The Wife Drought Quotes

How can you test whether something's an assumption? Try this: switch things around, and check how bananas everybody goes.

smouldering away in a fit of impotent rage

Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril's wife's baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.

I The calluses on his feet have grown the size of garlic: a bulb for each heel. His skin is thick under the layers of thinning tatters: of various fading colors, worn-out labels of clothes and pesticide bottles that buried him in debt when the lean season came. The shadow of his nose, the dark in his sun-browned face creases as he narrates his story. A flame dances between us as his wife tells of how her hands were viciously lashed when she tried to save their crops from being inundated: livelihoods eventually needed washing off by the stream. Even without the onset of drought, even without the coming of storms calluses grow enourmous, hands get bloodied and torn. What do we know about exploitation? Who planted the greedy plunderers in our land? Where are its roots, when do we pull out abuse by its foundations? What kind of calamity is this semi-feudalism? II. The streams are being muddied by footsteps rushing towards each front, to the fields where a new government is a seedling born. What law of the land, law of the heavens, raging miracle or pains of hunger brought us over to the side of the people? There is none that was written or told, none that was carved or sculpted. No book, no legend. We are here asking: What law? We who are mere drops in an unstoppable surge that comes. - Translation of Kerima Lorena Tariman’s “Salaysay at Kasaysayan” By ILANG-ILANG QUIJANO

More serious health, family, or financial problems could occupy the mind of a person so insistently that he or she is no longer able to devote enough attention to work. Then a long period of drought may follow, a writer’s block, a burnout, which may even end a creative career. It is this kind of distraction that Jacob Rabinow talks about: Freedom from worry is one thing—that you don’t have any problem of health or sickness in the family or something that occupies your mind. Or financial worries, that you’re going crazy about how you’re going to pay the next bill. Or children’s worries, or drugs or something. No, it’s nice to be free of responsibility. That doesn’t mean you have no responsibility to the project, but to be free of other things. And you’re not likely to be an inventor if you’re very sick. You’re too busy with your problems, too many pains. Many of our respondents were thankful to their spouses for providing a buffer from exactly these kinds of distractions. This was especially true of the men; the women sometimes mentioned pointedly that they also would have liked to have had a wife to spare them from worries that interfered with their concentration on work.

Let’s take a woman, and make her twenty-five years old and give her a postgraduate education. Let’s call her ‘Jane’. If she works for forty years, Jane is likely – if things go according to the average experience – to earn a lifetime total of $2.49 million. But if you take a second graduate, and call him ‘Jeff’, and give him exactly the same qualifications as Jane and bless him with the same degree of averageness, he ends his forty-year career with a lifetime total of $3.78 million.11 That amounts to, as Anne Summers pointed out in her book The Misogyny Factor, ‘a million dollar penalty for being a young woman in Australia today’.12

When men and women produce a baby together for the first time, it's an absolute festival of mutual incompetence. From The Wife Drought

When men and women produce a baby together for the first time, it's an absolute festival of mutual incompetence.

the life-draining drought also killed the trees that Caroline Henderson, the college-educated farmer’s wife, had nurtured. “Our little locust grove which we cherished for so many years has become a small pile of fence posts,” Caroline wrote to a friend.

But the very same taker tendencies that served Wright well in Fallingwater also precipitated his nine-year slump. For two decades, until 1911, Wright made his name as an architect living in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, where he benefited from the assistance of craftspeople and sculptors. In 1911, he designed Taliesin, an estate in a remote Wisconsin valley. Believing he could excel alone, he moved out there. But as time passed, Wright spun his wheels during “long years of enforced idleness,” Gill wrote. At Taliesin, Wright lacked access to talented apprentices. “The isolation he chose by creating Taliesin,” de St. Aubin observes, “left him without the elements that had become essential to his life: architectural commissions and skillful workers to help him complete his building designs.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s drought lasted until he gave up on independence and began to work interdependently again with talented collaborators. It wasn’t his own idea: his wife Olgivanna convinced him to start a fellowship for apprentices to help him with his work. When apprentices joined him in 1932, his productivity soared, and he was soon working on the Fallingwater house, which would be seen by many as the greatest work of architecture in modern history. Wright ran his fellowship program for a quarter century, but even then, he struggled to appreciate how much he depended on apprentices. He refused to pay apprentices, requiring them to do cooking, cleaning, and fieldwork. Wright “was a great architect,” explained his former apprentice Edgar Tafel, who worked on Fallingwater, “but he needed people like myself to make his designs work—although you couldn’t tell him that.

FOR 17 YEARS, Tom Carroll and his wife Hermine Ricketts tended an organic garden in the front yard of their home in Miami Shores Village, Florida. They grew everything from arugula to zinnias, mostly for home consumption. Then, one day in August 2013, disaster struck. It wasn’t a hurricane, a flood, or a drought. It was the government.

Why, after all these decades of campaign, reform, research and thought about how we can best get women into the workplace, are we so slow to pick up that the most important next step is how to get men out of it?

Of the wind Colpias, and his wife Baau, which is interpreted Night, were begotten two mortals, called Æon and Protogonus: and Æon found out food from trees. Those that were begotten of these were called Genus and Genea, and they dwelt in Phoenicia: and when there were great droughts they stretched forth their hands to heaven towards the Sun; for him they thought the only lord of heaven, calling him Beelsamin, which in Phoenician is Lord of Heaven, but in the Greek Zeus.

Francisco, who had lived in the San Luis Valley his entire life and under the drought for half of that life, could barely fathom such festivities. Little girls in fiesta dresses rode painted carousel horses on a merry-go-round powered by men turning a massive wooden gear. Boys one-third his height wore crisp and dustless sombreros. The dancing was so vigorous that he felt his legs stepping out without his permission, his body an unwitting mirror. The music replaced Francisco’s blood, and he felt he could do anything. That was when the blue sky stopped, right over Antonia Alamilla, who was dancing in a white dress. He saw now that it was not blue sky at all, but rather a blue balloon whose string was tied around her wrist. When she saw Francisco in his dust-covered overalls, she immediately stopped dancing and declared, in facile Spanish, “I love dogs.” The rest of the townspeople looked on in shock. No one had heard Antonia speak since she’d been born, and once she had met Francisco, she did not stop. He asked her to be his wife, and when they were married in Bicho Raro two months later, Antonia’s tears of joy coaxed rain from the sky and ended the decade-long drought.

Have a look at the results when Australians are asked if they agree or disagree with the statement: ‘It is better for the family if the husband is the principal breadwinner outside the home and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and children.’ In 1986, just over 55 per cent of men agreed with that proposition. That proportion swan-dived down to about 30 per cent by 2001, but by 2005, it had gone up again, to 41.4 per cent. Women subscribe to that view less enthusiastically than men on the whole, but they too have waxed and waned over the last 30 years. In 1986, 33 per cent of them thought it was better for men to work and women to keep house. By 2001, that had dipped to 19 per cent. But by 2005, it had bobbed back up to 36.4 per cent.17