How I Became Who I Am: My Most Influential Reading List

I'm totally stealing this from a friend of mine, but I'm going to do that whole shebang ten thing. I'm doing it because at first I wondered what books, if any, helped influence who I became - how I became who I am. As much of a bibliophile as I am (and I am), the writers who most influence my actual perceptions of reality tend to be on that TV machine. Books tend to be an enjoyable escape, because as much as I love Pride and Prejudice and James Thurber, I'm pretty sure they have not formed the very backbone of who I am. But then, I thought about the books I've read. And then I wondered how I would whittle that list down to ten. So, away we go:

1. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett. I found Waiting for Godot in high school. It was my first, aside from Whedony works, exposure to that wide world of existentialism. I loved it. There are lines in works, moments, that blow your mind. In the first act of the play, Vladimir's ponderings about the two thieves mentioned in the Gospels was that moment for me:

   VLADIMIR: But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?

   ESTRAGON: Who believes him?

   VLADIMIR: Everybody. It's the only version they know.

   The play wasn't necessarily introducing anything new to my life: I was already an atheist, I already was suspicious of metanarratives, I was already bemused and intrigued by the absurd. But it was the dream-like quality of the play, and the follies of the various participants, the obvious allusion to an absent, if not outright fictional, god, that really struck me.
   
   
2. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand. Now, years later (YEARS), I've come to the conclusion that I've read this book all wrong, that the philosophy Ayn Rand was expounding probably wasn't what I took out of it, and that all those people who were like, "Oh, The Fountainhead is awesome!" probably got the wrong idea about what I'm about, politically, ethically, and philosophically. And plus, there's that whole rape apologia thing surrounding Roarke and Dominique that makes the book fairly unsavory for me. Don't get me wrong, after reading The Fountainhead I had a period where I read up a lot on Ayn Rand. I knew she was a dogmatic free market capitalist, I knew she was all about the individual. I knew she was if not the than pretty close to it quintessential "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, cuz I'm not giving you one of my dimes" person. And yet. When I read The Fountainhead, I... ...not missed, but pretty much overlooked a lot of that. What I took from the book was, in no particular order, architecture=cool, selfishness=awesome, looking to society for vindication=stupid idea. All of that? I was totally down with. And then, no more than a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that the scene I'd always thought meant "to do charity work for society's praise is just stupid" probably was meant to be expanded to "to do charity work at all is just stupid". So, The Fountainhead influenced me greatly. But I took from the book, "Act selfishly. Actions solely to please others will end up, in the long run, being unworthy of your time and energy, and will get you down in the process". I took, "Do the right thing, even if others look down on you for it, even if doing the easy thing will bring you short term praise and success". But, for me, doing the right thing isn't really about a totally free market capitalist system. It may be about making pretty buildings. I'm not totally sure yet.
   
   
3. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys. I was going to put The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir here, because I love that book, because it intersected my feminism and my existentialism well, and because it was a lightbulb moment for me, a moment where what I had previously felt was brought into sharp relief via words on the page. But. The Second Sex, although I love it for articulating a matter that had long danced at the back of my skull, didn't really change who I am. It simply gave me another tool to utilize when I myself already knew and tried to explain to other people. Wide Sargasso Sea did something else. One, it made Jane Eyre, a book I have always despised, palatable. Two, did something The Second Sex did not. It took me beyond myself. It was like "The Yellow Wallpaper" in its gradual destruction of its protagonist. It taught me a new way to critique existing works. And, pathetically enough, it brought the issue of race in Jane Eyre into the equation. It was a book that was (I think) better written than the book it was inspired by, and it made me recognize other ways that original text failed, by fixing that failure. By illustrating the other voices in the world we would never recognize if we merely stuck to what is in the accepted literary canon.
   
   
4. A Wrinkle in Time (series) - Madeline L'Engle. I would be remiss if I were to leave this book, and the subsequent books, off my list. Much like The Fountainhead, it occurs to me years later that I again culled something from its pages the writer did not intend, though in this instance it was a bulwark for my atheism. A Wrinkle in Time, having reread it, is an extremely spiritual - and outwardly religious - book. You'd think I would have gotten that from Many Waters being about two characters meeting Noah and interacting with Seraphim, but my obliviousness (and the fact that a majority of my religious education comes from musicals) blocked that reading entirely. Instead, I took from it themes of interdependence, of looking at problems and people through love and not hate and fear, and that being weird was a pretty cool thing to be. That, and the knowledge and the first dimension is a straight line, and the second dimension is a square. Beyond that, Meg Murray was (and is) one of my favorite girl/women characters. She preceded Buffy by about a year. She was so awesomely real, strong and yet flawed, it was incredible. I should also mention that I could recite the entirety of the book A Wrinkle in Time until a couple of years ago, and I could still probably do a couple of the more major passages.
   
   
5. West With the Night - Beryl Markham. My father gave me this book when I was in 6th grade. My copy has the note he wrote to me, explaining why he was gifting it to me specifically, on the inside cover. That alone may explain why this book makes the list. My father introduced me to a lot of books - among those, The Fountainhead. And those all had personal reasons behind his love of them, and wanting to share them with me. But Beryl Markham and her story captured my dad, and made him think of me. So, I read it. And if this were merely a list about books that influenced me because of how well they were written, West With the Night would also make that list:

   How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, 'This is the place to start; there can be no other.'

   But there are a hundred places to star for there are a hundred names - Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru. There are easily a hundred names and I can begin best by choosing one of them - not because it is first no of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is a remembrance - revisitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

   This book, and Markham, however, make the list because she is an inspiration. The first woman to fly east to west, from England to Nova Scotia. She is attacked by a lion as a girl. She is a one time (literally, one time) horse racer. She is the first licensed woman horse trainer in Kenya. And although I still have that note in the book, I'm in awe that she made him think of me, still strive to be as cool, as confident, as ground-breaking as Markham herself was.
   
   
6. On the Road - Jack Kerouac. Yes, it is enormously cliche. And yet. I loved the book. It probably helps that I read it on a long train ride, so it felt like I was actually a part of Kerouac's philosophy and adventure. On the Road is why I spent the summer and the semester of my '50s class obsessed with the Beat and the Beat Generation.
   
   
7. Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life - Dolores Hayden. Every so often, a book comes along that makes me think, a la Chicken Run, "But we've always been egg farmers. My father, and his father, and all their fathers, and they was all..." And then the author fairly hits me on the head and says, "And wouldn't it be so much better if we looked at why, and what that's done for us, and maybe try to do X?" This book is that. This book is when I started thinking about how the structure of our lives and our environments shape our lives and our expectations. How we are, essentially, coveting little boxes on the hillside that are all the same. And how we can maybe go along making a different world, if we'd just change our expectations regarding neighborhoods and soccer moms and mini vans.
   
   
8. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge - Jean-Francois Lyotard. I don't mean to sound like a braggart, but I have an exceptional memory for words. Not names, and not faces, and definitely not tasks I was assigned two minutes ago, but words. Sometimes, that means I can quote what I want out of a book or television episode from memory alone. Sometimes that means I know exactly where to find the exact line I'm looking for in the book or episode. Believe me when I say, I can give you none of this work back. I couldn't even really remember the name of the book, just the author. Maybe it's because it was originally written in French. All I can say is that it has deepened my personal understanding of the world. Lyotard writes about the totalitarian nature of the metanarrative, and about the worth of the more democratic micronarrative. And, as I discovered in my quest to discover which book made the micronarrative something I believe in and agree with, I discovered something else. Before college, I was someone who believed in a reachable, objective truth. I hated anything that touched upon relativism with a passion (that may have been due to all of the moral arguments against my atheism starting with, "If you don't believe in God, there is no moral structure. And if there is no moral structure, then nothing can be immoral"; I'm just saying, those religious zealots trying to convert me kind of fucked me up). And yet, now I still despise moral relativism, and am passionately for micronarratives. Wha?! The answer, as I discovered, also lies with Lyotard. He postulated that there is an objective truth that we humans shall never fully understand. Which is basically my position. High five to Lyotard.
   
   
9. Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti. I was thinking about putting one of my favorite authors of all time, a Mr. John Steinbeck, on this list. But then I decided he is more of a Jane Austen type of person in my life: a writer I would not willingly live without, but one who has not had a profound influence on my being - aside from making me more of a snobbish reader than I was prior to picking up Cannery Row in high school. Instead, this spot goes to Jessica Valenti. It's like this: I was raised in a feminist household, so Full Frontal Feminism wasn't introducing me to anything I hadn't heard of before. But it was witty and well-written, and so not academic. And since I was reading Lyotard, I deserved some not quite academic-but-progressive reading. And if it had just been that, this book would not be on this list. But Jessica Valenti is the founder and an editor of feministing.com. And feministing led me to other, more substantial feminist sites, which then led me to womanist sites, which then led me to reading multiple blogs daily. And eventually, that led us all here. Without Full Frontal Feminism, I may never have gotten to this particular place.
   
   
10. The Short Stories of J.D. Salinger. I am one of the few people I know who did not appreciate the angst of Holden Caulfield in their own teenage years. One of those other souls is one of my 17 year old sisters, so maybe that inability to be charmed by him is genetic. Because of that, I avoided Salinger's short stories like the plague. I was wrong to (incidentally, my mother was the person who told me I would enjoy them). The first one I ever read was "A Perfect Day for Bananafish". From there, I was hooked. I quickly gobbled up "Franny and Zooey", and then moved on to the rest of "Nine Stories", and then to "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction". I loved the style of writing, the restless and unsatisfied nature of it, the people populating these stories being genuine in a way I'd never felt was true for Holden, and yet all quietly broken. Perhaps more than the short stories and the people yearning to live a life of meaning within them, it was Salinger's ability to retreat from public life that makes these stories precious to me. Salinger managed to both give me, in all, 13 stories I prize. And then, he articulated my belief about writing when he said, "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." I write, a lot. Some of that writing is here, the nonfiction stuff, the stuff that is separate enough from myself to share with both the people I know and potentially the people I don't who manage to stumble upon it. But my fiction is all my own.

And there it is: my list. Hopefully, in ten to twenty years, some of those books will have been bumped down the influence chain, with other books taking their place. I'm looking forward to the John Kenneth Galbraith memoirs possibly doing that.

James Thurber

I have a horrible habit of not listening to my mother's recommendations, of avoiding reading the things she says to read or watching the things she says to watch or listening to the things she says to listen to until I'm driven to doing it simply because I've gotten bored with the things I've been reading or watching or listening to over and over again. She is the person who first thrust The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler into my hands, the person who gave me The Secret of NIMH, the person who insisted I watch The Sound of Music and Dirty Dancing, the person who told me I'd really like Elton John and The Band, the person who introduced me to Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

And yet, with all of that, it still took me months before I read A Wrinkle in Time after she gave it to me and told me I'd love it. She gave it to me along with The Mixed Up Files and NIMH, in fourth grade, and it took me until midway through fifth to bother with it. It, and the other three books in the series, became my veritable Bible from fifth to eighth grade. It, among other things, gave my shop teacher a reason to not let me actually participate in shop class after a fairly harrowing experience with a drill, because he'd lived next to the author, Madeline L'Engle, while growing up and talked to me about this worn out book I insisted on carrying everywhere with me.

In eighth grade, I was spending the day with my father. We were driving around the state, visiting his various clients, talking, and listening to this book on tape he'd gotten out of the library, My Life and Hard Times. I knew of the book. A chapter had been in a compilation book series my parents owned and I'd poured over. Another chapter had been in my seventh grade Lit book, and I'd poured over that one as well. Listening to My Life and Hard Times with my father made me appreciate it, and the author, all the more. It was hilarious. And when I acquired the book-book, it took the place of A Wrinkle in Time as my new Bible.

I've been to the Thurber House in Columbus, OH several times. One time, my father got them to open the house early for us, because I loved it so much and because at some point we were going to have to leave Ohio, and he preferred that to be sooner rather than later. I have several James Thurber tee shirts, a lot of his books, and I still read portions of My Life and Hard Times on a weekly basis. James Thurber's Is Sex Necessary? is the book that I took out with my best friend and roomie's library card whilst in college, and then failed to return promptly (or rather, at all), and ran up a significant (around $200 or so dollars) late fee/replacement cost.

There are problems with James Thurber, as there would be with any white, straight, middle-class male author born in 1894. There are problems I've only begun to assess in my continued and continual rereading of My Life and Hard Times, with regard to race and gender and where the two meet. But his humor oftentimes comes from the ridiculousness of people, and more often than not from himself. And so, I was abso-freaking-lutely thrilled when Keith Olbermann professed to reading James Thurber to his father, because James Thurber is one of those authors who helped shape my life (and this whole beginning part is at least in partial reference to this meme), and who I feel is underappreciated - or at the very least, too much of an unknown. My happiness increased exponentially when the final segment on friday's Countdown was, in point of fact, Keith Olbermann reading a short story of James Thurber's, "A Box to Hide In". And because I love Thurber more than possibly any other author, I had to share. This story doesn't come from my personal Thurber Bible, but I do love it:

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The Book That Changed Your Life

This American Life's show Sunday was about books that changed, in various ways, four specific readers. David Sedaris scarred himself and his siblings with a pornographic and incestuous text, someone else was in love with Little House on the Prairie books, another woman fell in love with a long dead author and ended up following a similar life trajectory for a bit, and a man who wasn't David Sedaris amassed the largest private collection of books on the Lewis & Clark expedition. It got me to thinking about whether or not a book has ever really and truly changed my life. I read. A lot. I read a lot of different authors and on a lot of different subjects. I go through fiction and non fiction phases. Currently, I'm in an 'article' phase. But even though I've consumed a large amount of books in my life and have read my favorites more than a dozen times - easily - each, I was still left wondering if I actually have a book that changed my life. I'm still not entirely sure. I have a poem that reaffirmed my natural enthusiasm in Longfellow's Psalm of Life. I have an autobiography I return to time and time again when I need a pick-me-up or a all-families-are profoundly-crazy assurance in My Life and Hard Times. I have favorite books, and books that I enjoy. But I was at a loss for a book that actually changed my life.

And yet, there is one. It is A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. I haven't collected all of the books L'Engle has written. I'm not, nor have I ever been, obsessed with L'Engle as a person. It did not scar me, and I have never visited her childhood home. I don't want to move to her town. But A Wrinkle In Time was my constant companion from 4th grade to around 8th grade. I carried it every day in my backpack, I pulled it out during lunch, during class, during recess. Its very presence was comforting.

For a while, I had A Wrinkle In Time completely memorized. I loved it that much. Being the completely oblivious atheist I was (and am), I somehow failed to pick up on all the many religious themes contained within the book. All I knew was that Meg Murray, with her temper and her smarts and her worries she wasn't beautiful enough or smart enough, felt so incredibly real. She came alive, leapt off the page and went to save her brother from the evil of a brain with no heart through love alone. She wasn't me; she didn't have my interests or my particular worries. But she was someone I could relate to. I loved Meg Murray. I absolutely adored Charles Wallace. I liked Calvin. And I was mesmerized by the ideas about space and travel, about our world potentially becoming a Dark Planet, a planet shadowed but fighting in the name of and for the sake of Goodness. A Wrinkle In Time filled me with a sense of hope. I still, from time to time, go back to it. It doesn't bring me the exact same feeling of wonderment anymore, but it I can still see exactly why I loved it so much. I can't explain exactly how it changed me; I don't have a before and after picture waiting to be developed. It obviously didn't convert me to Christianity or anything as world-altering as that. But out of all the books I read and loved, it is the one I don't think I would give up.

And I wouldn't give it up because I can't imagine me without it. I can't imagine what I would be like if I didn't have Meg Murray and her powerful temper and incredible love in my life. I don't know what I would be missing if I didn't know about a tesseract. I may have become a great mathematician if I didn't get into that argument in 6th grade about a square being a two-dimensional object like Mrs. Whatsit said and not, as my math teacher was insisting, a one-dimensional one.

A Wrinkle In Time is the book that changed my life.

Saturday Sesame Street

These martians are adorable! I love how they hide by bringing their mouths above their eyes.



As an aside, for the first couple years of my sisters' lives, they did think eating books was a swell idea. My children's lit collection was almost halved by their insistence that they should consume the hardcovers and gum the pages within. It's still a point of contention in our relationship.

Where Am I Going To Be?

In a little clip art thing.

Nah.

I decided that, instead of my usual deal where I disappear for days without any indication about what's going on, I'd give an indication of what's going on.

And that is, I'm on vacation. Maybe I'll be able to sneak a post or two in, maybe I won't. But hopefully, that big pile of books near my bed will get read!

The American Family, Kate & Allie, and Co-Parenting

I recently bought my father the first season of Kate & Allie, a show he (inexplicably) loves and that focuses on two divorcees raising their children together in New York City. It was a present for Father's Day or my parents' anniversary or something of that sort, and rewatching it - along with the reruns of Kate & Allie that are forever playing on the WE Channel - while reading Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life by Dolores Hayden seems to have left some subliminal messages in my head.

Because when I was listening to yesterday's Talk of the Nation today (via podcast) about Geoffrey Canada's organization Harlem Children's Zone, something clicked. The thing that clicked is this: Canada said,

I was raised by a single mom, and it is so hard to raise children by yourself. There are so many obstacles, and yet we have this crisis in the country. There are lots of families that there's only one adult raising a child and they're trying to work and take care of the child at the same time. And the country has not made the kind of investment to help families who really have no other support. You know, when I grew up, my grandmother lived three or four blocks away, so we could stay with her and still be in sort of the loving confines of a structured family environment. Many families don't have this today, and so one of the real challenges is to make sure that we encourage fathers to stay with their children, support their children, stay with their spouses; and mothers to really make sure that you're forming relationships that will last for this child. So that these young people come up with two parents.

What clicked is that we as a culture are so focused on the ideal nuclear family, and that may not always be the absolute best possibility. I was with Canada up and through "encourage fathers to stay with their children, support their children". But I don't think that fathers (or mothers) have to stay with a spouse in order to continue to support the children, and that in many cases, there is a valid reason why the romantic (or sexual) relationship responsible for creating the child in question ended. Canada goes on to say,

It doesn't matter what the family looks like; there just needs to be two adults always focused on this child to maximize the chances.

And I agree with him.

I was raised in a two parent home, but I wasn't raised by two parents. More specifically, I was raised by a lot more people than just my two parents. My father has three best friends, two of whom have wives and one of whom who has an extremely doting mother. My mother has one best friend. My father has a sister, and had his parents - along with a fairly large extended family. I was the first child born in my generation, and for a long time I was one of the centers (or close to it) of almost all of these people's lives. They were frequently present, to the point where one of my uncles came on vacations with us and had his own room in our condo. My birthday is used for pin numbers and passwords, both for the people I'm related to and the people I'm not. I had (and have) a structured family environment, even though I'm not biologically related to a great deal of that support system.

Which brings me to Redesigning the American Dream, a book about architecture and community planning, and how America's development boom after World War II both reinforced gender norms and our isolated society. In it, Hayden explores why Levittown became the American Dream, as well as other, more innovative and diverse, housing projects in America and around the world. Some of the ideas in the book seemed alien while I was reading and after I had finished reading, like the Danish housing project Tynngarden, where "each family gave up 10 percent of its allocated interior square footage to create a shared neighborhood center for ten to fifteen families" and whose courtyard " contained mailboxes, the washing machines and dryers, a community kitchen, and a large two-level space for activities planned by residents". Seemed alien, until I started thinking about housing, how expensive it is, how expensive electricity is, and how expensive and time-consuming maintaining the ability to afford a residence is, especially when there are children.

Canada's program does an awesome job for low-income children, but I started wondering, sitting bored in my little cubicle, if his organization and countless other communities could be helped if we started rethinking our vision of housing and our idea of what constitutes a family, and what it means to be a community. Which is where this circles back to Kate & Allie. Kate and Allie had it slightly easier. They were childhood friends. But in today's world of internet access and social networking sites, there could be some sort of Harmony or Match.com for single parents (or even singles, low-income or otherwise) that could match up similar parenting philosophies or needs. There could be apartments buildings constructed with these kinds of created families, this kind of structured family unit, in mind. Apartment buildings that had adequate - if not huge - living spaces, that could support two co-mingling, co-parenting groups, or three, or more. If we stop thinking about the romantic couple in the nuclear family as the absolute most solid support system for a family, if we start accepting that mothers (and fathers) can form other types of relationships, platonic relationships that will last and be good for the child, then other ways to mitigate poverty and inadequate child care/supervision could develop, as another way to make a parent's and partner's absence less devastating.

This is in no way an attempt to prove fathers useless. I think fathers are important. My father is one of my favorite people, and I am who I am because of him. He has been my greatest cheerleader, my favorite sparring partner, my book buddy, my best friend, my confidante, my history teacher, my ethics teacher, and when I was younger, also my playmate and my song and story man all in one 6'2" package. I think Canada is right, other organizations are right, to push for fathers to remain in their children's lives even if they are no longer in their children's mothers' lives. But that doesn't change the fact that fathers do disappear, and working to make it less acceptable for them to do so is only half the battle. The other half is providing for those children and partners left behind.

I Love Neil Gaiman

I promise I'll post something more substantial in the coming days; I mean, I still haven't reviewed the latest Dollhouse episode, even though it is an episode that totally blew my mind and made me rework (mentally) the grading of the other episodes to date. But I'm lazy, and instead of rewatching (again) and thinking, I curled up with Stephen Colbert and Neil Gaiman. And Jon Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, but I care more about Neil Gaiman (a lot more). So I'd suggest watching this interview, because Gaiman totally rocks my socks:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil Gaiman
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Seeing this makes me kind of want to reread Neverwhere. Or maybe just watch the BBC production again...

P.S. My mother wants to know why I love such large men. She's a bit concerned that I love Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, and Jeff Goldblum.

Women, Rip Van Winkle, & Domestic Violence

A good friend of mine had up a link on his Facebook feed, advising people to read the fourth panel:Which reads: "Well, I wrote a little song about women, called 'Women are Special (They will not stop until we are dead". I had a problem with it at this point, and in the course of calling him for other reasons, pretty much expressed my distaste with the sentiment expressed in that one box. Because, hey, women are half of the population and if you seriously think maligning 50% of the population is a good idea, then there's a bit of an issue. He responded that most of the women in his life had wronged him at some point in some way, and I told him that most of the people in his life had wronged him at some point in some way - that's what happens when you have an insane amount of friends; some of them are going to not be so great, and sometimes even the great people screw up. He also mentioned the "Boys Are Stupid" Flair permeating Facebook as a reason why his link wasn't so bad. And here's where the "equal opportunity" insult falls flat on its face. Because the "Boys Are Stupid" flair is bad:

But it doesn't take into account certain inequities in life. There is a Gavin de Becker quote that says, "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them". Now, I'm not saying every woman is afraid of men, or that every man is afraid of being laughed at by women, or that some women aren't afraid of looking foolish in front of men or that some men will not experience the very real fear that a woman in their life is not only capable of killing or abusing them, but that it is also a probable outcome of their situation. What de Becker's quote does highlight, though, is the patently ridiculous and hurtful sentiment expressed in the above comic strip. Because domestic abuse is a very real, very large issue. Because:

Battering on women is the most under reported crime in America.

Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States; more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. "Violence Against Women, A Majority Staff Report," Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 102nd Congress, October 1992, p.3.

Three to four million women in the United States are beaten in their homes each year by their husbands, ex-husbands, or male lovers. "Women and Violence," Hearings before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, August 29 and December 11, 1990, Senate Hearing 101-939, pt. 1, p. 12.

One woman is beaten by her husband or partner every 15 seconds in the United States. Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1991.

About 1 out of 4 women are likely to be abused by a partner in her lifetime. Sara Glazer, "Violence, Against Women" CO Researcher, Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Volume 3, Number 8, February, 1993, p. 171.

Approximately 95% of the victims of domestic violence are women. Statistics, National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, Ruth Peachey, M.D. 1988.
...
Domestic violence is not only physical and sexual violence but also psychological. Psychological violence means intense and repetitive degradation, creating isolation, and controlling the actions or behaviors of the spouse through intimidation or manipulation to the detriment of the individual. "Five Year State Master Plan for the Prevention of and Service for Domestic Violence." Utah State Department of Human Services, January 1994.

Those statistics and figures make the assertion that it is women who will not stop until the men are dead laughable. And yet, the image of women sucking out the souls of men, as the comic continues on:

is a cultural staple. The shrewish woman is a staple on sit-coms, and in movies and in how we frame relationships. And it has been, for years and years, and centuries upon centuries. In stories like Rip Van Winkle, our sympathies are directed toward Rip:

I have observed that he was a simple, good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor and an obedient henpecked husband. Indeed, to the latter circumstances might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity; for those men are apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation, and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.

Certain it is that he was a great favorite among all the good wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles and never failed, whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle."

It isn't until we have been assured of the Dame's shrewish ways and Rip's goodliness that we are told in sympathetic terms what may account for Dame Van Winkle's irritability - though it isn't framed as such. According to Hawthorne, "The great error in Rip's composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable work", and his children looked ragged and like beggar children. And yet, still, we are told that he would do all the odd chores around the other wives' homes their "less obliging husbands would not do for them", possibly because those less obliging husbands were actually making the money necessary for their wives and children to not have to scrimp and save. And at the end of the tale, Rip awakens from his twenty year nap and finds his wife has died in his absence; this is seen as a major plus for Rip, as "he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle." Published in 1819, the perceived dynamic between men and women seems to have changed very little. Men endure wifely 'nagging', with little attention paid to whether or not that wife has a valid concern or not.

And what makes this even more insidious is that the same cultural norms play out when we are discussing the other, distorted aspects of male-female relationships. It comes down to the women. In domestic violence cases, one of the questions that invariably gets asked is "What did she do?", the implication being that if only the woman in question was a little less shrewish, a little less demonic, a little less harpish, she wouldn't have gotten hit. Again, this isn't the question that comes up for everyone; not everyone asks this question. Not everyone thinks this thought. But it is still a prevalent thought, in articles and message boards - especially in high profile cases. This same thing can be found when we discuss rape victims, when we tell women that to wear certain outfits and to go certain places and to act in certain ways is to open the door to sexual assault.

To assert that men are in general the victims of women and their soul-sucking ways is ludicrous. To assert that 'women', as a monolithic group, are threats to men and want them dead is also ludicrous. Because it just reinforces the notion of that mean woman married to the harried man. It attempts to give men, all men, regardless of whether or not they are married to nice, non-soul-sucking women, victim-status. It attempts to strip all women, whether or not they are nice, non-soul-sucking women, of their very humanity - literally, by turning them into demons. And it also reinforces the notion of men and women not as partners, not working in tandem, but as being in a constant struggle, as a war. I don't know about anyone else, but when I'm in a relationship, I prefer not to categorize that relationship as being a tug-of-war, a constant battle, a situation in which I am the perpetual victim. I would prefer to think of it - and portray it as - a give-and-take, a loving and dynamic duo. And for those who would categorize their relationships the other way, well, maybe they should just not be in a relationship.

A Review of Dollhouse's "Stage Fright", Part 2

This is Part 2 of an extremely long post. Part one is here.

Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects of this episode was something mzbitca foreshadowed when she said, "What I think will become clear is that we are not going to truly know who's operating on their own free will and who is truly a doll which I believe will turn the show completely upside down at one point". The Lubov/Victor reveal completely blew my mind, because I'm pathetic and couldn't see the signs a-coming. Like, Adelle DeWitt telling Dominic, "All the appropriate measures have been taken"; that one should have sent off warning bells upon warning bells. And yet, I remain completely oblivious to the twists and turns. At the same time, this whole Lubov/Victor thing opens up a whole new host of questions. Questions like, Does Victor/Lubov genuinely want to help Ballard in his quest, or does he know the information he gave Ballard was meant to get him killed? Has Lubov always been Victor? If so, how was he programmed to talk about Dollhouse without becoming disoriented, like we saw Echo become in "Ghost"?

For the record, I think Victor/Lubov didn't know about the death in the basement; my assessment comes purely from the "Watch your back" line, though, so it may be what I want to read in that more than what is actually there. And I tend to think, though I could be wrong, that Lubov has always been Victor and has been sent specifically to mess with Ballard. The other, almost more upsetting, way to read this is that Ballard's own dogged pursuit of the Dollhouse mystery ended up with the Borodins sending Lubov to the Dollhouse to get wiped - giving a whole new meaning to him not getting the "nice" death. Which, in a way, is better in terms of the actual story, the idea that no one is above implication in a system that is as widespread and as insidious as the Dollhouse is. It makes Ballard less the white knight, since he would be principally responsible for Lubov's wiping; it would also go toward demonstrating how Ballard has to this point treated Lubov as someone to be used as well, though for an ostensibly greater good. And by using Lubov, he has condemned Lubov to be used. Actually, I kind of hope that it is the second one. It makes the primary message of the show all the more potent, that using people as objects is a no-no, no matter how you do it or why.

And yet, Whedon (or at least one of the Whedons and Maurissa Tancharoen) also seem to suggest that this is rooted in who we are, and that we must struggle to overcome it:

PAUL: The technology exists.
LUBOV: Somebody made a monkey tango, right? It doesn't mean it's being used on people.
PAUL: It does. It does mean that.
LUBOV: How do you know?
PAUL: We split the atom, we make a bomb. We come up with anything new, the first thing we do is destroy, manipulate, control. It's human nature.
LUBOV: Yeah, people are mostly crap.

Aside from making me really like Lubov (and so, kind of sad to see him be Dollified), it is yet another strong, in-episode criticism of the very idea of a Dollhouse. It is yet another, poetically downer, message that this is a really bad thing that is happening and that we should recognize it as being a destructive force that deserves to be confronted and shuttered. It also demonstrates the dark side of Special Agent Paul Ballard; this is not a happy philosophy to live by. Neither is Lubov's "people are mostly crap", but he just sounds less affected by it than Ballard does. And yet, even with this pessimistic view of the world and humanity, Ballard still seems to feel that we can become better; it is not nihilistic, because he pursues a goal of the destruction of a destructive force.

This episode also deepens the audience's understanding of the Dollhouse's operation, and who are the more moralistic forces of the Dollhouse:

DR. SAUNDERS: I have her flagged for romantic or altruistic engagements only. Does anybody read these?

TOPHER: Her last romantic engagement turned out to be extremely high risk; maybe her engagement with Rayna will turn romantic. Ooh.

DR. SAUNDERS: She's a bodyguard?

TOPHER: She's a singer. Persona and parameter. Two separate elements. Persona: She's a struggling singer who just got her first break, yay. Parameter: She must protect Rayna. Which she will do instinctively and unconsciously at all times.

DR. SAUNDERS: So, she doesn't even know she's a bodyguard. And this makes what better?

With this, we see Dr. Saunders as an okay force; not a good force, just a better force than Topher. As Do Lurkers Dream of Electric Peeps? says, "Boyd Is Better Than The Rest. Better Doesn't Mean Good", the same can be said for Dr. Claire Saunders. She may not approve of unconscious bodyguarding, but she still approves of creating unconscious romantic attachments. It seems like Dr. Saunders and Boyd have incomplete moral codes, Adelle DeWitt and Lawrence Dominic have skewed moral codes, and Topher is just amoral. No one is morally righteous here, and no one has the high ground.

The progression of Echo, the bleeding of the CEOP (Current Echo Occupying Persona) into Echo, and the bleeding of Echo into the CEOP continues apace. Although I hated the beginning, the imprint of the importance of friendship upon Echo bled into her Jordan persona; that could have been because she was meant to be Rayna's friend, but Echo/Jordan also reacted to the fact that Sierra/Audre was in danger. When she said, "I have to help her", Echo/Jordan was looking at Sierra on the computer screen. She repeats Sierra's "Friends help each other out", and stretches the parameters of her assignment to reacquire Sierra as well as knock some sense into Rayna. She is special, because she makes her whole more than the sum of the parts the Dollhouse deigns to give her. But as Dr. Saunders tells Boyd, "Special isn't always a good thing", and that "sometimes the best thing to hope for, is good enough". There will probably come a time when Dominic's suggestion of sending Echo to the Attic will be more plausible, and harder for DeWitt to override.

Speaking of "The Attic", Dominic mentioned it last week, but I didn't delve into it. At the same time, the amount of references to feminist and prefeminist literature are piling up. The Attic plays a key function in Emily Bronte's Jane Eyre, housing Rochester's first wife Bertha; she is the madwoman housed in the attic, and she is the primary player in Wide Sargasso Sea (which, in my estimation, is heads and tails above the work it was inspired by). The nameless protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper" was confined to an upstairs bedroom, possibly in an attic. And, of course, there is The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, the 700+ work by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. As a feminist, I would imagine Whedon would be well aware of this tendency to put uppity women away and in an attic - especially in literature. Along with the Attic, there is the name, Dollhouse. Since those who are wiped are called Actives and not Dolls, there is more than a possible allusion to the Henrik Ibsen play "A Doll's House"; in fact, the first conversation I had with my father about Dollhouse went something like this:

ME: Jess is coming over friday to watch Dollhouse.

DAD: Oh?

ME: Yeah, because we have the big screen.

DAD: Oh. Right. Well, we'll probably be out at a basketball game.

ME: I could tape it for you.

DAD: Tape?! Ibsen?!

ME: What? No! Whedon! His new show?

DAD: Oh. I was wondering why you'd need to watch Ibsen on the big screen.

They made it back in time to see the show, by the way. 

Perhaps even more compelling is the fact that Nora was without agency until she discovered that there was more to life than being her husband's "little bird". She had to go on a journey of self-discovery, a discovery that had not ended when the play did. So who will Echo most emulate as a character? The unfairly maligned and destroyed and eventually dead Bertha? The broken and insane protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper"? Or will her story be the more hopeful one of Nora, a journey in which she leaves behind a life of being many someone else's plaything and aims to discover who she is and what to make of her life? The tension of Dollhouse may be the tension between these two divergent feminist story trajectories, between the destruction of woman by her society or the woman who escapes those bonds and works to create her own person. Based on Whedon's previous work, I think it will probably be more of the latter than the former but with bits of the former mixed in liberally.

Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist, Part Deux

I actually have been working on my New Year's Resolutions. I now know how to say "I am a gas station attendant" thanks to crispybenfranklin (putting me that much closer to actually being fluent in another language!), I am working out a list of who to donate to and when (January being for National Broadcasting, in which I gave money to NPR, CPTV, and Chicago Public Radio), I subscribed to The Nation Magazine, and I wrote a blogpost for the shared blog! It isn't the post John actually wanted from me for Wit War, but it is a post nonetheless. An excerpt:

I've seen the movie; I've read my friends' reviews of the book. And now I've read the book (a book I conveniently stole from another friend, who needs the book back due to it being a library book). And I have to say, I'm pretty glad I saw the movie before I read the book; otherwise, I would not have been interested in seeing the movie in the least. Which puts me in the minority among my co-bloggers, who liked the book more than the film. I started reading it while at the friend's house I then liberated it from, and I was immediately drawn in to its teen-pretentiousness, and its less than stellar writing. And this may partially be because I have really never been into YA novels; I was reading The Odyssey when I was in fifth grade, so I kind of missed this important book category. But my initial review of the book is this (and it helps if you've seen Sports Night to appreciate the inflection of the words): "Took two people to write that [book]?" Now, Isaac was speaking of the song Happy Birthday, but I think the incredulity of his response still stands.

The rest of it is here, if you are so inclined.

Review: Street Gang

Michael Davis' Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, is well constructed and thoroughly researched. Although we don't actually get to Sesame Street's premiere until page 199, more than halfway through the book, Davis' focus on how we got such a television show in the first place was entertaining, involved, and understandable. It is impossible for me to now think about how the book could have - or should have - been constructed. It seems obvious that the different key players' journeys to Sesame Street had to be highlighted and examined, how working on Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo helped form several of the key players responsible for Sesame Street's ultimate vision and aesthetics.

The book doesn't make any particular person out to be a saint or a sinner; each has strengths and weaknesses. Jon Stone didn't get along with David Connell, and he didn't like Carroll Spinney. But that doesn't say anything horrible about Stone, or Connell, or Spinney. Street Gang even examines how Sesame Street itself failed in some areas, how it at first ignored the Latino community, focusing instead on the African-American community and only recognizing its error and rectifying it by adding Maria and Luis after the Latino community protested. It (briefly) touches upon NOW's issues with Sesame Street's portrayal of women, though it does not really grant any of the feminists' basic concerns. It explores the demons present in some of the cast most affected by racism, like Matt Robinson, the original Gordon, whose sister died because several hospitals in the area would not treat her due to her skin color. And Northern Calloway, who abused cocaine, was bipolar, and who deeply resented his lack of success as being a product of his race.

What the book depicts is how a group of singularly talented people but radically diverse people came together for a common cause, that being to produce an entertaining and educational show. It details how these people, some of extraordinary ego, worked in tandem for years in order to achieve that goal, how they went about forming that goal, and how they developed and tested that goal. It examines the other child education programs of the time, and how Sesame Street deviated from the norm by not being set on a ship or in an idyllic place; how Sesame Street sought to help bridge the gap in education between the most disenfranchised populations of the inner cities and their middle-class, white suburban compatriots, and how it chose as its set a more realistic city setting. How it was integrated, how it had more than one primary host, and how the program was free from in show advertising of its tie-in products. And along the way, Davis closely examines the different important people who made Sesame Street what it was. Joan Ganz Cooney's familial history is assessed, her penchant for getting jobs she wasn't necessarily qualified for, how she was able to succeed in those jobs, her interest in public television, and her marriage to Tim Cooney and dissolution of that marriage, and her ability to be both the laissez-faire boss and the intrepid ring-leader of the Sesame Street project. The book starts with her walking up to Jim Henson's funeral, and appropriately so. Henson's Muppets were an integral part of the show's success, but the show itself was borne from a question asked at a dinner party of Ganz Cooney's, and it was her work - along with several of the other dinner guests - that both established the potentiality of a show like Sesame Street and Jim Henson's own involvement in Sesame Street (which adequately explains Count von Count's "Hi Mom" as Ganz Cooney's name scrolls by in "Follow That Bird").

Certain cast members are also described more fully than others; we are given quite a lot about Bob McGrath, who played "Bob", and his success as a singer in Japan - along with the fan clubs that sprung up there in his honor. Also highlighted were performers such as Carroll Spinney (Big Bird and Oscar), Sonia Manzano (Maria), and Loretta Long. And while quite a lot was written about the first true Gordon, the second and third Gordons got nada. Over all though, the book is an interesting read for anyone who is at all interested in Sesame Street, public television, children's programming, or even just the combined story of a few passionate individuals who succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations. For that alone, the success story and the genius and inquiry of those involved is worth the pages the book is printed on.

Read: √

Skim:

Toss:

Happy Birthday, Paddington Bear!

I friggin' loved Paddington Bear as a kid. I even tried marmalade because Paddington liked it so much (I, however, did not like it so much). And so, while going onto Google today, I was extremely excited/surprised to see this:

Paddington Bear is officially fifty years old today. I almost feel like digging out my old books and enjoying the bear from darkest Peru, dressed almost continually in his rain coat and hat and galoshes.

I Read Banned Books

So, this week is banned book week; and since it is Wednesday, I figured I would finally get around to discussing it. Earlgreyrooibos has decided to celebrate by taking a banned book (or series of books from the same author) and discussing it. If the lime greenness of her page hurts your eyes as it sometimes does mine, those posts can also be found here. One thing that surprises me is that Beloved is on the list; not because it isn't adult and not because it doesn't have themes that adults generally decide are too offensive for minors, but because my English teacher had us read it in high school. Since she was the type of woman who shrieked when naked butts came on the screen while showing the class the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet and attempted to cover them up with a piece of paper, I naturally assumed she would be the kind of woman who would be loathe to introduce a book with Beloved's descriptions of sexuality. But she surprised me, and I'm glad she did. Because Beloved (one of the books earlgrey highlights on Day 3) was beautiful and moving and haunting. It was also my first foray into stream of consciousness writing, the three chapters of which (20-22) I dutifully muscled through because I loved the book so much.

Banning books or challenging books present in schools is very much a problem for me, because the parents never choose to ban the boring books. I could have lived without having to read Great Expectations in 9th grade. I could have lived without being forced to read The Old Man and The Sea in 8th grade. Maybe I wouldn't have such a burning hatred for Hemingway had that not occurred. I am also sure that both of those books are great works; but when we are discussing 'age appropriate' materials, it seems strange that we ban books that deal with controversial issues the students themselves may relate to (puberty, isolation, sexuality) instead of putting on hold those books that need a bit longer frame of reference. My father is convinced that if I read The Old Man and The Sea when I'm around 30, I will love it because the frame of my own existence will better inform me of Santiago's. I suppose that may be true; but as I was reading it, I couldn't help but focus on the fact that this was a book that took 88 pages to say what could be adequately summed up in five lines.

I actually don't agree with the banning of any book, because book banning is a way of sanitizing life. As much as I like Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories more than The Catcher in the Rye, I understand the latter's significance. The reasons for banning it include the fact that Holden is a poor role model, but refuse to entertain the thought that maybe teenagers are smart enough not to look to Holden to be that role model. To ignore Holden's plight and story and impulses is to ignore the very facets of existence. To ban a book because it has profanity (which most students have heard), drinking (which most students know about), and promiscuity (I don't think I got that memo) is to pretend that those aspects of life are foreign to students and to expose them to these elements in literary form will somehow formalize ideas they hitherto did not know they possessed. Books banned generally contain themes and language that are uncomfortable for adults, not the students who who being protected. Adults do not want to believe that students are sexual, that students swear, that students are in actuality full human beings with the conflicting thoughts and desires that entails. By banning books, they seem to feel that they are protecting their children from unsavory influences. But I have never known a child to go bad because of a book.

(Fictional) Feminist Icon: Matilda

Matilda Wormwood is a feminist icon; she may not have been written with that in mind, but Matilda herself and the book in general is full of what I would deem feminist thought. First and foremost is the fact that Matilda is not a girl who misses much. She is intelligent, poised, and fully in control. She doesn't care about dolls or keeping house. She is uninterested in watching television or learning from her mother how to catch and keep a man. She is interested in reading; she is shown proactively seeking out the library and books she can become engrossed in. She is shown to be almost better at math than she is at reading. She is a mathematical genius. And she is someone who is analytical and who can devise strategies for dealing with imbecilic parents and violent headmistresses. When her book gets torn up by her enraged father, she doesn't cry; she simply figures out a way to get even, and doesn't get caught. She is the very height of precocious child, but what is almost more important is that she isn't alone.

I have heard some criticism about movies like Juno being that only the title character is a fully formed, intelligent girl. Juno is an anomaly in her world because she is smart and sassy and in control. Other movies or shows or books have a smart woman character who very rarely interacts with other women characters. Harry Potter generally falls into this plight in regard to Hermione Granger. No matter how great a character Hermione is, she is the only fully formed girl the books offer. We often hear about how great Ginny is, but the fact is the character has very little agency throughout the book series. We are told she is brilliant and to love her, but she never becomes fully formed. These sort of token women aren't really a step forward for women in fiction; they generally seem to be there because it is un-PC to have a movie or television show without a woman on it anymore. But Matilda is different. Roald Dahl created a world where we are introduced to more fully formed women than men. Mr. Wormwood is really the only man we meet who is of any note in the novel, with Bruce Bogtrotter and Nigel playing lesser roles for male representation. We have Matilda, obviously. But also Matilda's best friend Lavender, who is described as being "gutsy and adventurous"; Lavender and Matilda are the two girls in their age group given the most focus in the novel, and both girls admire in the other a keen sense of action; Lavender decides to play a prank on the Trunchbull in order to be a heroine like Hortensia and Matilda. These aren't girls for whom being the heroine of the tale is to wait to be rescued or for a man to take care of the monster but who expect to do it themselves and without reservation. The same thing can be noted for the character of Hortensia, who at the age of ten is still more interested in regaling newcomers with her tales of epic battle than she is in fashion or boys or expecting Bruce to be the one to come up with the really great pranks.

And the book goes beyond just putting forth good role models for girls into skewering anti-intellectualism. When Mrs. Wormwood tells Miss Honey, "You chose books. I chose looks" and proclaims that she is the one who finished better off, we are meant to recognize the ridiculousness in that statement. When Mr. Wormwood dismisses going to a university as a worthwhile goal, Miss Honey gets the last word when she retorts, "If you had a heart attack this minute and had to call a doctor, that doctor would be a university graduate. If you got sued for selling someone a rotten second-hand car, you'd have to get a lawyer and he'd be a university graduate, too. Do not despise clever people, Mr. Wormwood".

What the book succeeds in doing is presenting different forms of women. Women aren't universally praised; Mrs. Wormwood and the Trunchbull are examples of how women can be just as small-minded and evil as men. But the Trunchbull especially is placed alongside other women, and she is defeated by a girl as well. The book manages to be about girl power without minimizing that effect by repackaging it in a Spice Girls "We still care about looks and make-up" way. It is a book about an extraordinary little girl who encounters other noteworthy women. It is a book that manages to make a girl who is immersed in learning both approachable and successful, both happy and well-adjusted. It is a book about a girl who is proud of how intelligent she is and who isn't afraid to demonstrate that intellect, who has never absorbed the lessons set forth by society that intelligence is bad and is doubly bad to have if one is a woman. Because that message is the triumphant one in the book, because Matilda is so smart and active and in control and Dahl presents it as a good thing, Matilda succeeds in being a feminist tale, and a brilliant one at that.

Special thanks to my best friend, whose copy of Matilda I stole more than a few years ago...

Review: Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

Two weeks ago, I picked up at the library Bill Moyers' On Democracy, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, and a book by Alan Alda to break up the two heavy hitters called Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself. I'm fairly certain my library is utterly confused by my reading habits, as my librarian stared at my book choices until she got to Alan Alda, who, she said, looked like a "nice man". Given her age and the prevalence of M*A*S*H both during its run and after (my mother had a M*A*S*H shirt made in 1981 and the only reason why she doesn't have it any more is because I stole it), I was a bit confused. And it led me to questions like, "Does she not know who Alan Alda is?", "Does she assume I don't know who Alan Alda is?", and perhaps the most important, "How do I respond to 'he looks like a nice man'?" My first two questions are probably forever going to be unanswered, but the last one was; and the answer turned out to be "very poorly". I smiled confusedly and said, "Yes... he does", which probably made me look a bit slow.

All that small town confusion and small talk aside, Alan Alda appears to actually be a nice man, and doesn't just look like one. A nice man with an overwhelmingly positive outlook on life, even as he recognizes the depressing and overarching problems we face. The book is a mix of musings written for the book itself and speeches he gave to various organizations and graduating classes -and how those speeches came to be. Each speech is of a common theme -life, and how best to live it- and yet all are unique, all are funny, and all -as Alan Alda points out as being the point of the title- demonstrate more about how Alan Alda thinks and what gems he believes should be recognized than any universal truth. His truth is that the meaning of life is living itself, and it is one I embrace wholeheartedly.

 Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself is apparently a direct follow-up to Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, a book I haven't yet read and my library probably doesn't own. I thought that may be a problem because the book starts off where the last one ended, with Alda nearly dying on a mountaintop in Chile, and I didn't really know if I wanted to only read about his life from that point on; luckily for me, Alda jumps timelines. Also luckily for me, Alda's 'voice', his style of speaking, his style of delivering lines, is in full effect. Maybe it is that I watched too much M*A*S*H; maybe it is the fact that he was a very large part of Free To Be... You and Me, a tape my grandfather got me and that my mother later replaced on CD, to the horror of my friends and other family members. But while reading his book, I could hear him; and that made the experience all the greater.

What also impressed me was this: his take on existentialism. It is my own: 

Maybe it was my natural optimism at work, but what I saw and warmed to in the existentialist's writings was that life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; it's up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something, it's as though you aren't there. Existentialism was supposed to be the philosophy of despair. But not to me. To me, it was the essence of hope -because it touched the cold, hard stone at rock bottom and saw it as a way to push off it and bounce back up again.

That right there is the theme of the book: life is what you make it, so go out there and make it the best life you can. Life is for living, and enjoying. And Alan Alda's book is fully enjoyable. So I'm going to steal something from a blog I read, a shorthand review tool:

Read:√

Skim:

Toss:

And a special thanks to whoever gave the library this book in memory of Michael J. Senew.

"Girlie" Math

Danica McKellar, she of Wonder Years fame, has grown all up and become a mathematician. Everyone who has ever watched VH1's "Where Are They Now" probably knows that (and what happened to that show?). And after growing up, writing a physics theorem that has been named after her, becoming a yoga instructor (seriously, she and her mom have a line of videos), and continuing on as an actress, Danica McKellar decided to do something to help minimize the gap between girls and boys in math classes and possibly mathematical fields. On a visit to Good Morning America -and if you watch the clip, look for the little girl by the back window- she said, "Boys and girls are afraid of math in junior high, make no mistake about it." But boys are encouraged to go into math and sciences whereas "girls don't end up going into math and science as much as young women because they're not encouraged to. They're told in every message conceivable, every form conceivable -billboards, magazines, tv shows, movies- that people who do math and science are nerdy, and they're guys, and they're told that math is not for them."

So she wrote a book, Math Doesn't Suck, which I'm sure many people have heard about. Math Doesn't Suck is an interesting book with an interesting premise -that if you teach "girlie" math, math with feminized examples in a "fun" way, then girls will learn math and like math and be more likely to go into math. Making it look like the cover of a teen magazine (and Kiss My Math goes further with this theme), Danica McKellar tries to take the fear out of math by making it safe for girls. By integrating lessons on fractions, decimals, and percents with quizzes on being a "math-o-phobe" and questions about teenage (or preteen) crushes and horoscopes. Kiss My Math has the same premise and the same cover, with tips on how to beat stress and ways of finding out if the girl in question has supportive friends. 

It is kind of like guerilla warfare, education style. The books Danica McKellar writes are about things like being cool and feminine and having boyfriends. She says, "In Kiss My Math, I teach averages and I say, 'Okay, if your boyfriend texted you this many times today and this many times tomorrow and here's the whole week, how many times on average did he text you?'; that may be something a 13, 14 year old girl would be interested in knowing." And she may be right. Maybe the way to teach girls math is to segregate the examples we give to boys (bullet speed, trains meeting, traditional stuff), and examples we give to girls (lipstick color, texts received, feminine stuff), but I'm not convinced. As much as I like Danica McKellar and as much as I think she is doing a wonderful thing by trying to get girls interested in math -and as much as I agree with her that knowing math "just empowers them"- I can't help but feel that books like this and examples like this just reinforce certain gender stereotypes. 

And it leaves no place for the girl who either doesn't have a boyfriend or doesn't care how many times her boyfriend texted her, the girl who is turned off by girlie script and the idea that girls are going to intrinsically care about hair styles and boys and being popular and cool. And -perhaps more insidiously- it makes it seem like in order to succeed in math, girls have to be pretty and fashion-savvy. The girl with bad hair and no fashion sense still has no place in math. It reinforces the notion of what traditionally makes up proper girl behavior, and it adds math to the mix. Danica McKellar and her books aren't the only guilty parties here; Newsweek had an article about the Nerdette, and every girl highlighted was a fashionista and tech-and-math friendly. Maybe this is the way it has to be done; maybe in order to make girls in math palatable to both girls and the greater society at large, girls in those fields need to be girlied up and made to be not only smart but also sexy -not only tech savvy but also pretty. Maybe girls will be more interested in math if they know boys will still be interested in them, and maybe boys will be less threatened by girls in math if those girls would be equally at home on the cover of Vogue. 

But I wouldn't count on it. And it hurts girls who look more like Sara Gilbert (who I mention because she guest-starred on The Big Bang Theory) than they do Danica McKellar. McKellar mentions that being good at math is seen by girls as nerdy, and nerdy implicitly equals bad. But nerdy is no longer a groin to the flagpole offense for guys ever since the tech revolution, so we need to work more as a society for making it less of a crime for girls as well. That would mean turning the focus away from looks as being one of the most important things about a girl, and that would be good for girls interested in math and in general.

I think the thing that breaks down the real problem of math and girls -the problem Danica McKellar highlights in the beginning of girls being not only not encouraged but even discouraged from entering math fields- is being solved more by McKellar's own exposure than even by her books. Here is a girl who has succeeded in math and science and is being celebrated for it on news programs and on book lists. She highlights that it can be done, that girls can be afraid of math in junior high and still succeed. She is the ambassador, the woman girls can point to when they're in their guidance counselor's office; one of the people who can counteract the billboards and movies and tv series. We just need more of her out there, spreading that message.

Review: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

The enjoyable thing about reading memoirs, essays regarding familial life, and autobiographies of people we would term more or less "ordinary" is that often your own family looks better in comparison. These contain instances we snigger at, instances that would never in a million years be present in our own abode. When that isn't the case, there generally is the feeling that this family is your family's type of crazy; that you could easily see these antics and these characters in your own family tree, and so a sort of warmth and affection comes through toward these people -in some instances long since dead- because they prove that no, your family isn't, in fact, completely off their collective rocker and that there is a club and in this club behavior that is often present in your particular home is in fact the "norm". It is all those other families who do not have relatives throwing shoes down the hallways in order to ward off burglaries that have something wrong with them. My Life and Hard Times manages that side of it.

Sometimes a book manages to deftly balance between the two; David Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is one of those. This is a book I've put off reading for quite a while for various reasons, not the least among them being that I tend to not like modern memoirs. This is because there is a dark underbelly to memoirs that do not fall into the "enjoyable" realm. In some cases, reading about these various lives leave me feeling vaguely dirty -like just by reading about someone's violation or slow starvation in Ireland I have somehow both experienced the same incident and yet also contributed to its existence in the first place. Angela's Ashes was one of those books. I made it as far as the baby's death the first time I read it; the second time I managed to bully my way through about half the book. I had begun reading it because both of my parents insisted that it was hilarious; when I found it to be the very opposite, they told me it was because I wasn't reading it with an Irish brogue. Well, okay, but even with an Irish brogue, babies are still dead, fathers are still drunkards, and these kids still had miserable lives. People told me David Sedaris was funny, but I'd already been burned once by that line, thank you, and wasn't about to try again.

The other reason I had for not reading this particular book is not against David Sedaris in particular or the genre in general but a real antipathy for the book's title. It grew out of having to write a paper about the blue jean as an aspect of American visual culture. There is a surprising lack of academic study done on the topic, and so Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim would always pop up among the first three or so results. And nearly every single time, I would approach the book as if it were something other than a compilation of essays about this particular man and his family, as if it truly were about denim and potentially dressing your family in it. For that reason -and the fact that I seriously considered (and, I believe, actually did) bulking up my works cited page with children's books about fashion- I was less than pleased with its consistent appearance.

And so I harbored a real resentment for this particular book; but in between my reading about Hillary Clinton and various reasons why the teaching of religion was necessary and the nefarious way Jesus and Christianity had been co-opted by the right wing facets of America, I decided to try David Sedaris based on having seen him on The Daily Show. My library, being a part of my tiny, "blink and you miss it" town, didn't have his newest book. In fact, we had two books by him; but the one copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day was out, leaving Corduroy and Denim as the only offering available.

And I loved it. As usual, my interest waned in the adolescent years; and though there were the incidents that made me feel superior about my own family's position -descriptions of his brother Paul and his sister Tiffany were the best for this- other moments felt comfortingly familiar. And he can write. That won't be much of a surprise to many others, but I generally go out of my way to ignore recent authors, even ones my friends and family recommend and read. I am more at home among Steinbeck's work, Austen's work, Salinger's short stories, etc. Much like my music choices, I like my books to have been aged and critiqued by at least 50 years of readers before I take a dive into their pages. David Sedaris has, in one book, managed to make me think about potentially rethinking that philosophy.

I found myself marking passages mentally, to revisit. The book was able to both be new and fascinating and wholly engrossing and still feeling familiar and worn and comforting. Passages describing the Netherlands' celebration of Santa were amazing, amusing, and able to highlight others' idiosyncrasies without appearing smug. In the end, I have to say that the praises heaped upon him by the back of the book jacket are right: Sedaris is in possession of a certain pleasurable satirical wit; his talent probably could rival the size of China. I'll be sure to read him again, and soon. I just have to get through When Did Jesus Become Republican first.

Review: 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary

In a recent trip to my town's library, I unexpectedly picked up a book about Hillary Clinton. I've never had the inclination to pick up her book, Living History, so I was a little surprised that my attention was held by Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections By Women Writers, a book among the 6 or so new arrivals (I also picked up Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy and a book entitled When Did Jesus Become Republican?, leaving precious few other new selections for the other residents of my sleepy little town). The book is what its title proclaims it to be: 30 different takes on Hillary Clinton by 30 different women writers. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that everyone I know go out and have a look. Like all compilations, it has some essays worth reading and some that are best skipped. No one needs to read "Political Animals" by Susan Orlean, an essay that examines what Hillary's lack of personal pet ownership says about her and her candidacy. "RE: Hillary" was kind of a bust as well.

Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, the essays that were my favorites played to my preconceived notions of Hillary, gender, and the like. "Monarchy in the Making" was just the ravings of a liberal lunatic, someone who seemed incapable of recognizing how political families aren't necessarily a bad thing, and that it takes more than two people from the same family being democratically elected to make a monarchy. "The Road to Cleavagegate" was one that I was looking forward to reading when I first glanced at the table of contents, and was deeply disappointed with the level of analysis the nature of the beast was given. Plus, it had the ire-inducing statement, "No one thinks it diminishes a male candidate when he fluffs up his masculinity by discussing his favorite sports team in an interview. Clinton -or any woman- should not feel aggrieved if she is asked about her favorite designer". I shook my head violently at that statement, and not just because I can tell you more about my favorite sports teams than any designer; I mean, I'm someone who thought for the longest time that the designer Hermes was pronounced the same way the Greek god is. It is because as long as the male candidate isn't asked about his favorite designer along with the sports questions, and the female candidate isn't asked about her sports teams period, it is still an inherently sexist question.

The book definitely has some worthwhile moments; my anger toward Robin Givhan ("Cleavagegate"'s author) was alleviated and my enjoyment of the book as a whole grew when a later essay by Leslie Bennetts, "Beyond Gender", looked sourly upon Givhan's Washington Post fashion editorial about Clinton's cleavage -thought without name checking Givhan directly. It was an excellent moment, though probably a red-faced one for both authors involved. I bet when Givhan was proclaiming that the Clinton campaign overreacted to her statements of Clinton's femininity, she wasn't expecting to be quoted as comparing that femininity to seeing a man with his fly unzipped. And Bennetts herself probably hadn't anticipated Givhan's own participation in the project.

Several of the authors made it about the personal first and then connected their own history to Hillary. A couple failed, boring me completely. "The Validator" by Kathryn Harrison is one of those, more about her dictator of a grandmother than Hillary. But a couple really succeed. "Hillary's Underpants" by Lara Vapnyar and "Hell, My Name Is..." by Cristina Henriquez both manage to find the balance necessary for a compelling essay. (Hint: the balance is more toward the subject than toward the author.)

There is one contention made time and time again through the book; well, two. One is about Hillary's outward appearance. The very first essay is entitled "Yellow Pantsuit" and it rambles on and on and on about how Hillary-in-pantsuit (of presumably any color) is putting on a costume that belies her hippie clothing and coke-bottle frames of the past, instead of acknowledging that no one is going to get elected president wearing a pooka-shell necklace or peace beads; please, that would be like getting elected without wearing a flag pin. It also neglects the fact that Obama and McCain both would probably be more comfortable in jeans than their suits. Several others talk about how unattractive she is/was, or how she is perceived as unattractive. I went on the 'web and googled up a few images; what I found didn't horrify me. In fact, the woman of those pictures, especially the early pictures, is a woman I could see befriending. Mostly though, the articles about her looks and sense of style were boring and ignored the real issues of women in politics, one of them being "Why the hell are we so hung up on their clothes?" One essay attempted to cover that, but instead highlighted statements made by Hillary's detractors without offering many reasons as to what influenced their opinions.

The second assertion is that women don't like Hillary. I find that odd; I know there are women out there who dislike her. But a majority of the women I know like Hillary well enough. A few, like my mother and I, love her. And really, how many politicians do people really and truly love, or even like? There is a reason Bill, JFK, RFK, and the Gipper are held up as beacons; they are four politicians in modern times who managed to elicit an at times logic-defying, rock-star equivalent love from their constituents among the hundreds who are met with more tepid responses. No one truly loved Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon (especially now with Nixon). No one went ga-ga over LBJ. The Roosevelts, yes. But a vast majority of our politicians fall into that nether region of necessary more than likable.

The essays I liked the best were the ones that surprised me; the ones that went beyond the surface of the thing and really looked at some of the issues writhing underneath. Some of them reverberated with anger. Others were more tongue in cheek. But the ones I liked said something. And the ones I didn't like? Well, they said the same old thing.