I’ve been slowly but surely tweaking and expanding the site here. Most of the visual stuff isn’t particularly obvious, but it makes me feel better and brings me several steps closer to full XHTML compliance. The content stuff, however, is here for you to look at—I’ve finally put up the Reviews section. Most of these were written for the newsletter of Sisterspirit Bookstore during the 4 years I volunteered there; the others were written for OutNOW!, a Bay Area gay newspaper, or for the Reclaiming Quarterly. I’m hoping to keep in writing practice by expanding the section as I read, rent DVDs, etc. One navigational note: if the review has a cover graphic, clicking it will take you to Amazon, where you can purchase your very own copy. Just a little service from me to you (and maybe someday back to me).
January 2002
Patricia Foster, Editor
Anchor Books
1994
We have many roles in our lives as women; we are mothers and writers, workers and intellectuals, athletes and artists. And yet it is striking, in spite of all these different ways we have of defining and creating ourselves, that so much of our self-image and identity becomes focused on the physical: our bodies. A host of current “women’s” issues center around our bodies, our control over those bodies, and what our culture limits us to because of them. In Minding the Body, Patricia Foster and the contributing writers address that wide range of issues and ideas related to the female body with a great deal of insight.
Foster begins the book with a personal and political memoir about the vision of womanhood that came down through her family, one which placed motherhood as the natural (and mandatory) order of things. She also discusses the warping of self-image that led to her own anorexia as a young woman, that “abyss of illusory self-control” which can lead a healthy woman to starve herself to death. The theme of weight is echoed in many of the selections here, in both its personal and social implications. Sallie Tisdale contributes a moving piece about coming to terms with her body, about what it took for her to step out of the self-loathing that feeds so much of the diet industry.
Other contributors discuss more external political issues. In “Department of the Interior,” Linda Hogan traces the lineage of western culture’s fear of the female body to a related fear of wilderness—of wildness—specifically relating it to the treatement of Native Americans by arriving Europeans. They saw the land and the native people as wild things needing to be tamed, as women’s bodies are often seen now. Western culture “is a culture that fears and destroys what it perceives as wild….” In “Beauty Tips for the Dead,” Judith Hooper shares a poignant and insightful memoir of her battle with breast cancer and how it has caused her to re-evaluate her own body.
This collection, though it contains many grim truths about western culture’s (and women’s own) views of the female body, is not without its mellower and lighter moments. Margaret Atwood contributes “The Female Body,” written in response to a request by another anthology on a similar topic. She begins:
I agree, it’s a hot topic. But only one? Look around, there’s a wide range. Take my own, for instance.
I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell. I sprinkle it with water, brush parts of it…I dump in the fuel and away goes my topic, my topical topic, my controversial topic…in its oversized coat and worn winter boots,…hunting for what’s out there…hungry as ever.
Patricia Foster has done us a service. By providing one book with such a diverse set of ways we can look at the female body—our bodies—she has opened up new ways of seeing all the different ways it can be objectified and used to suit others’ purposes and needs. And the contributors, through the strength of their personal testaments, give courage to those who want to find peace in the body.
Layne Redmond
Sounds True
2000
This CD is an excellent introduction to the principles of chakra meditation. In three long chants with drum and other accompaniment, master frame drummer Layne Redmond and her associates take the listener on a journey through the body’s energy centers. The chants are composed of Sanskrit seed syllables such as vang and lang, and there is a specific set of syllables that corresponds to each chakra and its visual representation or yantra.
The first chant, “Garland of Letters,” is slow and hypnotic—it has a kind of lulling effect, but without dulling the brain. The music is spare and very focused on the rhythms of the frame drum, which are stately and steady. The seed syllables of the first through sixth chakras are chanted in order, beginning and ending with aum, and the overall effect is one of a holy procession of some kind.
“Lotus of Light,” the second chant, consists of the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, chanted quickly twenty times for the thousand petals of seventh chakra. I felt as if I were being pulled along by the arm with some urgency, and yet the drone style of the chanting had a very calming effect. It was like being the eye in a small musical hurricane.
The final chant, “Elements into Light,” takes you on a journey through the first six chakras by going through the Bija Mantras, or key frequencies, of each one. They represent the elemental energies associated with each chakra being drawn through the body.
Roots of Awakening has a lot to recommend it. On a musical level, it’s an interesting mix of middle-eastern-style drumming with sitar, flute, and other instruments, all played by talented musicians. The rhythms are deep and hypnotic, and the use of windwands and udu drums give the music an aboriginal flavor at times.
As an aid for meditation, this CD is also satisfying. The booklet gives a good overview of the chakras, their various symbols and syllables, and the overall philosophy of the system which I found very helpful as a novice. And whether you’re particularly interested in the chakra system or not, the chants and music serve very well in coming to a sense of intense concentration and timelessness.
[Originally published in Reclaiming Quarterly #82, Spring 2001]
Carolyn Gage
Common Courage Press
1997
In the great self-help wonderland that is the 1990s, the book of meditations has become a recognized staple. A guide for focusing one’s thoughts, the book of meditations usually comes equipped with an overall theme, such as alcoholism, Taoism, women-who-do-too-much, etc. Carolyn Gage’s new offering, while similar in structure to the standards of the genre, has taken it into an entirely new realm with Like There’s No Tomorrow. Simply put, she has supercharged the idea of self-help and brought it to self-power by bringing political and social awareness and action into this setting of mental focus.
The book, rather than being arranged chronologically, is laid out as a journey to strength, each short essay taking its tone from a concept (such as “freedom” or “strategy”) and usually a quotation from a woman Gage feels embodies that concept (or the struggle against it). Thus there is a moving essay on Art, and its suppression in women, introduced by this quote from Toni Morrison’s Sula:
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
It would be easy to dismiss this book as just another in a long series of books aimed at inspiring, comforting, and guiding women along their inner journeys. To do so however, would miss the point. In Like There’s No Tomorrow, Carolyn Gage has written a book that does all of those necessary things, and then shows us what the next step is: action. And she shows it not only by calling for action loudly, but by living it in her own life and showing us the examples of other women who have done so. It is a book that inspires one to thoughtful courage in the face of modern adversities.