women's night

Virginia Woolf, visionary: from Reid Robinson's Dec. 15 letter in the Toronto Globe and Mail (via Marcelo Vieta, via netwoman):

In a...prescient comment in a letter to Lady Robert Cecil in 1909, Virginia Woolf...writes: "There should be threads floating in the air, which would merely have to be taken hold of in order to talk. You would walk about the world like a spider in the middle of a web. In 100 years time, I daresay these psychical people will have made all this apparent, now seen only by the eye of genius."

Wish I could write like Shelley, aka Burningbird. Start of her latest:

Out on errands tonight I noticed how few lights there were about this year, how few homes seem decorated for the Christmas season. Last year at this time, you could easily know you were in the midst of a town that celebrated Christmas seriously. This year, most of the homes seem dark and shuttered...

Sheila Lennon's
Subterranean Homepage News has a wealth of great links:

• Margaret Wheatley:

  I've begun to invite the people I meet into conversation by asking: "What is it that you love about America? What things must be protected at all costs?" This question leads to wonderful explorations. People are energized to talk about what they love, what it means to live here as an immigrant, what they've learned about freedom, imagination, the human spirit, creativity, democracy. Even if these ideals are receding from our day-to-day experience, we realize how important it is to claim them as our own...

• from an article in Wired, this:

  University of Maine's Still Water new media lab has produced the Pool, a collaborative online environment for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts.
  
  "We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media...

• on electability:

  [ American culture today] equates violence with strength and power with potency. It is a rogue thing that does not honor the principles of civilization or the processes of governance.
  ...following the rules is for girls and sissies...
  But this is looking at manhood from a child's perspective. Adults realize why there are rules, and honor them. A child just understands power -- you have to be fair only because adults say so. And if you're strong enough and it's your ball, you can make up the rules...