Blog o’ Gnosis

In late October of this year, The New York Times published a series of articles on sleep and dreaming which are worth checking out. Below are links to each of the four articles, along with highlights, anecdotes, and some commentary. If anyone spots other articles on dreams in the news, I’d love to hear about them.

When I was in college back in Santa Cruz in the 1980s, there was a women’s poetry collective known as Moonjuice that held poetry readings and self-published their own poetry anthologies. That is how I became acquainted with the wonderful Maude Meehan, whose book of poems Chipping Bone I loved. When I was looking for Ellen Bass’s poem Then Call It Swimming to post here last year, I found it in one of the Moonjuice anthologies still on my shelves.

A couple years later, the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society came out with their first book of erotic short stories. Around that same time, the Women’s Songbook Project in Berkeley published the anthology Out Loud: A Collection of New Songs By Women. If I tried to recall all the grassroots women’s publishing projects I have come across from that era to this, I could go on for pages. In fact, just a couple weeks ago a friend sent me an announcement for a new anthology of women writers she’d been published in.

This Samhain season has had more than its share of sturm und drang, and I attribute much of it to the general sense of fatigue shared by almost everyone I meet. We are tired of war, tired of hearing of young people killed or injured in these endless struggles. We are sick and weary from corruption, pollution, environmental disaster.

We are working too hard, paying too much, bearing up as best we can under difficult times. With a stalled economy and soaring fuel prices, there are very few people who are not feeling in some way stretched to the limit. We are managing, but winter is coming and who knows what that will bring?

As it happens, this trifecta of disrespect is not all that difficult to accomplish. This is after all the feast of Samhain, when opportunities to ritualize bad manners abound. At Samhain the veil of etiquette is thin, as we all know, and the living and the dead co-mingle like ants around a sugar skull.