Truly Outrageous

Odds & ends

Oh, friends, it’s Friday. And it’s been a long week — well, if we’re being honest, it’s been a long year and a half. So today I bought a one-way plane ticket off this island at the end of July. Mainland, ho! What this quite possibly means is that I’ll blog a bit more at the other place as I get ready for yet another relocation.

Elsewhere around the ‘sphere, BFP is blogging the Allied Media Conference, which I am determined to attend next year, to take one step closer to my dream of live-blogging a hot off. She has a few posts up on panels discussing popular education, a topic she also touches on in her contribution to this month’s Carnival for Radical Action. [EDIT: Sudy over at A Woman's Ecdysis shares images from the conference.]

I am so excited by this Democracy Now! interview with Hannah Sassaman of the Prometheus Radio Project on the Local Community Radio Act, which was introduced in Congress to grant more licenses to low-power FM stations. Community radio! God, I might even listen to radio again if this bill passes! Here’s a snippet:

AMY GOODMAN: How do people find out about it? How do people apply to get a community radio station?

HANNAH SASSAMAN: After Congress — well, first of all, Congress needs to get these bills passed. And there are thousands of community members and many, many strong organizations, everyone from the Christian Coalition to Free Press to the Future of Music Coalition to Consumers Union and many, many other groups, are letting people know that these bills are on the table. Once these bills are passed, the FCC will announce a licensing window, when any noncommercial group, whether you’re a community church, a department of transportation, a chamber of commerce or a school, you can talk to the FCC, fill out your form and get a free license, in order to serve your community with essential information.

One of the stories I really like to tell is of WQRZ-LP in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall at ground zero, basically, in Waveland and in Bay St. Louis in Hancock County, of the forty-one stations lining the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast, only a handful stayed on the air, and WQRZ-LP, this low-power noncommercial station, was one of them. When this station was broadcasting about the storm, local volunteers swam across the floodwaters with batteries strapped to their back to keep the station on the air. It was the only source of local information for forty-eight hours after the storm, and because it was so essential, the Emergency Operations Center of Hancock County set up shop with that station and became the FEMA headquarters, and it got a commendation from the President.

These stations not only save lives, but are deeply relevant to their communities. If you’re a farmworker community and you speak Zapotec and Quiche as your primary languages and Spanish as a second language, you can’t rely on Clear Channel, Viacom or Infinity for your news. In order to connect to your community, to organize for rights in the fields, you need your own community radio station, like Radio Consciencia of WCTI-LP in Immokalee, Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ station. These stations are tools for social justice, and if we don’t take this chance to build them now, we’ll never forgive ourselves when we turn around in twenty years and hear the same corporate drivel and the same Christian right radio that we now have to abide by in our big cities and our small communities.

The other subject that excites me at the moment is that British sense of self-fascination as plotted in various novels. America’s inherited it and expanded it to the nth degree of course, but that sort of ‘oh yes, it’s quite grey here, and we have many small towns on heaths, and so much passion simmers wastefully under our worn cardigans and faded housecoats’ atmosphere — I fucking love it! Even, and perhaps especially, when you replace the small town with Fitzrovia or Mayfair and the threadbare clothes with surprise gifts from Harrods. It’s why I just read two Forster novels back-to-back, why I’m now indulging in a little le Carré, and why this article about a new expose of literary couples totally made my Friday (in that twitter into your cuppa sense, as opposed to the buy a plane ticket sense).

In one of Roiphe’s most telling anecdotes, [Vera] Brittain, shortly after the publication of her celebrated World War I memoir, “Testament of Youth,” puts aside a heartfelt letter from Catlin and absent-mindedly forgets to read it. Catlin, a politician manqué and disappointed academic, was writing to express his chagrin at reading that Brittain’s first love, who died in the war, was the irreplaceable force that had shaped her life. “Your book,” he informed her, “I think is very great, a very moving book … powerful, significant, important — for me it is oppressive also — to it I am an outsider, intruding, shamefaced, feeling very unworthy, painfully unworthy to the verge of tears.”

Oh my god, somebody pass the brandy. Brilliant! The first chapter is a bit too smug in its scandals, but ’tis the season for beach reads. I’m looking for this at the library.

Which reminds me: once I depart for more easterly regions I’m going to have, finally, some serious reading time on my hands again. What are you reading these days? What do you recommend? Poetry and essays especially welcome. (Also: help elle figure out sidebars on the cursed Blogger so she can put up a reading list!)