Paddling my own canoe

Book: A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

Author: Elaine Showalter

Published: 2009 (Random House)

Pages: 512 (not counting end notes)

After reading this book, do I remember all the obscure women writers who paved ways but have gotten little historical credit?

Erm. No. Not really, no.

But do I get a sense of how their contributions pushed women writers forward in general?

Yes! Totally internalized that. They were badasses just by picking up pens when their societies were looking at their ink-stained hands and were all, "You're wasting perfectly good baby-holders there."

Did I discern any real change in women writers' progress to get taken seriously as artists through the centuries/decades?

Yes and no. Women have made it to "real people" status now, and their contributions to the canon are taking at least 85% [personal estimation] as seriously as men's. Yay. But according to this book, since the first colonial ladies, the conflict has always boiled down to art vs. domesticity, with variations of compromise, praise, and scorn of one or the other, which didn't depend so much on the era of the ladies as the determination of individual ladies themselves. There's been major progress in what details are no longer taboo to mention, but whatever a woman writes still does and has constantly commented on her stance. Even when she pointedly staying quiet about the argument, that's a statement about it too.

What did I think about the women writers who refused the label of "women writers"?

I think they had/have the right idea because the label still confers a condescension of sorts, and what group wants their work all lumped in together just because they happen to have one thing in common that affects their art in wildly different ways to super-divergent amounts? But I do think it's worth mentioning the perspective a writer is coming from on material and to what degree gender/sex affects this view on an individual basis. That'd be a pain in the ass to use for bookstore and library displays, though.   

How worried was I about the word "celebration" in the subtitle?

Fairly. It made this book look a lot more fluffy and uncritical than it actually is. But, again, this is one of my 90% finds from the dying Border's in my hometown last summer, and once I got to the part where the author rips Gertrude Stein a new one, I knew the author wasn't here for an unconditional love sisterhood meeting.

Which--okay, I tried to read 3 Lives and no, I didn't understand it. Postmodernism is one of those things I'm comfortable not understanding. But this author really, really hates Gertrude Stein and showed it by putting aside objectivity long enough to criticize so personally I started wondering if Stein had ever spit on her or something.

Bookshelf, donate, or trash: Bookshelf. It's a good reference book, inspiring without getting sentimental, and a good abbreviated history lesson. But ultimately, it works best as a very springy jumping off point to go find out more about the more interesting yet less covered ladies of the pages.

Weirdness evolves

Book: Innovative Fiction: Stories for the Seventies

Authors: various

Pages: 224

Published: 1972 (Dell Publishing Co., Inc.)

The seventies, man. To me, they sound like Led Zeppelin, look like my parents’ faded high school senior portraits, and make me blink like I’m staring at a disco ball. I don’t know how much of the persevered nostalgia to believe; I wasn’t there.

But I’m most inclined to believe real time travelers like this collection of short stories, which have the authentic whiff of being written and published in the era. It’s interesting to see what qualified as innovative fiction from forty years ago, because to me, it seems like avant-garde prose shares a lot of the same underlying structural principles:

• Stream of consciousness narration that implies chaos and all its marginalia is important because it’s closer to the actual thinking process and thus a more authentic way of recording
• Screwing around with grammar, most notably making up new words and writing dialect phonetically
• Seemingly nonsense that represents a higher theme buried under stupid-sounding sentences
• Titles that crack me up (I’m going to start yelling, “Miss Euayla Is the Sweetest Thang!” [all emphasis and capitals and exclamation points the author’s] at random intervals to liven up my work of standing at a cash register)
• Multiple points of view that clash together like jagged pieces of glass to make the reader wonder what really happened and how

But just because authors play around the same way doesn’t mean they come up with the same thing, or even things that look remotely like each other. These stories still seem odd now, which means weird just keeps evolving. (Woo!)

Most of these stories I enjoyed on at least one level. Sheer absurdity carries a lot of them, like the first one “The Hyannis Port Story” about a guy who goes to install windows in a very vocally Goldwater-supporting house that’s right near the Kennedys’, and “The Jewbird,” which is about a talking bird who comes into a family’s house and starts integrating himself into the family before the dad decides he hates it and kicks it out. 

“Momentum,” the story I was most reluctant to read because it was presented in one big breath of stream of consciousness on two independent columns of each page that I had to zigzag both my eyeballs and brain through while still remembering the other side, surprised me at how touching I found it by the end. It’s about a guy going back to his college and trying to relive his glory days. This was the best example of how a weird structure can elevate a common subject; his rush of confessions and digressions revealed his nerves and mood swings right next to the everyday details that he had to pay just as much attention to in order to get through his visit.

A couple stories I just didn’t understand, whether I’m too removed from the political subtlties of the times or whatever a hobo in a wheelchair is supposed to mean as a symbol when he gets shipped across America in a big crate. Sometimes I just DON’T KNOW.

But that’s okay, because as weirdness evolves, so does your Constant Reader.

   

Think of the children and what they've been through

Book: My Father’s Keeper

Authors: Stephan and Norbert Lebert

Publication: 2000 (Little, Brown and Company)

Pages: 243

I never like to mention my interest in Third Reich Germany. Even just typing that makes me feel creepy. And I feel like it makes things worse when I explain that I’m interested in it because it’s part of my heritage.

But that’s true. My grandma—my Oma—on my mother’s side is German. (Almost fifty years over here and she’s still got a wonderfully thick accent.) She was a teenager over there during World War Two. She never talks about it. I don’t know how she feels or how she felt about any of it.

I told my favorite high school teacher this one time, and he asked the exact right question: “Does that make you more interested in it or less?” More. I want to know what it was like to be in such an explosive time of history.

That’s why I pick up books like My Father’s Keeper for prices like $2 at places like the Augusta/Richmond County Library friends of the library used book store. I can’t check any books out there because I can’t get a library card there because technically, I don’t live in that county. But that is beside the point.

Which brings me to the storytelling aspects of this. I really liked the concept: the author’s dad was a journalist who interviewed the offspring of high-ranking Nazis in 1959 about what it was like growing up in the very middle of the Third Reich. The author followed up his dad’s interviews in the late 1990s to see how the last forty years have affected these same people.

But I never got the human aspects I wanted to see. It sounded like there was a set list of questions the author went down asking in order, and then wrote the answers in a list-in-paragraph form instead of teasing out the unique bits of each person’s story. The thing is, he tried to do that, I could tell, but the stories started sounding the same anyway. Wives and sons and daughters detained for questioning, Hitler as a smiling godfather, either extreme guilt and attempted distancing or fierce protection of their fathers’ ideals—I would want to see these shared characteristics analyzed in one chapter, at the beginning, then a focus on individuals and their own details.

Also, this book was translated to English from its original German. I’m automatically wary of translations because language is a tricky bastard when you’re jumping from one to another.   

This book jacket makes me uncomfortable.