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.

Edible words

Book: Edible Stories

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Published: 2010 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 265

Food is such a good revelation of our human natures because it’s a necessity that we can dress up to a luxury, the most raw biological process turned into high elaborate ceremony. Our relationships to it bring us together as cultures and push us apart into individuals as we make weird faces at our friends when they use too much ketchup on their fries. What, when, and how someone eats says a lot about them and their worldview. Also, a lot of it is delicious.

Kurlansky manages to wring some fleeting profundity from that line of thought in most of these stories. He uses recurring characters that slip and slide in and out of each other’s food lives to weave a sense of continuity that doesn’t stick well but provides nice consistent background in vignettes. The first one, about a guy who gets amnesia and loses his senses of smell and taste from falling in a hole, is my favorite. I like the semi-detached way his thought process is described and how it re-shapes his world from the inside out. In later stories, he ends up becoming a nationwide Food Network-type star and is scared to death that someone will find out his secret.

The story about a lady who goes to a Yankees game with her one-night stand and is bothered that he wants to eat a fancy spread he brought from home instead of ballpark hotdogs is interesting, too, but it never shows any glimpse of the absurdity that glimmers in unexpected but welcome places through the rest of the book.

The food is never as important as I think it will be in each story. I was hoping for more reliance on food as character building or explaining; but I wasn’t disappointed in the book as a whole. It was one of those books that in my head gets read by a soft, low voice with the slightest hint of a British accent. Translated into the real world that means I stayed pretty much interested the whole way through.

In this picture, the thing that looks like a hair is actually an antenna stuck to the sticky bit where the price sticker used to be. I finished this book the first night I spent in my new apartment and the first time I saw a bug in there, so, you know. Whap. 

"A great girlfriend gift"

Book: Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom

Author: Kristin van Ogtrop

Published: 2010 (Little, Brown and Company)

Pages: 259

Awe: the state in which I hold working parents. I have taken care of kids (daycare summer job) and am right now easing myself into a professional life; separately, each of those things have exhausted my punk ass to the point where I am really, sincerely, bewilderingly curious as to how the hell people do both at the same time without keeling over.

But: everything I’ve read about it has such a well-worn fondly crazy lightheartedness that I can’ tell what’s exaggerated for laughs and what’s damped down for sentiment. Van Ogtrop’s stories don’t go any deeper than the rest of them.

Can: it be something you just have to DO, like moving your legs when you want to learn how to run, or when you discover that nobody actually knows how to be an official adult and everyone just b.s.es their way into it until something clicks?

Does: the blurb that says “The ideal girlfriend gift!” mean a great present for a significant other or something to give a female friend? Either way sounds a little insulting and presumptuous.

Everything: this does not make me want children. Like, at all. I’ll settle for cooing at them while their mothers are preoccupied, thanks, so maybe both of us can visit the other side of life for the brief second that will be all we need. Also, I wanna play with the Legos.

The movie might be better.

Book: Election

Author: Tom Perrotta

Published: Damn. I don’t know.

Pages: 200

Well, that was sort of shitty.

I’ve wanted to read Election for awhile, ever since I heard about the movie version and how good it’s supposed to be. Of course my first instinct was to think “I bet the book’s better” and then avoid both until I saw the book in a secondhand store and sat down to read the whole thing during the four hours I thought I had work which is actually tomorrow but I was already out and what the hell, home didn’t expect me back until 5 p.m.

This story’s concept is interesting and has a lot of natural dramatic potential. A well-liked high school teacher throws away two ballots to let his favorite student candidate win the election for school president. The story unfolds from all the major character’s perspectives, in clumps that were nicely organized by person but too short to allow any real characterization growth. (The janitor who finds the thrown-away ballots is more effective in his two or three paragraphs than the other characters who’ve had the whole book to stretch out.)

But Perrotta once again disappointed me with his lack of depth and subtle details that would’ve made everything way more dynamic. His Little Children is like this, too, another tension-filled conceit fumbled through flat characters and an environment just a little too generic to care about. And in both books, the characters are largely defined through badly timed sex with the wrong people.

That last would be a good thing, except it’s both non-explicit and has nothing to do with advancing the main plot. I require at least one kind of cheap thrills from marginal writing.

Sigh. Maybe the movie’s better. (Books, you make me sad when you make me say that.)  

Lonely vs. alone

Book: The Late Bloomer’s Revolution

Author: Amy Cohen

Published: 2007 (Hyperion)

Pages: 288

Lonely and alone aren’t the same thing. I think people confuse them too much, especially in artistic depictions of normal life. People are social animals, right? So we’re all miserable when we have no one else around us, so for happy endings everyone has to be paired up with his or her sex of choice. Yes?

No, not really. Amy Cohen finally realizes that, and she made me cry while going through her process.

Really, it’s your standard woman-discovers-herself-through-dating-way-past-when-she-thought-she-would-be-settled-down arc, thrown together with learning how to ride a bike at age 35 and being okay when her fiancé left her because he didn’t want kids.

That was the ending. Her fiancé went to live on the opposite coast without her after she gave him an ultimatum: go and live without her or stay in New York with her. And it didn’t destroy her, and I wanted to shout this ending in Hollywood’s direction so maybe they’d get a good idea or two. Woman discovers hard but necessary decision actually makes her grow! Yes!

Her book made me cry because it made me think about what being lonely really means. It’s not something that can just magically go away with the addition of another warm body; she was loneliest when she was trying to make connections work with the wrong people. And that is just an awful feeling, this giant black hole that opens up in time and swallows everything until you’re exhausted and bored and have no idea what to do next so you don’t do anything, which makes it worse.

Cohen’s a writer good at setting up empathy by simply telling her story. She’s also wearing a tank top, jeans, and Converse in her author photo, so I feel like we’d get along. That means she’s done her job right.    

Good writing, boring story

Book: Dicey’s Song

Author: Cynthia Voigt

Published: 1982 (Fawcett Juniper)

Pages: 211

There are two tags I expected to use for this post but didn’t: dysfunctional families and coming of age. You want to know why? Because I don’t believe in false advertising, unlike the blurb-writers on this book.

I guess you could argue that the dysfunctional family part is inherent in four siblings who have to find a place to live after their mother gets—too crazy? Too sick? Too crazy-sick? The narrative is never specific about that, and by the time this book starts Dicey and her sister and brothers are already settled at their grandmother’s.

But that’s just it; they’re settled. Their most traumatizing conflict is behind them, and in this book all they have to worry about is being too good to fight on the bus and waiting for the smart brother to figure out how to teach them to read and letting the sassy popular girl in their English class convince the teacher they didn’t plagiarize their super good essay and finding the $500 their piano teacher cum family friend slipped them for a trip to visit their mother who dies and needs to be cremated.

It’s an interesting setup of real-life problems (I was for serious worried about what they were going to do with their mom when she died and the undertaker told them it would be $750 they most certainly did not have for a burial) that each get solved within fifty pages or so, staggered so not everybody’s made happy at the same time but they definitely all are by the end. There’s nothing truly at stake; even if they fail, their grandma won’t let them back into the real hardships of their earlier life.

And the coming of age part was going to be a sort of automatic thing because Dicey, the oldest, is thirteen, and what the hell else do you do at thirteen, especially if you’ve been in charge of your ad-hoc family until you show up at your grandma’s?

But Dicey’s such a blank character. I accept the fact that her life has made her brusque and practical, but I refuse to believe that she doesn’t have even half a speck of the imagination or rebellion that makes teenage characters so interesting. She doesn’t change at all; the world around her just starts telling her how good she is.

All that being said, this book was very well-written, just the perfect balance between understated prose and decorative language that exactly explained abstract thoughts and feelings. I read it fast because I remained convinced that there was a better story released in the next chapter.        

Also, this is “a Tillerman Family Novel,” according to the cover. This is a SAGA, folks. I bet the first couple books are more interesting. I trust Voigt to handle melodrama with just the right touch.

It's everybody's fault

Book: Somebody Else’s Daughter

Author: Elizabeth Brundage

Pages: 338

Published: 2008 (Viking)

Somewhere (“way outside of Yonkers…”) there is a book jacket painted with an artistically blurred family portrait of a mom and dad and baby girl in which only the little girl’s face is completely in focus, or a book jacket painted with a stark bloody picture of a murdered hooker in a plaid skirt propped up against a tree with snow getting in her hair. Either would fit this story about a small private school community that basically gets ripped apart when all the grownups around can’t contain their secrets (money and a wife from the porn industry, a not-really-accidental murder at the last school they headed, eating disorders, general paranoia).

And the new writing teacher gets swept up in everything as the biological dad of Willa (one of the school girls) who takes this job because he wants to see how his daughter is doing in her adopted family. He hasn’t seen Willa since he and his drug-addict wife gave up Willa at her birth, and nobody knows who he really is for 99% of the book. He’s just kinda there, hanging out and teaching and reading her writing class journal and trying to make sure she doesn’t get into trouble in as discreet a way as he can. That’s, um, sweet? Or creepy, maybe? A little?

I don’t like how this book is written: third person omniscient that gives away all the secrets in blobs of thought-exposition before any of it has a chance to make for real dramatic tension. It decentralizes the plot to the point where I was reading about how the headmaster was the one who murdered a hooker because she was pregnant from him and I was going, “So, this? This is what everything’s supposed to lead to, right? Dead hooker usually automatically indicates climax in a community melodrama, so…I’m going with yes.”

I don’t like the character growth, either. When I first met them, the characters seemed promising: an adopted girl who’s got a great life but is starting to get uneasy enough to explore her identity through sex and her biological roots; a liberal sculptor of a mom who will have to mold her son a little more than she wants to so they can both survive the school year; a porn producer father and husband who’s starting to feel extreme guilt about how he makes his family’s money; an angry young girl who doesn’t know how to deal with her anger or sideline status and starts lashing out.

But do any of them do things that make character sense after the shit starts going down? NOT REALLY, NO.

What especially bothered me, like, took me out of the story bothered me, was the “conversation” the adults had the first night they met. They were basically throwing around buzzwords about feminism without actually saying anything to each other, which would be fine except this was supposed to be a very revealing conversation, how they all got to know each other, because they never got together in groups larger than happily/transcendentally or unhappily/forcefully screwing couples for the rest of the book.

And, and—the porn guy starts off as super misogynistic, but that turns off abruptly and is never mentioned again when the sculptor lady starts an affair with him but then that just ends and dies as one of like five subplots (most of which are about sex or love) that only get mentioned when hookers aren’t getting murdered.

Sorry to dwell on that part, but I keep mentioning it to remind myself that it happened and was supposed to be dramatically important, because in all honesty there was no reason it should have been.  

Nobody expects the...you know...

Book: The Witch of Cologne

Author: Tobsha Learner

Pages: 462

Published: 2003 (HarperCollins)

Everybody in this book lives in terrible fear of the Spanish inquisition, especially the protagonist who is a Jewish midwife who dabbles in kabala just to make sure but only really believes in actual science that she had the balls to learn because she pretended to be a boy to get educated and then she turned out so awesome at it that nobody cares except the meany priests bent on revenge and power.

This is a very serious book that takes itself, True Love, and fighting for freedom very, very seriously. Its whole tone is covered in that layer of misty gravity historical novels seem to think they need to convey that this is some important shit going down. Look, lady, I can tell, not the least reason because you insist on telling me everything and showing me nothing (except sex scenes, which, I mean, good job on that part). You get inside everybody’s head, which would be awesome except that they’re all cardboard. It especially bugs me that Mary Sue and Mr. Too (not their real names), the protagonists, are portrayed as the only two enlightened enough to even consider that everyone is equal. All the other characters are like, “Scandal!” or at the least, with fond chuckles, “You crazy kids.”

I guess it is hard to portray how new the idea of equality was back then without American readers of today finding the arguments cartoonish and obvious. But I bet it’s not impossible. 

And I know it’s possible to portray all the devastation of a doomed romance without overwriting about souls and destiny and how unicorns fart rainbows when these two fornicate but only in secret because Society doesn’t want them to be together.   

Here’s a list of things I said out loud as I was plowing through this, in rough chronological order.

• How’d she get such a good manicure in the German Jewish ghetto of the 1600s?
• It’s a crime for a book with this cover to be SO BORING. (The plot gets better, though.)

• “Speak plainly, Wilhelm, my gout has shortened my temper.” Ha. This. Do more of this.
• Does one pronounce the city Cologne like the stuff men use to smell pretty cologne? Is that where that came from? Where’s the Wikipedias I left lying around here?
• There was seriously someone called the Witchfinder General?
• Besser tsu shtarben shtai’endik aider tsu leben oif di k’nien; better to die upright than to live on your knees. That is this book’s motto, right there.
• I HATE WHEN AUTHORS GO, “blah blah was blah blah as if it were blah blah, as indeed it was.” IF IT WAS LIKE THAT JUST SAY SO. DON’T DOUBLE BACK ON YOUR METAPHORS. THEY WILL BITE YOU IN THE ASS FOR THAT.
• Her “nether hole.” Um. Is that…the, ah, female opening designed for sex, or does that mean—okay, I can’t tell from this scene and am just going to move on. She had a good time, anyway.
• Of course she’s pregnant. (Not related to above scene. Different lady.)
• And—wait, he actually DIES on the rack? Huh. That works for the narrative. Yay, no last-minute saving bullshit.

Terrible things. Happen to saintly people. Another one. Okay, it’s symbolic corn-punching time. *rolls up sleeves* 

Pretty but not much else

Book: Come Together, Fall Apart

Author: Cristina Henriquez

Published: 2006 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 306

It’s nice.

I wish I had more to say about this book. But really, “nice” is the only word that fits. These short stories and novellas are about relationships between lovers, families and, occasionally, a little bit, about the political upheavals going on around them. They’re all set in Panama, which is the most interesting thing about them and saves them from collapsing under all the symbolic weight placed on such light words. These are the kind of stories that are meant to Mean Something.

I’m talking like I didn’t like them. I did. I thought they were…nice. There’s that word again. They’re floaty and dreamy and don’t leave much behind but they’re nice to read.

A note on the tag “old books:” When I use that, I’m not necessarily talking about books written twenty or more years ago (although there are a fair number of those in my reading pile); I’m talking about books I’ve personally owned (one way or another) for at least nine months and have yet to read because of everything else that distracts me. This book is one of those, a small hardback priced at $2.99 from a warehouse sort of store in my college town that was labeled with a giant banner that just said BOOKS and contained massive amounts of discounted, well, books. I went into that store once or twice, went into spasms of glee, but now they’re closed, so no more from them.

A brilliant scattered mind

Book: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Author: David Foster Wallace

Published: 2005 (Little, Brown and Company

Pages: 343

David Foster Wallace’s “Host” (about talk radio and how it got to be such a broadcasting juggernaut) is the only essay to use these box-and-arrow digressions instead of footnotes. But it illustrates perfectly what it’s like to read his writings.

“Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?”

No. No, I did not, but now I do, and it’s this ability to deeply mine such subjects with such a fiercely churning analysis and absurdity detector that makes David Foster Wallace one of my new favorite authors.

Yeah, this book was dense as hell, but it was worth the work and the headache I nursed after gorging on it.

(A bookstore clerk from a Charleston trip I took told me that Consider the Lobster is the best gateway into DFW’s writing. That was a couple years ago; cut to last weekend when I went with my boyfriend to the Boarder’s out here. It’s closing, which means everything’s on sale, which means you better believe we combed that entire place of half-empty shelves, which meant I found this book and decided it was time. When I run out of books from my old pile, my been-waiting-patiently-for-who-knows-how-many-months-slash-years pile, I’m going to find Infinite Jest and the three bookmarks it requires.)

His literature and language essays are the most…straightforward isn’t the right word. The most linear, I think is better. He talks about the Great Male Narcissists in a review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time; he talks about Kafka’s humor (did you know Kafka even had any humor? I sure didn’t) in written speech; he talks at very long, interesting but also long, lengths about authority and usage of American English; he gets right to the heart of why sports memoirs are so disappointing but why he keeps buying them anyway: he keeps looking for the transcendence he sees in the great athletes when they’re playing their game, convinced their physical eloquence will translate to the written word.

YES. That. *nodsnods* I kept doing that while I was reading.

I’ve wanted to read DFW since I read an article in Rolling Stone about his suicide. He just seemed so passionate and talented and like he was actually doing something to combine those two strengths. And then in a reporting writing class I took, our first assignment was to read a commencement speech he had given; it was about trying to find the transcendent in every day, and, frankly, it’s the best advice I’ve gotten about how to deal with the real world.

So I respect DFW, a lot, as a writer and as a thinker. His writings make me feel justified and hungry about finding pathos in the deep meanings of things. No, it’s probably not a good idea to take comfort from a suicidal artist of any sort. But I do.

  

Lack of squishy armchairs

A few days ago, I went to my hometown’s Boarder’s and started paging through a book about submitting writing to publishers to decide if it was worth its $3.95 sidewalk discount price. Sort of an exercise in futility, since I didn’t actually have $3.95 and couldn’t convince my mom it would be an investment in my future after I laughed at how obvious most of the advice was. But I kept digging deeper into it, convinced I would miss something important during my 2pm speed-read and equally convinced there was nothing there and I’d be cheated if I paid money for it.

Bookstores drive me crazy. There’s just so much crammed into such a relatively small space—millions of words covering thousands of ideas bound up in hundreds of neat packages stacked together waiting patiently to unleash their power. It’s amazing.

I love the journal sections, too. I’ll pick up each one that has a pretty cover and flip through it like I’m expecting messages already scribbled in there. All those blank pages beg to be filled with ideas instantly so they can start being read.

And it makes me nauseous. I want to read everything at once, so I end up overwhelming myself, paralyzing myself with indecision. I already have so many novels—but I love them, they’re my favorite thing to read—so all the more reason to get something else—but do I get something I know I’ll agree with? Something I can argue? Something entertaining, light, serious, easy or hard or middlebrow but profound? True or not true or just true in the author’s mind? Gah!

Not having money to spend doesn’t help me from wanting. It does help my ultimate decision, though: nothing. I’ll buy nothing but enjoy myself all the same by grabbing a Poets and Writers, turning to its classifieds and scoping out which writing contests have reasonable deadlines and no entry fees. Doing this will also help me decide that chain bookstores need more squishy armchairs.