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.

Tina Fey gives me cheap laughs.

Book: Bossypants
Author: Tina Fey
Published: 2011 (Little, Brown)
Pages: 275

"Who doesn't like Tina Fey?" could be the subtitle of this book. Based on the reading I snatched during my lunch breaks by picking this up in the campus bookstore without actually buying it, I will attempt to answer.

• People who truly believe that women can't be funny. (I picture these guys as old-fashioned clockmakers holding Humor Cogs and shaking their heads regretfully at broken ladies.)
• People who are disappointed at how normal and good Tina Fey's life has been and are probably just jealous that this disproves the theory that one has to have a shitty life to get any material from it. 
• People who have refused to watch SNL since the 1970s because they say it went downhill right after that. 

Fey's very good at making fun of herself in a way that brings her down to hardworking everylady level. She loves her life and gets deprecating laughs out of the awesome bits, which makes her more human, and sarcastic enthusiasm about the stressful bits, which show how much she secretly likes them. She's also excellent at inserting one-liners into good advice to break up the earnestness just when it starts to get a little weird.

She is still a TV writer, and that shows in the bounciness of her prose, like it really wants to come out of her mouth instead of stay on the page. That's not a bad thing. In fact, that probably helped me read this faster, an essential part of the stealth read strategy. I feel like Fey would understand the maybe-not-completely-kosher habits of a reader/writer with a day job and make fun of them before joining in with a giant sandwich. 

Talking with the ladies

Book: The Paris Review Interviews Women Writers at Work

Authors: various (and lots of prizes); edited by George Plimpton

Published: collection in 1998 (Modern Library)

Pages: 451

Interviewer: So, you're 22, have had two short stories published in a random university quarterly, are just coming off depression from not getting picked for Machine of Death Volume 2, will include the phrase "apple pie-scented box of shame" in your next writing, and just finished reading over 400 pages about ladies who accomplished more literature than you'll be able to catch up with even if you give up your day job and Mad Men addiction. How does that make you feel?

Constant Reader: Er. Can I quote Peggy Olsen?...

Interviewer: No. That just exposes how much you've been procrastinating.

Constant Reader: Fair enough. Well, I feel very tired after reading about all this awesome literature production. I feel like I've written all 70 of Joyce Carol Oates's novels while wearing the wrong prescription in those groovy giant glasses she wears in her author photo. But in a good way.

Interviewer: Is that possible?

Constant Reader: If I have enough caffeine in me, then yes.

Interviewer: What's it like reading about other writers' work habits?

Constant Reader: Addicting. I--hell, everybody--always think there's some sort of magic lurking just past their murmurs about early morning and longhand versus typewriters and various shades of seclusion. But it's not magic, and that might just be the most magical thing about it.

Interviewer: Is that encouraging at all?

Constant Reader: Encouraging and scary, yeah, but definitely doable. "I can work like this. Let's get liberated." HA.

Interviewer: You're going to turn into Peggy Olsen before you get to the end of season four.

Constant Reader: You say that like it's a bad thing. I just don't want her bangs. 

Awesome job, ladies.

Book: Fantastic Women: 18 tales of the surreal and the sublime from Tin House

Authors: various (edited by Rob Spillman)

Published: 2011 (Tin House Books)

Pages: 256

I’ve been trying to review this book but the mermaids and werewolves keep getting in the way.

They’re all over these stories, along with nuns who fall in love with lighthouse keepers and people who have two shadows, one of which grows up to be The Troubled One, and people with a surplus of oranges conducting surveys on if you think you’re someone’s most special person (hi, Miranda July!) and a woman who turns into a deer at night but doesn’t know how to tell her husband what it means and a woman bound and gagged and hanging upside down in her own home watching soldiers burn themselves and the neighborhood children on grill funeral pyres in her back yard. And a house with a tourist road running through it.

What I like most about these stories is how the peculiar parts of each are taken for granted: Uh, yeah there are pocket universes you can jump around in for fun and for hiding. That’s the way it’s always been. None of these writers club you over the head with the surreal aspects going “Look! I wrote something SURREAL! Isn’t it WEIRD and WACKY and WHIMSICAL and other w-words that mean HOLY SHIT UNIQUE?”

No. They write from places of serene, quiet confidence that you, dear reader, can figure out the weird shit on your own. They’re gonna focus on what’s going wrong over here, or how this lady gets through her day when things are falling apart.

Because they will fall apart, and nobody except the protagonists will notice until it’s too late, if ever. Sometimes the main women manage to right things, sometimes she just lets go. Either way it’s a great collection of ethereal stories that all touch each other’s fancy without being remotely identical. Yay, Tin House.

I might use the rest of this space to blab about how I don’t like when women writers are described as such. Words of all things should be taken equally as seriously from whoever writes them and based on whether the words or plots or characters or styles are stupid or not. Blah blah, done with that because I do also enjoy being able to end on a hypocritical “Awesome, ladies” note. I mean, I am a proud member of their tribe.