Mother’s Day and the Anti-War Movement

I refuse to raise my child to grow up to kill another mother’s child. ~Julia Ward Howe, founder of Mother’s Day, 1870

Originally conceived of as a protest to war, Mother’s Day has become a marketing tool to boost consumer spending to give suck to the six or seven corporations that own practically everything. Now that Rosie the Riveter, maker of fighter planes and tanks, is the face of feminism, we tend to forget that the early feminists were anti-war activists. These days Clinton “feminists” want young women, like young men, to be required to register for the draft. More and more women today are proud to exercise the hard-won privilege of lopping mortars at meat targets, and pink-pussy-hatted feminists are appalled, not at the large number of civilians killed by U. S. supported forces worldwide, but by Trump’s attempt to keep transgender people from getting in on the killing.

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Review of Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

“Male violence did it.” Martin Amis has a bit of a reputation for making sweeping, declarative statements like this one that ends the first paragraph of Yellow Dog. I’ve read all of Amis’ books except Pregnant Widow and Koba the Dread (on my list, next) and I’m very familiar with the Amis conception of gender.  I can make sweeping generalizations about his Men and his Women.

Death and Sex

Death and sex are literature’s subjects, not science’s. What we care most about is what these subjects mean to us—not what they, in fact, are. When scientists attempt to enlighten us on these matters, they often fall to recounting certain metabolic processes, generally missing the point, while we readers sigh or snicker, wondering if the researcher has any experience out of the lab. This is not the case with Death and Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan. See my review in New York Journal of Books.

That’s What They’re For

N.Y. Civil Rights Law § 79-e (1994) permits a mother to breastfeed her child in any public or private location.

When I was a breast-feeding mother, I was told frequently (usually it was women) to “go find a private place to do that.”  I would do no such thing.  I carried my son in a sling and breastfed him while I walked to work on busy NY City streets.  Once I was at a child care facility at my gym and a mother asked me not to breast feed in front of her 10-year-old son.  Now that boy is probably going to be exposed to some nasty and tasteless pornography here pretty soon, and I figure the more positive images he has of women’s breasts the better.

If you’re a mom, don’t be afraid to flaunt it!

Smoking Hopes is now available as an Ebook

My first novel Smoking Hopes was released in hardcover by The Permanent Press in 1996.  I’ve wanted it to go to ebook for a long time now, for reasons that I’ve been writing about in my “Literary Fiction” posts. Mainly the ebook appeal involves copyright protection for authors as well as greener practices for the globe. So I was really glad to see The Permanent Press go digital.