Perfectly Disgraceful

215 - 2009

   215 Festival. Or click here for the Facebook group.

That show at Brickbat Books tomorrow looks really good, doesn't it? Come by and get your copy of The Good Thief signed by Hannah Tinti. What do you mean you don't have a copy of it? It's one of the best new books I've read in years.

 

  

Brickbat gets Philly Mag best bookstore award!

Isn't Rex wonderful?

Twilight hole

I fell into a burning ring of Twilight...

You may recall my dithering about whether to allow the Older Child (perhaps I should now refer to her as Eleven?) to read Twilight. Even though I lost that battle and she already read it, I decided to try reading it out loud to her. I couldn't do it. The dialogue was so painfully bad that I couldn't read it without being sarcastic. The chuckling! There is so much freaking chuckling in the Twilight books. Now tell me, how often do you run into chuckling in this day and age? And how often do teenagers chuckle? Please. And then there is the smirking. So much smirking. Yes, teenagers probably do spend half the day smirking, but I think the fatally sincere Edward is found smirking far too often. As my friend Linda said, "There is nothing worse than a writer who can't just stick to "said." "

I gave up on reading Twilight out loud and decided to skim through it to make sure it wasn't totally inappropriate, which is a little like closing the barn door after the cows have gotten out, but whatever. Four hours later it was 3:00 in the a.m. and I couldn't put the damn book down. I have no idea what happened.

I spent all of Memorial Day weekend in a disoriented Welbutrin start-up haze ignoring my children and reading the first two Twilight books. I had to skim through much of the books to avoid chuckle-induced nausea, but I still couldn't stop reading. However, I am a wee bit concerned that the Welbutrin fog may mean the books have indelibly imprinted on my soggy brain, much likes the werewolves and their mates.

After I finished the second book, on Sunday, I put out an all-points Facebook bulletin seeking Book Three (I know they all have names like Crescent Moon or whatever, but I think of them as Twilights 1 - 4), but no one came to my rescue. I trekked over to Target on Monday. No Book Threes. Then I realized I couldn't purchase a paperback version and I really wasn't willing to shell out for a hardback.  Eleven came to my rescue! She borrowed the copy her teacher had made available to her combined fourth and fifth grade class! Yay! Also, WTF? I guess her school is even less interested in censorship than I am.

While I was impatiently drumming my jittery (Welbutrin start-up side-effect) fingers waiting for Book Three, I needed another teen-age angst fix. We have a lot of books in our house. A LOT. Some might say TOO MANY. However, very few of them have anything to do with teen angst. I was reduced to reading Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, which was nicely full of angst, not to mention sex and the Riviera, but probably would have done well to have a few vampires thrown in.

It was also around this time that a friend linked to this SHOCKING EXPOSE of the cultural Mormonism in the books. Warning, the link is very funny, but also kind of a buzzkill. I enjoyed the books more without getting any of the unsubtle Mormon subtext. I wish I hadn't read that blog until after I finished the book. It's fascinating, but the writer really hates the books and I don't. Although I am rather embarrassed that I enjoyed them so much.

I still don't get it why I fell into the Twilight hole. The books are poorly written. But I found the characters engrossing (I keep thinking about them!) and the pacing brilliant. Or perhaps brilliant is to strong a word, because I did keep wondering how a writer who doesn't seem all that smart could write books that I couldn't put down.

This lead to a whole discussion, mostly in my head, of literary vs. middlebrow vs. lowbrow books. When choosing fiction, I tend toward the literary. Not the super extra literary, more like the upper middle brow. Again, Linda came to the rescue in defining my literary tastes, when I go outsider the mildly literary realm, "what I like is kinda-trash written by really smart, literate people." And Stephanie Meyers just does not seem like a smart literate person-- to me. I know that's terribly snobby, but I don't care. I just don't get why these book had such a hold over me.

A nice side effect of my Twilight hole may be a renewed interest in fiction. I've spent the last ten years reading much more non-fiction, mostly essays, than fiction. Which seems strange to me as my entire literate life until recently had been spent deeply immersed in fiction. I still think of myself as a fiction reader, even though I often go months without reading anything that isn't online or the New Yorker. I would like to get back to what still seems like my real life, being engrossed in novel after novel. If it took a few weeks of being a Twilight junkie to get me back on the lit wagon, well, I owe a big thank you to the vampires.

Amends from heaven

Inspired by my much-admired friend at Crooked House, who often posts passages about babies in literature, I thought I'd type out this bit I recently read in Flowering Judas by Katherine Anne Porter.

She had learned now that she was badly cheated in giving her children to another woman to feed; she resolved never again to be cheated in just that way. She sat nursing her child and her foster child, with a sensual warm pleasure she had not dreamed of, translating her physical relief into something holy, Godsent amends from heaven for what she had suffered in childbed.*

When people talk about how awesome breastfeeding is and how everyone should totally do it, they're usually talking about the precious precious little babies. Yeah, it's great for the babies and all, whatever. Pre-kids, I'm sure I decided to give it a try based on this argument. Post-kids, I'm really not interested in that side of things. I now see it from a mother-based point of view.

Sure, breastfeeding is good for women physically, which is a nice benefit, but more importantly, it can be very fulfilling emotionally. Which is why I don't understand the recent backlash from educated upper-middle-class women. 

Once you get past the difficult first six weeks, breastfeeding is usually wonderful. It feels loving and cozy and wonderful, it forces you to slow down and enjoy your baby, it's a great opportunity to catch up on your reading, and it's an easy source of comfort for a distressed baby. Sure, pumping is not the greatest, but it's not that bad. And you really don't have to pump so that your baby can be exclusively breast-fed (the only benefit of that, for an otherwise healthy baby, is less-stinky poop), it is totally allowable to pump for your own physical relief. This can be all about you. I kind of think it should be.

As I've said before, if you're not interested in breastfeeding, I'm not going to try to talk you into it. If you're on the fence, I think you should give it a try, because it's a lot easier to stop breastfeeding than it is to start. If you try it and don't like it, stop doing it and don't feel guilty. I don't understand the guilt. I have never been able to tell a formula-fed baby (let alone kid) from a breast-fed one, have you? 

*This passage is from the point of view of Sophia Jane, aka The Grandmother, a white slave-owner whose first three babies were wet-nursed by her personal slave, Nannie, with whom she has a complicated and close relationship in spite of the, ah, giant obstacle of slavery. Nannie nearly dies after the birth of her own fourth child, so Sophia Jane nurses not only her own fourth, born nearly simultaneously, but also Nannie's baby, deeply scandalizing the entire family.

Censorship and the modern mother

The Older Child wants to read the Twilight series.

 

Rex and I have never censored her reading material. If memory serves, I believe we started reading the Harry Potter books to her when she was not quite six, toward the end of kindergarten. While there are adult themes in the Potter series (good v. evil) they are not adult themes.

I have not read any of the Twilight books, though I've read a bit about them, enough to have the impression that the subtext by their Mormon author is abstinence. Which is an idea that I'm not really down with as a life philosophy, though I will admit to a prudish preference for waiting until college.

If the subtext is abstinence, it seems the text itself is pretty steamy. The Older Child has never before evinced interest in steamy. As recently as this past Christmas, she was much more interested in acquiring another American Girl doll. In fact, if I made her choose between, say, a few sleepovers with friends and reading Twilight, I would bet that she would pick the former.

When the Older Child began her Twilight campaign, I tried persuasion. I tried to convince her that she would enjoy the books a lot more when she is 12. I actually believe this, it wasn't just a tactic. I think she would be much more thrilled by a book about all-consuming crushes when she actually has one, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't, yet.

Unfortunately, my gentle campaign of persuasion and delay met up against an unbeatable force: peer pressure. One of her best friends wanted the two of them to read the book together, chapter by chapter. The Older Child told me she'd try the first chapter and if it didn't hold her interest, she'd set it aside for awhile. A day later, she had finished the book.

And now she wants to read the rest of the series. Which, as I understand, grows more and more adult with each book. She tells me many of the other girls in her class have read the whole series, which makes me wish these other supposedly over-protective mothers would provide a little censorship for my benefit. I could read the books myself, though I don't think that will make much difference in whether I allow her to read them or not. And I do feel a bit like one of her other best friends, if everyone else loves these books so much, than I will be boisterously uninterested in them.

I'm not willing to censor my children's reading. I really do wish she'd wait until she's a little older to read the other Twilight books. I imagine I will be having a similar discussion with her in only too few years about a subject of greater import. But in neither discussion will I tell her she can't. I'll just try to persuade her to wait until she'll enjoy it a lot more.

Blocks

Maud Newton finds excellent quotes:

“Of course any novelist has difficulties. I don’t have ‘blocks,’ I mean I don’t get into a state where absolutely nothing can be done for weeks; I can always do something, though the something that I do may have to be revised later on… I think the thing to do is to make one’s unconscious mind work for one. When there’s a problem, and suddenly you get a sort of knot in the procedure, where you want to do two things that are incompatible, for instance, or when you can’t really see what a character is like — there’s a sort of blank slate where the character ought to be — then you must meditate upon the problem, set it, as it were, as a problem to your unconscious mind, and hope that suddenly some creative flash will arrive. And that is a time that requires very great patience.” — Iris Murdoch, The Threepenny Review, 1984

This is how I worked when I used to write (unpublished) novels. I did a lot of fiction writing while at my job as a junior economist, back in the days before the internet, or at least, work-access to it, existed. The best covert ways to procrastinate from doing work were to write fiction or read the dictionary-- which gave me the idea for my second novel. However, as being found reading anything other than an economics journal was somewhat suspicious, and typing was not, I typed away. At lunchtime I would give myself a little thought assignment while I trod the streets of Center City. When I returned to my desk, 500 words or more would pour out (I'm a word-counter, it always gave me a sense of accomplishment to see the numbers grow larger). Even better than a walk, was a drive. I used to get some of my best thinking done while driving.

Now I rarely drive and I seem to have little space in my head for thought assignments. I feel fairly confident I'll get back to my real writing someday, when the children are older and I'm less distracted. Although, honestly? if I wasn't messing around on the internet all the time, I'm sure I'd be writing fiction again.

Still, I console myself with the idea that I'm biding my time:

“Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer — he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive for him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.” — E.B. White, The Paris Review, 1969

I'm waiting for that perfect wave, and in the meantime, enjoying more than an occasional drink.

That sh*t was B-A-N-A-N-A-S

We always said the 215 wasn't your typical literary festival. For one, there is always booze, nothing worse than a sober writer. All that booze leads to some wackiness, of course. We've had people go back to hotels with best-selling novelists. Other, older, best-sellers have tried to hook up with young cuties and been shot down. Someone even got pregnant at a 215. For reals. Even when sex wasn't involved, I'm such a fan girl that hanging out with writers is delirious fun.

But last night may have been the craziest 215 ever. David Rees called it, it was a five alarm banger. And I don't even know what that means.

It began as one would expect. Rees was over-the-top funny. I mean, seriously. If you can catch him live (dates on the right) DO NOT MISS IT. Hodgman was his excellent Hodgman self, if slightly more serious than past performances. Still, the finger on the touchpad voting screen bit slayed me. Another don't miss tour. I adore that man.

But it was the afterparty that tore shit up. Ian Svenonius dj'ed arcane and insanely funky soul and blues. Lord Whimsy got his dance on. Random passersby joined in the dancing-- in the neighborhood of the Latvian Society, those passersby are going to be, well, interesting. At one point Rees thought some "greasers" were going to start throwing punches. Rees is excitable.

Then, just as the greasers were disappointing us with their pacifism, in walked the cake-taker. An androgynous female version of Omar from The Wire. She was fascinating. You couldn't take your eyes off her, and she was all over everyone. Dancing in our faces, up against our bodies, trying to hook up with us. She had a DSLR with a giant lens and took pictures of everyone. What I wouldn't pay to have some of those pictures. It was when she entered the scene, dancing her ass off, in her cowboy hat and briefs peaking out of tight jeans, that Rees called it. A five alarm banger.

But when she sat down next to Rex and me, took off a boot and produced a what looked like, to my untrained eye, a big black Glock hand gun, well, shit got bananas. She tried to get my number after that, and let me tell you, it's hard to say no to a heat-packing plate of sex even when you are happily married. Unless, like me, guns scare the living shit out of you.

Best 215 ever? Oh yes. I think so.

Wyoming and genocide

I admit that I have not closely followed Annie Proulx's career, I think I was only vaguely aware that she wrote the story Brokeback Mountain was based on. I read The Shipping News and Accordion Crimesback in the '90s, before I had children, when I read novels all the time. I liked those books, but I think The Shipping News fooled me into thinking of her as a New England writer.

So when I started reading all the Wyoming stories in the New Yorker, I barely realized they were written by the same person. I read her two stories from this summer in reverse order, first Tits Up in Ditch, an unpleasant story with tones of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Then, most unfortunately, I read Them Old Cowboy Songs, set in 1885, which features a horrific end to its main characters.

The end of the female character is dwelt upon in great detail. The kind of detail that sticks in my brain and pops up in the middle of the night when I am lying awake in bed and then my brain knits over and rehashes it until I can't stand it any longer and I have to get out of bed and do something. The story My Parents' Bedroomby Uwem Akpan did the same thing to me, but it was set during the Rwandan genocide, so I did have fair warning. I already knew that I couldn't handle any detailed writing about the genocide, so I should have avoided it. Just looking up the link for this post gave me a sick feeling in my stomach.

Movies do that to me, too. I fear that I will never wash certain scenes from Leaving Las Vegas from my brain. I've learned to not watch movies like that. I cannot handle gratuitous violence or lingered-over rape scenes. I can't read T. Coraghessan Boyle anymore, either, and he used to be one of my favorites. I just can't deal with how he tears his characters to pieces.

I have no wish to censor literature. I think that stories about what genocide does to individual people and families are especially important. It is the only way we can really understand something so horrible, because, really, the fact that 800,000 people were murdered in one month is not an idea the human mind can comprehend. I think this is why Holocaust denial is so potent.

And, in the same vein, it may be true that Proulx's stories about Wyoming are important. So that we can understand some of the horror that birthed our nation and produced some of the narrow-minded and mean-spirited fellow-citizens we are stuck with today. And yet, I can't help thinking (and I have given this a lot of thought) that there is something gratuitous about those stories. Something excessive. I think the gruesomeness is a little cheap. Possibly showing a lack of imagination for a slightly more nuanced way to make a point.

It's not that we shouldn't have literature about horrific events, but that literature should make you feel and understand the event without reveling in the violence. Without long lingering looks at agony and pools of blood. We need the literature to help us understand the horrible things that humans can and will do if good people do nothing, but these Wyoming stories bother me. Maybe because they are so relentlessly dark, because there is no hope. I need a little hope mixed in with my horror. I need to feel that we can learn from these things and not let them happen again.

The young book reviewer

I am very proud of the Older Child. She gets much better P.R. than I do. Check it out at Daily Candy Kids - Philadelphia.

Crazy Eloise Wilkin

Darling Rex wrote a lovely post about Little Golden Books; in honor of him, here is my take on a weird book from 1948, "The New Baby", illustrated by Eloise Wilkin.

Such a cute house! I almost want to live in it, if only it weren't so clearly in the suburbs of pre-feminist America.

 

She doesn't look it, but this young mother is only days away from going to the hospital and delivering a full-term baby! Perhaps she is related to Sarah Palin. Also, she appears to be about 22 and is decorating like she's 60, although I do like the couch.

 

Much of the action in this book revolves around the delivery of a bathinette. I know! I had never heard of a bathinette before, either. It looks like it would make bathing a baby a huge pain in the ass. I used the kitchen sink for my kids. Note that big brother Mike is shocked to hear of the imminent arrival of his new sibling. I assume all the neighbors will also be shocked that a clearly non-pregnant woman is about to give birth.

 

Aunt Pat arrives to cook for the boys while Mummy is in the hospital, daddies didn't know what a kitchen was back then. Aunt Pat does such a capital job, in spite of her deformed legs and back, that they decide to name the new baby after her. My grandmother still has a stove like that. I wonder if I can steal it and cart it home from Pittsburgh....

 

I bet that Daddy is hoping his wife's ability to show no signs of pregnancy also means that she won't end up looking like Aunt Pat. Do you think Daddy got that schnozz in a bar fight?

 

Aw, what a cute baby. Let's hope she doesn't grow up to have stick ankles and Aunt Pat's cheeks. I bet all the old ladies are going to run home on their chicken legs and cluck about how terrible it is that his mother lets that little boy run around outside in out-grown pajamas. Seriously, though, what is he wearing?