Rebecca Moake’s Reviews > Orwell's Roses > Status Update

Orwell & his wife named their dog Marc to remind themselves they hadn’t read Marx…his life later wrote that they later read some Marx and disliked him so much that they couldn’t look the dog in the face

Lawrence Weschler 2005 essay “Vermeer in Bosnia”
“Human beings need reinforcement and refuge, that pleasure does not necessarily seduce us from the tasks at hand but can fortify us”

Roses as a symbol of pleasure, leisure, self-determination in contrast to many utilitarian ideologies that view things of pleasure/beauty as counter revolutionary and bourgeois

Rose Schneiderman roses represent “the right to live, not simply exist”

James Oppenheimer poem published in American Magazine in 1911
“As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our significantly bff their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knee—
Yes it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for roses too”

Story of servant girl Maggie who went to women’s suffrage rally and came home and said what she liked best was about how “the women votin’ so’s everybody would have bread and flowers too”

Created logo “Bread for All, and Roses Too”

Author writes that even when her objective is political, she cannot write without also having an aesthetic experience
“Even when the agenda is bread, what spills over is roses.”

Gardening is “to bet on a future in which the roses and trees would bloom for years” make whole what is shattered; “reap the beauty of the earth directly” and be both of consumer and producer

Industrial Revolution built on fires- job of “stokers” “all these coal fires put the buried carbon back in the sky”

Trees are “captured light”

Miners story can be told as a story of labor or ecology, “the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation.”

“To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it’s changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere.”