Hippiness galore!

[sabotabby]

Oh weird; they're making a movie of The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk. I can't quite explain this book's place in my life. I read it at a wayyy too impressionable age, and at some level, it shaped a lot of my ideas about politics and ecology and urban planning. When I read it later, it had aged badly—to say the least—and I found the resolution wholly upsetting in a way that exemplified why I reject pacifism as an ideology even while I agree with a lot of the author's ideas.

...but damn I do kinda want to see it as a movie, if they do a good job. And if they do a bad job, I think it's fodder for the most epic screenshot review since Atlas Shrugged.

Comments

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I am totally looking forward to that movie, good or bad. The first time I heard about the book was when I was trapped on a train next to a hippie woman, going from Missouri to Chicago, and she (exactly like an Xtian proselytizer) could NOT stop trying to convince me to read it because it would change my life. Of course that made me hate it deeply, and I didn't actually read it for another about ten years, when a fellow teacher I liked also recommended it. I started the book very aloof and ready to hate its woo and hippiness, although there was at least a bit of acclimation to Bay Area pagan/wiccan stuff going on with me around 2002. And I was surprised to find that I liked it, though I am afraid that it's not much of a political plan. Starhawk herself seems to me to be actually a useful leftist -- at antiwar meetings her interventions were good, and not ultraleft or liberal. I've even done a spiral dance with her, up at a lefty educational conference in Humboldt County!

[sabotabby]

Starhawk as a person seems to be not as useless as that book would suggest! It has far too much woo to make me actually think it's decent, but it does have some interesting ideas in it.