solnit and Leslie Jamison. [applause] before we start in earnest i want to say im not doing a book signing afterwards because theres a more Perfect Technology for people to handle objects before i handle other peoples objects has never been invented and were in a global pandemic. I also want to say what i am canceling most of the tour for the next couple of weeks because its the responsible thing to do and i want you all to wash your hands and i want to use and is either and i want you to not touch anything and dont sneeze or cough on anybody and just be really careful. Those of us who are healthy and robust and have options have an obligation to exercise that utmost care for those who are more fragile. And so i just decided last week i wasnt going to sign books in assigning line because of germs and the pandemic is clearly, whats that rumbling, is this a sign or is it a sign or a subway . Is that like the ultimate new york question . So i wasnt worried about my health but i didnt want to be running around the country being a vector and i didnt want to be an occasion for large gatherings as they are being banned so that the pandemic conversation which may intersect with the recollections of my nonexistence conversation i just wanted to make that psa and im going to read a little bit and sit down with leslie to whom i am so grateful for paying so much attention and coming up with such fantastic questions for our conversation. This is just a little bit of the beginning of the book. One day long ago i looked at myself as i faced a fulllength mirror and saw my image darken and soften and then seemed to retreat as i though i was vanishing from the world rather than my mind wasshutting it out. I fitted myself on the doorframe across the hall from the mirror and my legs crumbled under me. My own image drifted away into darkness as if i were a ghost aiding from my own site. I blacked out occasionally and had dizzy spells often in those days but this time was memorable because it appeared as though the world wasnt vanishing from my consciousness but that i was vanishing from the world. I was the person who was vanishing and the disembodied person washing her from a distance, both and neither and in those days i was trying to disappear and appear, trying to be safe and to be someone and those agendas were often at odds with each other and i was watching myself to see if i could read in the mirror what i could be and whether i was good enough and whether all the thingsive been told about myself were true. To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all those things at once. The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most political topic in the world said Edgar Allan Poe who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. I was trying to not be the subject of someone elses poetry and not to get killed. I was trying to find a poetics of my own with no mats, no guides, not much to go on the red they might have been out there but i hadnt located them yet. The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice, to insist upon that or at least to find a way to survive amidst an fos that relishes your erasures and failures is worked at many and perhaps most youngwomen have to do. In those early years i did not do a particularly well or clearly but i did it ferociously. [applause] thank you for being here, rebecca. Its really wonderful to be, to have the chance to talk to you and to get to all of us and it was wonderful to hear the beginning of the book in your voice. I was wondering, where in a strange time and theres a lot that i want to ask you about the book on its own but i guess in the couple of days leading up to this event ive been thinking about the ways in which some of the ideas in this book, particularly ideas about how Community Functions and how art rises out of community and how identity rises out of community. They feel like they this moment in particular ways but i was curious, maybe i thought we could start with how youve been thinking about the present moment we are in, thinking about contagion and health and the ways we might care for each other, how some of those very urgent realities at the moment are spoken to by the book or the book or whether they are connections feel present for you . The tragedy of epidemics is that in ordinary disasters, earthquakes and hurricanes, if authority and racism dont muck it up too much people come together in amazing ways as they did in Hurricane Sandy here in and 9 11 much more so than anybody really reflected at the time as we let the Bush Administration i think i can say hijack the meaning of that event and the idea that we all have to be separate to be safe is not just complicated when it gets so close to zeno phobia and you know, as we sit here in a synagogue weird ideas about purity and although im excited to be in a synagogue and especially a synagogue that had nick cave playing a minute ago and whats interesting to me is im understanding we have to be separate to be together, that being separate is how we take care of each other. Were going to separate ourselves in various ways out of solidarity and how do we communicate that and its interesting, its almost the antithesis of what happened to me as a youngwoman. I remember realizing at a certain point why wasnt i political when i was young and realizing to be political you have to feel like you have something in common with other people and that you have power and i started out with neither of those things and obviously and it up with plenty of both but it was a journey but every crisis is partly a storytelling crisis. How do we tell the story that were doing, not because other people are bad and we must but because we care aboutthem. How do we tell the story that we are separated physically because we are coming together. And its virtually, socially as a society and how do we do it when the institutions that should have laid the groundwork to do this right have failed us profoundly as the Trump Administration has economically in terms of managing the cdc, the information flow and the rest. Theres a lot to say from what you just said but i think theres something really subtle and vital about the role that narrative can play in framing separateness as a form of care rather than a form of fear mongering or scapegoating or distancing and that even just starting to talk about it in that way that separateness is a way we are trying to care each other rather than protect ourselves is an important framework to put out there. Thinking about care rather than protection orsomething like that. Is also going to be interesting because were such a profoundly unequal society. Some of us have Great Health Care coverage. Some of us have none. Some people can tell you telecommute from home and some people are gig workers who will lose their apartment if they dont show up and work even if they are worried , even if they are sick and theres been a bunch of people, this is not my original point , noting that a better case for medicare for all, paid sick leave and a bunch of other stuff could not be made by this pandemic which i think also makes a great case for Elizabeth Warren family. My people. You know, saying really smart things about the pandemic and economic crisis last month and saw it coming. So when of course Elizabeth Warren could be a beautiful segway to the fear and loathing andsilencing of women in the american society. I was going to pick up on something you said just a few minutes ago about how when you were a young woman thinking about what meant it political to that to you then, that you felt neither did you have power were neither were you touched by a feeling of having things in common and i was connecting that to a portion of what you read where you talk about one of the core ideas of the book that to be a young woman is to face anapproximate fear and annihilation and those things maybe think about one of the compelling origin stories in the book that i thought thwould be a great point of departure which is the story of your writing this, the sort of concrete literal space of the writing comes from and you tell the story and im hoping you might share with us but of receiving a desk as a gift from a friend who had experienced trauma and you say i wonder if everything i have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce young woman to nothing. And so i wonder if you could tell us the story about that desk and how it affected the writing that happened on it. The book has a mildstart after that opening passage. Its the sunday after Ronald Reagans inauguration, the moment when the economy was going to turn away from the new deal and the Great Society and the social safety net and become a monster that now destroyed so many lives in this country and i was househunting. My parents had cut me off a few years before. I was 19, i was really poor and i was looking trin want ads for the cheapest apartments in San Francisco and there was a 200 a month apartment and i called the number and the building manager told me to look at it and i made an appointment so i start with this story thats also a positive story about a complete stranger, an old black man who saw how much i wanted this apartment in a place of my own and went out on a limb to make it possible for me to have it. Ib. In in a society that would not acknowledge existence of the silent except byot telling me tt it just had to change, i do accept it as a given and adapt myself to the fact lots of men want to kill and harm and tortured and a great and intimidate and insult women all the time. And what not going to do a damn thing about it. Youd just need to not go there and not do this and not be out and not talk to these people and not wear that dress, you know, the endless litany of things women are not supposed to because amend that end up coming in her life so much. The chapter a segue from the pleasant stuff about my apartment with my writing desk and describing it. It was given to me right after moved into the apartment by a friend of mine i had known for a few years. Who had left her boyfriend figure before and to punish her for daring to leave them, daring to choose what she needed rather than he n wanted. He stabbed or 15 15 times and t to death your and because somebody came along, because there was an ambulance come , because there were transfusions of hospital she didnt die. All of the police blamed her and everyone blamed her for what happened and there was also no justice. So she moved far away back to San Francisco, gave me the desk that a a been given to her by womanhood been evicted. This is one of the interesting things about writing is that it makes me look harder, go deeper and everything ive ever written, i write in chairs, on airplanes, in bed, you know. I writely anywhere but mostly ie written at the desk since i was 19. It was only when writing this book relates everything ive written has, everything above written has been written on a platform given to me by a woman a manan tried to silence forever and, therefore, i can think everything ive ever written which was pretty early on about feminism and my punk magazine cover story 1985 and wanderlust and so may think since then has been a counter to the tip to make women nobodyto and nothing and didd an silent and powerle. And that was kind of shocking, you know. Now i know i cant get a bigger desk either. For a while. While. Or that you have been writing on a really big desk the whole time. Thats a great way to think about it. The desk has been bigger than you. The desks legs go all the way down to the bottom of the story. I was thinking about how sort of you make choices around what that writing involves and i think certainly for me as an admirer of your work and somebody whos been really influenced by your work im sure i speak for many people when i talk about that admiration, one of the things i love the most is the way that you are work totally raises distinctions between what it means to talk about the personal and political and the counterweight youre describing very much involves invoking both in trying to document the kind of constant conversation between the personal and political. I was really struck by a moment in this book when you describe coming out of this background as an undergrad was more focused on journalism and shifting or pivoting away from the more objective language of reportage or kind of the mode of the oped toward trying to find a more personal language that could get i wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that evolution was like away from the sort of objective editorial journalistic mode not that you have banded the methods of reportage but claiming the role that the personnel could play in the political import the choice to invoke the personal in your work, how both how thats evolved for you over the years and how you think about that question of invoking the personal. aball of us speak from a particular place that has to do with who we are and values and consequences. Because before that there was such a sense of something neutral and objective which is usually white and usually male and usually pretending to some weird rationality. But what i was really doing back then and 80s was writing in three different veins, trained as a journalist actually abi was doing journalistic work, writing working as an art critic or you sue authoritative tone but its personal and your opinion but its very extra light these are my opinions and associations but not this is my inmost story. Then i was writing much more personal lapidary essays and it just felt like three things that were really far apart and then it was actually being an activist that changed everything. We so often talk about activism as a kind of broccoli you should eat because its good for you with implication a [laughter] a lot of the best things that ever happened to me came to me and the best people that ever happened to me in the 1988 i started going to the annual spring actions begun by franciscans were more than 9000 Nuclear Bombs had been detonated experiences that became part of it comes up later. It was such an extraordinary experience. You had mormon down windows atomic veterans, nuclear physicist, japanese survivors of atomic bombs dropped there and japanese buddhist monks, these wonderful franciscan priests and nuns who were radicals. Lesbian and separatist payday guess because of still 80s. Scary tiedyed guys who kept trying to hug you. But it was abwe were dealing with the rehearsals for the end of the world and this dusty remote place very few people had ever seen was where the cold war was being enacted. It was also western shoshone land i became very involved in the western shoshone land rick stargell which was one of the most transformative and eyeopening and wonderful things that ever happened to me. I did a few things for them but they did so much for me. It was the complexity of all the layers of meeting western attitudes toward the desert, the history of civil disobedience from throw through gandhi antinuclear activism all these other layers ia realized they needed every tool i had that meant journalism, critical analysis, you can actually take the tools you use for criticism and apply them to the politics of the nonrepresentation of native people. The representation of Nuclear Weapons and war and the coded masculinity that an anthropologist was decoding in new among nuclear physicist. You could use all those tools but also the personal experience. What is it like standing in handcuffs watching the most beautiful sunset in the world in a kettle pin with 500 people who care about the same things you do. I realize that, i bought into the idea this was three different kinds of writing but could all be one kind of writing. And at the personal voice experiential thing was it like to actually be in this place. What is it like to camp next to a nuclear crater. What is it like to be handcuffed and driven 70 miles in these rituals of arrest . Was it like to unlearn the versions of western history that so erased native americans . Was it like to drive to join the indian wars in the 1990s manifestations. So that was actually probably my one big literary breakthrough was, they all belong together and then predicts my second butch savage dreams. So, in a way your answer to the question enact the very thing you are describing by invoking those particular examples of being handcuffed and that cattle pen and watching that beautiful sunset 500 people who care about the same things you do. It gives me chills anyway that feels quite related to what youre saying. There is a beautiful passage in the book where you describe a long essay about so much of this book as people are getting is about you coming of age as a writer and not just comingofage one but comingofage over and over again. You talk about adulthood as a constant process of evolution rather than a single threshold to reach but you describe

© 2025 Vimarsana