IT’S THE WEEKEND!

A long article and book review on literacy, patriarchy and the way we process information. I’ve read the Lévi-Strauss quotation about literacy not being an unmixed good for the world, and had at the time considered it biting the hand that feeds – this is an interesting expansion of those ideas.

To perceive things such as trees and buildings through images delivered to the eye, the brain uses wholeness, simultaneity, and synthesis. To ferret out the meaning of alphabetic writing, the brain relies instead on sequence, analysis, and abstraction. Custom and language associate the former characteristics with the feminine, the latter, with the masculine. As we examine the myths of different cultures, we will see that these linkages are consistent.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/17/shlain-alphabet-goddess/

In reading about her particularly brutal early life, we learn that Saint Olga of Kiev was ahead of her time on bat bombs:

Now Olga gave to each soldier in her army a pigeon or a sparrow, and ordered them to attach by thread to each pigeon and sparrow a piece of sulfur bound with small pieces of cloth. When night fell, Olga bade her soldiers release the pigeons and the sparrows. So the birds flew to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the sparrows under the eaves. The dove-cotes, the coops, the porches, and the haymows were set on fire. There was not a house that was not consumed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev

ALSO ALSO THIS JUST IN thank you, a reader, for sending me saved by the bell hooks just in time for today's newsletter:

http://savedbythe-bellhooks.tumblr.com/

Alex.