The Golden Notebooks

Feeling Sentimental

2012-01-19T19:34:00.000-08:00

Apparently we pregnant types are supposed to be sentimental. Every other blogpost on the pregnancy part of Babble is about crying at the cotton commercial or something. For better or worse, I seem to be the same cynic I've always been.

Of course, there's a lot of suggestibility when it comes to talking about emotions. If I were being paid to blog about being pregnant and how I felt about being pregnant I would probably attribute a lot of things to it that I don't when I'm just going about my life. Which is why I was interested to find a link to this article, from New York magazine. Now, you might think that reading an article with the subtitle "Why Parents Hate Parenting" might be a bad idea for a 39-week pregnant lady, sentimental or otherwise. But it's a strong article because instead of falling into the normal lifestyle carping (singles are happier! no marrieds! no parents!) she sets out to solve the seeming paradox of why studies have consistently found parents less happy than those without kids although almost no parents would say this. A lot of it is what you'd expect: parents are in denial, parents expectations have become too high, etc. But the real meat comes at the end, when she demonstrates how, like always with such studies but is so rarely mentioned, it really comes down to the questions being asked. When you ask moment to moment things, like, do you have more stress, of course parents say yes. But when you look at more existential questions, like feelings of loneliness, parents come out as less depressed. One of the parents are less happy people doesn't buy it, because life is actually experience as series of moments, not as what we make it in reflection. I'm not so sure. I've always been fond of what Annie Dillard says, that good days are not hard to find, it's good lives, and that a day spent reading is not always a good day but a life spent reading is always a good life. People like to tell aspiring creative types or whoever that you have to enjoy every part of the process, the doing, not just the having done. But the process sucks lots of the time for almost everyone. So if we are not so happy moment to moment, but construct ourselves that way in retrospect, is that really such a failure? "Being in the moment" may be a balm against anxiety, but does it take us away from where the meanings are - in where we've come from and where we're going?

So I was thinking about this and thinking maybe I'm not so unsentimental after all, and then I came across Philip Levine's wonderful poem "You Can Have It" in Rita Dove's new anthology, and thought especially about these lines:

. . . We were twenty

for such a short time and always in

the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt

and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded

by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes

of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,

no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now

that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,

calendars, doctor's appointments, bonds

wedding certificates, diveres licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.

The ice to standing pools or rivers

racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose

between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.

Like any good feminist, I'm skeptical about nostalgia. The nostalgia here totally takes me in, but mostly because it's for a time before my birth. "Purple Rose of Cairo" and "Radio Days" are my favorite Woody Allen films. It's as impossible for me to imagine commemorating 1994 the way Levine commemorates the year he turned twenty. It's as impossible as imaging my kid at twenty in 2032(!) Maybe my youth was just less textured and nostalgia-worthy than Levine's. But Levine's nostalgia goes hand in hand with its impossibility. The past as we imagine it, his 1948, his being twenty, is as if it never was, unless he wills it back, give it to us, who were never there. It's a construction, but just maybe it's not a lie, the way I always thought it was. Life may be a string of moments in which the average parent is more unhappy and stressed, but it's also the string of moments who trail behind, as equally unfixed as any vibrating present the happiness gurus could imagine.

Vanity and Despair

2012-01-16T09:45:00.000-08:00

So I was so absorbed by Downfall, the 2004 Hitler's bunker movie and father of the father of internet memes, that I subscribed to London Review of Books just to read this amazing review by Bee Wilson of a new biography of Eva Braun.

Before watching Downfall, I hadn't thought of Braun as much more than a Woody Allen punch line. As Wilson tells it, she was a throughly apolitical person, enamored with Hitler from their initial meeting when she was seventeen. She took endless photos of their life together, and mostly wanted the same things any younger mistress of a powerful man might want: more time, more attention, nice clothes and nice parties. As Wilson notes, she didn't fit the Nazi's propaganda of the selfless self-sacrificing wife and mother, but her apparent sentimentality and complete lack of self-reflection make her very recognizable. How different is gleefully cheering for your man and clinging relentlessly to the idea of your relationship, with all the photos to prove it happened from being any kind of functionary? Sentimentality is the ideology, just like the bureaucracy was for Arendt.

Looking at the reviews of Downfall it was funny to see echoes of the tired debates about whether or not art should "humanize" Hitler or other Nazis to help us understand "how such things happen," and whether viewers need to be reminded that the Nazis being portrayed were really, really bad people. The whole thing is particularly funny when film critics take this on, as if it were in any three hour film could "explain" anything. Shoah is nine and a half hours and it only works because it sticks to its own dictum to describe rather than to explain. Anyways, Arendt had the last word on this a long time ago.

"Vanity and despair" was a phrase Robin Morgan once used to describe the dominant subjective conditions of patriarchy. Reading about Braun is particularly unnerving because there's so much vanity and not enough despair, at least not until the bunker. I didn't know before seeing the film that they got married 36 hours before they killed themselves together. Guess the apocalypse is one way to get a commitment. It makes me think of the end of Shaun of the Dead, when the main character laments having to kill his zombified mother, best friend and girlfriend in the same day. "What makes me think I'm taking you back" the on-again off-again girlfriend asks. "You don't want to die single, do you?" he answers. Wilson ends her review by noting that she may have also been trying to persuade him to have children, posing him for pictures with the children who came to call. But charm and sentiment only got her so far.

Poetry Corner: Transformations

2012-01-04T17:25:00.001-08:00

Early in my pregnancy, when the changes were subtle and undetectable, I compared the experience to music playing in the background: something you would tune into or out of many times over the course of a day, without fully realizing it. At the same time, actual music was taking on more weight: instead of having the ipod on and being half tuned in while I read, it took all my attention to keep up. Along with music, poetry seemed more interesting than anything else I was reading: against all the books and columns and blogs of deadly literal advise and polemics, nothing seemed more appropriate than the metaphoric. Not surprisingly, Plath's "Metaphors" has held on as a the ur-text through all eight syllables (and counting) so far.

Anne Sexton's classic 1971 collection Transformations is among other things a fascinating combination of the literal and the metaphoric. The back of my edition describes it use of fairy tales as "reenactments, parodies" but that doesn't seem quite right to me. True, there's a lot of humor in juxtaposing the stories to contemporary language and metaphors: the miller's daughter in Rumplestiltskin is a "poor grape with no one to pick./Luscious and round and sleek./Poor thing./To die and never see Brooklyn." Later, after she becomes queen, and tries to bargain with Rumplestiltskin for her child, she is "as persistent as a Jehovah's Witness." But the stories themselves are mostly told straight: dwarfs and Kings and death behave much as they're supposed to. It's the language and, especially, the more generalized openings of each of the poems, prior to the start of each narrative, that cast them in a their frame. Thus "Cinderella" begins: "You always read about it:/the plumber with twelve children/who wins the Irish Sweepstakes./From toilets to riches./That story," while "Rapunzel" begins with the witch Mother Gothel's apologia: "A woman/who loves a woman/is forever young." It's the sympathies and not the stories that bring in the revisionism. Interestingly, along with Gothel, Rumpelstiltskin, another child-stealer, also comes in for sympathy: "She offered him all the kingdom/but he wanted only this -/a living thing/to call his own./And being mortal/who can blame him?"

The so-called "confessional poets" have fascinated me for a long time. A lot of people seem to look at them the way a lot of people look at second-wave feminism: a necessary step, but incomplete, and certainly less sophisticated than what's come since. There are a lot of connections, of course, and Transformations especially resonates with the feminist criticism of the period, with "images of women" and the rereading of the existing canon. But for lots of contemporary readers and feminists it's all too blunt, too much about the body and babies and breasts, and did Sexton really have to write "The Ballad of he Lonely Masturbator"? But I don't think so: no social movement or body of work is perfect or even complete, but that doesn't mean that those of the recent past should be seen as relics or as stages on the way to where we are now, the way the fairly recent past is so often judged.

"A strange vocation to be a mother at all," Sexton writes in "The Maiden Without Hands." Even when children are not stolen, they are everywhere contested, made strange; they transform and are transformed. At its best, the project shares the ambition of the feminist classics of the period. The movement says, what has been is not what what will be, and the poetry says, what is is already not as it is.

Talking to Strangers

2011-11-21T15:50:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I was afraid of talking to strangers, especially under certain circumstances. I was scared of picking up the phone to call someone, or of knocking on someone's door to sell Girl Scout cookies or what have you. Even recently, working on political campaigns that involve phone banking or door knocking fills me with dread. When I was in college I tried to write for our school paper. I remember interviewing a professor of mine - not a stranger, but close enough - about a new policy on student-faculty dating. I remember sitting there trembling while he said something about how student-teacher relationships were inevitably erotic, but you couldn't get such a subtle point across in an article, so please don't include that. (Yes, he was an English prof.) I didn't include it and the story went on the front page and soon after I switched to writing reviews.

I've always looked at this as a kind of political as well as a personal failing, as if a little timidity was all that stood between me and becoming Studs Terkel or Anna Deveare Smith, two folks whose work fascinates me probably partially because the thought of doing what they do is so terrifying to me.

One thing about being pregnant is that it involves a good deal of talking to strangers. I haven't had the experience people talk about where strangers try to touch you, but lots of strangers and casual acquaintances will engage short conversations with the standard questions - the answers are easy enough, and it's not like you had to initiate - but there's something about it that takes me back to that fear.

Miranda July is no Terkel or Deveare Smith. Like other indie filmmakers, her work is apolitical in a specific way - it's a world where people exist in the thinnest of social environments. In her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, this isolation works to brilliant psychological and existential ends, but it feels like a fun house mirror version of the world, where everyone's ultimate unknowability becomes literal. They can't really connect - ok, fine who can - but they also can't have a normal conversation.

So perhaps the high concept premise of her new book It Chooses You - interviewing people who place ads in the Penny Saver while procrastinating endlessly over the completion of her new screenplay - isn't so odd or surprising. It's exactly what you'd expect when a performance artist tries to force herself to overcome social phobias and normal taboos and make herself into an existential Studs Terkel. At first glance it's an odd book even for her - she describes her own struggles with the screenplay in the same elliptical, beautiful, searing weirdness as we get in No One Belongs Here. Except that fictional characters have a reason to speak in heightened metaphors; it's odd to hear a somewhat public figure use this for her own state of mind. Except, you realize, it's not a literary conceit: she actually thinks things like: "it was as if he'd just thrown some confetti in the air and called it words."

July says at the beginning that it's a book in part about L.A., which makes a lot of sense. A lot of the obsession with atomization in indie films might have something to do with that city. There you have to seek out strangers to talk to; here in N.Y. you have to dodge them. And not only when you're pregnant. It's also in part about older people in a younger world - the people who sell things in the penny saver don't have computers. July seems to think they exist in a different emotional space than the rest of us - I'm not so sure. If nothing else it reminds us that the internet sure as fuck didn't invent shut-ins. July works hard at being her best Terkel-like populist self. When she interviews Andrew, a seventeen year old trying to sell tadpoles, she seethes when he tells her how he was shunted into special ed classes for no reason he understands and encourages him to see his obvious gift with animals as something he can use, test scores be damned. But then she runs up against Ron, also known as the kind of person who makes you think you're right not to talk to strangers:

Ron was exactly the kind of man you spent your whole life being careful not to end up in the apartment of. And since I was raised to go out of my way to make such men feel understood, I took extra-special care with his interview. But as he talked on and on (the original transcript was more than fifty pages), I realized that I don't actually want to understand this kind of man - I just want them to feel understood, because I fear what will happen if I am thought of as yet another person who doesn't believe them. I want to be the one they spare on the day of reckoning.

Later she notes how much more willing to run from the situation she is than she was at sixteen, when she corresponded with a prisoner. But it would be too glib to say, ah yes, well, there's talking to strangers and then there's going to the houses of strangers when you're a woman and when it's the latter you know where the fear comes from, and that it may be a gift, like the self-help books say. What is being an artist or a creative person if not the fantasy that we will be something other than another person who doesn't understand, and that the understanding may spare us? Ron may not deserve it, but we do.

More Gaitskill

2011-11-12T09:47:00.001-08:00

When I was about eleven, I wrote a story for English class about a teenager who wanted to be a model. Which was kind of crazy: around then I wanted to be a dancer, a writer, a therapist or a lawyer. Of course a few years later the topic would seem like the most ridiculous and embarrassing thing, the sort of thing written by an eleven year old reading certain magazines, the worst possible topic for a young girl who understandably wants to write about the only thing young girls can write about, which is wanting. But having just finished Veronica - and with it, having read all of Gaitskill's books, the first time I'm managed that with an author for a while - I have a little more compassion for my younger self. Who knew modeling could be a theme for a great novel? Well, not modeling exactly, but all that goes along with it. As Allison, the novel's narrator, puts it, "I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn't. I'd gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college." Beauty, Dorothy Allison wrote, tells an ugly story, and it is the thing that teaches Allison life and sex and cruelty. Beauty and the things that go with it - youth and sophistication, or at least the appearance of it- separate Allison from Veronica, a woman with whom she forms an unlikely friendship. Beauty and the power imbalance that it creates and embodies challenge our sense of ourselves as good and kind people, and of our world as one where empathy is possible. Good liberals who reject the cruelty of winner-take-all ideologies hesitate - and with good reason - when it comes to beauty and sex. It's no good for the rich to say more and more is never enough - not everyone agrees on this, of course, but the imperative is clear enough for many of us. But if the beautiful and talented want more experience, more sex, more life - who are those of us with less beauty and talent to stand in their way? Certain strains of feminism have challenged women on this point - perhaps this is why its ideals seem so particularly arduous. Allison's friends tell her how good she is for standing by Veronica as she struggles with AIDS and her other friends abandon her. Allison knows better. She understands the cruelty of pity. In less extreme circumstances, I've had friendships where I was close to each of these roles, and her brilliant evocation of the dynamic is devastating.

Throughout the novel Gaitskill uses variation on a haunting image: after she describes a scene, Allison says, "Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them, she's the fool and I'm the person who has something. But in the tenth, I'm the fool and it's her show now. For just a second, that's the picture I saw." It's the possibility of the tenth picture which brings Allison back, and that makes ten pages of the seemingly "personal" or "apolitical" Gaitskill more worthwhile than a dozen thick tomes of so-called voice of a generation authors whose lukewarm, smoothed over sociology of the middle class somehow passes for "realism."

Me, Elsewhere

2011-11-05T04:12:00.000-07:00

I have a review of Vivian Gornick's short biography of Emma Goldman up at the November issue of Open Letters Monthly.

In the same issue, be sure to catch Rohan Maitzen's great takedown of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot. It does sound pretty dreary - really, deconstruction-bashing, how novel! There's nothing worse than a novel editorializing and theorizing to you about the superiority of art to editorializing and theorizing. Well, yes, then, why don't you get on with it? Even Roth is completely dreadful when he gives in to this. Because I'm a masochist, I recently caught Sam Tanenhaus on his podcast bitching about Eugenides not being nominated for a National Book Award: as with Franzen, supposedly it's a conspiracy against "major" or "popular" authors by judges who don't recognize that books that sell can also be good. It's a clever way (well, not that clever really) to give a populist spin to a standard lament for the eclipse of your pet white males, who by definition have something big to say, no matter how parochial their subject matter. Can't it ever be that sometimes they're just not that good?

Poetry Corner: Dedication

2011-09-24T14:33:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm working on a review of Vivian Gornick's new biography of Emma Goldman for Open Letters Monthly. Over at The New Inquiry, The Jacobin's Bhaskar Sunkara takes issue with Gornick for spending too much time on her romantic life and failing to present an adequate analysis and critique of the limits of Goldman's brand of radicalism, deeming the book "a trite celebration of the 'good fight' and some parlor gossip."

But what does it actually mean to fight the good fight? Are the contours of a life of struggle really so familiar to us? Of course, from a certain radical perspective, this is besides the point: one struggles to change the world, not to live a meaningful life. Yet given the precariousness of radical victories, part of the story is always the lives left behind across decades of difficult and sacrifice, and, often, seeming failures. By aiming for more than a meaningful life for oneself, meaningful lives are constructed: this is one of the central tensions at the heart of Benjamin Balthaser's wonderful new collection of poems, Dedication, (you can get it here.)

Drawing on experiences and interviews with relatives who were activists and members of the American Communist Party, the book meditates on the lines of blood and memory that extend from the long-ago epiphanies, cherished books, and conversations across decades that erode their power, both through the active repression of HUAC and named names and the less deliberate but no less intolerable diminishments of age, separations, and silences. "Dedication for Arrival" implicitly rebukes all those who have seen American repression as somehow insignificant because it lacks the familiar icons of state repression:

When they came, they did not come,

in darkness, as they did,

they did come with greased faces,

black with smoke, as they did,

_________________________

They came in the middle of the day,

they came in suits, they knocked on the door,

and read from a warrant, signed by a judge,

and when the children wept, they patted them on the head,

and gave them sweets, and the neighbors

peered from darkened windows

not knowing and prayer but silence, and rumor.

Finally, though, it is in the construction of meaningful lives that the losses and gains are measured. In "Dedication 4 for Sid Grossman: Service," we see a captain ridicule his commitment - ("we know what your background is"),

to run their logistics, the Lieutenant called on you.

Grossman will talk to those niggers, and when

you walked through the tropical darkness,

and onto the other side, and you spoke

with the ease and directness one grants to men,

it was obvious you had not learned this in the Army.

I don't buy or recommend poetry that often, but do yourself a favor and pick up Dedication here.

Reading for the Plot

2011-09-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

I remember, back when I was still a student (I say this as if it was some little brief fling instead of how I spent more than half of my life), reading a preface to one of Doris Lessing's novels. I think it was Martha Quest, although it might have been the namesake of this humble blog. In any case, the preface quoted Lessing crediting her literary accomplishments to her lack of formal schooling. It gave her the freedom, she said, to read the way one should read: haphazardly, without a plan, wherever one's interests and fancy took one. Well. I set her aside for awhile and guiltily went back to whatever I was supposed to be reading for a seminar. Now that I'm out of school (as much as a teacher can be), working on fiction as much as anything academic, I read more this way than I probably ever have. I don't know if I agree completely with Lessing: there's something to trying to discipline oneself to read deeply into a certain topic, even through the boring parts. In any case, I had something of an odd summer, and at the end of August I realized that what I'd read over the last two months - the good bad and ugly, made no sense together whatsoever, except that it made perfect sense. One feels, nonetheless, some need to account for What is Found There (the remnants of the good student, perhaps).

In any case, then, some discoveries and some embarrassing confessions:

- Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland. I came to read this in a way that's probably something like Lessing's ideal, but that almost never happens with me: I saw it at the bookstore, was struck by it although I'd never heard of it, and read it right away. I'd heard of Myles as a poet: this is a collection of prose pieces: some you might call reviews, some you might call essays, I suppose. There's a lot about art, but the best, for my money, are the responses to Times articles and the like: she takes some throw away, completely conventional line and runs with it, as if the writer had actually meant what he wrote. Her anti-advice commencement speech is pretty great too.

- Jane Green, Babyville. On to the ugly. Every once and a while I get momentarily fascinated by "chick lit." I kind of liked Bridget Jones and the one Candace Bushnell book I read. I tend to be of the "if it's popular there must be something there, and well-done pure entertainment is harder than it looks" school. But good god, this was awful. Somehow one can take a TV show where there is "the career girl with her one night stands" and "the housewife obsessed with babies" - just being played by an actor inevitably gives them at least a touch of something recognizable. But sitting through descriptions explaining to you that's who they are, in case you missed the point. Blech. The sex scenes sucked too.

- Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking. Borrowed from a friend while at a country house. I imagine that, good or bad, celebrity memoirs are far more entertaining that chick lit with "relatable" characters. There were funny pictures, plus it makes you curious to re-listen to mid-period Paul Simon.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude. The only reread among the bunch, for an online reading group. My first read was in a grad seminar, overburdened by its reputation in Latin American literature and how much my Latin Americanist friends get annoyed by it as a result. I did enjoy it more this time, but it was still all a bit much for me. I think I'll always be a minimalist or a realist at heart, and usually both at the same time.

- Leslie Chang, Factory Girls. A bit of a cheat on the arbitrary reading plan, since I'd taught a chapter in my composition class on work, and wanted to see how the other pieces fit together. It's a great read. Chang isn't a lefty, and she clearly doesn't want her story about young migrant workers in China's new cities to be primarily a story about exploitation. What she does instead, though, works well, showing us how her subjects navigate a truly strange world. The chapters on the instant schools that have cropped up to teach the ways of the capitalist world and on the dating market among young migrants are particularly captivating. After reading the latter, at least, it's really really hard to complain about how "artificial" OkCupid is.

- Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. J.K. Rowling gave this classic from 1948 a boost with her blurb, and you can see why. I guess you'd call it Y.A., though not everything with a teenage narrator and point of view merits that, does it? Is Catcher in the Rye YA? In any case, it brought me back to a lot of childhood reading - the Britishness, the propriety, the girl discovering the library in the old house, the way first crushes or loves bump against trying to be a good person. I wonder how many books for teenage girls stage this conflict, about what is given up to win someone else. It's probably not up there as a theme for the vampire and end of the world types, but it still does it for me.

- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. The best of the bunch and probably the best novel I read this year. I have a New Yorker cartoon on my fridge that shows two farmers looking over a pen of cattle. "Before we slaughter them," one says, "we give them each an achievement award." Yes, the novel is about clones, but it's really about kids who are like us, only more so: they go to schools where they are told they matter, that they are cared for, that what they think and feel matters. That the teachers are interested in their art because it reveals something about them. The unwinding is in discovering that this isn't true, that they are a product, being prepared. And unlike our visions of youthful liberation, this is one set of raw materials that, despite any Mario Savios lurking among them, doesn't love the machine, but isn't about to throw itself into the gears, either. Taking it a step further, you think about what it means to create children - of the regular non-clone kind - and have to explain to them they're going to die. Cheery stuff! But way less depressing than Babyville.

- Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer. A delight from the first infamous sentence, as I knew it would be. Takes one of the oldest and well-worn topics - the problem of subjectivity, and plays it out in the concrete in all its horrors. Worth several shelves of philosophical monographs on the nature of truth.

- Annie Murphy Paul, Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Read this for the obvious reason. The subtitle tells you exactly why this book might be terrifying for a lot of moms-to-be, but I really appreciated actually reading some of the science behind all the recommendations, speculations, and confusions. Reading blog posts at Babble or wherever I just want to go around with a red marker and write "citation please." It's especially interesting to read about the "natural experiments" a lot of these ideas rest on, given that obvious ethical problems with traditional studies, and the history of what used to be believed is pretty hilarious. Paul was pregnant herself when she wrote the book and does a good job trying to frame the information without mother-blame, though her confidence that this is how it will be used seems overblown, to say the least.

- Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Another cheat, since I'm teaching some of it in my America in the World class. An ethnography of the Green Zone from the bad old Bremner/CPA days. He sides a little too much towards the "hubris/mistakes were made" interpretation, I think - giving the stories of well-intentioned young staffers and their disillusionment leads one a bit to the conclusion that things might have been different if there had been more competence, intelligence, what have you, instead of to the point that, as Jamaica Kincaid said of the British in one of our readings for the class, the problem was that they just should have stayed home. Still, an important document. The little "scenes" in between chapters - descriptions of things like where young staffers lodged in big communal bunks went to fuck, or the support group for Democrats - are the best part. Ah, remember the aughts? How much younger we were then.

Gloria: Four Decades of Not Taking the Bait

2011-08-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

"Our job is not to make young women grateful, it's to make them ungrateful."

This quotation from Susan B. Anthony serves as something of a touchstone throughout the recent HBO documentary about Gloria Steinem. It's a short film, just 60 minutes (Stephen Colbert quipped that it's 75% as long as documentaries about men), and because it takes a personal approach, structured around interviews with Steinem, it doesn't offer a comprehensive history of the second wave movement, or a lot of context for viewers unfamiliar with that history. Dana Goldstein has a good piece about the shortcomings of the film, especially regarding the treatment of race. It's too bad, because I think a lot of that history is really under-known and discussed. I don't mean the frequent specious charge that younger women are ignorant and therefore ungrateful about what the movement did for us. First of all, as Steinem points out through the Anthony quotation, gratitude should not be the goal. Certainly it's hard for any of us to really have a visceral sense of what the pre-(this round of)-feminism world felt like, which I think is part of the spell that Mad Men casts on so many of us. But as Steinem, who always rises above the media's attempts to bait her into trashing younger feminists, has pointed out, young women, when you look at actual poll numbers - let alone how we vote with our feet - are far more feminist than earlier generations. What I mean is that feminism often isn't really integrated into people's sense of social movements and how they work. Most well-educated progressives probably couldn't name the main civil rights laws except the non-passed ERA or the main court cases except for Roe. This doc. does little to address this, but the personal angle works well on its own terms, as Steinem talks about how she came to politics as a young journalist sent to cover a hearing on abortion laws, the ways the pre-feminist world led to her mother's breakdown, how her mother's own aborted writing career spurred her own ambitions and drove her from her family, the impact of being in the media spotlight, and her first marriage at 66. And it does a great job with what documentaries do best, showing us photographs and archival footage that evokes lost worlds: all the talk shows where, as Steinem points out, they hadn't yet gotten to anger against feminists and were still stuck on ridicule, and she navigated with wit, humor and grace, never taking the bait, gamely avoiding all their cajoling of her to diss other feminists, to diss on wives and mothers, to talk about nothing but her personal life - they made her deny she was dating Henry Kissinger after a White House visit, which tells you about what you need to know. As Gandhi said, first they ignore you, then they laugh, then they fight, and then you win - or, you sort of win and then you keep fighting.

The Stakes

2011-07-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

A couple episodes into the fourth season of Breaking Bad, my fears about the direction we're going in seem to have been justified: now that there's no facade, now that there's just Walt, criminal mastermind, it's more of a really well-written and beautifully shot crime drama than anything else. Skyler's own transformation as she "breaks bad" promises to be very interesting this season, although it's unclear if this will be treated as more than a side plot. Amanda has an interesting post arguing, persuasively to my mind, that what's happened is not really a moral transformation on Walt's part - he's just become fully realized as the asshole he always was underneath the nerdy facade of his previous life. She's responding to an interesting but odd post by Chuck Klosterman, which argues that Breaking Bad is the best of the widely agreed-upon group of "TV as great art" shows of the last decade (the others being The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men). As always, what's interesting is not which is actually best, but the reasons given and what the tell us about the reader, and Klosterman's are odd, if not unfamiliar. Klosterman likes Breaking Bad's clear morality:

Breaking Bad is the only one built on the uncomfortable premise that there's an irrefutable difference between what's right and what's wrong, and it's the only one where the characters have real control over how they choose to live.

This is different than The Sopranos, Klosterman argues, because it was always clear Tony and the people around him were fundamentally immoral (again, he's assuming that this can't be true of Walt, because he's not actually killing people at the start.) The Wire is too morally nuanced, its characters existing in a world where the lines between doing good and evil, intentions and results are hopelessly convoluted. As a result,

The conditions matter more than the participants. As we drift further and further from its 2008 finale, it increasingly feels like the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical. Which is not exactly a criticism, because that's an accomplishment, too … it's just that it turns the plot of The Wire into a delivery mechanism for David Simon's polemic worldview (which makes its value dependent on how much the audience is predisposed to agree with him).

Ah yes, the old the "political makes things narrower" argument - which is odd since Klosterman has just said that The Wire is the most morally complex of the shows, but because that moral complexity takes place in a context (which is by and large what makes it complex), it must be somehow diminished, less than universal (as opposed to Breaking Bad, which is I guess universal because it involves a middle-class while protagonist who presumably makes his purely immoral decisions in a social vacuum.)

But the discussion of Mad Men is odder still:

Mad Men is set in the 1960s, so every action the characters make is not really a reflection on who they are; they're mostly a commentary on the era. Don Draper is a bad husband, but "that's just how it was in those days." Characters can do or say whatever they want without remorse, because almost all their decisions can be excused (or at least explained) by the circumstances of the period. Roger Sterling's depravity is a form of retrospective entertainment, so very little is at stake. The people on this show need to be irresponsible for the sake of plausibility, so we can't really hold them accountable for what they do.

I hear people say things like this all the time, and I just don't get it. Isn't it clear that the characters do navigate their restricted environment in very different ways? That they not only exist within its strictures but help enforce them on one another? I guess people who say things like that think that they live in morally correct times, that their own choices and morality aren't shaped by anything but their own inborn and universal compass. Maybe the drama of choosing to act badly in a fundamentally morally correct world has a purity that Klosterman appreciates, but it's not the world anyone (even Walt) lives in.

Perhaps the most revealing moment came in this aside to the discussion of Mad Men:

Semirelated: Of these four shows, Mad Men is the only that doesn't regularly involve violence. This also changes the gravity of the characters' decision-making, because the worst thing that can happen to anyone is merely losing a job or being humiliated.

It shouldn't be necessary to belabor what's wrong with this: the stakes on Mad Men are never a problem, given the gut-wrenching emotional violence that "merely" being humiliated entails. Also: the "worst that can happen" also includes being raped, regularly sexually harassed, the daily violence of living the closet, having to conceal a pregnancy and giving up your child, having your life choices thoroughly constrained by sexism and racism, being a young child and having parents who are completely emotionally distant if not abusive. So yeah. (Of course then your definition of 'anyone' has to go beyond Don and Roger.) People rail on about violence in popular culture, but what's often under that discussion is the assumption that violence, when properly dealt with, is the necessary condition of moral seriousness, that anything else is just an updated costume drama. It doesn't matter to me which of these shows people think is best, but I do think Mad Men has done something important in how it dramatizes emotional violence - which can be particularly challenging for the viewer as we aren't given the release physical violence often provides. This should put to rest the "costume drama" insult once and for all - except that Wharton, Forester, James et. all knew a thing or two about emotional violence as well. . .

The Critique of Pure Feminist Reason

2011-07-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Although The New Yorker has been called out for the relatively low proportion of female bylines, they've gone a long way towards winning me over by making Ariel Levy a regular. She's brilliant on any topic, but it's especially gratifying and sanity-restoring to read articles on feminism, or feminist-inflected pieces, like her brilliant profile of Cindy McCain, in a mainstream publication that not only don't make you want to throw things across the room, but that actually make you say, yes, that's it exactly.

I didn't have quite that reaction to Jane Kramer's profile of Elisabeth Badinter, in last week's issue, but I was fascinated by it. Badinter is a French philosopher, the author of a "three-volume social history of the French Enlightenment"and co-author with her politician husband of a biographer of Condorcet. She's also the author of five polemics on what, in her case, it doesn't seem archaic to call "the woman question," from a 1980 attack on the idea of maternal instinct through her recent indictment of "what she regards as a spreading cult of 'motherhood fundamentalism' in the West."

Badinter's books, Kramer tells us, are popular in the provinces and found at supermarket checkouts, but the context is very different from, say, the last time this was true of feminist polemics in this country. Friedan and Steinem, whatever their flaws, were extremely effective popularizing writers, but they were also of course crack activists, organizers, and institution builders. Badinter tells Kramer that "The daily work of militancy is not for me. As a feminist, I can only do one thing - put into relief something that has been ignored." Which is of course her right - but the intellectual-turned polemicist poses certain problems distinct from the polemicist/activist. Badinter's popular works sell, but outside of a movement, we end up with the equivalent of dueling bloggers saying, "I'm not judging the choices of other mothers, but . . ." - This is pretty much where Badinter goes when it's pointed out to her that there's little evidence her country is in the grips of some maternal cult: France actually has low rates of long-term breast-feeding and high rates of mother's participation in the workforce. The empirical is accidental; it's the polemics that matter.

Part of this seems to be about the role granted to "public intellectuals" in France. Anyone who's been unfortunate enough to have more than five minute's exposure to Bernard Henri-Levy's imperial gasbagging should suspect that the much vaunted greater stature given to "intellectuals" in that country is at best a mixed blessing. Even in a case, like Bandinter's, where someone has done serious, intense archival work, it takes us to the the idea that everything someone has to say thereby becomes important regardless of how it stands on its own merits. Sometimes the results are mostly silly, as in a Princeton talk Joan Scott recalls in Kramer's article:

Badinter was saying all sorts of banal things about how the French were sexier than Americans, better at sex, how American women washed too much, how they were embarrassed by bodily odors, by oral sex. We asked hostile questions, like, 'How can you say these things off the top of your head?'

Of course, feminism has long had this effect on people, and it's not feminism's fault: gender, sex, family, mother, work: these things cut so deep, matter so much, who can stop from saying these things off the top of one's head? But sometimes the results are not just silly but dangerous - as in Badinter's advocacy of the headscarf ban in French school and the more recent ban on niqabs in public (incorrectly referred to as burqas, as Kramer notes.) More on that in a minute.

There's something going on here besides the temptations of a public platform. From her beloved Enlightenment figures Bandinter has inherited a love of categorical abstraction. Atheists hate it when people point out any similarities between their approach and that of religion, but in this case it's hard to avoid. For Badinter, attachment parenting is bad because it coincides with the "naturalistic ideology" that's been ruining things since Rousseau. How different is that from the religious position that birth control is bad because it's "unnatural"? She concedes that 'motherhood fundamentalism' isn't actually a major trend in France, but it could be. This gets even worse, not surprisingly, when she turns her philosophical devotion to secularism on the hot button issues of the moment:

She sees her defense of the burqa law as consistent with her concern for the rights of Afghan women . . . There are five or six million French Muslims, and, for now, she says, the percentage of Muslim mothers with full-time jobs is no less than the national average; she wants to keep those women out in the world assimilating.

In other words, there's no evidence that religion is keeping women from the workforce, but she wants to ban their religious expression - just in case it does! Badinter is upset that women are have abandoned the liberating ideas of her beloved Enlightenment - "never mind," Kramer points out, "that the citoyennes of 1789 lost those rights before they ever had them, or that they got to vote only after the Second World War." And never mind that, at its best, "the personal is the political" meant that there was something important in testing the abstract categories passed down by tradition - be that tradition religious, secular, intellectual - against the realities of one's lived experience. Kramer makes Badinter seems like a compelling figure in a lot of ways, and points out that she deserves credit for embracing the label and intellectual work of feminism, unlike most of her peers in the French elite. But I couldn't help but find the way Kramer describes the debate depressingly familiar, echoing the worst press-driven "debates" that pit one group of women against another. The intellectual weight (or baggage) Badinter brings to the table doesn't help matters. She may reflect the problems of the current xenophobia among European secularists, of intellectuals in the public sphere, or just of philosophy as a discipline, but in any case, it all seems, as Joan Didion once said (wrongly in my estimation) of the women's movement itself, to have become a symptom rather than a diagnosis or a cure.

Gaitskill

2011-06-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

After reading Mary Gaitskill's amazing "The Other Place" in The New Yorker a while back, I poured through her three short story collections over the spring: Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry. What to say about Gaitskill? I guess she's best known for the way she writes about sex, partly because of the story that was the basis for Secretary. And understandably so. She makes Roth look like a Victorian. (If Katie Rophie had any sense, she'd be raving about what balls Gaitskill has, but of course she doesn't count.) It's not because she's more "explicit," whatever that might mean. Partly it's generational: go back to Goodbye Columbus with the hidden diaphragm that ruins everything and you remember, this is a writer who's always living in the shadow of the newness of the sexual revolution. No matter how old his (male) characters get, you can always hear little Alex Portnoy somewhere in the background: look at what I'm getting away with! Gaitskill, some twenty-one years younger, has her characters simply live in the world that Roth's can't stop proclaiming from the rooftops. It's become somewhat usual to say about this, across the aesthetic and political spectrum, well, now that sexual liberation is taken for granted of course sex has lost its sacredness/meaning/profundity/metaphorical possibilities/aesthetic interest, transcendence. It's such a commonplace we don't think about how odd it is: if more people were to engage in a wider variety of, say, artistic and political activities, would we say, oh, now art or politics has lost its meaning? Perhaps we would. ("If everyone's an artist, no one is, etc."). The logic of scarcity runs deep, and yes, this is saying that sex under capitalism is still thought of primarily as a commodity, but so are all experiences, so we shouldn't dwell on this too much.

In any case, Gaitskill shows how ridiculous all of this is. There's a lot of S&M in her books, which is perhaps an imperfect way of heightening the stakes, of recasting sex as a metaphor. But in any case, it works. Which is the other, deeper way in which she departs from someone like Roth: sex as metaphor works because it's about something besides breaking taboos or trying to cope with aging and mortality. Call it the sublime or just call it the soul, as Gaitskill does in "Mirror Ball."

So I decided to kick off this summer's reading by moving to Gaitskill's novels. I've been thinking a lot about my preference for short stories over the novel, but in Gaitskill's case I also think she may be better suited to the form: the intensity and strangeness she does so well are just that much harder to sustain with a single story and set of characters over a few hundred pages. Reading Gaitskill sometimes feels a little like having sex: not because the writing gets you off, although it might, and you don't get the sense she'd mind. People talk so carelessly about being "transported" by a good story, but most of the time we don't mean it - we mean, oh, a couple hours went by and I didn't notice. But distraction and transportation are not the same. With Gaitskill, you might forget and hour has gone by but probably not three. At a certain point you want to or have to come up for air, and go back to pretending you are this well articulated person in the world, that there is a boundary between you and that world, that you a person with opinions and ideas who just happens to have a body you must tend to now and then.

So I wasn't surprised that I found Gaitskill's first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, less satisfying than the stories. It felt, as so many novels to do me, like a story stretched beyond its size. Two women who seem very different meet by chance: in this case, because one, Dorothy, responds to an ad from the journalist Justine for an interview. We start with their early interactions, are then presented with alternating scenes from their childhoods, and then reconnects them on the way to some kind of climax. What I wasn't quite as prepared for was the strangeness: all of Gaitskill is strange, but here it's less the uncanny perfection achieved in so many of the stories but the strangeness which leaves one perplexed. Let's just say this is probably, thankfully, the only novel whose main themes are S&M and the followers of Ayn Rand. If anyone could pull this off, it would be Gaitskill, but it doesn't quite work. I like the idea of playing with a relationship between women with disparate amounts of power, and the Ayn Rand stuff (she calls her "Anna Granite" and the philosophy "Definitism") is interesting, especially as she manages to show why this would appeal to women, and to people without power more generally. After all, if everything around you already affirms your superiority, you don't need a bullshit philosophy and thousand page novels to confirm it. But we're still left with a story stretched beyond its normal life. And the treatment of Dorothy as "fat girl" - well, it just feels like something a thin girl would write. (Though as a thin person I obviously might be as clueless as anyone about this.) She's trying to do the thing the "Definitists" or whoever have contempt for, to write about someone without power clearly, without sentiment or pity or condescension or cheeriness but still not take you to pure despair - it's just a really hard thing to do. Interestingly the more widely known and praised Veronica seems to work with a similar dynamic between two women - on to this one next.

I also kicked off the summer with the completely strange - in the wonderful, sublime sense of the Gaitskill stories - collections of essays and assorted prose by the poet Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland. More soon.

Artifact from the History of Trolling, 1970

2011-06-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

I've been spending a bunch of time poking around the wonderful site, longform.org, which curates longer works of journalism and creative non-fiction from around the internet - including some pre-internet era pieces that are available online. Recently in their archive I came across Ellen Willis' review from the NYRB of Alice's Restaurant and Easy Rider. It was fascinating to read that, watching Easy Rider at the time it came out, someone immersed in the counterculture reacted to so many things in the same way my friends and I did when I saw it for the first time in a frat house in the midwest, inexplicably going through a Phish-inspired tye-die revival in the mid-nineties. (I know, I know.) But what really made me smile was the exchange of letters between Willis and one Thomas M. Kando, of Sacramento State College. True, a few of the touches are very 1970, like addressing her as "Miss (Mrs.?) Willis" and the reference to "Momism," but by and large the whole thing could come straight out of the moderation queue of your favorite feminist blog, with a quick pause to use the search and replace function and put in "feminazi" for "women's lib" and "child support" for "alimony."

Using "females" as a pejorative noun? Check. Calling Willis emotional? Check. Saying that

because she's in "women's lib" she's not objective? Check. Heightened gestures designed to make his argument seem logical, a la a bad term paper? Double Check ("While I have not seen Alice’s Restaurant, I have gone back to see Easy Rider a second time. Therefore, although my observations will be restricted to the latter film, they will reflect thorough knowledge and deep preoccupation with the issues it raises." Yes, our Mr. Kando is more grammatically equipped than today's trolls, but is it really correct to call him a better writer? The sloppiness of today's trolls is at least less dishonest.) Mentioning that she is an "active member" of a feminist group as an accusation? Check. Accusing women of "wanting it both ways"? Check. Complaining that men have been emasculated on the basis of a comic figure from pop culture? Check (Dagwood, no less.)

Not having the option of a delete button and and IP ban, Willis responds: beautifully, of course. She even takes on Dagwood: "Who is really taking it out of Dagwood—Blondie, or his boss?" So to Willis, then, the last word:

I’m all for abolishing alimony—which is far more oppressive to second wives than to men—so long as we simultaneously abolish all job discrimination and guarantee housewives a minimum wage, higher pay for overtime, unemployment and retirement benefits, paid vacations, maternity leaves, and the right to strike. How about it, Mr. K.?

How about it, indeed.

Writers who Sit on Your Face

2011-05-29T06:40:00.001-07:00

In the brilliant comic novel U.S.!, in which Chris Bachelder imagines what a continually resurrected Upton Sinclair would make of our world, there are many brilliantly hysterical riffs, jokes, and parodies, but my favorite is the review of Pharmaceutical!, the novel our 120 year-old hero would be writing. (I remembered it as a Times review although it's actually not labelled as such, but hey, it's a Times review.)

Sinclair never understood that art and polemic do not mix, that great and lasting art has no authorial agenda. Novels are not tracts or pamphlets; they do not serve to convince readers of anything. A novel may ask questions, but a good one never supplies an answer. In the long history of Western Literature, in the Natural Selection of Great Books, we can clearly see that the survivors are those that aspire to a timeless and organic Beauty and not those that are written to support an autoworker's strike.

Only the Natural Selection bit is a tip off - the rest you could find on any given Sunday. And just like on the editorial page, it's always anyone tainted red, or some progressive variant thereof - who has to answer for the great sin of Ideology against Beauty.

I think of this riff every time I read something like this. Carmen Callil is an Australian-born author who has spent her writing life in England, the founder of Virago Press and the author of a book on Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy's go-to man for aiding the deportations. She made the news recently for resigning as a judge from the Man Booker International Prize because she didn't like the winner they picked. Now, this is perhaps an odd thing to do, but normally you'd expect it to be discussed in terms of how much more contentious the British are about books, something American writers often describe with not a little longing and envy. But because the writer whose book she didn't like is Philip Roth, and because Virago is a feminist press, she had clearly committed the sin of Ideology against Greatness. She was a accused of "ideologically inspired illiteracy" and, of course, "misunderstand[ing] what a novel is" - that by Jonathan Jones who wondered if she was disturbed by "a terrible scar of monotonous male sexuality" - whatever that might possibly be. Laura Miller gamely tries to defend Callil, pointing out what Callil actually said, which was in part

Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist.

This is a pretty straight-forward and non-controversial thing to say - in fact, it's something Roth's alter-ego Zuckerman might have said about himself. Miller tries to argue that these are "legitimate aesthetic reservations" that don't deserve to be branded as ideological. One understands the impulse, but this hard line between the aesthetic and the moral never works. After all, if Roth's only and ultimate topic is the self (and yes, one could argue this is true of every novelist, but leaving that aside for a moment), surely one manifestation of this is that every woman one comes across will likely be a projection of that self, its desires, or its fears. I happen to enjoy all of this - I like listening to a self wind and weave, I like sex, ego, and self-involvement as themes, and I prefer a world in which women are projections to a world like Cormac McCarthy's where they mostly don't exist. But surely this is a matter of taste - and one not unaffected by my own particularities of class, temperament and Jewishness - and not a question of Greatness.

Which is of course the point: it would be much better if, when Callil said "he goes on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe" - his defenders had said something to the effect of "how interesting! I for one enjoy this topic enough for a hundred books, and in fact, I rather enjoy having my face sat upon." (Because come on, it's a pretty accurate description.) Wouldn't that be a better tribute to the liberation of sex and ego than the usual pap about Transcendent Greatness and Beauty?

Of course, then, how would we know who to give the prizes to? Maybe it's the need to award and rank that's the real ideology here.

Opium Feels Good

2011-05-08T12:39:00.001-07:00

In high school, we had a semi-famous writer come and lecture us about drugs. Looking back I can imagine he was probably an ok guy, who'd been persuaded to get into the motivational/anti-drug business that, in an early nineties post-Nancy-Reagan haze, was probably a better career move than, oh, being a semi-famous writer. At one point during his speech, he tried to be "interactive" by pulling kids from the audience and asking them questions. I remember that he pulled out this kid named Troy, and everyone started to snicker. Troy wore a worn black leather jacket over Tesla t-shirts (I know), so obviously, I guess the thinking went, by both the semi-famous writer and the snickering kids, he knew something about drugs. He asked him why people did drugs. Troy said, "because of the way it feels?" and everyone snickered some more before the semi-famous writer said, no, no, clearly it was all about trying to fit in, and Troy looked embarrassed and sat down. On my way out of the assembly I heard one kid say to another, "God that was awful. I need a drink."

I think about Troy sometimes when you hear some smart-ass atheist talk about "the opiate of the masses." Jonathan Kozol had a good reply when asked about this in the context of a South Bronx church and he said "here, opium is the opiate of the masses." But the point is, each in their own way, opium and religion can make us feel good. The fact that this feeling is temporary or purchased at some expense does not make this feeling "false." In The Corner David Simon talks about the bargain we've made with people our system has rendered disposable. The puny welfare checks people bitch about are a very small bribe to keep the real demands at bay, and we should pay them gladly. You can say you want to take drugs away from people, but you have to give them something in return. Same thing with religion, which the political atheists don't really understand. They say, condescendingly, that they understand religion gives some people meaning and hope, but the implication is always that needing this is a sign of underdevelopment, and that if those people would just wise up they wouldn't need it: as if anyone among us lives without taking pleasure from something that could be called an illusion.

All of this came to mind as I recently finished watching the first season of Simon's current show, Treme (highbrow television being of course one socially acceptable way to get pleasure from an illusion.) Like The Wire, it's the portrait of a city, in this case New Orleans. The feel is so different, though. Instead of drug dealers, cops, politicians and teachers, we have musicians, a bar owner, a chef, a dj. All the systematic injustices are there - and are heightened even further by the storm - but there's so much more joy. How often did we see folks in the Wire take solace or pleasure in each other? If we did, it was usually a sign something bad was around the corner. Here, the musical scenes, of the manic Davis riffing on what he'd play if he didn't have to stick to the station's playlist, the scenes of Janette running around her kitchen and managing to pull something beautiful out of the chaos are all such joys to watch, not to mention Clarke Peters (Lester from the wire) as the Mardi Gras Indian Albert, stitching his costume and getting his crew back together. (If only Lester had had a whole crew of miniature makers to run with!) The lawyer and the academic are naturally partial exceptions, but even they get in on the fun at times.

At one point a young musician whose success has taken him to New York wonders if all the effort being put in to the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras is worth it, if it would be better put into rebuilding the city. It's an interesting question: if you looked at the usual statistics (and taking into account how how Katrina and the post-Katrina exile of the city's poor) you'd look at New Orleans like people look at Baltimore, as as series of outrages and problems, and of course Simon is the last person who'd deny this. But there's a lot in how people get by and resist and make beauty in their lives that can't be measured. It's a tricky point, one that can easily sound sentimental. A lot of my lefty friends probably think that talking about resistance through culture or the resistance of everyday life is some kind of weak-kneed cultural studies wishful thinking best left back in the eighties. And I agree that it's important not to confuse this with something systematic: Albert triumphs in getting his tribe together but can't make any progress with his protest about public housing, because it's mostly just him. Still, how we carry ourselves, reflect ourselves back to ourselves, celebrate and mourn really matters. In the end any guard against inevitable suffering and loss can be thought of as a kind of opium, but there's still a big difference in the fact of being soothed, and the ways in which we do it.

ETA: Based on the first three episodes of season 2, it's going in a very different direction which puts what I'm saying here in a very different light. More soon.

The Rabbit Done Died

2011-04-02T04:40:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite episodes of Mad Men is the one where Betty gives birth. I love the scene in The Group where poor Dottie sits in Washington Square Park with a diaphragm in some sort of complicated box contraption. I was completely transfixed by the horrific sex-ed scene in Frederick Wiseman's classic High School documentary. In short I have an unhealthy obsession with the horrors of pre-second wave medicine for ladyparts. Sometimes you hear people make a joke that the only thing the second wave ever did was get us women gynecologists, to which it made sense to me to say, even if that was true, daiyanu and we should make a shrine to them.

So I'm really really confounded that, until I came across this piece, I'd never known about the rabbit test. How could this be? What a crazy image, what bait for writers - this must be in The Bell Jar at least. Maybe it's one of those things you skim over and don't notice when you don't get the reference. According to our wikifriends, who love this sort of thing, it's been name-checked on lots of shows (including MM of course), but a full-on description, someone sitting at home waiting on the results of a rabbit autopsy - why I have I never read this scene? From what I could figure out with a little basic searching, it ended sometime in the sixties or early seventies - certainly recent enough to be part of our cultural memory. Is this something everyone but me knew about? Interesting that we're never too old for this to happen.

Interestingly, the linked article notes that, according to Kinsey's 1958 study, 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies chose illegal abortion. On MM we've now had all three of the main female characters have unintended pregnancies, and we've had two consider abortion but decide against it, and one be completely unaware until giving birth and then having a coerced adoption. Three more unlikely outcomes. Now, of course, only Peggy was single (though statistics on women married to one person and pregnant by another would be interesting, though impossible to obtain), and of course drama rests on improbabilities, but it's still revealing. I asked a friend who used to work at Planned Parenthood and she said, of course, we gave counseling to tons of people and they made all the different decisions you can make, but once they're in the waiting room like Joan was, they're not changing their minds. Again, drama rests on improbabilities, and no one story has to be another story. People often respond to the dodge of this issue in contemporary-set films by saying, well, if Juno or whoever had had an abortion, there would be no movie. That doesn't apply to Mad Men, with its ensemble and multiple plot lines. If Mad Men is a story about what it was like to be a woman at this time, an actual illegal abortion should be part of the story. Not that I'm not feeling ungrateful this week of assurance of its return, in whatever form.

On a somewhat related note, reading this made me wonder if, along with the attack on reproductive rights, the fight against asshole doctors will continue forever. No one cares about writers, except to ask for free books when they're come out from anesthesia. Jesus.

Against Professor X

2011-03-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

In this political climate, it's tempting to say nothing about teachers or teaching other than politicians should stop messing with us, stop lying about how we created your problems, just stop. At the same time, as this article points out, a lack of a real progressive discussion about the real challenges and failures of teaching causes lots of smart and well-meaning people to get sucked into the current vogue style of "reform." It doesn't work, but at least people seem do be doing something, right? Whereas lefties are usually left to say, nothing will change unless fundamental inequalities change, but because people don't have hope that this can, they hear this as a surrender to the status quo.

So, I guess I should preface what I have to say about this article by saying, the exploitation of adjuncts is a scandal, and also that we should be wary of expecting all teachers to be heroic, and I respect teachers being realistic and self-critical about what they achieve.

That said, "Professor X"'s original piece in The Atlantic, and this excerpt from his book are truly crazy making. They are basically an account of someone failing at a job and therefore determining that the job can't be done by anyone, anywhere. Maybe it's in the book someone, but in neither of these pieces is there ever a hint of something like, "I tried this, it didn't work, so I tried this." There's not even really anything about teaching - he mostly describes handing out assignments and then his anxiety about how to handle their inevitable failure. The portraits of the students are generalized and stereotypical and give you a sense he didn't get to know them very well - which isn't his fault - as an adjunct with a day job, this would be very, very difficult to do. But if you're going to write a book about teaching, one that will most likely lead readers to conclude that there's no point in trying to make higher education available to working-class students, you have to be self-aware about what's going on. Maybe there's more context in the full book, but in both these pieces, there is fake self-criticism ("I feel so bad about giving Fs, but I do it because I believe in standards") but no real analysis (if "whole classes" are failing, is that really because they are so woefully unprepared, or that there is something wrong with the way I'm preparing them and/or assessing their work?) There's a little bit about how unprepared he is, but instead of calling for better training for adjuncts or trying to learn himself, he figures that there just must be nothing to be done. In the original Atlantic piece, he laments the students' inability to do research, but is profoundly uncurious about learning anything about teaching, and doesn't consider that his pedagogy (at least twenty years out of date when it comes to composition) might be a problem. And he knows that the likes of David Brooks, who blurbs his book, will praise his 'hard truths' when, like the 'hard truths' of a Chris Christie, they are the exact opposite of telling truth to power - they are telling power exactly what it wants to hear. For all that the "reformers" talk about every kid succeeding, there's the point at which you know they don't believe it. What they want is a way to be able to sort kids into successful and not successful with a good conscience. In What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain points to a study that says the most universally held quality of great professors is that they believe students can learn. They believe it's their job to teach all of them, wherever they're starting from, not to sort them. Of course there's a difference between graduate students and undergrad majors, between undergrad majors and folks in a survey, but you treat all of them seriously. This should be obvious, but if you don't believe your students have a right to be in college, things look different.

ETA: Looks like if anything I was too easy on Prof X. . . . In this great common sense response,

Lorraine Berry says much of what I'm saying here, with examples from her own teaching. . . apparently Prof X. also thinks the problem is that caring women are too nice to fail their students. Not like our manly Prof X. Glad to know I wasn't imagining the sexism of the Atlantic piece (he actually says his students have too high a sense of their abilities because of Oprah.) Some folks have written about the sexism of the current attacks on teachers. It's a dark triumph of propaganda that's managed to paint a female-dominanted profession as one of self-satisfied incompetents, because, while of course women teachers and women in all professions have the normal ranges of success, one thing women tend not to do is write books about how much they suck at their jobs and expect to be praised as truth-tellers.

The End of Don?

2011-03-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

Now that the long form television as 19th-century meme has official reached its stunning apex (though I still think the Wire is more Zola than Dickens), it seems appropriate to be reminded that the two forms are also classic examples of all that can happen when art and commerce collide: from piracy and fanatical enforcing of spoilers bans to things like this. So, on the off, unbearable to think about possibility that there is to be no season 5, we are left with these thoughts: If this were really the end, and the official end of Don is that he goes off into the sunset with Megan, does this represent a very meta ending about the final triumph of the ultimate pitch? Or better yet, did Weiner set up his negotiating position perfectly: ie make an ending that cannot possibly be the ending, so that he really really really has to be brought back at any price. Of course not: networks don't care about the deep existential confusion brought about by the possibility that Megan is the last word on Don. Still, 2012 is a long way off; it's hard not to give way to all the fallacies of fiction ex-grad students like me should be immune to: where are Don and Megan all this time? By 2012, it'll feel like it's ready to be 1971, at least.

Some Thoughts On Identification and Viewing While Female

2011-02-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

So, Daniel Mendelsohn doesn't like Mad Men. Well, to each their own and all that. It's a very stylized show, obviously, and I could understand why some people might find it mannered or stilted. I do agree with his assessment of how the show fails on race, and his point about fans being drawn to the shiny surfaces is a fair if obvious one, I suppose, but I don't think it's quite right. The Sterling Cooper world has to be attractive enough for Peggy to want to join it but corrupt and hollow enough that her success can't be purely triumphant. It's not just that she's trying to succeed among people who can't or don't respect her, it's that she's succeeding at a job that is ultimately about nothing - think of the brilliant episode from last season around the award show. Peggy's hurt that Don gets the credit for her idea, but the sycophantic silliness of the whole procedure make you relieved for her that she didn't get brought along.

But what I found most interesting about Mendelsohn's piece was that he seems very bothered by the uniform unlikeable nature of the boys over at SC/SCDP. Sure, the show wants to make a point about sexism, but do they all have to be so sexist all the time?:

the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating.
He criticizes the show for inviting us to feel superior to its characters, a criticism I've heard before but which really doesn't make sense to me:

For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering.

But showing both the appeal of the world and being unflinching in its depiction of its injustices is precisely the point. I don't trust this notion that depicting the sexism of the past has nothing to teach us but how superior we are. The idea that there's nothing in the show's sexism viewers can relate to doesn't seem right. Mendelsohn thinks it's hypocritical for the show to depict the men around Joan as louts but then show us how good she looks and invite us to leer. But what about a female viewer who is invited to share Joan's dilemma about the role she plays, and think about the double edged sword of beauty and being leered at? And even when the show does serve to show us how far we've come, isn't this a valid role? Take the scene in the first episode when Peggy goes to the doctor and tries to get the pill. (One of many, may scenes that belies Mendelsohn's claim that the appeal of the show is how the characters are 'unpunished' for what they do - and no, the men don't go free and clear either, even if the rations are skewed). If they're anything like me, viewers would leave that scene rushing for their credit cards to make a donation to Planned Parenthood - and is this such a terrible outcome, to feel so sharply what other women went through and feel grateful that we don't have to?

Mendelsohn gives a sense of where he's coming from at the end of the essay, when he argues that their real point of view on the show is the kids, and that the appeal to viewers is to see our parent's lives. There's certainly a lot to that, although my parents are a little too young for this to be largely the case for me and many of my friends who soak up the show so avidly. He seems relieved to have this point of identification, relieving him from being forced to identify with those unappealing lecherous boys of SC/SCDP. He seems to argue that somehow it's easier to see as complex the morally compromised figures of The Sopranos or The Wire, but in showing men who are attractive and intelligent to varying degrees and also refract, in their differing ways, the prejudices of the day, Mad Men just wants to rub it in. Well, I for one am glad the show dares to show sexism as the stew in which these characters simmer all the time, not just when it's topical, because that's how sexism works. If that makes some viewers uncomfortable because it makes them not want to identify with the protagonists they otherwise would, well, a discomfort in identification is nothing new to lots of viewers, especially those who have the unfortunate habit of viewing while female.

One Fewer Reason to Vote Democratic

2011-02-03T03:09:00.000-08:00

Back in 2000 when I was a wee thing, all my friends were voting for Nader. Everywhere I went people were talking about him with lots of excitement; when he drew a full crowd and lots of celebs to Madison Square Garden I was ambivalent about him for lots of reasons, and went back and forth on how I would vote right up until I got into the booth - I even remember reading and thinking about all the 'swap a vote with swing state' schemes that were going on. Seems quaint, doesn't it? Folks who've been made to feel embarrassed in retrospect that they voted for Nader can take heart that at the time I was very embarrassed that I didn't end up voting for him.

One of my roommates at the time wasn't having it. All her friends were voting for Nader too and I remember the button she was wearing that she also gave me, that's probably lying around in my collection somewhere. It said, "it's the Supreme Court, stupid." Nobody had to tell me or anyone else what it meant: fall in line, vote Democratic, or else Roe gets overturned. I've known plenty of people for whom this was a deciding factor in not going third party, or in motivating them to vote when they were otherwise apathetic, as well as otherwise apolitical or centrist women (and men) who felt motivated to vote Democratic because of choice. One of the things that frustrated me about the discussion around What's the Matter With Kansas and the whole cultural versus economic issues frame is that, aside from drawing artificial distinctions (how is the denial of benefits for one kind of health care to millions of poor women since the Hyde amendment not an economic issue?), it led people to talk as if all the juice was on the prolife side, as if getting rid of the issue (which is difficult and who likes to talk about it anyway?) could be nothing but a boon to Democrats, in spite of the fact that their stand on the issue was being used to keep Democratic voters who had highly legitimate questions about what their party stood for in line.

This week a lot of folks are rightly up in arms about HR3, which has gotten the most attention for its 'redefining rape' bullshit, since withdrawn, but is terrible for lots of other reasons too. Nine of its co-sponsers are Democrats, and so when the DCCC sent out a petition attacking Republicans, Sady and others have done a great job calling them out. As many have pointed out, even the existing rape exception is pretty feeble, given the hoops it sets up for anyone who would want to access it. The longstanding existence of the Hyde amendment is yet another example of how successful Republicans have been in washing wielding their 'taxpayer's rights' crap while the rest of us are stuck paying tons more for torture and fail to make more than a peep about it.

Is this the plan of the new Congress - a kind of inversion of Frank's thesis: vote for tax cuts and get abortion restrictions?

Gornick on Bellow, with assist from Baubie

2011-01-29T04:54:00.000-08:00

My beloved Baubie, who passed away on December 15th, was for many years a faculty wife extraordinaire at the University of Chicago. When my grandfather's department was recruiting new faculty, she would take them and their wives to the CSO or the art institute to show off the city she loved. She would help them find doctors and apartments and synagogues or churches to help them with the move. She nurtured many of his graduate students, some of whom were there at her 90th birthday party so many years later. I've thought about her sometimes during one of those endless conversations about the squeeze on academic labor - yes, of course, it's the switch to part-timers, but is there also not something in the loss of all that free and invisible labor done by the wives? (Of course, many times the part-timers are the wives, but that's another story.)

Baubie loved the intellectual stimulation of the Hyde Park Community. She was unfailingly warm, in her Minnesota way, about pretty much everyone there. (We once had an argument about her insistence that Milton Friedman was a really nice guy). One time when we were going through some old books, there was a stack of Bellow and I asked if she'd met him. "Oh, sure." I asked what he was like. "Well, you know," she said. Of course I didn't, but I did: that was as close as she would come to saying someone was less than wonderful. "His wife was a doll, though," she said then. "Well, you know, one of his wives." God bless Minnesota nice.

***********************************************************************************

So there's a volume of letters of Bellow's out. As I've mentioned before, I love letters and diaries and the ephemera of writers, so I was curious about them. Unfortunately I couldn't get through the reviews of them I'd seen, as each one began with a long lament about the eclipse of the great masters, how Bellow's readers were dying out, and on and on. Isn't after someone's dead a good time to stop kissing up to them? So I was delighted to see that Vivian Gornick had a piece about the letters in Bookforum. Reading it brought home what should have been obvious: the lamenters weren't only trying to win Bellow's favor, they were imitating him:

Then there is the unhappy transformation of his attitude toward the culture in which he found himself. In 1952, he wrote to Lionel Trilling: "Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But . . . things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!" A decade later he was in the full, relentless cry against "the present" that made his books rise repeatedly to crescendoes of ridiculing bitterness against his own time.

Of course, you could argue he really was just growing wiser with age and able to see the corruptions around him more clearly, or that the world really was just getting worse. But as Gornick outlines, over the course of the letters, the world goes sour in much the same way each woman, and women overall, and friendships, went sour. There's a difference between being enraged by the world and having contempt for it. Having contempt isn't critique, it's a way of rejecting the premises outright, the way Bellow or Roth's characters accuse women or feminists of doing. As Gornick wrote in The Situation and the Story, being able to imagine the other isn't a question of political correctness, it's a necessary function of the literary imagination.

There are a number of reasons why reviewers might glide over this or struggle to frame it in more heroic terms. There's the natural pull towards canonization, of course, along with a desire to counter criticism deemed 'political' - even if it means ignoring the writer's own obsessions. There's also a kind of deference that I think is greater for book reviewers than those working in say film, in that reviewers are writers, so you're writing about someone who does what you do, and within that likely does things that you can't do, so who are you to say they have become solipsistic, self-justifying, self-pitying or what have you?

Take a sentence from Herzog Gornick quotes, when he says of women, "They eat green salad and drink human blood." Now, that's kind of a brilliant sentence. Beautiful, maybe? Is that the right word? But it's power doesn't make it 'true' in any of the ways a statement like that could be 'true.' Yes, yes, it's Herzog saying it, not Bellow, so you could say, it's a truth-telling statement about the thought process of a certain kind of betrayed husband. But it's a truth obtained by absorption in this point of view, not distance. Then, in a letter, we get a sentence like this one:

In a 1984 letter to a former mistress, he says of the fourth wife now leaving him almost exactly what he'd said of the second when she left him: "Where a woman's warmest sympathies should be there is a gap, something extracted in the earliest years of life which now is not even felt, not recognized as absent."

A less brilliant sentence this time, its ironies more obvious and bare. Why should we take the laments for the culture any differently? Baubie once asked me, when she was taking a retirement class on Nobel Prize winning authors, why they were all so dark, why weren't there any who could write about the joys of life. I mumbled something about how much harder that is to express, a wholly insufficient answer, because it's not just with sexism or cultural decline that literary folks seem especially vulnerable to equating bad news with truth.

There's always a pleasure in writers with voice and craft, and there's lots of reasons to read Bellow, to find him compelling. But there may also be moments when one finds it all a bit much, that life is short and art long and that, contrary to popular belief, there are limits to a woman's masochism, even as a reader. A lovely thing about no longer being a student and no longer twenty-one is the ability to accept this with relief.

On another note, I was delighted to read in her author note that Vivian Gornick is writing a biography of Emma Goldman. I love her autobiographical essays and her book on Stanton, and ever since discovering the unbelievable genius B. Traven, I've been itching to learn more about anarchism. It's not quite Minnesota nice, but at least there will be dancing.

The Idea of Datedness (with Jazz Hands)

2011-01-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

This week I went to the ballet. The trip was inspired in part by my rant after seeing Black Swan about how yes, she lost a lot of weight and trained hard, but people who said Natalie Portman looked like a ballet dancer just don't know what they are talking about, and were doing a real disservice to the amazing artists the film was trying to be about. It also seemed like a kind of Social Network thing: let's make this world seem even more misogynist world than it is, and kind of condemn, that, but mostly wallow in it, because you know what isn't misogynist: Hollywood! Not to mention the idea of 'reinventing Swan Lake by making it visceral!" as some revolutionary statement. What's next, a visionary theater directory who wants to set Hamlet in Nazi Germany? Zany!

But, in any case, the movie made me want to go to the ballet. I complained to my friend that no one wants to go, and he gamely volunteered, so last week I saw a double Jerome Robbins program, "Dances at a Gathering," originally from 1969, and 1958's "NY Export: Opus Jazz." No offense to black block theaters and their folding chairs, but there's nothing like going to Lincoln Center in the middle of the week. "Dances at a Gathering" is the kind of modern ballet I love best: just enough story: no mythological frufru, no dead virgins, just friends coming together mixing, flirting, pairing off, repairing off, and quietly bidding each other off, all with a classical vocabulary, and gorgeous lines to match the single voice of Chopin's piano line.

But it was the relatively short "NY Export" that just floored me. My friend joked before hand that he wanted to see jazz hands, and he wasn't disappointed. Everyone has seen Robbins choreography, since he did West Side Story (along with Peter Pan, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof and others), and it always kind of kills me when people joke about the dancing gangs of West Side Story, as if musical theater was supposed to adhere to the Dogma rules of social realism. But it's not just the jazz hands: everything about this piece screams 1959, as much as the Weber paintings I last wrote about, from the sneakers to the gorgeous Ben Shahn backdrops. People make fun of the obsessive period stuff on Mad Men, but it's undeniably a huge part of what we love: the illusion of transportation, to which the visual is the best pathway. Nostalgia is dangerous in general, when it's for a time we never lived in as much as when it's clearly a proxy for our own childhoods. But it's also unavoidable, and, taking it with the proper suspicion, we can enjoy it as one of the transporting pleasures of art. I was trying to describe Ben Shahn and all I could think of was the line from Annie Hall, you know the one, "you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandies University, the socialist summer camps, and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings," and of course I'm not that at all, no one could be who isn't a good thirty years older than me, and even going back that wasn't really my family, but it's something to laugh at, and to explain why you like the "dated" more than all the things the hip people have "rediscovered."

Does Matt Weiner Owe Idelle Weber Royalties?

2010-12-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

When I was a budding feminist at Smith College, taking lit courses, Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics: feminist literary theory was something of a touchstone, laying out a narrative of the stages that feminist criticism had gone through. First there was the "images of women" criticism, looking at how male writers had portrayed women, then there was the discovery phase, when critics discovered or, more often, rediscovered women writers who had been neglected, under-read and misread. (Rediscovered because, often enough, as Jane Tompkins demonstrated about 19th century American fiction, women writers were often, in a reversal of the standard artistic-heroic cliche, well-known in their own time only to be buried later by the condescension of cultural gatekeepers.) Then, there was the phase we were presumably in at the time, and presumably still are: the phase of theory.

The idea of course was that criticism had become more sophisticated, that we didn't need to do that rediscovery thing anymore. (The images of women stuff was of course often seen as really passe, and "simplistic," which always struck me as unfair. Someone had to say something about Mailer, and anyone who gets on the cover of Time for doing it must be doing something right.) But the more damaging unstated assumption that I think goes into this is the idea that the rediscovery has been done, that our curriculums and cultural institutions are so multicultural and progressive that they bend over backwards to celebrate women artists, and artists of color. I mean, many of us know that this isn't true, as the Guerilla Girls brilliantly demonstrated time and time again. But we're still surprised by what we don't know.

All of which is to say, before I went to the Brooklyn Museum's great exhibit on Women and Pop art, I'd never heard of Idelle Weber. Munchkins I, II & III, the yellow and black triptych of silhouetted men going up and down the elevators at MetLife prompted Time Out to write this:

It begs obvious comparison to Mad Men; it's almost hard to believe it's a product of 1964 instead of another contemporary, guiltily nostalgic reflection on white-collar conformity.

Which would seem to have it exactly backwards: Mad Men is doing a Pop Art commentary on itself every time the camera starts behind Jon Hamm's head, and it would seem the real anachronism is thinking that artists aren't capable of critiquing their own age. Weber also had these cubes with the silhouettes on them which were kind of gorgeous, and one of them even had a figure in a slumped, viewed from behind pose. Now if one of those showed up on Draper's desk, it would be a meta-joke, but it could it also be a parting gift from Cooper, who has plenty of time now to build his collection beyond the Rothko from season 2.

Here's part of what wikipedia has to say about Weber:

In light of her success, Weber moved to New York to work and to secure a gallery affiliation. Sam Hunter, then curator at MoMA, arranged for her to meet art historian H.W. Janson, who admired Weber's work but stated that he did not include women painters in his books.^[1] Charles Allen, owner of the Allen Gallery, similarly indicated that he did not show women artists.^[2] Weber attended an illustration and design class taught by Alexander Liberman at the School of Visual Arts, but when she asked Robert Motherwell if she could audit his class at Hunter College, he responded that married women with children were not permitted to audit classes because they would not continue painting.^[3] Weber had married earlier that year. In 1958 her son was born, followed by a daughter in 1964, yet she continued painting.

We think this is an old story, that it's either too far in the past or too familiar to bother us much. But Weber, like many of the women in the show, is still alive and working, and as the old Guerilla Girls poster said, you could probably buy most of the show for the price of a single Warhol.

Music Corner: Streets of London

2010-11-19T16:30:00.000-08:00

Today while working in my office, I was playing my normal Pandora mix station, floating in and out as I moved between varying levels of concentration and spaciness. Then, midway through a song, I was startled upright. My brain stumbled, trying to make sense of what it was hearing, failing at instant recognition but knowing I was hearing something deeply, almost primally familiar. It was that odd sensation seeing someone you're struggle to place but knew ten or fifteen years ago, a wholly different thing than running into someone you're struggling to place but met last summer.

Finally I looked at the screen and saw that I was listening to Sinead O'Connor's version of "Streets of London," Ralph McTell's old folk hit. How did I not know she'd recorded this song? McTell's song was one that my parents had recorded off The Midnight Special, the folk program on Chicago's WFMT (named of course for the Ledbelly classic), turned into mix cassettes and played during our car trips. They're probably the songs I'll remember when I'm senile and have no idea what Lady Gaga, David Foster Wallace or Mad Men ever were or why I or anyone cared. Like a lot of these songs, "Streets of London," was a sad song by a guy with a plain voice and a guitar, filled with a longing that was probably a strange thing for a kid to have as their formative musical experience.

Sinead's version, though, is something else. Sinead, of course, is, was, always, Something Else. I've been thinking a lot recently about how the late 80s and early 90s were this weirdly open moment, culturally and politically: think Public Enemy, riot grrrls, Backlash on the best-seller list, Spike Lee. Backlash prompted me to go to a women's college. Musically, though, if I were to be honest, Bikini Kill and such were never really where it was at for me. Sinead on the other hand, was Something Else. (If I were to be very, very honest, Tori Amos was a big part of it too, but that's another story.)

Now, it's tempting to write something nostalgic about how I listened to I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got obsessively, and how it understood me perfectly, and all that, but that's not quite how it went down. It was more like she was someone I was always conscious of, but who was unsettling, and I knew it would be more unsettling to spend too much more time with her. I was an intense person trying to hide; she was an intense person who made one of the best videos of all time by being totally exposed. I remember talking to a friend about the bald head and the closeup, and how brave they were, how beautiful she had to be pull it off, only vaguely sensing how brave and subversive it all was for a twenty-three year old who was already a single mother, already getting heat for her politics, for talking about her abusive childhood, whose debut was full of all the mythic poetry we could want at sixteen but also a song whose sublime horniness we could only begin to appreciate back then, who ended one of the greatest breakup albums of all time with the bare a cappella incantation "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" - quite something for sixteen year olds to try to wrap our heads around - but who also put one of the best anti-Thatcher songs in the middle of it.

Then, as everyone knows, there was the Pope thing. I was at my first semester of college at the women's college Backlash had inspired me to attend. I may have been watching it live, because I remember seeing her do it, and I know it was cut from the episode, although maybe it was on the news or something. I remember my fellow students - certainly an audience inclined to be sympathetic to how her translation of Marley's anti-racist message into a cry against abuse and its enablers - being mostly embarrassed by it. We were nice girls, we believed in being fair to everyone, and tearing up a religious icon's picture smacked of nasty things that nasty people did. I remember the discussion being about how she must be crazy, cracking under the fame. I remember my high school boyfriend, a nice Catholic boy, going off on her and me stammering a half-hearted defense. I remember enjoying her next few albums but wishing she wouldn't have little audio clips of Germaine Greer or speeches about how the potato famine wasn't really a famine and about "the one true enemy - the Holy Roman Empire" and how Jesus said "I bring not love I bring a sword." I remember being embarrassed for her when I read some music magazine interview where she said that all the problems in the world were caused by child abuse, because I was in college and I knew the answer to any statement like that was always ButIt'sOfCourseIt'sMoreComplicatedThanThat and then you get to leave it there. Oddly, I don't remember people steamrolling her CDs, Joe Pesci on the next SNL talking about smacking her, or her getting booed off the stage. Once again his followers did the Prince of Peace proud. (Wikipedia says that even before the pope thing, Old Blue Eyes threatened to smack her for not wanting the national anthem played before a concert. He had a point. I mean, any country that allowed that gangster-enabler to be a paragon is a pretty amazing country, no? The guy is like a walking encyclopedia entry under white privilege.)

In any case, of course it turned out that she was right, that there was a lot that we didn't know - not just about the church, but about her. At least, I didn't know until this year that she'd spent time in a Magdalene laundry after being encouraged to shoplift by her troubled and abusive mother. I didn't know they'd operated that recently. Frank McCourt-style memories of mothers talking about priests don't get at what she describes in the opening of her editorial response to the Pope's "apology":

When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, "Nobody's perfect," we said, "Ah sure, it could happen to a bishop."

This made me think about the opening of one of Chris Marker's films, when he talks about the Old Russia and how the czar's people would smack someone who didn't take their hat off and bow, and how whenever you talk about Revolution and the good and bad of it, you have to remember that that's where it started. And this part made me cry:

We worked in the basement, washing priests' clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.

She doesn't give the exact dates but it was probably no more than a dozen years from then, from that first guitar from the kind nun, to being discovered and the "Lion and the Cobra" and the breakthrough with "Nothing Compares" and then to that night on SNL. People think artists take on unpopular views because they want attention, that it's an affectation, that they're just not serious people like the rest of us and they should shut up and play. And of course there are some where that's an understandable response. But I think with someone like her, being so public so young, without the ideological training that is the passage through prestigious institutions that other types of public figures go through, you get something real and raw and beautiful, and more often than not, people just don't know what to do with that. We bitch about the superficiality of popular artists, and then when one isn't, we freak out at their sincerity. She must be crazy, or else she doesn't really mean it.

Well she wasn't, and she did. And I wish it had been her reedy version of "Streets of London" I'd heard on those car trips, because that voice can (almost) make me believe in something like a holy spirit, which she says she believes in in spite of it all, and even if not, it's a voice I'd like to remember in my senile years.

A Maximal Minimalist

2010-10-30T15:12:00.000-07:00

Recently I went to some galleries with a young painter. The galleries didn't do much for me - how often they don't - but the afternoon yielded me some framed New Yorker covers I bought on the street. And it yielded me something he said: "Everyone's a minimalist or a maximalist."

One of the hardest things when you're young is knowing what you like. I think the young are often pretentious out of something of a good impulse: they don't know what they like so they try to like everything, or at least all the right things. We blame universities and over-intellectualizing for taking us away from what we like, from that natural state of love we once had for reading, or looking, or listening, or what have you. And maybe it's true for some. But for me, at 15, at 20, and sometimes even at 25, the question "Do you like it?" instilled terror. It wasn't that I didn't like things, it was just that there seemed to be no pattern, no way to describe it.

Like the best friends or the best partners, the best teachers hold up a mirror. I remember Anna Deveare Smith giving a talk at NYU, and she said, the best thing a teacher did for me was tell me I was funny. One of the most romantic pieces of writing I know is "He and I" by Natalia Ginzburg, which begins "He always feels hot, I always feel cold."

So, if ten or fifteen years ago, I'd been at a gallery and some had asked, are you a minimalist or a maximalist, I would have gone into a panic. Instead, now, when he said it I said "ah, so that's what Synecdoche, NY was really about! Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman are doomed from the start because she's a minimalist and he's a maximalist."

This week, Poet Laureate Kay Ryan spoke at my school. She was a great reader and performer, and the students loved the way she slowed down her readings of her tight little puzzle poems. At one point she talked about how things like taste are pretty set early on, and read "After Zeno," which she wrote when she was 19 following her father's death, years before she started publishing, and which starts:

When he was

I was.

But I still am

and he is still.

Immediately I thought of Lydia Davis, who does something similar in "Grammar Questions," also about a father: "Now, during the time he is dying, can I say, "this is where he lives"?

So there you would seem to have it: two versions of the minimalist, in poetry and in sort-of prose, which nevertheless aspires to the condition etc. It is perhaps not accidental that in slogging through Infinite Jest (how the maximalists must announce themselves in their titles, as if we couldn't tell!) I keep thinking, look at all the hidden gems - you could have hundreds of beautiful poems here, if you pulled them out, if only they were fifty words on a page, where people could see them!

But I also think of this, another poet mourning a parent : "towards education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school and learning to be mad, in a dream - what is this life?" And later, this - "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window - I have the key - Get married Allen don't take drugs - the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window. Love, your mother' which is Naomi - "

Which takes me back again to the same question: why not say what happened, why not say her words? What will it be: to say nothing (and everything) of a life, or to say everything (and nothing)?

Long-Ass Mad Men Post, In honor of Carla and not illustrated by a photo of Deborah Lacey

2010-10-20T17:03:00.001-07:00

(Lots of spoilers)

As folks who know me know, I'm more than a little Mad Men obsessed. I wrote a whole honest to god essay about Betty Draper (Francis) at the start of the season this summer. I've had multiple dreams about the show (more about that later) . More than that, though I think it's probably permeated my thoughts over a longer period of time, and I've had more discussions, with more people, about how they've responded to it, often in a deeply personal way, than just about any other work of art in any medium that I can think of. That the thing this is true about happens to be a television show would have bothered me once upon a time, but it doesn't now.

Sunday, I had some folks over to watch the finale. As it unfolded, we started asking each other, "Is this really happening?" as if we expected Don to reassure us "It will surprise you how much this never happened" and Allison to insist "This really happened." Which it did: he really proposes to Megan, he really says all those gooey things with that glazed look that we've only seen when he was trying to sell furs to Roger in a flashback, things that he referred to in the very first episode as "invented by guys like me to sell you nylons." When Joan and Peggy shared their conspiratorial cigarettes, I was delighted, not only for a hint of solidarity to conclude this season of the rise of the working woman, but because after the long slog out in California, we finally saw that someone besides us thought this was ridiculous, that we're allowed to laugh at him.

So, Don. Don Don Don Don. Perhaps this says something about my level of cynicism, but I was more annoyed and angry with Don after this episode than ever before, including when he blacked out and forgot to pick up his kids. The problem is, I don't know if this is his fault, or the show's. I don't know if I hated it, like Amanda did. I do think it was crazy to dump the firm storyline so completely: I'm happy as anyone to see Peggy triumph, but panty hose ain't going to cut it. Overall, I have this weird trust in the show, that they're fucking with us on purpose, giving a finale that's not really a finale, making us wait to see exactly when Don is going to snap out of it. But why did he fall into it in the first place? Does the guy just go crazy every time he goes to California? (As one of my friends mentioned on Sunday, we never really found out what was going on with those international playboy types he ran away to in season two.) I get that it's kind of a twist from the earlier Don-almost-improves-but-then-runs-away scenarios, running away from a marriage and and running into one are almost the same thing. Exactly how did he get from mourning Anna to this?

But then I think, maybe this is why it's a brilliant show, maybe not everyone would react this way, maybe someone like Megan to take care of him is the best he can do, since he's certainly terrible at being single. And hey, once's he's married he'll have better luck scoring again. (When he's married to a brunette, will he start cheating with blonds?) I mean, I don't really think this, I actually want Faye to blackmail his ass. But I imagine how people might have a very different reaction, and how all throughout the California interlude, you're trying to see what Don is signaling, how deep the self-deception goes, or if an actor thinks of it in terms of self-deception in order to put it forward.

But here's what I'm thinking about the most: Betty and Carla. Peggy and Joan may be able to reach across the divide, but not these two, not in this life. How absolutely infuriating that Carla finally gets some lines but only when she's being dispatched from the Francis household and, presumably, the show? In one of my recent Mad Men dreams (yes, there have been more than one), I was pitching a show to Matthew Weiner, saying that he should do an episode that follows Carla home, and shows her teenage son, recently politicized, taking her on for working for someone like Betty. In a Times interview, Weiner defends the lack of black characters by saying that was the reality of advertising at the time, but I don't buy it: they showed us Peggy's family, which is anything but part of that world, why not Carla's? I find it telling that The Wire was so good at showing us black (male) characters, and Mad Men is so so good with white (female) characters, but never the twain presumably can meet, as if we're all like Peggy and Abe in the bar, arguing about who has it worse, unable to take in more than one injustice or struggle at a time. Then things got really weird: I was looking on IMDB, and Deborah Lacey, the actress who plays Carla, isn't listed on the full cast list. Just not there. And the only photos I can find of her won't upload onto the blog. Is the whole internet trying to play some meta-dark joke commentary? Forget one episode: as a commentator on this great post by Sady about Betty's sad silences puts it, "I want to know about the sadnesses and losses of Carla. That ought to fill up a few seasons. Or a few dozen." .

My other Mad Men dream? Jon Hamm with a Tom Selleck moustache representing himself in court in his divorce from Megan. It's going to be a long wait until the next season.

ETA: Here is a great piece by Salamishah Tillet on the show's "All of the blacks are men, all of the women are white" problem, complete with the photo of Deborah Lacey I can't upload.

ETA: Finding this picture of what Ida Blankenship really looks like almost makes up for everything.

Poetry Corner

2010-10-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

The other day I wrote a long, intemperate post on the subject of Jonathan Franzen. (Short version: I think I know why Freedom is not the Great American whatever, which is, as Frank Norris once wrote, not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff, but I don't want to read it just to see if I'm right.) Then I thought better of it and deleted it. Then today, I was reading about how Freedom wasn't nominated for a National Book Award, and I thought, that's why I deleted it: ultimately you can't spend your time with things like that. So I looked instead at what was nominated: how great that Patti Smith's amazing Just Kids is in the mix. And then I noticed that Kathleen Graber was nominated for poetry. I used to teach with Kathleen back at NYU - I didn't know her very well, but she always had a stack of beautiful books that she'd carry around tied together with a sash or a rope, which I got a kick out of because it made me think about that scene in Rope, but it also because it's just a beautiful way to carry books. Once in a while we had readings in the program I taught at, and she'd read something just so breathtaking I can remember exactly the lines and how she read them. Stuff like this. So I looked up her new book of poems, the book that got nominated, and it turns out it was inspired by a Joseph Brodsky essay about Marcus Aurelius and that when she was writing it she would alternate between reading his meditations, writing a poem, and cleaning out her garage, inspired by Aurelius stoic injunctions against attachment. File that one away under the practical uses of poetry and philosophy.

So, in such a spirit of detachment, godspeed, Jonathan Franzen. I meant you no harm. I'm sure you and Freedom and the great American whatever will be fine. In the meantime, I'll be reading The Eternal City.

drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality

2010-10-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I ended up seeing Howl after messing up the times for the movie I actually wanted to see. It was one of those great unexpected viewing experiences. I'm sure a lot of people will hate it. There isn't really a script: the whole thing is made up of scenes from Howl's obscenity trial, Franco as Ginsberg talking to an unseen interviewer, and Franco reciting the text over a truly odd set of animations. It doesn't come close to passing the Betchel test, but it's hard to fault it for that when Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassidy and Peter Orlovsky get about three lines between them. There are also lots of great photos of the young Allen & friends, which are gorgeous and heartbreaking the way the photos of young Dylan in the Scorcese documentary were. When the real Ginsberg sings over the closing montage, you kind of start to weep a little. The closest thing to it I can think of was Chicago 8 from a few years ago. It's hard to know what to say about the animations: Moloch is a giant calf like the golden calf you destroy in Sunday School pagents. There are lots of phallic fields and the approaches to animating lines about the cocksman and Adonis of Denver or sweetening the snatches of the sunrise are not metaphoric, to say the least. But the whole thing made me kind of weepy. I mean, first of all, putting basically the entire text in a movie is gutsy. Why not team up with Oprah and have a whole series of movies that are nothing but animated recitations of great books? Maybe that will be Franco's next project, or his Columbia thesis, if he doesn't first get inspired by this role to throw potato salad in the face of professors who lecture on Dadaism.

If there is an idea that comes across here, it seemed to be something about the liberatory, utopic feel of the poem. What feels hard to recapture about 1955 was not why Howl might have been shocking or met an obscenity charge. (The trial part of the film was the least compelling - it's fun to see the expert witnesses make fools of themselves, but it's all too smug.) What you get from Franco's reading is the celebration of these men and their beauty. It's the sex revolution before there was a sexual revolution. In the interview Franco as Ginsberg says that the key thing about the infamous line about saintly motorcyclists is that it ends with joy, which the reader doesn't expect. And as Andrew O'Hehir points out in his review, despite all our progress, we still don't have a lot of unabashedly romantic and erotic celebrations of same-sex love in our culture (or, arguably, of heterosexuality either.)

The movie also made me think more about the idea of self-disclosure, which I contemplated in my last post. Why not just write what happened isn't quite the question for poets, of course. To the extent that the movie has any kind of a 'plot,' it's how Ginsberg comes to write the poem he doesn't want his father to read. The format of the film protects it from the paint-by-numbers Freudian 'find your voice' thing of most Hollywood biographies. But we get close to it when Franco as Ginsberg talks about learning to put the everyday in his poems, about how the best of us comes out when we speak to our friends, but writers hide that to try to sound better than they are. This took Ginsberg to his reinvention of Whitman, making his subtext text. It's a familiar revelation, but somehow Franco makes it work.

But here's what I was really left thinking about, of course: Jon Hamm. He doesn't have a lot to do as Ferlinghetti's lawyer. But when we get to "who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments if fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality" the animation takes us past billboards that look exactly like the opening sequence of Mad Men. There's no way this is a coincidence. Later we see Ginsberg in a San Francisco ad office, moving tag lines around the page, expressing relief that he can survive in a straight job "with several secretaries." All of which leads me to one inescapable conclusion: in the series finale, when Don finally drops acid, he's going to find out that his whole stint in adversing was a peyote trip and he's going to wake up in the apartment of Midge's bohemian friends from Season one. Roger was the ghost of his dead father, Bert Cooper is the shaman, and Ken Cosgrove is the angel-headed hipster." Then he and Sal run away together. (Sal as in Sal Paradise: coincidence? I think not.) Who's with me?

Fragmentary Thoughts about Writing and Roland Barthes' Mother

2010-09-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

I remember, once, in college, visiting a friend at another college. Her favorite professor, a poet, was coming over for dinner. We made a three course Indian meal, picked out the best cheap wine we could afford. I remember this poet seemed to me uniquely glamorous, a woman who was not famous and would never be but somehow made her living doing something creative, and was older than us but carried herself in a way that made us think she had a right to write the poems she did, that she could write about passion and not be ridiculous.

Midway through the dinner, the poet talked about her mother. She said that she'd always thought the most terrifying lines of poetry she'd ever heard were these, from Anne Sexton's "Housewife":

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother. That's the main thing.

It was the last two she was referring to as terrifying. To be swallowed was one thing, to be was another. We all nodded knowingly at the great wisdom of what the poet was saying.

*********************************************************************************

When I was in graduate school, I was surrounded by something called "theory" and people I thought of as theory heads. A lot was said about what that was, some of it interesting, a lot of it not, and somewhere deep inside me there may be someone who has something to say about that. One thing I remember is conversations among ourselves, and with people we were hiring, where the question was posed, "who is your favorite critic/theorist?" Thankfully in my program this was really a question about who you enjoyed reading, people who were called critics or theorists not because they were 'experts' or had some claims to be systematic, but because they were smart and beautiful writers who wrote something that didn't fit into any one category. And when we asked the question that way, nine times out of ten, the answer was either Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes.

It's probably not a coincidence that both these writers work in the seems of genres, from Benjamin's not-quite-essays and epigraphs to Barthes' mythologies and the pseudo-dictionary of "A Lover's Discourse." I remember one of my favorite grad school teachers saying that if we got nothing out of what we were doing, perhaps we would have a chance to give that book to to the right person.

So, now, this little New Yorker piece. I love things like this, pieces of diaries, pieces of other lives. When I'm on the subway and I see someone writing in a Moleskin, I have to stop myself from looking over their shoulders. In that moment of writing, squeezing in a few lines before school or work, it seems everything they had to say would be of the utmost fascination. When you see something like this, one little fragment for a day of grief, you think of the hours squeezed into that sentence. At one point, he says "I don't want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it- or without being sure of not doing so - although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths."

I think I know what he means. All writing comes from life, and there's something distasteful and ethically suspect about it, and not just when we're betraying confidences. Even after her death, Barthes doesn't want to turn is mother into literature, but he is unable to do otherwise. Sometimes I think the whole trend towards abstraction in criticism - of which New Critics were as guilty or guiltier than theorists - and the whole insistence on the irrelevance of biography, was a way of dealing with this discomfort. We think novels are better or superior to memoir, because we think memoir can't be written, not really, not fully, by anyone with a conscience.

It's odd to hear a man of about sixty speak of his mother the way he does. He mourns ("Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning, I'm suffering") her the way we think of morning a long-time partner, her absence a constant presence. Apparently they lived together for the whole of his life. I don't know anything about the circumstances, but I prefer to think of it as nothing pathological, as simply a case where a bond doesn't break. Should it feel so strange, to hear a man mourn with pure grief, rather than with the guilt and half-regret we expect from today's memoir writers.

Of course, it's even harder for the mothers to tell their stories. Back in A Room of One's Own, Woolf goes through the names and says, the thing these women all have in common is that they are not mothers. More now can find some insufficient solution to the need for time and solitude, but the ethics of saying what they know remain vexed. A friend told me recently of finding the diary of a great-grandmother, who described not only her desperate unhappiness, but contained detailed portraits of her husband and children in meticulous and unflattering detail. I asked her what she did with it and she said, I got rid of it, of course. There is the responsibility, there are feelings, also. But there is also the urge to record, always equal parts hope and despair.

And so the mothers remain everywhere and nowhere, as Barthes once said of men in women's magazines. Others pull together the fragments, as in this chilling piece of a story by Lydia Davis:

Mothers, when they are guests at dinner, eat well, like children, but seem absent. It is often the case that they cannot follow what we are doing or saying. It is often the case, also, that they enter the conversation only when it turns on our youth; or they accommodate where accommodation is not wanted; smile and are misunderstood. And yet mothers are always seen, always talked to, even if only on holidays. They have suffered for our sakes, and most often in a place where we could not see them.

Six Thoughts on the final books of Middlemarch

2010-08-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I had a lovely dinner with my Middlemarch reading mates. I sped through the final books to be prepared, jotting down notes as I went. At dinner, I launched into an impromptu speech on the comparative trends in the 19th century novel in England, France, and Russia. This isn't really my field (I've never really had a clearly defined one - such is the beauty of the Comp. Lit major), but halfway through I thought, hey! I actually know something about this. This is the other side of the well-commented upon impostor syndrome common among academics: you worry for years that you're a fraud but then, slowly you realize you actually know what you're talking about, at least some of the time, which is an odd feeling.

Anyways. Six thoughts!

1) I loved reading Middlemarch but I can't say the experience was completely immersive - probably I'd need to read in the period a little longer first. Throughout my reading life I've gone through phases where I find it very hard to concentrate on serious reading, and others where I can't get enough of it. This is part of why I'm suspicious of the-internet-is-killing reading thing: in my experience web or channel surfing or what have you comes as a result of distraction, rather than being its cause. 19th century literature certainly does have a different pace - and of course reading it in one go is different than how the original readers would have encountered it in serialized form. But it does seem my reading improved over the course of the novel, as the writing started to feel more 'modern' to me - which is not inherently a good thing, of course, except insofar as it meant the writing was feeling less strange, with meant I was acclimating myself. I wish more writers wrote more honestly about their reading experiences - boredom, frustration and all - not the 'oh I can't concentrate anymore' self-laceration, but the foibles of it.

2) With Austen, especially in Persuasion, Eliot seems to share the fantasy (i.e. wish fulfillment, not necessarily completely unrealizable) that the heroine will win love through the force of her character - in this case, Dorothea's loyalty to Lydgate's innocence and even Rosamond's redemption. If love/marriage is the drama of women's lives, the least an author interested in their inner lives can do is make this a scenario in which she can act and not be acted upon - and winning love through a virtuous action perhaps gives more agency than directly pursuing it, even were that permitted. We see the other side of this in someone like Wharton - in The House of Mirth it is the heroine's character - or at least her unwillingness to completely corrupt herself that leads to her tragedy.

3) What happens in novels? I remember, years ago, watching Dangerous Liaisons with a good college friend and her brother. The brother kept saying "why don't the just drop the bomb!" He knew the characters were supposed to be doing cruel things, but it seemed silly to him that they did this through letters and mind games and not violence. And it's true: if you're used to contemporary movies, it feels weird, a world without violence where conflict must be found elsewhere, where the set pieces are constant: dinners, this or that person coming to call. And if you're used to contemporary fiction, it's the world without sex that strikes you: I mean, you understand about the Victorians at all, but how do you have knowledges about marriage without it?

4) People talk about Balzac as important in writing novels about money in a way that was previously frowned upon. Middlemarch is not really a novel about money but it is a novel about position and profession. Fred and Will need to find a position in order to win Mary and Dorothea and are held back by expectation and the meddling of their elders. Lydgate needs to be more successful to save his marriage. Causaban's scholarly impotence mirrors the failure of his marriage. These men's struggles for position in so many ways mirror the women's struggle for satisfying marriage and each sheds light and sympathy on one another's.

5) While Eliot takes on and in many ways achieves the challenge of giving a comprehensive portrait of her town, the working class characters and the servants are marginal and fall down. This is pretty universal in 19th century lit. of the canonical variety. I've thought a lot about why being an English major so often feels small 'c' conservative, despite the political affiliations of its practitioners. As a wee lit major taking women's studies majors, you're often immersed in something like Eliot or Austen or Wharton while your soc. major friends are reading about nannies. This tension probably led me to a lot of the ruminating on the topic of how gender and social class intersect, like I was trying to do here.

6) Surely when Woolf called this a novel for grownups she meant that we get at least three marriages at the start rather than seeing them at the end - though of course we also get Dorothea's second and Mary/Fred's first at the end. The postscript sums things up in a way that makes it sound like our narrator is talking about real people, whose lives can be summarized as by a biographer. Here we get and interesting caveat to our happy ending, a hint that, pace #2 above, it's not only a contemporary reader who finds marriage as a reward for virtue a less than completely fulfilling end: "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done - not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than the negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will Ladislaw." I can't think of another ending that makes this kind of gesture towards its own limitations, in a how many story lines we have way, not some meta-meta hemming.

So, obviously, I didn't read and write about two books every week this summer. But aside from Middlemarch and the three other books I blogged about, I read a great book by Julia Serrano about sexism and transsexuality, one of Anne Lamott's memoirs, and a book about teaching by a certain controversial radical Chicagoan, and I have a post coming up on Jean Baker's great book about the suffragette's. So, if you count Middlemarch as a couple books, it wasn't too too shabby.

Is it OK to be foolish?, in which our narrator can't refrain from television references: Middlemarch Chapters 34-42, Book 4, "Three Love Problems"

2010-08-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

Poor Mary. When we realize that medicine is not a respected profession in Middlemarch, Eliot's world seems far away. But Mary's predicament, we can all imagine "And you see, I must teach: there is nothing else to be done." She is unhappy because "I am not fond of a school-room: I like the outside world better. It is a very inconvenient fault of mine." But the others ignore this, explaining instead that she must dislike it because she'd be teaching girls, who are of course, completely silly and "can neither throw nor leap."

And Casaubon. Ah, poor Casaubon, Eliot keeps telling us. He's sick and in a painful stalemate with his wife and can taste the young Will circling Dorothea. It’s so easy to mock, the narrator keeps childing us, but we should have some sympathy for the man. It's a an admirable position, even if we sometimes feel like we're been scolded. I'm often not fond of satire: people say it's about our hypocrisy, but we usually mean, 'look at how foolish they are!" Baudelaire said, we laugh to feel superior, and this has always seemed to me a real and intractable problem.

Of course, Causabon’s suspicion of his foolishness is not harmless: he sabotages Will's desire to acquire a respectable position, and we can tell worse is to come. On Sunday night's Mad Men, the Berkeley coed tells Don, "But no one knows what's wrong with themselves and everyone else can see it right away." So often when we have third person narration, we feel that that's what's going on "look at what's wrong with them and they're too foolish to see it!" No wonder the pull of first person to shield these poor characters from such piercing inspections.

But it's just as easy to say that people can imagine all too well what is wrong with them, but must protect themselves or others from that knowledge. Thus "Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his illness to Lydgate, nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as to how far it might be likely to cut short his labours or his life. On this point, as on all others, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable to him." Poor sickly Casaubon (although as always with the 19th century, it's hard to figure out exactly what his symptoms are supposed to be) brings to mind another moment from the golden age of cable: Tony Soprano, in one of his moments of clarity, venting his anger at Christopher, says "I took pity on him. But people shit on your pity."

Our narrator is so very considerate and responsible in helping us to empathize with her characters and their foibles. But we still wouldn't want to be the Casaubon of this story any more than if Eliot took a more satiric approach. We want to be the center of the story, whose flaws are inevitably noble rather than foolish. Eliot is trying to paint a portrait of a whole community (and how much it takes, by her method, just to get one small provincial town - making you question those whole claim to capture nations), but she's no naturalist. This isn't Zola or the wire, where environment is all. Eliot believes, fiercely, in something called character. (Mad Men believes in it too, even though it's always telling us that it's an invention). And as long as we're in the world of character, we find ourselves jockeying for position in the narrator's favor. I'm not like that, not at all.

Of course, then there's Mr. Brooke, who really just is foolish, for whom the narrator makes no special pleas, and who is of course absolutely nothing like us or anyone we know.

"For My Part I am Very Sorry for Him": Special Pleading (Chapters 22-33)

2010-08-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

(To the left: Victorian novel on the mantle of my bedroom in a Victorian mansion in S.F.).

My fellow reader has noted that he sometimes finds the narrator of Middlemarch invasive: he described her as another character. It's certainly the part that feels the most antiquated to the contemporary reader. The philosophic commentating of the Russians is more understandable to us than the character and situational commentary we get here. And yet. Most of the lines I find myself underlining in this section fall into this category. Witness chapter 29, which my correspondent also pointed to as a favorite. Dorothea is barely back from her honeymoon but already miserable enough t0 identify with the suffering evident in the photograph of an old aunt who had mad a bad marriage. There are multiple story threads in the book, of course, but Dorothea is a if not the central figure, certainly the closest thing to an Eliot stand-in. But the narrator positions herself in this chapter as the one who keeps us honest, who doesn't want us just to sympathize with the young Dorothea but with her not young and in many ways unappealing husband: "I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect." She wants us to understand his predicament, how he will give in to convention by marrying Dorothea but has no idea what to do with her, no idea that there is something to do. This is a result of convention, of course, but her judgments are also those of character: "His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity."

Elsewhere the narrator says: "People were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their own lies unique while everybody else's were transparent." In every other interview you read with a contemporary author or filmmaker, they talk about how they don't want to judge their characters, just to understand them. Now, if by this one means that you don't want to see them as simply bad and there fundamental different from the rest of us, or give your reader a quick dose of moral superiority, this makes sense. But in practice what it means is that the author will not trust herself with the non-moralizing kind of judgment, that is, discerning observation that looks at the character from the outside. Without this it's hard to have something like Austen's piercing but compassionate satire. (And of course, certain kinds of description, interior monologue and characterization invite the reader to far harsher and less compassionate judgement than what Eliot leads us to, but with less honesty about what they're doing.)

A lot of other stuff happens in this section, of course: its title, "Waiting for Death" refers to the machinations as the family waits for old Mr. Featherstone to pass. But more on all these threads later. In the meantime, to underline this point, a couple gems of narrative intervention:

- "The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots."

- "For the old man's dislike of his own family seemed to get stronger as hot less able to amuse himself by saying bitter things to them. Too languid to sting, he had more venom refluent in his blood."

- And one she gives to a character, just for balance: "Oh my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them." George Eliot pre-channels Oscar Wilde!

Lydia Davis, "Varieties of Disturbance: Stories"

2010-07-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

The first time I came across Lydia Davis' work was in the Nerve "Naughty Bits" collection. It was a piece called "This Condition," and it's just about the sexiest thing you'll ever read, though my tastes on the matter have been known to be atypical. Since then I read her collections Almost No Memory and Break it Down and now this most recent collection.

Davis is typical and atypical of certain things about contemporary fiction, at least the kinds I'm most fond of. Some of the pieces are one line long, some are typical flash fiction length. She starts with situation, mood, tone. Many aspire to the condition of poetry. They're often hysterical. All the blurbs say there's no plot, but I don't think that's right. Take a piece like "Enlightened." It starts "I don't know if I can remains friends with her." The narrator talks about why: "I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it's not very enlightened to say that." I guess there isn't a plot because we don't know the events or conversations that have led to this revelation, but really, does it matter? You could say there isn't plot in the typical epiphanic sense, or you could say there's an epiphany every other line. They're lived in rather than unfolding across time - what it feels like inside a mind.

While I was in Seattle, my friend who is a fan of popular fiction was saying that she likes the commercial because the strengths are in character, plotting. Her husband likes short stories, she said, but she finds them frustrating because you don't get enough time with the characters. She's frustrated, wants more. Her husband and I said that's exactly what we want: to want more. I like to feel like I'm dipping into another world; I don't want or can't buy into that I actually live there. I think about that O'Hara line about not enjoying a blade of grass unless it's near a record store or another sign that people do not regret life - I can't enjoy an event or description unless a mind or some other sign of where this life comes from is near. Otherwise the world is more interesting.

Besides, you can't tell me a piece like "Head, Heart" lacks for one single thing:

Heart weeps.

Head tries to help heart.

Head tells heart how it is, again.

You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.

Heart feels better, then.

But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.

Heart is so new to this.

I want them back, says heart.

Head is all heart has.

Help, head. Help heart.

Dispatches from the Provinces: Middlemarch Chapters 11-21

2010-07-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

I am currently sitting in the Isadora Duncan suite of a lovely B&B near the Haight Ashbury section of San Francisco. So, reading the Victorians in a Victorian! Quite lovely. Up until this morning, however, I was at my parent's suburban home, where I read this second set of chapters where you start to pull back from Dorothea's story and get a sense of the social landscape of Middlemarch. Now, being from the suburbs of a Midwestern city may not be the perfect socio-cultural analogy to the Midlands, but it got me thinking about the Provinces, following from Eliot's subtitle "A Study of Provincial Life." Of course the hero's move from the Provinces to the city is an ur-subject of the bildungsroman and the 19th century novel - here we have characters with those ambitions who don't move or who move and come back: Lygate had love in Paris but will have marriage perhaps in Middlemarch, Causaubon looks foolish to the younger would-be intellectual because he lacks German, and Dorothea honeymoon in Rome.

I love the description of Lygate and how he comes to his profession: until he discovers medicine everything comes easy and knowledge is something you just display. Medicine isn't about position for him but his position in Middlemarch cannot help but be part of the issue: hence his plan "to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world." And his admirer Rosamond - of course her provincial ambition is filtered through him. I love the description of her infatuation: "a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance," which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher." For young people, so often the idea of romance is that idea of being someone else, of being someplace else. But the unevenness between the girl who pours all of that into the young doctor, and the doctor who finds her fetching but is more taken with his book on Fever, leaves us with our narrator pitying them both.

And Dorothea! You start off wondering how she will slowly become disenchanted with her marriage, and instead we have her breaking down into sobs on her honeymoon- the realization comes all at once, as the husband sucks the life out of Rome. Every provincial has that moment of realizing that, if you're looking through the wrong eyes, all the art and culture that was supposed to take you somewhere else can't take you anywhere, but it's robbed you of the fantasy of escape.

"Her ideal nature demanded an epic life": 8 thoughts on the first ten chapters of Middlemarch

2010-07-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

1) Once upon a time, when I was in high school, I had a certain teacher. In graduate school, the program I taught in had these peer mentoring groups, and the leader asked us to think about who our mentors were. I mentioned this certain teacher and there was an awkward moment: you weren't supposed to mention a high school teacher as a mentor. But she was. In any case, the year I graduated, she bought a book for each person in our class that, she said, thought of in some way as a match for us. She got me Middlemarch, which was her favorite novel. I remember her saying something about plowing through it when she was pregnant and housebound, and maybe that was the way you needed to appreciate it. Now, I've gotten through quite a few Big Books in my day, but for whatever reason this one has been on the shelf - has moved many shelves - until now. When I took it down, I was shocked to find that my copy (now broken at the spine) has an inscription from her that mentions my reading it "when the spirit moves me," so I hope she'll understand.

2) The prelude with Saint Theresa as setting the scene for Dorothea: "Her passionate ideal nature demanded an epic life . . . Her flame quickly burned up that light light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-depair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order." The idea of religion as an outlet for the otherwise unrecognized needs of girls and women is especially fascinating for me. In Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother, she talks about her mother's passionate relationship with various priests. In those days, she says, priests were the only ones who took a women's inner life seriously. Rationalists types (including myself) who don't like the hard line atheist line often talk about religion as a source of community, which is absolutely true, but sometimes we forget how much it's a source of/outlet for emotion. If you're young and passionate, God, good, evil, and all that feels the way life feels, that things matter, that everything is at stake.

3) "You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is always a good opinion." Having opinions about things as a way of trying to exist in the world, a way to be known, understood . . .

4) Dorothea's desire to be taken seriously: so much of 19th century literature that takes on The Woman Question fights on this terrain: the question is women's mental acuity, moral nature. It's a question of fitness, about claiming a place in people's estimation, not in the world per say. I'm thinking of Margaret Fuller's extensive focus on what a woman properly educated would be capable of - that translating German is at the top of the list isn't just about class, it's about symbols of recognition. Or of the end of Persuasion: the heroine is rewarded in love because she speaks and proves women's greater capacity for love. It's odd to read this stuff in an era where defenders of sexism so often are the ones to tout women's alleged moral superiority.

5) Mr. Brooke: mansplainer?

6) Of course, 19th century novels with heroines most often end with marriage (comedy) or death (tragedy). That we start Middlemarch with Dororthea's engagement to Casaubon announces a different kind of story. I also love how chapter 10 ends with this understated account of the marriage: "Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either these gentlemen under her maiden name. Not long after the diner-party she had become Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome." Maybe that's why my copy has a quote from Virginia Woolf calling it "one of the few English novels written for grown up people."

7) Dorothea's attraction to Casaubon and the question of perspective. If writers, filmmakers bothered more to look at relationships between older men and younger women though the eyes of the younger woman, we might often see what we see here: the longing to be taken seriously, for knowledge, and for some kind of place in the world, even though Casaubon is no world-breaker. But it seems that just as we get a taste of this, the perspective starts moving around. Even as our gentle narrator says, judge not harshly the middle-aged man's spinely legs, we see in their descriptions - his blood runs semicolons, something of truth. Not to mention: his big project is The Key to all Mythologies. He's perhaps a higher quality mansplainer, like Mr. Ramsey in Woolf's To the Lighthouse, who will get to R when everyone else is stuck on Q.

8) On Casaubon leaving middle-aged bachelorhood, and a representative passage of what's gotten me hooked: "Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affection would not fail to be honoured, for we all of us, grave our light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively. . . "

"As Seen by Toads": Week 2, #1: The New Yorker, 20 under 40 issue

2010-07-05T17:58:00.000-07:00

So, apparently, according to a recent article in The Nation, Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary gave this definition of realism: "The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads." Now, as it so happens, when I started playing around with fiction a few years back, it seemed to me that what I was interested in trying to do was, for a lack of a better term, psychological realism. I went to workshops where some people wrote about wise talking flounders (they were usually the guys) and the others (me and usually many of the women) wrote about a variety of topics that were nonetheless about homo sapiens in a world basically resembling ours, interacting with each other in ways that recall the way non-fictional people sometime interact with one another. Seeing as how the talking flounder camp liked to see themselves as heirs to every modernist, postmodernist, and magical realist they could name (and boy could they name them!) and tended to look at the actual world folks as backwards: too nineteenth century, too domestic, too female. Perhaps I was being sensitive. I developed this little rap about the 30s and realists being the real radicals and all that.

After playing with writing for a while, though, and reading fiction through that experience, I started to look at it differently. I started to think that there's no such thing as realism. A great teacher told me what I was trying to do was "describe how the happening happens," which might be another way of saying psychological realism, but it doesn't feel like realism when you try to do it. I don't mean that in that "artistic creativity doesn't fit those tiny critical boxes" kind of way. I just mean that I've started to think about the way all good fiction heightens, punches up, alters things. Contemporary fiction we often think of as realist often does this by condensing and distilling time, scene, character: hence the iconic role of extra spaces between paragraphs. Of course, you learn in school that modernism was where you get authors playing with time, like the great "Time Passes" from To The Lighthouse. But every work of fiction deals with the central question: how to tell a story that may take place over five years in ten pages, or ten minutes in 30 pages. The backwards time structure of Underworld didn't do that much for me, but I chocked up when a character's old age is described with something like 'time had passed quickly, like the time in a novel.' The great realist writers always have those moments where you feel the strangeness of experience recalled and condensed, the strangeness of life.

So. My favorite story in the "20 under 40" issue (which had 8 of the 20) was the most 'experimental' or whatever, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here We Aren't So Quickly" It describes a lifelong relationship and marriage through a series of selected details. It's not told from the point of view of old age recalling youth; instead it's a voice removed from the whole of life, looking down at the string and trying to figure out why one point should mean more than another:

And here we aren't, so quickly: I'm not twenty-six and you're not sixty. I'm not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into any sea. . . Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

Two of the stories, by Joshua Ferris and Gary Shteyngart, try to take their punch up from reality through humor and satire, and really really didn't work for me. Basically, their satire revolved around the fact that some people in Hollywood are assholes, except aspiring screenwriters who are nice but a little lazy (Ferris) and that the future will be bleak because no one will read books or really try to communicate except our nebbishy hero. Then there were the stories by Philipp Meyer and Rivka Galchen, which really didn't seem to have any punch up at all: that is, they described things that happened to people. And as far as I could tell that was all they did, and it wasn't enough, though of course I could be missing something. I feel this a lot with memoirs: it's not that writing about yourself is self-induglent, just that when self-indulgent people do write about themselves they think what happened is interesting enough.

"Why not just say what happened?" Joan Didion asks in "On Keeping a Notebook." She's restless with herself, mistrusts her accounts of things, she bears down and squeezes the rock.

ETA: Hmm, the June 28th story is really good too: a writer uses a terrifying story she hears at a dinner party in her book and dreads running into the person who told it to her. That's about it, but she gets at the strangeness of it, and by coming at it by this angle, with this remove, the original terrifying story holds us in a way it can't when, as in the Meyer story, it's just something that happens. The story is by Nicole Krauss. So, advantage Park Slope power couple.

By the way, in the same issue, the consistently wonderful Ariel Levy gives "kinder face of the right" Mike Huckabee just enough rope to hang himself. His big draw seems to be that no one could picture him in a sex scandal. Because folkies ex-ministers never have them! The secret of his marital success: "I think we both went into it understanding it was for life. . . I've always said, 'If you believe divorce is an option, you'll take it." In the next paragraph, the happy couple goes to a Pat Boone concert where one of the songs contained this similarly moving homage to the sacred marital bond: "What is a wife?. . . A patient soul that picks up my dirty socks and underwear and handkerchiefs and washes them and puts them back in the drawer so she can do the whole thing again, next week"

Earlier, Levy challenges him to make an argument against gay marriage that isn't based on religion or his personal sense of 'ickiness.' He flounders, but he should have just asked Boone. If men marry men, or women women, how do you know who's supposed to wash the underwear?

Week 1, #2: "I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.": Patti Smith, "Just Kids"

2010-07-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

I was outside Greenlight Bookstore in Ft. Greene the other night and noticed a book that had collected the stories of prominent New Yorkers talking about the moment they first arrived in New York. Now, there's at least one obvious problem with this, excluding, as so many stories about the city do, the people who grow up here. There's also the whole lost golden era thing. Ah yes, we think, back then people could come with no money, find a cheap place, work at a bookstore. . . and that kind of nostalgia for what you never lived through (the only kind of nostalgia I'm ever vulnerable to) is kind of boring, and probably wrong in a whole bunch of ways.

But then you read Patti Smith's memoir, and she comes to New York after working in a factory in Jersey and giving up a baby for adoption at twenty and right away by coincidence she meets Robert Mapplethorpe, then he comes into the, yes, bookstore, where she's working and buys her favorite necklace, then she runs into him in the park when she needs to get away from a creepy writer she went out with because she was hungry, and they fall in love, and they're still artistic soulmates after he discovers he's gay, and she makes extra money buying up first editions and reselling them, and they actually live at the Chelsea Hotel, where Janis Joplin hangs around without an entourage or anyone bothering her, and eventually she meets Janis Joplin and writes a song for her, and she writes poetry, and when she starts reciting poetry it's at St. Marks, and when she decides to start writing songs and then performing them it's at CBGBs, and she's about the only person on earth who can compare herself to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and get away with it. And did you know she tried to track down Rimbaud's lost writings, went to his hotel? She's just that kind of person, the person that these things happen to, and so yeah, it's a romantic and nostalgic book. What of it?

Of course, nostalgia is always about loss too, and along with Patti and Robert creating and meeting all the right people, the other thing that happens in Just Kids is that people die. Jim Morrison dies and Patti writes "Break it Up" about him Jimi Hendrix dies and she writes "Land" about him and Janis Joplin dies and never gets to sing the song Patti wrote for her. Years later, after Patti has moved to Detroit with Fred Sonic Smith, Robert calls Patti distraught that Andy Warhol has died, and then Robert's partner Sam dies and then Robert dies, and Patti writes "Paths that Cross."

The nostalgia and the elegy and the romanticism all work so well in part because this is such a fundamentally sweet book. The portrait of Mapplethorpe as a young vulnerable and protective artist finding his way is especially moving if you think about the way he became the anti-NEA poster boy in the eighties. His photographs, which you get a taste of throughout the book through reproductions that follow the story, are breathtakingly beautiful. He saw his S&M stuff as something he had access to and therefore a duty to record. His image as someone looking to shock makes all the more heartbreaking his and poignant his reaction when Patti tells him she's leaving New York: "My mother still thinks we're married." Sady Doyle has a typically awesome piece that notes how much she defends his work, and how reticent she is in describing her own artistic and sexual daring. She's right, and her observations about how women who write without that reticence get slammed are of course spot on. I don't know if Smith is holding back, so much, as telling a different kind of story than the one her music tells. I remember reading a profile of Almadovar where someone expressed surprise that he was being very critical of a colleague who had an affair. "Your characters are so sexually out there!" someone said, and he said "That's art. This is real life." So many people are moralizing in their work or public presentation and then "fail to live up to it," if they're even trying. Patti and Robert pour their wildness into their work, and with each other they were tender and protective and kept their vow to take care of one another. It's hard to know what counts as bohemian, or countercultural, but this combination is certainly something we could use more of.

Week 1, #1: Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America

2010-06-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

Back Story: This week I was on campus, and I found Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent book in my mailbox. I had no idea why it was there. Now, were I the Secret type that Ehrenreich goes after in this book, I might be tempted to think "free book! Gift from the universe that wills good things to those who wish for them!" Sadly, on the way home I remembered that I'd filled out a survey for a publisher and selected this as my free book thank you about six months ago. Well, sometimes the universe takes its time. Or, as the homicidal nun in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You puts it, God always answers our prayers, it's just that sometimes the answer is no. In any case, I like Ehrenreich's stuff and have used some of it my classes, but the best thing I've read of hers is the essay "Welcome to Cancerland" about how her experience with breast cancer led to "A Cult of Pink Kitsch," the essay that was the origin of this book, so I was excited to take a look.

The Read: Like all of Ehrenreich's work, this is, if I may allow myself to use the bland language of the positive, "a good read." The someone hyperbolic subtitle is about the only wrong note in the whole thing. From her experiences with being told to think of cancer as "a gift" to motivational corporate speakers who show up just before everyone's about to get axed, from the prosperity gospel to the "positive psychology"'s grab for academic respectability, she weaves together stories of a relentless insistence on positivity which is, naturally enough, most often directed to those with the least money and status. My personal un-favorite: a California home security system company whose 'motivational' tactics included breaking eggs on the heads of under-performing salespeople and making them wear diapers. (The punch line: it's not harassment because they did it to men and women!) My reaction to a lot of the book was like what Ann Patchett describes after seeing "Glengary Glenn Ross": it was like a horror movie of what your life would be like if the whole writing/teaching thing didn't work out. People work in offices like this! Every! Day! The last time I temped was over ten years ago and I still have those nightmares. (And I remember that last job too, at some fancy fashion place in the far West Village.) Someone in a class I'd just T.A.'ed for walked in and shot me a look I'll never forget. Actually, I'm sure she was perfectly lovely and I just remember it that way.

To me, though, the most interesting part of the book was her chapters on the origins of positive thinking, in the "New Thought" of the nineteenth century which arose as a response to Calvinism and its many ills. One of the most interesting figures in this story is Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. I remember reading her biography in a book of short bios of exceptional women when I was about nine and how she healed herself and how there was this slip of paper on her bed when she died that said "God is my life." It was a chilling but moving story, then as now: then as now, of course, positive thinking is a way for people to claim power when the world has given them little of it, and it was an attractive option for all those nineteenth century sufferers of mysterious ailments, which included, I learned from this book, not only middle class women but clergymen, who didn't yet have direct marketing empires to conquer. I guess it makes sense when you think about preachers in 19th century literature, like poor old Hooper behind his veil.

The temptation, of course, is react to the emptiness of things like the Secret and the prosperity gospel by seeing the old model of neverending sinfulness as attractive - or at least as admirably rigorous in light of what's replaced it. The book never does this, but it did leave me wondering at times - the mega-churches, for example - so they're light on theology and heavy on guitars and support groups - is this a problem? Of course the calculated optimism the guy who writes Dow 36,000 is dangerous, but what about the ordinary person? Enforce cheerfulness is terrible, sure, but the actual experience of people drawn to these things - it's easy and probably mostly correct to think of it as quiet desperation, but the whirlwind tour Ehrenreich gives us doesn't leave a lot of room for their voices.

Coming Up Next: Fiction. For Real this time, including perhaps, the notorious 20 under 40.

Why The Golden Notebooks?

2010-06-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

So, after another semester of carrying around the same book for months, it's the summer, and I'm feeling ambitious, like the kid who wants to win the library summer reading prize kind of ambitious. So, my plan is to read 2-3 books a week, and write about them here. Now, every good blog needs rules so: Rules!

1) Lots of fiction, maybe some poetry. This year I had that "I assign so much non-fiction, I'm a second rate sociology/history teacher instead of an English teacher! Harold Bloom was right!" moment that happens to the best of us. Then I awoke from this nightmare and realized that Harold Bloom was still wrong and I was just hankering to read some more fiction.

2) Lots of stuff I already have on my shelves but haven't read, especially that friends have given me and cause me endless guilt every time I stare at my floor to ceiling shelves. (Seriously, those there are my shelves! Pretty cool, no? And they've filled up since then! I still need the leather chair and the sliding ladder, though.) And lots of stuff that will require much much shame of the you've never read what variety, like that game in that David Lodge novel (which, no, I haven't read).

3) Book Club! My friends at Open Letters Monthly are making The Tale of Genji this summer's Infinite Jest. A worthy choice, but for me it will be the summer of George Eliot. A few friends will be tackling Middlemarch this summer, so I'll post on this one throughout. Which has been sitting on my various shelves since it was given to me by my high school mentor, which makes it the queen of the guilt for not having read club.

4) I might post about non-books, but will try to keep the someone is being wrong on the internet stuff to a minimum, for obvious reasons about the shortness of life.

So, why the Golden Notebooks? Well, of course, because. I first read Lessing's masterpiece in a Modern English Literature class back in my undergrad days. The prof. was a little self-conscious, as male profs. are somewhat want to be, about teaching this feminist classic to a bunch of young feminists at a woman's college, so he asked if any of us wanted to teach it. Being the not-yet-recovering terminally "Good Student" I was at the time, I volunteered. I don't remember a lot about what we did when we taught it, but I remember defending it from some complaint or another. Something must have stuck because some six years later I taught in this seminar. Now assigning all of a 635 page novel (in a course where we were reading about five other novels) was probably one of the more naive things I did back when I was a naive young graduate student (ah, the early aughts . . ) I prepared this whole lesson on British politics of the period because I was afraid they'd be vexed that these middle class women were canvassing for Communists. Instead the students were upset that they slept with married men. Go figure. But, seriously, how can you not love a 635 page novel whose summar is best described by its character: "Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love. . ." I'll spare you going on and on about the brilliance of the four notebooks that capture different parts of a life - the political and the artistic, the personal and the public, memory and the present - and how this is the best treatment I know of some thing I think about a lot - the struggle to live an integrated life. I'll especially spare you any thoughts on the way too obvious observations one could make about how blogging might be transforming the long proud tradition of 'notebooks' as important women's writing - whether actual diaries or fictional ones like the ones in Lessing's novel. Lessing is a bit grumpy about The Kids, and she'd probably hate that. But, Sei Shonagon is dead, so she can't complain, and my new girlfriend Sady says it best.