Review: M. Gessen, Sarah Schulman, Rebecca Solnit - all in one week

M. Gessen came to town Thursday May 8th as part of Literary Arts. They were supposed to be here in February, but the weather got in the way. It was sold out at the Schnitz, and the crowd was very engaged but also looking for easy answers. The most memorable moment to me was an audience question “is Trump an agent of Putin?” or something that was trying to distance themselves and this country of creating Trump, to put the blame and therefore the responsibility on someone else. I was pretty pissed off. Gessen, as in “Keep Em Guessing” thanks Jodi Darby, responded that there didn’t need to be a conspiracy for it to be as bad as it is, and that we should actually look at what is right in front of us. Also this: “to see Americans who don’t have the history of living under totalitarian rule, and who think of themselves as freedom-loving, as valuing their rights to free speech and freedom of movement and all sorts of other important things, to see them fold a lot of the time, is incredibly disheartening.”

Sarah Schulman was here Monday May 12th at Powells downtown to talk about her new book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity which “provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future. Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work — and why it matters. “ I’m sure they’re right but I haven’t read the book yet. Schulman was charming and tired. She read from the book a bit, then Lydia Kiesling asked questions. or tried to, but Sarah answered the questions she wanted to be asked instead, which I love. “ If you do nothing, the fascists will just control your life more.” The audience was full of her friends and long time fans, but only about 5 rows of chairs. There was a kid who mentioned being part of the PSU library takeover and how he felt like the students lost the good will of the general public, and I think he asked why. Or, Sarah told him why anyway. “The reason to do an action is you’re running a campaign. … You become the expert on your issue, you design a solution that is winnable, like divestment. you present it to the powers that be and when they say no you run a campaign that involves actions. The actions convey to the public that you have a reasonable solution. That’s what actions are for. … People are doing actions that are not connected to demands and they don’t land anywhere.” It was smart, clear knowledge from experience. I loved it.

Rebecca Solnit was at Revolution Hall on May 13th on book tour for No Straight Road Takes You There. We got a free copy of the book with our ticket, so again I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into, but a Solnit essay collection is well trod territory for me. She did read from her intro and again to end the event, and in the middle she joked with Lidia Yuknavitch about being a mermaid (which was cute the first time, and the timing the 4th time was good, but you know, we didn’t need it more than once. I’m glad they’re friends), got a librarian to do a fact check for her, talked about Virginia Woolf and slowness as a philosophy and an art form.

I like how she makes connections, and I like that she was slumped in those big weird chairs. She didn’t talk about Recollections of My Nonexistence, her memoir and my favorite of her books. I didn’t expect her to, but I was hoping for a good question to address it that I wasn’t capable of asking. She talked about the cover being yellow as part of the rainbow you could make on your bookshelf of her essay collections. She talked about climate change a lot and her activism and she wanted to keep answering questions. “We are making the future now”. We can see the change and impact we have when we look back, and we may have to wait a long time to see what that impact is, but we have time. We are fighting now to have time in the future to still be here and be able to look back. “I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take, the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past.”