Rose: Love In Violent Times

Rose: Love in Violent Times  Inga Muscio

2011

Weight: 9.6 oz

Method of Disposal: Donating or Giving Away

I fell in love with Cunt: A Declaration of Independence when I was 16.  It got me excited.  I proclaimed that I would buy 100 copies and give them all away for free before I died, just to spread the word.  I wrote Inga a letter telling her about my plan, thanking her for writing, and asking her to sign a book.  She sent back an autographed copy and some Cunt stickers I carried around with me, never deciding on where they would get their best use.  

I did buy quite a few copies of Cunt.  I gave them to friends.  I bought the revised copy.  To this day, I still have one of the original yellow books, one of the revised blue books, and the autographed yellow copy.  I quit buying them right as I got into college.  I was reading so many amazing things.  It just kind of faded away.  It was not until much later that I found my disappointments with the book.

Despite my growing distaste, I continued to buy her books.  It meant so much to me at 16, and that means something no matter what I learn, feel, think in the now/future.  

I just pulled Rose off the bookshelves and read it for the first time.  I was disappointed.  It was all over the place and never seemed to come together in any real way.  The chapters were labeled differently, but I so often felt like I was reading the same thing over and over and over.  It is her stream-of-consciousness, blunt writing that is her strength, but it can also be her weakness.  I like that she does not write as if she is smarter, more educated, wiser than other people.  I like that she says things that make sense.   I worry when she compares the opening of a Wal-Mart to the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan.  It feels like a painful and inaccurate comparison even though I agree that Wal-Mart does terrible things.  I could even think of a lot of ammunition/information to throw behind the argument that a Wal-Mart opening could be like a bomb—but I did not get it from her.  She mentions is, but she drops it quickly and moves on, like almost everything else.   I do question some of the research, statistics, information she sites.  There should be a good way to not fall into the rut of academic writing but still give me a clue as to where you got your information that rape has gone up dramatically since the Iraq War (and things like that).  I do not doubt that it has, but I want to know more about it and read more about it.  

I have disdain for the use of “retarded” in the first Cunt and for the flippant anti-prostitution analogies used in Rose.  I just do not see the need.  I think it is unnecessarily hurtful, though possibly unintentional.  Just, if you are asking us to think about our words then think about yours.

I think Inga is a great activist, a passionate writer, and probably a loving person.  I am just not so easily amped up anymore.  I have grown and changed.  I am no longer moved by the language and voice I once was.  Again, I am still thankful for that energy I was given as a teenager, but in the future I hope to read far more useful books on the same topic.  We do need to find love in these violent times, afterall.