This is gorgeous…

I’m reading a book about writing that features great selections from all kinds of different books. Here’s one from Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us:

When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.

I’m pretty much swooning out of my chair.

Losing and finding Lucy Maud Montgomery

I just finished the Lucy Maud Montgomery biography by Mary Henley Rubio, and it broke my heart over and over again. There’s so much I didn’t know about her, and what I mostly didn’t know was how bad it was: her life was hard. She struggled with her own mental illness, in addition to her husband and son’s. I’m certainly not the first person to assume that the person who invented Anne Shirley had a happy childhood and generally contented life.

Beyond her personal family struggles, the critics turned on Maud in the 1920s; this devastated her. Rubio writes:

In the mid-1920s, the growing cadre of men who panned her books included influential newsmen, university professors, and writers in Canada, and they all knew each other. In 1926, one of Canada’s powerful newspaper critics led the attach, labelling her books the nadir of Canadian fiction. A much respected professor of literature termed her books ‘naive’ with an ‘innocence’ that suggested ‘ignorance of life.’… In the face of such attacks, even the critics who had previously lauded her writing started being careful to temper their praise.

Nevertheless, all these men were impressed (and annoyed) by her sales and success. While some allowed that her large readership might speak to some undefined cultural need, others have felt that her popularity merely proved her ‘lowbrow’ quality. These detractors spoke with such a powerful voice in Canada between the mid-1920s and her death in 1942 that her work fell into disfavour… By the 1970s, the general wisdom was that Montgomery was a sentimental writer who appealed to the uncultured and masses of undiscriminating women and children, and still in the 1980s expressing an admiration for Maud’s books was rather risky. She was relegated strictly to the category of ‘children’s writer,’ and was judged by her weakest books, not her best.

For over 50 years, even during the hardest times, even when her family was coming apart at the seams, L.M. Montgomery kept writing. I can’t imagine what that drive is like – part of it was motivated by financial worries, since the publisher of her early books, especially the cash cow Anne of Green Gables, screwed her out of royalties. A lot of her drive came from being an ambitious hard worker at a time and place (turn of the century PEI) where being ambitious was not something a woman should be.

I feel closer to Maud now that I ever have. There’s something very sad about her, but something inspiring too.

You’re never through with surprises til you’re dead…

I’ve been reading up on Lucy Maud Montgomery lately for a piece I’m writing. I’ve learned a few sad, surprising, and interesting things.

One, she didn’t write Anne until she was 30-years old. Her first novel (AGG) wasn’t published until she was 33-years old. This makes me feel like slightly less of a loser.

Two, she likely died by suicide, 75 years ago today. I remember when this news came out back around the Anne centennial in 2008 but I had put it out of my mind. Her life in Ontario seems quite lonely and full of hardships, mostly domestic.

Three, her archives are at the University of Guelph, 45 minutes from my door. I must pay a visit.

And four, the Emily series, my absolute favourite, was her most autobiographical work. Emily was a dark little weirdo writer I always strongly identified with as a young person. I recently re-read the whole series for the first time in 20 years and loved it just as much.

Thanks, Maud, you strange little Island weirdo, who made millions of us feel less alone.

What kind of worries are these?

At first I was worried that all the good motherhood stuff has been already written. But then I realized, just like every person writes about childhood differently – think David Sedaris vs Dorothy Allison – everyone can write about parenthood differently. There are a million ways be a child. Yes, there are shared responsibilities that link most parents across the board (the non-negligent ones, anyway), there are also a million ways to be a parent, and a million and a half feelings you can encounter along the way.

The question is, why I have internalized it any differently? Clearly when society devalues mothers they devalue their stories. Are fatherhood stories dismissed the same way? Unlikely.

This is why I should stop worrying and start writing.

And if a nice White lady writer from Nashville can be called dangerous…

The way Ann Patchett wrote about Lucy: I, and many others, loved it.

Some people very much didn’t like it. In an essay called “The Love Between Two Women Is Not Normal” from This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Patchett writes about the backlash she received when Truth and Beauty was assigned to incoming freshmen. A protest was planned.

My friends from New York offered to go with me to South Carolina, expecting a gladiatorial match I would surely win. My friends from home read drafts of my speech and howled over the ever-growing stack of newspaper clippings. My friend from Mississippi told me not to go. “Cancel,” she said. “Cancel, cancel, cancel.” Mississippians tend not to be cavalier about the dangers of bigotry in the Deep South.

And why the fuss? It doesn’t surprise me:

“The love between the two women is not normal.” The reporter and the seventeen-year-old had finally come out and said the thing that no one else had had the nerve to mention: Lucy and I must have been having sex with each other. That was the only explanation for our loyalty, love, and devotion. Sex was the payoff for a difficult relationship, and without the sex the whole thing made no sense.

She went, she gave her speech with a bodyguard there, and she notes there wasn’t much protest. She admits to spending a huge amount of time on her speech, hoping it would persuade young hearts and minds to avoid censorship, but ultimately doesn’t think she changed many minds, which is indeed a topic for another day.

In my better moments, I tell myself what happened was a noble battle between freedom and oppression, but I knot it is equally possible that nothing so lofty occurred. Some people find sex and suffering and deep friendship between women unpalatable subjects, and seeing these subjects bearing down on their children, they no doubt felt they had to try and stop it. They didn’t succeed, but I seriously doubt that anyone was harmed by completing the assignment. If I am the worst thing the students of Clemson have to fear, then their lives will be very beautiful indeed.

 

Oh Ann Patchett can soothe the soul…

I mentioned in the last post how vital and beautiful Ann Patchett’s writing about female friendship is. It’s also unique, as Erin Wunker pointed out. When Ann met Lucy:

When I turned around the say hello, she shot through the door with a howl. In a second she was in my arms, leaping up onto me, her arms locked around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist, ninety-five pounds that felt no more than thirty. She was crying into my hair. She squeezed her legs tighter. It was not a greeting so much as it was a claim: she was staking out this spot on my chest as her own and I was to hold her for as long as she wanted to stay….

I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first. I felt I had been chosen by Lucy and I was thrilled. I was twenty-one years old and very strong. She had a habit of pitching herself into my arms like a softball without any notice. She liked to be carried.

I’ve read Truth and Beauty: A Friendship at least six times. That bolded line has always, and will always stick with me. It is one of the best books I have ever read about beauty, and about  love. It is a memoir about two women best friends.

I did Lucy and myself a great disservice our second year at Iowa and left the house on Governor Street to move in with my boyfriend, who lived in a small cottage behind a larger house a mile away. This act of packing up an leaving home set in motion a much larger mistake that would take years to correct. At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was doing something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all. Wasn’t it more important to live with a man, a man who was certain to wake up one day and be happy because I was there with all my good intentions sleeping beside him? Wasn’t that more valuable than staying with a friend who made me laugh, who made me think about everything, but was, in the end, just a girl?

Ann Patchett has this language that Erin Wunker seeks, but is one of the few.

 

Finding a book at the right time…

A feminist book which addresses mothering, among other things. I just read and loved Notes From a Feminist Killjoy by Erin Wunker. She`s a feminist academic, blogger, activist and mother. She also, like me, loves Sara Ahmed.

She has a section of friendship that I love:

I hate most of the words used to describe friendship among women.

What is it about female friendship that inspires such insipid descriptors? I struggle to find a collective noun that fits my friends without itching in it’s not-quite-right fit. My girls (too infantilizing). My crew (I don’t row, so…). My gal pals (sounds like a condition. My tribe (too new age-appropriative). My bitches (just no). ….

I’ve been looking for the language to describe friendship among women to myself, but I haven’t found it yet.

Why is that?

What do we resist when we resist finding or forging this language? What do we lose when we don’t have the language to name the communities of care that hold our heads above water and bring us back to ourselves?“

I’m thinking so much about communities of care lately, partly because of my new job. Now I’m re-reading Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, which describes a female friendship in the best way, in the most unique and beautiful way. Ann Patchett found the language that so few have. I still have to digest this book, and will have more to say later…

“A birth story is a bit like… a war story”

“A birth story is a bit like the female version of a war story – an endlessly repeatable, endlessly compelling ritual form. We know its contours, its rhythms, its stakes. We know that our hero makes it out alive – they’re here to testify to what they’ve seen. All that may feel familiar. But what opportunities for unexpected newness would get missed if we avoided the familiar, the conventional, the universal?”

–Molly Fischer, in her review of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson.

Thinking on this. Working on this.

And you want to travel blind…

Been luxuriating in a fog of Cohen.

Writing again…

Well, what do you know, I’m working on some stuff. A suggestion, from an artist-in-residence at an art school I went to in 2005, made to me Jan 20th, 2008, is finally bearing fruit. My Donna Tartt-ish pace with be the death of me.

Better than late than never, I suppose.

 

The Misadventures of Post-Recession Rory Part 2: Rory Gets Rejected

While mopping the floors at Luke’s diner night after night, Rory has a lot of time to think about the next phase of her life. She considers asking Logan’s dad for a job, but can’t ignore the fact that his newspapers are closing one by one. Lorelei perkily suggests a master’s in journalism, and Rory pooh-poohs it; would it really put her any further ahead of the now fierce competition? The epic return-to-grad-school/flee real life/panic applications of 2008/2009 has made her ask herself some serious questions about her chosen field of journalism. Maybe Logan’s slimy dad is right. (I’ve personally always thought he nailed it when he assessed Rory). Rory isn’t a shark. Rory doesn’t really like to compete.

Here’s where Rory and I are once again alike. She’s high-achieving, yes, but not Paris. I’ve always had a (slightly less insane) Paris in my life, a best friend who was the top of the class, and needed to be so. The Parises of the world will always be fine, career-wise, but the Rorys? (And maybe the Alixes?) Not so sure. She and I tire of competition quickly and spend time asking, constantly obsessing, what is it all for? Why can’t we just sit in a corner, puff on a cigar and read books all day and occasionally be brilliant and collect a paycheck? Like old, male, college professors of the 1950s?

Rory dreamily mops while reading some Joan Didion, and it occurs to her: she should get an MFA in creative nonfiction instead. Rory is used to pie-in-the-sky schemes and dreams, being the daughter of a woman whose antics fueled seven seasons of an adorable show.

Cue the darling indie song that plays while Rory sits at the counter of the diner late into the night working on a manuscript to send to the most prestigious of writing schools: The Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Rory, being a Gilmore, frets constantly, after slipping her huge envelope into the mailbox, and yet also sort of, kind of, just a little bit, expects to get an acceptance letter. This is the girl who got into both Yale and Harvard. Whose grandparents blow smoke up her ass on a weekly basis, grandparents whose wealth has opened countless doors for her. Why wouldn’t she get in?

Over the next few months, during the picturesque winter in Stars Hollow, Rory serves burgers and banters with Lorelei with gusto, confident that her future (at least for the next few years) has been decided. While Lorelei stands outside on a chilly February morning in an absolutely darling slippers and robe combo, dreamily monologuing about the loveliness of snow, Rory paces the halls in the house, waiting for the mail. It arrives, and the girls pile on the couch with steaming mugs of coffee to open it. Rory’s face falls when she reads:

“We regret to inform you that we will not be admitting you into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. We received over 900,000 applicants for 25 spots, including some from Nelson Mandela, Jesus, and Condoleezza Rice, and admission was highly competitive.”

And so of course, Rory goes into a funk – Rory was always in adorable funks on the show, with that big porcelain brow of hers all furrowed. Lorelei, that unrelenting optimist, tells her to try again next year. Richard and Emily are disgusted that their child of privilege was not admitted, even after they tried to schmooze the board of the university. Emily goes on a drunken tirade about low-class state schools, and who needs them anyway, and why would anyone want to live in Iowa, that dreadful place, while Richard smiles tightly over his glasses, looking at bills that they cannot pay due to losing at least two thirds of their money in the stock market. He still hasn’t told Emily.

Meanwhile Rory calls Lane to complain about the unfairness of it all, and Lane is simultaneously being puked on by two toddlers with the flu.

Read an amazing book…

and then procrastinated writing about it until the very last day when I had to take it back to the library because I’m awful.

Ta-nehisi Coates, my role-model in writing, my best friend in my imagination, had this to say about the Brad Paisley/ LL Cool J collaboration, so astute I hooted out loud:

One of the problems with the idea that America needs a “Conversation On Race” is that it presumes that “America” has something intelligent to say about race. All you need do is look at how American history is taught in this country to realize that that is basically impossible.

Eula Biss, a white (although she complicates this in her book) writer, wrote a book called Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays, in 2010 and it is extraordinary. Reviewing this book in Salon, Kyle Minor writes,

Eula Biss’ “Notes From No Man’s Land” is the most accomplished book of essays anyone has written or published so far in the 21st century. If it has not taken up residence in the popular imagination of readers in the same way Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” did in the late 1960s, perhaps it is because we live in a time in which it is more difficult for books to assert themselves with great cultural force in the way they once did, or perhaps because Biss, unlike Didion, has yet to receive the strong support of the systems of power that bring great books to the attention of a broad readership.

I would also argue this book hasn’t received the attention it deserves because it is a prickly and uncomfortable book about race. Ta-nehisi has always been incredible on the subject of why this “conversation on race” is so rarely done right:

I have had conversations with very well-educated people who, with a straight face, have told me that there are Black Confederates. If you ask a very well educated person how the GI Bill exacerbated the wealth gap, or how New Deal housing policy helped create the ghetto they very likely will not know. And they do not know, not because they are ignorant, stupid, or immoral, they do not know because they are part of country that has decided that “not knowing” is in its interest. There’s no room for any sort of serious conversation when the basic facts of history are not accessible.

Eula Biss, in an interview about revising the essays in this book in 2008:

I was revising this collection during Obama’s campaign and I remember feeling dismay at one point because the national conversation about race in that moment felt so misguided, so atrophied, so impoverished. Almost everything I heard about race on the news was silly or stupid and so I began to worry that my book assumed some basic understandings that just didn’t exist in this country yet.

In one of her great essays, Biss describes teaching a class at the University of Iowa while working on her master’s degree:

Racism, I would discover during my first semester teaching at Iowa, does not exist. At least not in Iowa. Not in the minds of the twenty three tall, healthy, blond students to whom I was supposed to teach rhetoric…. Sexism does not exist either, at least not any more. My students considered my interest in these subjects very antiquated. These things, they informed me, with exasperation, had already been resolved a long time ago, during the sixties.

This book is so rare and so uncomfortable because it is tackling a subject most people refuse to acknowledge even exists, or refuse to acknowledge as complex. I need to buy this book, and re-read it, and stew in it, and write longer on it soon. But please read it, if you want to be challenged, and amazed, and floored.

RIP Roger Ebert

From Slate:

Roger understood how much movies matter, how a good one can burrow into our souls, and he never let anyone forget it. It’s hard to imagine him no longer out there watching, thinking, and writing about movies. But it’s comforting to know that he changed the way we watch, think, and write about movies forever—and for the better.

From Rolling Stone:

The death of Roger Ebert is a blow to movies, not just movie criticism. He energized the medium by taking it on full force, two-fisted, making it better by not letting the suits get away with anything.

From Dana Stevens, movie critic at Slate:

But he remained relentlessly modern, always alive to the particularity of the current moment he was living and curious about the one that would come next. It was that quality—paired with a seemingly bottomless reserve of intellectual and physical energy—that made him so keenly observant as a critic and such a master of the epigrammatic, fast flowing Twitter form.

And from a letter he wrote her after she wrote him when she was twelve for advice on how to become a film critic:

go to all of the good movies you can and write-write-write for any place that will print your stuff.

I have been thinking about movies a lot lately, and about criticism. Reading about Ebert, and reading about Pauline Kael recently, kind of made me wish I was better at being a critic. I’m not very good at being critical of movies. I love so many of them, even the deeply flawed ones, and I’m not great at articulating why I love them. My near-constant refrain after seeing almost anything: “I liked it.” or “I loved it.” I have never pushed myself to think hard about movies. I’m trying to change this. I’m also trying to “write-write-write” as much as I can, and submit to anywhere that will print my stuff. It’s not going well. Many of the tributes to Ebert have mentioned how since his illness he has endured so much pain and yet he was energized in his writing and commentary. I think it’s absolutely amazing and inspiring.

So I will re-read some Ebert and try to figure out how to think smarter about movies. Ebert more than anyone showed you can love movies and be thoroughly and precisely critical at the same time.

Amazing debuts….

There is a debate raging about women author’s share of hype/reviews/buzz/critical attention. They may be under-represented in hype, but in terms of quality, women novelists are currently winning the gender battle. I’ve read three debut novels recently by women that are absolutely incredible:

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth is about a lesbian teenager sent to a re-education “pray the gay away” camp. The writing is gorgeous, the characters are heartbreaking – it’s all fabulous.

I recently re-read Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! which I have raved about before. So dark yet somehow light and airy.

I’m currently reading The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff, her 2008 debut and so far I’m blown away.

Also, The Antagonist by Lynn Coady (not her debut) was without a doubt the best novel of the last five years. She’s brilliant and tragically underrated.

Oof. Why do I keep whining?

A woman named Karina Longworth wrote a review of two reissued Ellen Willis books at Slate. It was an okay review, sort of itself a bad attempt at writing like Ellen Willis. I hate when I read something mediocre about something I love, knowing that if I had tried to write it, I might have (probably would have) written it a bit better. BUT I didn’t; I don’t; and I won’t. So, good for Karina Longworth for actually writing and not whining like a jerk all the time.

I was living in Park Slope, nearly three years ago, when I was offered a full-time job with benefits writing film criticism in Los Angeles. I was 29, and this sort of job was the only thing I had even thought about wanting for years, so I jumped at it, without giving any real thought to the enormous ways in which the decision would change my life.

Although, boo fucking hoo. You got offered an actual journalism job in the middle of a recession, in the scorched earth era of journalism.

This is how Ellen Willis does this kind of ennui better:

One day, sometime during CCR’s banner year, 1970, I was feeling depressed and confused about music, politics, writing and almost everything else that was important to me. In an effort to shake off the mood, I stacked all five of my Creedence albums on the stereo and danced to them, one after another.

And me? No writing happening here. No Creedence dancing either. How to get started again?

RIP David Rakoff

I was reading David Rakoff’s last essay in his last book about having cancer and wondering, hoping that this cancer wouldn’t kill him. It did. His writing is slyly brilliant. Sneaks up on you. He’s also a kindred negative spirit:

Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing… always always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time, sometimes forever.

Maybe you can figure out where my head is at.

What I’m reading…

Today, I read Let’s Talk About Love : A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson. It’s part of the 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums. This one is about Celine Dion.

In this book, Wilson investigates issues of tastes, class, ethnicity, language, gender, etc., in the music and fan reception of Celine Dion. It’s a fantastic, very short read. It’s been helpful for me, thinking through my research project, especially the sections on taste. Wilson notes that in a survey from the 1990s, the four types of music that have the least-educated fans are rap, heavy metal, country, and gospel.  This isn’t surprising. This is so often the kind of music you frequently hear people saying they listen to everything but. “I like everything except country,” or “I like everything except metal.” etc. Wilson does some great analysis on why this is so, and how his own tastes as a music critic have been douchey and suspect.

Wilson summarizes the work of French theorists Pierre Bourdieu quite well, pointing out this fun fact:

But it was in asking people the reasons behind their choices that Bourdieu exploded the assumptions embedded in the whole ‘brow’ system (which originated in racist nineteenth century theories about facial features and intelligence). What he found was that poorer people were pragmatic about their tastes, describing them as entertaining, useful and accessible. But from the middle classes up, people had much grander justifications. For one thing, they were far more confident about their dislikes, about what was tacky or lame. But they also spoke in elaborate detail about how their tastes reflected their values and personalities, and in what areas they still wanted to enrich their knowledge…

Taste is a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction. And its end product is to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure.

This is a kind of embodied work that Bourdieu and Wilson are speaking about. I’ve been reading Lit by Mary Karr, her third memoir about leaving her impoverished “white trash” Texas upbringing and going to university. Eventually she marries a wealthy man from a wealthy family. This is the scene at dinner:

Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposed what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only As you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try – without letup – to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads’, preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. Andre triple-creme cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn.

It’s taken me so much EFFORT just to do as medium-shitty as I’ve heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of.

In Sara Ahmed’s take on Bourdieu, she notes that the upper class bodies, through their seeming lack of effort, disappear from view. This also takes a kind of work, a disciplining into the right orientations toward objects, music, culture etc., considered tasteful.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I have a lot more work to do on taste, gendered working-class bodies, and obviously, country music performance.

Narrowing down

I am attempting to rapidly narrow down what I’m doing for my research project. It isn’t going well.

I am re-reading Lit by Mary Karr. It’s devastating and hilarious. A welcome distraction.

I forget how to write.

Is this going to be a problem?

Salon is on fire today…

Another gorgeous piece about books:

Yes, ambitious, talented writers will continue to exist and their writing will be great because they have read. And yes, there will remain people who have nary an interest in writing but luxuriate in an afternoon of reading. The devaluing of imagination as it departs on flights of fancy brought on by just being with yourself, this is what is changing us in profound, yet to be fully realized ways.

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to use your imagination without wanting to know how.