Emma Goldman: Anarchist. Lover. Public Speaker.

It’s my second conference presentation. Ever. I’m seated between two other women—one, a PhD candidate at a tony East Coast institution; the other, a full professor and virtual expert on my topic. We were placed in the largest of the four conference rooms, and it’s mostly full. Curses. I thank the conference gods we’re allowed to sit during our speech. And that I brought a PowerPoint. ("If you'll all just take a look at this shiny picture instead of at me . . .")

Public speaking has, throughout my life, been the bane of my academic existence. As the hour of reckoning approaches, my stomach inevitably begins to dance and my palms get sweaty. I totter between the conviction that everything, as it always has been, will be fine, and the terror that this, yes this, is the time when I will finally, completely go to pieces in front of a large group of people. Maybe I’ll forget the words and do a dance, or worse, run from the room. (Fight or flight.)

I’ve always admired women and men who are gifted public speakers. There’s such an element of performance to it: a combination of confidence, conviction, and drama. Remembering my own shortcomings in these areas, of which I am painfully aware, I love to look up to this particular historical woman of the day for inspiration.

The incomparable Emma Goldman was born and raised in the Russian Empire, in present-day Lithuania, to an Orthodox Jewish family. In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States—already a veteran of a radical student circle in St. Petersburg, her political career would take root in the midst of the labor and anarchy movements of urban America.

It’s difficult to enumerate all the causes Goldman fought for: anarchism, socialism, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, free love, birth control. She sought to address the social evils that resulted from a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing America, as around her the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the robber barons got like super crazy insane stupid rich. Today this struggle, while tiresome, seems timeless; in the late 1800s and early 1900s, I imagine that it was also terrifying. The America we know---messy, diverse, capitalist, benevolent, unjust---was being born, and these struggles were its birthing pains.

Goldman typically sided with the underdog, railing against the inequalities of American society and the injustice of those in power. Her fights met with various degrees of success. But whatever her cause, one thing you could say about Goldman: she could speak.

Her speeches were famous, or infamous, depending what side of turn-of-the-century politics you were on. She toured the country giving her special brand of fiery talks that indicted the industrialists, the politicians, and the very structures of capitalism, and incited the working class, the women, the underprivileged to action. As writer Vivian Gornick puts it in "Love and Anarchy" (Chronicle of Higher Education 58:10):

“[Goldman’s intensity] was midwife to a remarkable gift she had for making those who heard her feel intimately connected to the pain inherent in whatever social condition she was denouncing. As the women and men in her audience listened to her, a scenario of almost mythic proportions seemed to unfold before their eyes. The homeliness of their own small lives became invested with a sense of drama that acted as a catalyst for the wild, vagrant hope--especially vulnerable to mean-spirited times--that things need not be as they are.”

We are in an election year. If you’re like me, you’re probably a little tired of hearing political speeches. (But how about that Clint Eastwood, right? Heh.) Without pointing any fingers, we’re seeing candidates who purposely downplay their past achievements if they don’t align with the party platform. Candidates whose views are “evolving” instead of just straight up existing, who must avoid certain subjects so as not to stir up segments of their voting base.

Emma Goldman wasn’t a politician. She was, perhaps, more of a rabble-rouser. But her career is incredibly inspiring because for everything she spoke about, she believed. Her passion was singular, unparalleled. Indeed, one of Goldman’s major complaints about fellow anarchists and revolutionaries was their diminishing of the individual within the mob and their privileging of the intellect over feeling. For Goldman, the individual was everything-- her anarchist utopia involved the liberation of the individual, not just the collective. It wasn’t all about politics. In fact, she had an active sex life and threw herself wholeheartedly into her romances, most notably with fellow anarchists Alexander “Sasha” Berkman and Ben Reitman. She didn’t just speak, she lived. (If you don’t believe me, read a few of her love letters. Wow! She’d put modern romance novelists to shame.)

Goldman built a decades-long career out of her activism, so of course, she had her fair share of trouble with the police. She was suspected of being involved in at least two assassination plots, including President McKinley’s, though it’s unlikely she played a role. It wasn’t until 1917, however, that her “treasonous” positions on World War I and the military draft finally made her United States residency untenable. She was deported to Russia, where she witnessed and quickly became disillusioned with the Revolution. She spent only two years there before moving on. After spending time campaigning against the fascists in Spain, she finally settled in Toronto, where she died in 1940 at the age of 70, a long, rewarding, and, in my opinion, incredibly well-spent life behind her.

My speech is over. I hand the microphone off. I’m pretty satisfied with how I did—I enunciated, I made eye contact with audience members, I didn’t stumble or stutter. I got my message across. Most of all, I didn’t run from the room in a panic. The full professor to my right congratulates me; she tells me I had some great material, but I could work a bit on my dynamics and volume. I’m no Emma Goldman, but I'm getting there.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Rebecca D. Martin is an essayist and book reviewer in Southwest Virginia. She's also a wife and a mother, a reluctant meal planner, a relaxed home keeper, and an obsessively avid reader. Her work has been published in The Other Journal, Kinfolk Magazine, and The Lamppost, and she is a staff writer for The Curator. She writes about books and domestic culture at www.rebarit.blogspot.com. When longtime friend and fellow writer Carrie Allen Tipton and I get together to talk books, especially books with nuanced considerations of family and homemaking, we can’t say enough. So here are in-depth reviews of just two books that are on our shelves lately. We hope you enjoy them!

Rebecca D. Martin Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Our bags were packed for vacation. Our small family prepared to set adrift and let the sand and waves and salted air breathe a simpler, richer life into us. I zipped the final duffle bag, sliding Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea into the top.

Morrow Lindbergh knew what we were after: the “spontaneity of now; the vividness of here” that would strengthen our small family. In this thin volume, organized by meditations on a handful of seashells (literal gifts from the sea), Morrow Lindbergh’s connections flow from an interesting 1950’s cultural critique to early Feminist philosophy to her own struggle maintaining a balanced, introspective life while housekeeping and caring for a family of seven. I hoped her thoughts about home and family, culture and womanhood, work and writing, nature and the sea would set my own thoughts on a good course for our beach week.

I also approached Morrow Lindbergh with some reservation. Here was a complex woman. She lost her first child in a horrific kidnapping and murder. She married early Feminist thought with troublingly hardlined notions of feminine identity. Her husband was a mid-Twentieth Century aviation icon who held racist ideals disturbingly in line with the Nazis. In later life, both Anne and Charles admirably championed environmental protection and preservation. She learned to fly planes when other women merely stayed at home. She recognized staying at home to raise children as a choice, a noble one. This was a woman who had things to say. But did I want to hear them?

I discovered I did. One of the significant and unexpected gifts I gleaned from this book was a sort of readerly humility, a willingness to keep listening to the end, whatever my responses page by page. And in the end, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was a person I genuinely liked, whether or not our worldviews aligned.

There are, indeed, many treasures to be found between the covers of this book. At times, Morrow Lindbergh’s prose grows pedantic, but in other moments it shimmers with a lovely, rhythmic give-and-take, and leaves the reader with gems, most notably her thoughts on simplification: “Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions.” Or, “What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice!” Or, prescient of our current information age’s pitfalls (and she didn’t even have a Facebook account!):

“We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The inter-relatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold.”

There is a kindred understanding here. I feel challenged to return home to our normal-paced autumn life and consider how I might simplify (a slimmer Facebook newsfeed, for a start) – and how I might love my family better in the process. Yes, I’m glad Gift from the Sea made its way into my duffle bag, and I’m glad I could overcome some of my hastier judgments in order to glean some of Morrow Lindbergh’s sea gift insights for myself.

Carrie Allen Tipton

A Southerly Course: Recipes and Stories from Close to Home by Martha Hall Foose

Someone else will have to review this lovely book as a cook. I am reviewing it as a homesick southerner. Martha Hall Foose’s recipes and stories emerge from her deep love of southern culture, a sentiment which I share and which remains a source of puzzlement to both of us.

In the introduction, she muses over why southern foodways exert such a hold on her, profoundly realizing that “it is perhaps because we Southerners are homesick for the place in which we still live.” Her poignant longing for the very earth on which she stands connects with my own desire to stand there once again. Like Foose, I was raised in Mississippi; like her, I left to learn of the wider world; unlike her, I return now only in my mind and twice a year for holidays. But her book has helped me undo my own exile this summer, to come back home again.

I first came to know Martha Hall Foose’s work at a cold Christmastime, the right time to snuggle under a quilt made by my great-grandmother in Arkansas in 1936 and read Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook. This, her first book, hooked me with its ingenious cocktail of stories, recipes, tidbits of culinary advice, photos, and mini-essays. I wasn’t the only one; it won the 2009 James Beard Award. The writing was elegant and funny and, thank heaven, deeply unconcerned with speed, ease, or health. The recipes called for mayonnaise and deep fryers, and celebrated regular afternoon libations.

In A Southerly Course, published in 2011, Foose expanded on this successful formula. Marked by her blend of formality and informality, its dishes run the sociological spectrum from congealed salads for bridal luncheons to crawfish bread for tailgating. Its arrangement in five sections, corresponding to the courses of a proper dinner, emphasizes her formal training at the French pastry school École Lenôtre. Ingredients such as mirlitons, sweet potatoes, and crawfish highlight her fusion of indigenous southern staples with highfalutin’ techniques. Unconcerned with political correctness, the author draws heavily on the hunting culture of the Mississippi Delta, her childhood and now adult home. She speaks of a world of monogrammed serving utensils and ladies’ luncheon clubs.

In her recipe for Custard Pie, dedicated to fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty, Foose said that Welty helped teach her that “you don’t have to leave the place that you love and know, that it is not a prerequisite that to understand home you must exile yourself to gain perspective.” For me, leaving birthed fresh perspective on the traditions, people, landscape, and culture that I grew up with a few states east of Texas, where I currently live—and which is most definitely not the South.

A Southerly Course reminds me that though I may live in exile, there are many paths back, through word, image, palate, and most especially, through memory. And if I keep flipping through this book long enough, I might just try my hand at the crabmeat casserolettes. At least I can eat well while I long for home.

The DIY Illusion

Long before Pinterest, which seems to have become the ultimate repository of DIY dreams, I was cursed with the insatiable desire to surround myself with beautiful and interesting things and to announce proudly to the world that “I did it myself.” This urge to emulate the creations and achievements of others extends even beyond the realm of tactile objects to skills and feats as well. When I visit a museum, I can’t help but think, “I will return next week and copy the masters!” When I discover that someone has written a poem a day for a year, I think, “What a great idea! I should do it too!”

This impulse has resulted in a number of false starts. I seem to recall joining one of those 356 groups on Flickr and subsequently following through for about three of 356 days. After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I bought an “Easy Italian Reader” and a yoga mat, both of which have seen embarrassingly little use since their addition to my collection of very-useful-yet-unused self-improvement tools.

I know I’m not the only one. Tutorials, how-tos, and advice columns make up some of the most popular information on the internet. We want to know, in 500 words or less, how to build our own websites, sweep own our hair up into classy side chignons, and paint striking works of modern art for our homes.

Don’t get me wrong—I love reading this stuff, and I love writing it too. I am a strong advocate for homemade food and handmade things and tools for self-improvement. But I often find that I don’t give enough consideration to the “yourself” aspect of DIY inspiration. I so easily forget to account for where I'm starting from. I see a hair tutorial and try to ignore the fact that my hair is the frizzy, chaotic alter ego of the long, silky locks in the photo. I see “Easy Italian Reader” and realize much later that I still can’t read it if my Italian vocabulary is limited to food terms.

This is not to say that we should all abandon our DIY dreams and leave the doing and creating and achieving to the experts and professionals. There’s certainly nothing wrong with gathering inspiration from the creations and achievements and adventures of others. But if I hope to cultivate motivation from the things that inspire me, rather than disappointment at my failure to replicate them, perhaps a bit more self-reflection is in order.

The DIY illusion is not the idea that we can do things ourselves. Every piece of inspiration we encounter broadens our sense of what’s possible. There’s certainly room in this world for more faith in what each of us is capable of. The illusion to be wary of, however, is that we can do new and unfamiliar things quickly and effortlessly, if only we had the right tools or the time to watch a five-minute instructional video.

So the next time I file away a glamorous photo or add a new how-to book to my wishlist, I hope to take some time to differentiate between inspiration and aspiration. Often what’s most inspiring about beautiful creations and fantastic achievements is not the glamorous photo of the end result to which we may aspire but the story of the person or people behind it, the combination of time, talent, learning, commitment, failure, and perseverance that made what’s possible real.

Why You'll Never Be Good Enough: Bodies in Magazines and Media

When someone compliments me on my appearance, I don’t believe them. OK, not all the time—but sometimes. I fully realize that this is reactive and silly, and I know that my occasional lack of confidence can be especially irritating to my boyfriend, who compliments me more than anyone else—why can’t I just take it? What, do I think he’s lying? Analyzing my instinctual reaction, in conjunction with the discovery of this recent study by University of Nebraska – Lincoln professor of psychology Sarah Gervais, I realized that often, a positive impression of my overall image triggers a negative array of thoughts, each little thought corresponding to a single part of my appearance that I don’t like. That single part is measured against an abstract composite ideal of female beauty and, invariably, falls short. Loop back to brain: “How can this compliment be true in light of this [clearly imperfect body part/feature]?”

Gervais's findings are intriguing, and while the headlining statement—Men Are Seen as People, Women Are Seen as Body Parts!—is a little sensationalist, there rings some truth in this statement. The images of women and women’s bodies that inundate us in the media—be they celebrities, fashion models, or disembodied legs/lips/torsos—are perfect. More and more, they converge towards a singular, mythic body that is flawless, without fault, and unworthy of a single criticism. What this does for women who don’t have that body (read: pretty much everyone, including most celebrities and fashion models) is inconclusive, but I’m willing to bet it's pretty negative in the aggregate.

Recently, former Us Weekly editor Janice Min wrote about her struggles with the unrealistic post-baby weight loss expectations that she believes are culled from media representations of celebrities. She realized that, when she had her baby, shedding pounds at celebrity-rate was close to impossible, especially considering the coterie of assistance most celebrities have at their disposal (trainers, dieticians, stylists, money). Jezebel was correct in pointing out the irony that this was coming from an Us Weekly editor—and not just any editor, but the one almost principally responsible for making post-baby weight loss celebrity stories in-demand over the course of the 2000s.

Considering Min's complaints (and her resulting diet book “for real women”), I’m stuck on a quote from a Daily Nebraskan story on Gervais’s study. According to both Michael Goff, senior lecturer in advertising at Lincoln, and Jan Deeds, director of the Women’s Center, media is merely a reflection of our subconscious objectification of women and not its cause. “Advertising doesn’t do anything magical with that (process),” Goff says. “It just exploits it.”

This feels like incredibly wishful thinking. If advertising isn’t the cause, that implies its blamelessness. Then what is the cause? Society? The dominant culture? The male hegemony? Is not advertising a part of society, a part of culture? It is certainly one of the most visible, most visual, and most recycled elements of our culture. How can the images that it continues to reproduce be blameless in our construction of gendered images and, consequently, our own self-image? If anything, these things are cyclical, absent of a singular “root cause”. I’d like to lay at least some of the blame at the feet of ad execs and women’s magazine editors.

I’ll end on this note. On “Project Runway” this week—an exploitative reality show that provides a window into the image-obsessed fashion world and uses stick-thin, pliable models and that I nevertheless absolutely love watching—the designers were challenged to create looks for “real women” who needed a makeover. Ven, a 27-going-on-50-year-old male designer with, let’s be honest, a bit of a paunch, was dismayed that he got the “largest” woman, and complained to anyone who would listen about how it was so unfair that he, a designer of women’s fashions, should have to work with proportions like these. When Tim Gunn asks what size his client is, Ven rolls his eyes and says, “I don’t know—a 14?!” Then he describes her proportions as “off.”

When we create an impossible ideal, and when that ideal is hammered into our consciousness by the fashion world, by magazines, by celebrity photo shoots, and—very often—by post-production manipulation, we all end up being “off,” and we all feel it. If advertising and pop culture are a reflection of our values as a society, then our values as a society are also reflections of our intake of advertising and pop culture. The cycle is end-able.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist living in central Pennsylvania. She is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, A Woman Traces the Shoreline (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Another Beginning (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming, 2013), and In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming, 2013). Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals like Brevity, The Rumpus, No Tell Motel, quarrtsiluni, MiPoesias, Phoebe, Cream City Review, TYPO, Quarterly West, Literary Mama, Glamour Magazine and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Penn State. I decided to ask my fabulous gal pals—astute readers and writers, all—from my MFA days at Penn State what they’ve been reading this summer. Even just seeing all of our names so close to each other here in print makes me wistful for days of gin & tonics together after workshop. (But not for workshop. Shudder. That you can keep.)

Jenn McKee is a Michigan-based entertainment/staff writer for AnnArbor.com and blogs about parenting at www.AnAdequateMom.com.

The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild by Susan J. Douglas I’m currently reading Susan J. Douglas' The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, and it's funny and infuriating and thought-provoking all at once. Since my four year old daughter is in the midst of a full-on princess phase, I'm reading the book with an eye toward the discussions we'll have as she grows older and absorbs even more coded media messages about women and femininity; but it's strange how what you're reading often jives perfectly with events happening around you in real time. The book's starting point, the Spice Girls and their take on "girl power," are suddenly hot again, thanks to their reunion performance at the Olympics; and I'd just finished the chapter that's focused on the (d)evolution of women's magazines through the years when I learned that Helen Gurley Brown died. Good, perspective-sharpening stuff.

Camille-Yvette Welsch teaches at the Pennsylvania State University and her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle among other venues.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See When the last living speaker of nu shu, a centuries old language spoken exclusively by women died, I was fascinated: so was Lisa See. See’s novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, chronicles the intense, marriage- like friendship sometimes contracted between two Chinese women called laotong, who spoke the language.  As the brutality of their lives unfolds—foot binding, marriage contracts, opium addiction, domestic abuse, death—nu shu gives the women a chance to both lament and celebrate each other and their friendship.  The novel offers an intimate, if depressing look at a language and a kind of relationship that gave voice to women who were traditionally both silenced and hobbled.

Danielle Magnuson (@DnlMag) is a writer and editor living in Hopkins, Minnesota. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain I reread Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a preface to Paula McLain's 2011 historical fiction novel The Paris Wife, written from the point-of-view of Hadley, his first wife. Hemingway’s writing is just as terrific as I remember from 15 years ago, but his characters drove me nuts. What a bunch of drama queens. The Paris Wife, as a modern-day accompaniment, is heart wrenching, with Hadley as the virginal, good woman and Ernest as the troubled young man drawn to her purity. I read The Paris Wife mostly in the bathtub in the final month of my own pregnancy. It was pretty heavy to read about the birth of their first child as I sat in anticipation of the same event in my life. The shifts in their individual indentities, the shift in their relationship, the way it all fell apart—by the end I was wiped out, emotionally.

Cindy Clem lives and (sometimes) writes in central Pennsylvania. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis I’ve been dabbling in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis since 2010 and have yet to finish it, not because I don’t like it but because it’s a Brain, and I approach it with reverence. Davis’s stories are spare, strange, cerebral.  They leave me delightfully at a loss and yet replete. The meticulous tracing of self-consciousness, the absence of emotional manipulation—this book is like Zen, but funnier. This title: “Meat, My Husband.” This passage:  “Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it […]. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.”

Sheila Squillante writes poems and essays and teaches at Penn State. Follow along at www.sheilasquillante.com. How to Train Your Dragon (series) by Cressida Cowell This summer, I am in love with Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books. I’ve been reading them with my son and they are just excellent. The ten books follow the unlikely hero, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, the thirteen-year-old someday- heir of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe of Vikings, and his tiny, petulant, but sometimes selfless dragon, Toothless. The prose is smart and lush and equally adept at delivering wry, winking humor that will appeal to parents and gross-out, bodily-function humor that will make kids howl.  But for me, the smartest thing about these books, is that Cowell has wisely chosen to frame them as the memoirs of Hiccup as an old man, looking back on a glorious, well-lived, warrior’s life. What this means is that every time the clever but bungling, underdog protagonist ends up hanging by a thread in the maw of a Seadragonus Maximus, anxious seven-year-old readers who are hanging there with him can stop, breathe, and remind themselves that we know Hiccup will prevail because we know he lives to tell the tale! We can spend less time worrying about mortality and more time focusing on how interesting (if disgusting) it is to be so very close to a dragon’s GI track.

Colors of India.

Half the fun is getting there, they say. Certainly, visiting the roads less travelled has always fascinated me and drawn me to new adventures. This is why, for our honeymoon, Dany and I chose India, a country we had never been to before, but somehow seemed to know through our Indian friends’ stories. We travelled from Agra to Cochin, saw crowded cities and remote villages, witnessed congested bazaars and found cows hacking their path through vegetable markets. We spent time with our friends in Delhi, sharing typical spicy dishes with their families. We travelled the rocky roads of Rajasthan on our own, rode camels along the Pakistani border, got soaked under the Mumbai rain, and finally took part to our friends’ wedding in Kerala. Step by step, we realized how legendary stories are attached with every place and how strong our emotions could get.   

What struck us the most was VARANASI, a holy city located on the banks of the river Ganges, a pilgrimage site for hindus. People come here to die and be cremated at the burning ghats along the river. It’s very different from what we had known and seen before. It’s a unique place where you smell joy, hope, life and death. All at once.

Have you read Arundhati Roy's book, The God of Small Things? Some stories draw us in by making us wonder how they will end. This novel begins by telling us how it ends, and has a living, breathing rhythm to it. It’s a very melancholic novel, and it paints a picture most of the people probably wouldn't sympathize with. This is one of those books that left an indelible mark on me---the words dance and merge, and take in the sad memories of a story that is tragic, but hopeful in a way. The hope lies in the possibility of new beginnings.

Writer's Words -  Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

On joy.

“Anything's possible in Human Nature,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. “Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.” Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it. Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.

On death.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.

On Small God. 

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression. 

Varanasi As I Saw It. 

 

 

 

Liliuokalani, Hawaii's Last Monarch

I’ve been to Hawaii a few times, and growing up it always seemed like the happiest place on earth---South Pacific edition---but one chance overheard statement in 2003 stays with me and can probably be credited with changing (or at least complicating) my view of the islands forever. (I also wrote about it here, where I reviewed Sarah Vowell’s excellent Unfamiliar Fishes for my book blog. Just openly acknowledging that I’m repeating myself on the internets.)

So what was the statement? My parents and I were poking around a tiny inlet on the Big Island one evening, and nearby a Hawaiian family was having a BBQ picnic. One of the men laughingly reprimanded a few tykes who were getting too rambunctious with this: “You want to be like the white man? Killing everything you see?”

That was my first indication that Hawaii was, shall we say, acquired by the United States by means less than savory (though really, we could say that about all the states . . . but I digress!). The man wasn’t speaking with resentment, but this acquisition, it would seem, dramatically affected the worldview of his fathers and grandfathers and continued to color his own. (No pun intended.)

As far as anti-imperial icons goes, Liliuokalani is pretty tops. She’s not the only figure in the islands’ anti-imperial movement, but she fought back in the last days of Hawaiian sovereignty against an encroaching American authority, sought to prevent annexation, and was even placed under house arrest for her alleged role in inspiring a coup (echoes of Eleanor of Aquitaine!).

The first and last queen of Hawaii was born Lydia Kamakaeha to a noble family, into a culture already experiencing the drastic effects of white missionary activity and Western economic and strategic interest. She was educated by missionaries at the prestigious school for high-ranking Hawaiian children and married a white sea captain’s son named John Dominis. He’s the bearded stud seen here:

The line of Kamehameha the Great was broken after the death of Kamehameha V in 1872, and two years later Lydia’s brother, David Kalakaua, became king. Lydia was now a member of the royal contingent and heir to the Hawaiian throne. In 1887, she accompanied her brother and his wife on a great journey to Queen Victoria’s Golden jubilee (the 50^th anniversary of Vic’s reign; long enough for anyone, but she’d go ahead and add another 14 years of rule to that anyway).

This probably doesn’t need to be said, but going on a trip in 1898 was no joke. Fifty years later, you could hop on Pan-Am and be in London in less than a day. Liliuokalani and her family spent months on the road. They took a boat to San Francisco, took a train across the United States, and then took another boat to England. Along the way, they visited all the classic road trip pit stops: Sacramento, Salt Lake, Denver (which she describes as “an infant city… [with] but a few scattered houses”), the oil fields of Pennsylvania, Boston, New York, and, of course, Washington, D.C. They were received by President Grover Cleveland and dined at the White House, as they were later received by Queen Victoria in London.

Personally, I find the Hawaiian royal family’s trip fascinating. I honestly think it should be immortalized in a movie. It would be part biopic, part historical drama, part road trip buddy comedy (I’m thinking John Dominis could be the whiny guy who keeps screwing things up for everyone else; Liliuokalani describes how, in San Francisco, he had to be taken into the wharf on a stretcher because of a sudden attack of rheumatism).

On David Kalakaua’s death in 1891, Lydia took the throne as Liliuokalani. She was, notably, to be the first reigning queen of Hawaii, as well as the last Hawaiian monarch. For decades, white missionary descendants and businessmen had been playing an increasingly active role in local government. When Liliuokalani, in an effort to restore more authority to the Hawaiian monarch, abrogated an 1887 treaty that gave special privileges to the United States (including ceding them Pearl Harbor), the businessmen had had enough.

The Missionary Party deposed Liliuokalani in 1893 in a bloodless coup and announced their rule as provisional government. Sanford Dole (cousin of the pineapple guy) became president and pushed for Hawaii to be annexed by the United States. Grover Cleveland was opposed to this---he actually felt that the coup was unlawful and that the Hawaiian monarchy should be restored, so the matter temporarily remained in limbo.

In 1895, a failed coup in the name of the queen took place, and Liliuokalani was placed under house arrest. She agreed to formally abdicate, in part so that her supporters would be released from jail. However, she continued to fight tooth and nail against the annexation of the islands, which, of course, happened anyway in mid-1898 as the U.S. was in the throes of the Spanish-American War---hey, here’s some islands exactly halfway across the Pacific where we can stop our ships on the way to the Philippines! Annexed.

The rest is history. And so is the part I just told you about.

I feel a lot of sympathy for Liliuokalani, maybe more than I feel for other historical women. She was born into a changing world, a Hawaii in transition. The ending---American annexation---was not inevitable, but forces in that direction were powerful, beyond the control of a single person. This was the dawn of the American century. Liliuokalani was only queen for two short years in the 1890s before being deposed by Dole and his ilk, but her intentions for Hawaii, framed as they were in the language of her conquerors, remain clear to us today. For however brief a period, for however little she could do, she stood against the relentless tide of American imperialism and became a lasting symbol of resistance.

Oh, and she also wrote songs (see “Aloha Oe”). Another reason I like her.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

We're huge fans of Jenny Volvovski's work. She is a member of the award-winning creative group Also with Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe. She has been re-imagining book covers for the books that she's read, and we've thoroughly enjoyed following along on From Cover to Cover. In our minds, any project that combines reading and design is awesome. This is no exception. Here, Jenny shares her reading list, along with her re-imagined covers. 

From Cover to Cover is a project I’ve been working on for more than a year now. It has a very simple premise: I read a book, and then design a cover for it. I started it because I love to read, and always think about a book’s cover before buying the book, while reading it, and after I’m done. I also wanted to have a project independent from my client work, where I could have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, without worrying about feedback and revisions. Book covers are a great medium for graphic designers because so much content has to be condensed into a single image. The cover has to relate to what's in the book, but also not give too much away.

I wanted all the book covers I made to feel like part of a series, so I gave myself restrictions; a color palette (green, white, black) and limited type choices (Futura, typewriter, hand drawn/handmade). I always prefer working with a set of limitations, so this made the project both more challenging and more fun.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Skippy Dies will probably be made into a movie. It’s a very plot driven novel that follows the adventures of a couple of teenage boarding school boys (and eventually girls and teachers) at Seabrook College in Ireland. It covers typical school-age topics like love, and bullying, but also some very non-typical ones, like opening a portal to a parallel universe. The story starts with Skippy dying (this is not a spoiler) at a donut shop and that’s primarily why I chose donuts to be the main visual elements on the cover. Donuts are mentioned later on in the book as a metaphor for life. I also like to think of each donut being a metaphysical stand-in for the main characters in the book.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas was recently made into a movie, and I am not quite sure how they pulled it off, but I would recommend reading the book before seeing the movie (sage advice). The book consists of 6 seemingly unrelated stories starting with travel journals of an American notary traveling in the Pacific in the 1850s, and ending (kind of) with the adventures of a clone in a post-apocalyptic future in Korea. There is a thread between all of the stories, which I will not give away, and as you turn the page and start over with each new narrative it’s really exciting to find out how the previous story relates to the next. Since so many topics, characters and time periods are part of the story, it was hard to pick a visual for the cover that made sense with all of them. So, I decided to make the focus of the cover the structure of the book. There are 6 stories, they start chronologically (earliest time period first). The first 5 are interrupted, the 6th starts and concludes at the center of the book, and then the initial 5 are concluded in reverse chronological order. So, the folded paper on the cover is a reflection of that. The type is printed on top of the paper, so some spills from one piece of paper to the other, like the overlapping stories. The shadows and the white paper give a “cloud-like” effect to the cover.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

Since there’s a running theme of books being made into movies, the Lonely Polygamist fits quite nicely, as reading it feels like watching the continuation of the HBO show Big Love. The book follows Golden Richards, owner of a fledgling construction business, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children. He of course, is unsurprisingly cracking under the weight of all the responsibility. In order to deal with the stress Golden has an affair. And not-surprisingly this doesn’t solve his problems. For the cover of the book, I made the title and author name act as a family tree for Golden Richards’ family. He is represented by the white O in the middle, his wives are the bigger letters connected to him, and the smaller letters represent the children (there weren’t exactly the right number of letters to account for all 28 children, but I thought this was close enough). And, if you look closely, one letter stands away by itself with no linear connection - representing the affair.

Community, Women Writers, and Attractive Comediennes

With regards to “Community” fandom (and fashion, if you're Heidi Klum), you’re either in or you’re out. If you’re not a fan of the show, or haven’t watched it, you don’t understand what all the fuss is about. But if you are a fan, like me, then you won’t shut up about it. For those of you on the outside, “Community” is a manic, endearing, and ultimately brilliant half-hour comedy on NBC, soon to enter its fourth season. The plot centers on a group of misfit friends whose only commonality is that they attend Greendale Community College, where they regularly meet in a study group that doesn’t seem to consist of actual studying. Instead, crazy hijinks ensue! It’s produced some of the most ambitious episodes to hit prime time in years, including an entirely stop-motion Christmas episode (reminiscent of the old “Rudolph” style TV specials) and a 30-minute homage to the obscure 1980s film My Dinner with Andre.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is “Community” does—genre send-ups, surrealist humor, endless pop culture references for the 20- to 40-year-old set—but whatever it is, it’s groundbreaking. And a large part of the credit is owed to the women who work on the show.

Creator Dan Harmon, at the recommendation of a female NBC studio head, made sure that his writing staff was comprised of half women. In an interview with the AV Club, he notes the difficulty he had in finding talented women writers—not because women aren’t talented, but because there just aren’t as many women writers to choose from—but that now he wouldn’t trade the gender makeup for the world.

Harmon: “The energy is different. It doesn’t keep anybody polite. We’re not doffing our caps or standing up when they enter the room. They do more dick jokes than anybody, because they’ve had to survive, they have to prove, coming in the door, that they’re not dainty. That’s not fair, but women writers, they acquire the muscle of going blue fast because they have to counter the stigma. I don’t have enough control groups to compare it to, but there’s just something nice about feeling like your writers’ room represents your ensemble a little more accurately, represents the way the world turns.”

Credit is also owed to the amazing cast, which notably includes three incredibly talented and hilarious women: Alison Brie (Annie), Yvette Nicole Brown (Shirley), and Gillian Jacobs (Britta).

Through the combined efforts of the writers and the actresses, the three female leads on the show are fleshed-out, complex, entirely human characters. Their personas are not entirely defined in relation to a more prominent male character. They aren’t wives, or love interests, or sidekicks. Despite the ostensible central lead of the show existing in Joel McHale’s egocentric ex-lawyer Jeff Winger, there’s a near-equal weight of importance given to each of the show’s seven main characters, and the women are just as interesting and well-explored as the men, if not more so.

In a totally engaging and lovely round-table interview with the Daily Beast, the “women of Community”—the three actresses plus writer Megan Ganz—dished on what made their show’s treatment of women special. This includes the, ahem, liberated sexuality of Gillian Jacobs’ character Britta. “The thing that is unique about [Britta] is that she is never the subject of slut shaming,” says Jacobs. “Like, she’s one of the only female characters that doesn’t ever get punished for having an active sex life.”

The sexuality of the women—most notably Brie and Jacobs, who are young and, by most people’s standards, hot—is an especially interesting point, when considering the use of sexuality as the defining spectrum for so many less-developed female characters on TV. It’s the age-old Mary Magdalene vs. Eve, slut vs. prude binary, which “Community” so successfully subverts. Jacobs goes on to note that when auditioning for high school characters in the past, she was dismayed at the way their representation was filtered and distorted through the male perspective—high school girls as seductresses, confident sex mavens; Ganz adds that these male writers often “remove all awkwardness from the teen experience.” The more complex and realistic sexuality of a character like Britta, and even the more subtle sexual evolution of a character like Annie, is refreshing in a landscape of women-as-seen-by-men.

There’s no real black-and-white, right-and-wrong guide to how a woman should portray her own sexuality. As with most things, the more agency she has in the process, the better, whether she chooses to show a lot or a little (so to speak). However, I have to admit I was taken aback to see this 2011 GQ feature of Brie and Jacobs, including a crazy suggestive photograph of the actresses in barely-there lingerie portraying a porn-worthy lesbian sex scene. As beautiful as they are, and as much agency as they may have had in creating this photograph, there’s still a real “ew” factor when imagining the relationship of this piece to the audience it’s intended for. You know—men’s magazine readers.

Not that overt sexuality is bad. To illustrate my point: take this scene in “Community” where Annie sings a sexy, wide-eyed, Betty-Boop-meets-Eartha-Kitt Christmas song, in what Ganz calls a send-up of the infantilization of female sexuality. It’s hilarious, and it showcases Annie’s sexiness without being exploitative—instead, with the song’s gradual devolution into nonsense words and floor-crawling, it becomes a self-aware critique of exploitation.

I suppose part of my discomfort with the photo shoot stems from the very different tone of the two scenes, and maybe specifically from the audience each one is intended for. Art isn’t created in a vacuum—there tends to be a dialectic between the creator and the audience out of which emerges the dominant interpretation of the work. Brie and Jacobs playing sexy on “Community” to an audience of viewers (mostly) in on the joke—and (mostly) appreciative of the very real comedic and performing talents of the two—feels legitimate, like there’s an end to the venture. Brie and Jacobs playing sexy on the pages of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, within whose audience the aforementioned criteria don’t exist, within whose pages instead women are regularly set on display as object of desire and/or decoration, feels exploitative. It’s sex for sex’s sake—women as fantasy creatures. Brie and Jacobs cease to be.

I’m in no way condemning Brie and Jacobs for this editorial choice-- nor for any other "sexy" photo shoots they choose to be a part of. They’re both absolutely fantastic and, in many ways, trailblazers. It's simply instructive that in our media, even wonderfully intelligent, forward-thinking, self-aware actresses such as these are inevitably represented in the visual language of a culture obsessed with sex and, particularly, women as sex objects-- and that there's a fine, often indistinguishable line between satirical and actual objectification.

The Streets of Lisbon, The Views of Belem

I haven't been overseas since the beginning of 2012, which feels like the longest lapse between adventures in a decade. But my life in San Francisco is in flux and requires me to stay put. I suppose with various changes in my life, each day at home feels unfamiliar in its own way, so it's *almost* like I'm wandering in a new place, or at least experiencing similar sensations I feel when I roam the streets of a different country. But I feel the itch to explore again. To see colors I'm not used to seeing, like the oranges on the rooftops of the buildings in Lisbon. To smell whiffs of pasteis de nata, a flaky, golden Portuguese pastry I can almost taste right now. To turn a corner, to explore an alleyway, to find a picturesque hilltop miradouro from which to gaze—and dream.

Portugal, I'm thinking of you.

xo, Cheri

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What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

There is a house---a camp, really---on a lake in New Hampshire that is owned by my husband's extended family. It houses many generations of strong women; a matriarchal household in every sense of the word. Bought in 1948 by my husband's great uncle and his wife, many of the women who now run the house during the summer and collectively supervise their kids running through the woods and swimming in the lake grew up traipsing through the same woods and swimming in the same waters. It's a family with deep roots and a well-documented tree, but one that is also made of people who have been brought in and enmeshed through skinny dips and grilled hot dogs. Stand in the kitchen long enough, and you'll hear one of the women say "did you hear about the time when..." before the rest of them break out in peals of laughter that carry down to the lake and across the water. The more time you spend here, the more clearly the ghosts materialize and give a sense of tradition to the rhythm of the day that has survived with the minimal necessary evolutions for over 60 years. Claude and Phyllis (the couple who bought camp) skinny dipping early in the morning and serving hot dogs and milkshakes for lunch; the bouncing Jack Russell terrier begging to be let in by appearing in two second intervals in the open top half of the Dutch door on the porch (after chasing a squirrel into its hole and getting his face stuck in its burrow); my mother-in-law first learning to waterski by sitting on the shoulders of her cousin as the boat pulled them both up. In these stories, the men are key players to be sure, but their narratives remain peripheral. The driving characters of the stories of camp are the women. I am weaving myself into the fabric of this family, first as a girlfriend, then a wife---a friend, a mother, an aunt. The Christmas before I married Jordy, the ladies of camp bought me a beach towel with my name embroidered on it. It was to be left here for the winters, awaiting my return each July. I took the gift as a statement: just as there was a place in the hall linen closet for my new towel, there was a place in this family for me. I've come here this week for a family vacation. My in-laws are here, and my husband has a rare break from work. This is more than a vacation, though. By coming here, I get to reconnect with women (and their kids) who I see maybe twice per year, but to whom I feel viscerally connected. They've held me in hard times, called me sister in happy times, and loved me unconditionally through both. For 64 years, the women of camp have gathered by the water, surrounded by bronzed children of various ages to discuss our lives, to discuss current events, to discuss what to make for dinner, to discuss what we're reading. We call ourselves "the ladies of the beach."

It's funny to have such a strong connection to the history of a family that is not biologically mine (in the abbreviation-language of camp, I am an NBR---a Non-Blood Relative). In many ways, I think that spending time with Jordy's family on land that they have shared for so long binds me to his family in a more raw and fundamental way than any other could. I learned to water ski the same way and in the same water that my husband and his entire family learned; my daughter jumps off the same rocks that my mother-in-law jumped off as a little girl, and we all make a daily pilgrimage to the ice cream shop where 2 generations have worked during the summer. The oldest of the third generation will be old enough to continue the tradition next year, and we are all eagerly awaiting her employment (though our waistlines may disagree). Connecting with Jordy's family this way encourages me to love him (and them) even more deeply, and in a sense for more time. Though my time moving forward is limited, I feel like with each summer here, I get time both in the present, and also in the past. It's a richer, augmented experience when you're layering summer on top of summer on top of summer. I recently picked up The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt. It's a story of a summer house, like this one, and the family that inhabits it. I just started the book, but I love the way that the house and the land are intertwined with the family and its history. The author's memories of his grandparents are similar to the memories that Jordy has, and likely similar to the memories that Emi will have as she grows up. It was handed to me as soon as I arrived, looking for something to read. I just finished 1Q84, and needed something to thumb through at the beach in-between discussions of the latest article in People or Frank Rich's column that morning. Reading is an integral weft in the social fabric of the ladies at camp. We love books, we love to read, and we love to talk about what we're reading. Here's a sample of what's made an appearance at the beach this week. If some of the reviews seem short, it's because I made people tell me what they were reading as they were running through the house on their way to the beach, the grocery store, or to watch the Olympics (the only time, save for the U.S. Open, that the television is allowed on).

Lulu, 65 The matriarch of this house, Lulu, has made it her business to extend her family. She is the wife of Claude and Phyllis' younger son, John, and is at the center (though some days she would like to be removed from it) of camp life. A fellow only child, Lulu's philosophy is that there are always enough beds, and we can always make dinner stretch to accommodate a few more. Lulu is an honorary grandmother to most of the kids here, and is an honorary mother to all of us. She is the grandmother who waterskis and swears like a sailor and finishes the crossword in the Sunday Times, and she makes it her business to keep alive the history of camp (and with it, her husband's family). When you come to camp, you inevitably hear the stories of this place, and Lulu is often the one telling them. Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichel "I love it. It's a memoir of her childhood with a very crazy mother and how food became so important in her life. She comes from a really crazy family, and she just by happenstance gets connected to a family that loves food, and she discovers that when the world isn't working well, you can make a good meal and all is suddenly right with the world."

Nancy, 70 Nancy's husband, Ricky, was raised with John, Lulu's husband. Both of their fathers were off fighting in WWII, and their mothers, Dot and Phyllis, moved in together. Both nurses, they were best friends, and each had two boys. They got double coupons and worked opposite shifts so that while one worked, the other watched all of the children. They shared jobs---Dot hated darning, so Phyllis did that, but Dot did all of the maintenance. The husbands were in the same medical corps in Italy. Ricky's family used to rent the camp next door when Claude and Phyllis bought this camp, and Nancy first came up to the lake when she and Ricky became engaged.

Nancy, through sheer luck, stayed up here the summer that I brought newly-born Emi to camp. She would rock Emi as Emi screamed and screamed, and she would sit with me through the seemingly never-ending nursing sessions telling me stories of her own family, in and out of which members of our family would dance. Asked about her favorite things about camp, she says, "The thing that always struck me was the intergenerational thing, the cocktail hour with the great grandparents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and kids, sharing stories and sharing time. All of the ages and stages and kids, and everyone just kind of took care of their own kids and other kids---kind of like how it is now. Oh, and coming down to the beach with all of these very professional, intelligent, highly educated women sharing stories from smutty magazines."

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy "It's a book that I never in a million years thought I would read (even though I'm an English teacher), but my book club decided they would do it. I am fully immersed in it. The first 100 or so pages were difficult just because of the many characters and getting the names straight (and feeling intimidated by the fact that it's War and Peace). But once you get over that, Tolstoy is so fluid and so all-encompassing and he understands human nature and the big picture so well, but he includes detail to make it seem here and now. The writing is a narrative, so you read it for a story, but you also get a sense of the history and the philosophical and ethical issues that people thought about at that time in Russia (and even now): the nobility and the peasants; why people go to war. You're also brought back by the everydayness of the characters that he creates, and they become real. It's a great read. We were supposed to read 200 pages and meet and read another 200 pages, but I've almost finished it because I've become so involved with it."

Emily, 37 Emily and I became fast friends when she started dating Jordy's cousin, Evan (Lulu's son). She is one of the funniest people I know. She was married here at the lake, and I was one of her bridesmaids. She returned the favor for me when I married Jordy. Her daughters, 4 1/2 and 2 years old, sandwich Emi in age, and the three of them are quite a sight to behold when they are galavanting together on the beach. Emily now does the Sunday crossword with Lulu, and she's the only person I know who can beat Jordy at Scrabble.

"I just finished Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I loved it up until the very end, but I couldn't put it down---I was sneaking reads during work. It was a page turner, and you didn't know what was happening. It was a good mystery, and how you felt about the characters changed throughout the book at different points. I read The Art of Racing in the Rain at the beginning of the summer. It's written from the point of view of a dog---[she looks at me raising my eyebrows and goes, "I know, but it's really good."] the dog is this smart being, but because of how he was created (with a floppy tongue, no thumbs)---he's stuck with his thoughts and knowledge of things but no way to express himself. I just started reading Sharp Objects."

Alice and Claudia, 10 I've known Alice and Claudia (sisters, daughters of Jordy's cousin) since they were toddlers, speaking in one-word sentences and eager to investigate my shoes every time I came to their house. Watching them grow has been astonishing; if ever there were two more interesting 10 year olds, I don't know them. Alice is wonderfully imaginative and creative. This week, she made a magic wand for her brother out of a twig that she had stripped the bark off of in a striped pattern, and a vine woven around and anchored with pine sap. Claudia is thoughtful and funny and up for anything. She's also incredibly creative, and her wrists are buried in brightly colored friendship bracelets that she's made. The two sisters, along with their brother and cousins, are delighted to invite Emi to play with them, and are old enough to be able to tell her stories when she's older about her first years here.

Alice The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, Meg Wolitzer "It's about this dude who plays Scrabble, and he has a power in his fingers to read things with his fingertips. They're in a tournament in Florida. I got it for my birthday from Grandma and Grandpa. It was on the Chautauqua reading list."

Claudia The Son of Neptune, Rick Riordan "It's the second in a series the Heros of Olympus, which is the sequel series to the Percy Jackson series. It's about a boy, Percy Jackson, who's memory is taken by Hera/Juno, and he loses 8 months of his life with the wolf Lupa and her pack, learning to fight. Then he leaves the wolves and journeys to the Roman demigod camp and he's originally from the Greek demigod camp. I read the first one in the series and it was about a boy, Jason, who gets the same thing but goes from the Roman camp to the Greek camp, and he has to unite the camps before the prophesy can come true. It's so good, I've read it seven times."

After a bit of questioning, Claudia admits she's read it seven times because she's already read (or can't find) the other books in the top of the boathouse, where the girls sleep. I promise to take her to town tomorrow to get a new book to read at the local bookstore. She'll read it and give it to her sister and cousins---I imagine that it will end up in one of the bookshelves in the house, waiting for Emi to grow into it. As for our trip into town, I can't promise anything, but it will likely include an ice cream cone. I know all too well that in a blink, Claudia will be old enough to drive herself, and in another one old enough for me to take her kids for her while she catches a moment to read on the beach.

What I Learned at the Rock Concert

Part 1 Last week I went to a concert with my parents and my husband.  We saw Crosby Stills & Nash. And it was awesome.  It took me half an hour to figure out which one was Stills and which was Nash, but it was still awesome. My husband and I were definitely in the minority, most of the audience was over the age of fifty.  But they sure knew how to have a good time!

The woman sitting directly in front of me was having an especially good time.  Every time the band played one of her favorite songs, she would jump up from her seat and dance in place.  Sometimes other people around us were standing up, clapping and dancing, but often she was the only one on her feet.  But she didn’t care.  She didn’t care that she was the only one in our section dancing, or even standing up.  She was celebrating this moment, this song, this experience.

Of course her celebration was basically blocking my view.  Since her seat was right in front of mine, whenever she got up to dance, I could only see a third of CSN. At one point my husband looked over and gave me a sad faced kind of grimace, apologizing that I couldn’t see.  But truthfully, I didn’t care. This woman was so darn happy; it made me happy just to be around her.  She was getting such joy from the music and the performance; I couldn’t help but be affected by it.  Whenever she would get up and dance, I couldn’t stop smiling.

This woman was probably older than my mom, and all I could think was, I want to be that happy, that excited, that rocking in thirty years.  I want to be the kind of grown-up that celebrates life and grabs onto joy whenever its around.  I want to rejoice in those pure blissful moments.  I want to stand up at a concert and sing and dance and clap along with the band.  I want all those whippersnappers to look at me in awe and say ‘that is one groovy old lady’.

But nothing happens overnight right?  I can’t expect to wake up at 60 with all the answers and a convenient pair of rose tinted glasses on the nightstand. So I’m starting now, today; I’m making new habits.  First, I’m going to dance more; just put on a record in the middle of the afternoon and boogie in my living room. Second, I’m going to make a conscious effort to recognize the joy in my life.  To be in the moment and appreciate the bliss that finds me every day. I'm going to celebrate my life.

And in thirty years, I’m going to rock that concert.

How It Began

When I am growing up, my grandmother often prints out thick packets of stories and legends about women who did things and sends them to me in large manila envelopes. After a while I have history and myth all mixed up, but I know more about Sacagawea and Joan of Arc, Jane Austen and the goddess Athena, than any of my friends in Mrs. Smith’s first grade classroom.

Every summer we make the drive to North Carolina to visit my grandparents. This time, I walk into the room where my sister and I always sleep and instead of the familiar stack of printed-out pages there is a small hardback book sitting on the bedside table. The cover shows a collage of train tickets, magazine photographs of the Eiffel Tower, and plastic figurines of women in traditional southern French dress. I like it right away. I have always judged books by their covers.

Postcards from France is a series of articles written back to her American hometown newspaper from a young woman spending a year living in Valence, a small city in the southeast province of Savoie. I finish the book in one day. I read it again the next year, and again, and again. Inside the back cover, in the careful, blocky handwriting of a child just starting to write, I inscribe, “This is a great book!”

From then on, I am completely obsessed with the idea of spending a year in France---of travelling the entire country, becoming fluent in another language, and making unforgettable friends. I will do this, too. And I do, in my own way.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Randon Billings Noble is a creative nonfiction writer living in Washington, DC.  A graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a former teacher of writing at American University, she currently writes the blog From the Hatchery while raising her 17-month-old twins.  Her essays have appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, Passages North and elsewhere.  You can read more from her at fromthehatchery.com, randonbillingsnoble.com, and on Twitter (@randonnoble).  When I was halfway through my one and only pregnancy, I stopped reading.

Before this I had always read.  I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, and I was always a little jealous when I read about others learning to read – when C-A-T became “cat” and leapt off the page and into imagination.  According to my parents, when I was three years old we were driving by a billboard and I read “Rustoleum” right off it.  Rustoleum.  Impressive . . . but it doesn’t exactly leap into imagination.

In high school I tore through the classics assigned by my English teachers as well as the Sweet Valley High series I discovered on my own.  In college I branched out into Women’s Literature and Native American Literature and rooted back into Chaucer and the medievalists.  In graduate school I focused on Renaissance Drama until I defected from my English program into an MFA in Creative Writing.  There I read Proust, Bulgakov, Joan Didion, Andre Aciman . . .

I continued to read when I jumped the desk and became a teacher of writing instead of a student.  I read throughout my courtship with my husband and well into our marriage.  Then I got pregnant.  With twins.

The bigger I got the more immobile I became.  I was never on bed rest, but when your waist more than doubles in size and is heading towards the planetary, it’s tough to move around – even inside your own house.  For a few weeks I mostly just sat in a chair in our living room and read, but then I started to become stupid.  I couldn’t focus, even on the Sookie Stackhouse novels I was burning through on my Kindle.  Later I learned that your brain can shrink up to 8% during pregnancy.  Since I was carrying twins, I imagine my brain shrank 16%.

Finally they were born---each weighing well over seven pounds.  And for the next few months I was completely and happily consumed by them.  But then I started to miss reading.

When the weather got warmer, I began to take the twins out for walks in their fancy double-decker stroller.  One of our first outings was to the library.  Right by the front counter was a shelf of new releases whose breadth of subject matter made me almost giddy---a mystery set at Pride and Prejudice’s Pemberly, the latest installment in the Game of Thrones series, novels about werewolves (one starring Henry VIII no less), a collection of Alexander McQueen’s fashions, a thick volume of illustrated anatomy, a group biography of former North Koreans, a bunch of vegetarian cookbooks, The History of the World in 100 Objects.

I checked out three books that day and read them in less than a week.  My brain swelled like the Grinch’s heart bursting out of its magnifying frame.  I was myself again.  I was reading.

Here are some of my favorite finds:

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi St. John Fox, a writer, has gotten into the habit of killing off his heroines.  Mary Foxe, his made-up muse, objects.  She challenges him to join her in a series of stories where she, too, has a hand in their creation, and nine divergent fairy tales are the result.  The relationship between the writer and his creation grows more complicated, however, when Mr. Fox’s wife Daphne becomes convinced that he is having an affair and breaks into their narrative.  Will Mr. Fox have to choose between his fantasy muse and his flesh-and-blood wife?  Or will yet another story write itself?

One tale begins:

There was a Yourba woman and there was an English-man, and …

That might sound like the beginning of a joke, but those two were seriously in love.

They tried their best with each other, but it just wasn’t any good.  I don’t know if you know what a Yourba woman can be like sometimes.  Any house they lived in burnt down.  They   fought; their weapons were cakes of soap, suitcases, fists, and hardback encyclopedias.  There were injuries …

One day the woman stamped her foot and wished her man dead.  He died.  (And now you know what a Yourba woman can be like sometimes.)

She had a devil of a time getting him back after that one.

The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, illustrated by Nate Powell I was immediately struck by this graphic novel’s cover.  I wanted to know what these two men were looking at, and with such different expressions.  In a way, they’re both looking at the same thing: their hometown in Texas where in 1968 a civil rights protest turns deadly and five black college students are charged with murder.  Larry Thompson is the black activist who leads the protest.  Jack Long (a fictionalized version of the writer Mark Long’s father) is the white reporter who crosses the color line to film it.  Jack invites Larry’s family to his house on the white side of town and eventually testifies – for the accused students – at their trial.  Amid the hatred, violence, and misunderstanding in this story, there are also fishing trips, barbeques, rodeos, realizations, redemption and, ultimately, a sense of unity.

In this scene Larry’s family is at Mark’s house.  The kids are sent outside to play, conversation stumbles and an offer of drinks is refused.  But then Mark puts some music on …

We Others: New and Selected Stories by Steven Millhauser This collection features stories about a mysterious figure who emerges in a commuter town to slap people – hard – before disappearing, about a boy infatuated with a girl whose one white glove hides an unbearable secret, about the creator of clockwork automatons who finds himself in competition with a mysterious rival, about a knife-thrower who marks the people who flock to see him, about a museum whose endless bewildering rooms call people to return again and again …

These stories claim to be about others, but we are more haunted by the way they reflect back on us.

The title story begins:

We others are not like you.  We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold.  We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places.  We leave that to you.  Did I say: more watchful?  That above all.  We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you.  We crave your attention.  We hunger for a sign …

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont A sad tale of love and loss and the sea, but set at a New England prep school – not aboard the Pequod.  When his best friend and sailing partner commits suicide, Jason Prosper transfers to Bellingham Academy, a second-chance school for the privileged.  But even as he forms new relationships at his new school, he is haunted by his past and threatened by a secret he only slowly unravels.

One of the surprise pleasures of this book was the wordplay between friends.  Despite its rather dark plot, this microcosm of teenagers is full of intimacy, prankishness and wit.   I’ll leave the revelation of the title line, the starboard sea, for you to discover as you read, but this passage gave me a whole new appreciation for the creative usage of SAT vocabulary:

Cal’s mother, Caroline, had once made up a deck of vocabulary flashcards, encouraging us to quiz each other in preparation for the SAT.  Cal’s favorite word was ‘abrasive.’  He’d misuse it every chance he could, inserting it into sentences where it didn’t belong.  ‘This ham and cheese sandwich is mighty abrasive.’  ‘That’s some abrasive foot odor.’  ‘I’m going to get abrasive on this ancient history exam.’

And the book I just picked up this week: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed This book is a collection of Dear Sugar advice columns from the online magazine The Rumpus.  Someone commented on Twitter that she was reading it with a highlighter but should have been with a tattoo gun.   As I leafed through its pages I felt the same way.

Every page of this book feels quote-worthy, but I’ll end with a piece of advice that Strayed, in her 40s, wrote to a woman in her 20s – something I wish I had read in that living room chair, trapped under the weight of 15 pounds of baby, feeling time slide away like a tide and wondering if I would ever get some fraction of my brain – my life – back.  Strayed writes:

The useless days will add up to something.  The shitty waitressing jobs.  The hours writing in your journal.  The long meandering walks.  The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not.  These things are your becoming.

I hope this reading will be part of yours.

Pixar's Brave, Continuing and Subverting the Princess Tradition

I am a Disney princess. I have seven Disney princess Barbies (yes, present tense---they’re still stashed in the childhood shrine of my old home closet). My most treasured memories are of my formerly-yearly trips to Disneyland with my parents. I know the entire Menken/Ashman (and Menken/Rice, and Menken/Schwartz) catalogue by heart. That said, as a grown-ass woman with a social sciences degree, I readily recognize some of the problems inherent in the “Disney princess” idea, and the representations of female heroines in Disney movies from the “Golden Age” to the “Renaissance.” Jasmine’s Orientalist harem fantasy outfit. Ariel’s child-bride status. And the fact that, despite ‘80s- and ‘90s-bred themes of rebelliousness and girl power, each film’s resolution involves a marriage accompanied by a happily-ever-after fulfillment.

In the last decade or so, Disney films have made steps in the right direction. Mulan, for example, is a hardcore soldier who risks death by cross-dressing as a man to take her elderly father’s place, and ends up being better at winning battles than any of her male comrades. Tiana, the first black heroine, has the much more grounded, non-fairy-tale goal of opening her own restaurant, which supersedes romance (until, of course, she meets Prince Naveen).

As far as children’s films go, though, Pixar has indubitably taken up Disney’s mantle as the reigning champ, the benchmark (okay, technically Pixar is owned by Disney, but you know--- whatever). And what’s come up in the past decade or so that Pixar’s been releasing feature length movies is: where are the female protagonists?

Now they finally have one.

Merida, the wild-haired heroine of Pixar’s latest offering Brave---its 13^th full-length animated feature---broke new ground for the very fact that she was female; the 12 previous protagonists, whether man or beast or robot or toy, were all male. So Brave represents a break with tradition, a big step forward, and the bonus of a new, strong role model for all the little girls (and boys) of the world, whose parents take them to see Pixar films and who benefit from Pixar’s better-than-children’s-movies storytelling.

That said, I’m really disappointed to admit that I was disappointed in Brave. I mean, it actually kinda breaks my heart. True, my expectations were beyond sky-high. Finding Nemo and Ratatouille are personal favorites, and I honestly think WALL-E and Up are some of the greatest achievements, not just in children’s movies, but in film history.

As many reviewers have already noted, it was a perfectly acceptable film by the standards of its genre. It was beautifully-animated, it was fun, it was sweet. But I’ve come to expect so much more from Pixar. I expect to be surprised and delighted, to have the conventional plot subverted, to see something that no one else has done before. For example, a story that revolves around a haute-cuisine-obsessed rat's ability to control the physical actions of a human chef by strategically pulling on his hair. Or a story that begins with the end of the world. Or the death of a wife.

The story in Brave is in many ways a conventional princess story, though it succeeds in, slightly, turning it on its head. Merida is a Scottish princess approaching womanhood, and as such is bound by tradition to marry the first-born son of one of the area tribes. The respective sons compete in an athletic game for her hand in marriage---a tradition meant to unite the land and maintain friendly relations between tribes.

Merida, of course, resists this tradition. She doesn’t feel ready for marriage, and it’s clear her options aren’t exactly appealing. (In this, her position is reminiscent of Jasmine’s in Aladdin---lame suitors, stubborn princess.) She butts heads with her mother, a loving but stern woman who values tradition and underscores Merida’s responsibility in keeping the kingdom together by marrying.

In the sense that, unlike Aladdin and other princess predecessors, Merida’s story does not have a conventional marriage ending, we are given a feminist reimagining of the traditional narrative. And in the sense that the film’s central relationship is between two women---the sometimes loving, sometimes brutal battle of wills that is the mother-daughter relationship---it is also admirably woman-centered. (And definitely passes the Bechdel test.)

But despite the steps forward in the woman-as-protagonist direction, Brave feels a little like a missed opportunity. The story is weaker than previous Pixar offerings, and it rests on tried-and-true children's-film conventions instead of exploring new territory. It will not go down in the record books as one of the greatest animated films ever made. It might not even get nominated for an Oscar (or at least, it might not win). For all the credit it gets in having the first female protagonist, to do so it still had to revert to a more conventional fairy-tale narrative---albeit one slightly reimagined for modern sensibilities.

I like Merida. I think she’s a great character. She’s tough---she’s a tomboy---she’s uncomfortable submitting to feminine convention---she’d rather be riding her horse, shooting her bow, and climbing precarious cliffs than playing the princess. She is flawed---her temper and her stubbornness make her brash, inconsiderate. She is naïve; she is rebellious. She is interesting, and she is realistic. Worth noting: Merida's mother is also a fantastic character, a woman with her own strengths and weaknesses different from Merida's.

Where the problem lies is that this story has been done before. And while that would have simply been a disappointment if it was just another Pixar movie, the fact that it was a landmark, first-female-protagonist Pixar movie makes that disappointment especially acute. It could have been better. Let’s hope Pixar’s next female protagonist has a film that befits her. And, maybe she doesn’t have to be a princess, either.

YWRB: It Takes Nerve

By Amanda Page It took nerve to go to the microphone and ask a feminist legend for some advice.

It takes real nerve to be a rebel.

It took a year of writing about rebellion for me to build up the nerve to finally claim my life as my own. I was 22 and ready to travel and it seemed like the whole world was telling me, “No.” I simply wanted to get on a plane.

“You can’t go,” I was told. “You can’t leave.”

My biggest rebellions have always been about going after what I want for myself instead of living in service of what others want for me. It’s hard to hold our own desires and protect and honor them. The wants and expectations of others can so easily become the “shit” that we’re not supposed to take. If we don’t respect our own wishes, then we’re taking shit from ourselves.

It takes nerve to take no shit . . . from others or from yourself.

Nerve is like a muscle. Rebellion is the exercise that builds the nerve muscle.

And you can do rebellion by writing it.

It took nerve to whip out our pens and legal pads in bars at midnight. It took nerve to declare that we were writing a book. It took nerve to share the idea with the wild woman from my poetry class.

Each action was a tiny act of rebellion, working my nerve muscle, making me more capable, more daring, more able to surprise myself.

I was told, “No,” but I said, “Yes.” Yes, I will.

I can now say, “Yes, I did.”

The stories we hold dearest are the ones that come from the times that we dare ourselves to do something.

Do something that scares you. Today. Anything. Ten years from now, it might be the moment that changed everything. It might be your best story.

Your best story takes nerve.

On (Un)following on Twitter

I've been wondering what Twitter is to me. While my favorited tweets reflect of my headspace, and encapsulate my strengths and flaws, my entire Twitter stream is the pool from which these highs and lows materialize—an idea-filled microcosm of my world, where my current interests lie. I've been thinking about the process of unfollowing, especially after reading Mat Honan's piece on Wired about unfollowing everyone. For me, the unfollowing process is active and ongoing, and while I've unfollowed people for various reasons, it's less about the account being unfollowed and more about me. My interests change from week to week, so I follow and unfollow to keep up with my mind, to keep the flow rushing and constant and healthy, to prevent debris buildups and mental cobwebs.

* * * * *

Earlier this summer, I noticed a a smattering of #TBEX in my stream, the hashtag for a travel blogging conference. I'm not a travel blogger, but in 2008, I'd created my Twitter account and my blog as platforms to complement my job at a travel website. In the beginning, I followed and networked with travel writers and travelers by default, but over the past four years, I've diverged from this path and discovered other interests and topics I enjoy writing about. It has made sense to unfollow publications and bloggers that no longer offer ideas and information that are relevant to me.

I still have friends and contacts from the online travel sphere and today find myself on the periphery of this world, yet wade in other currents that interest me, like technology and nonfiction, within my Twitter stream. I see how my Twitter feed is constantly evolving, not stagnant. It feels natural to follow and unfollow; to cull and prune; to find a balance, on any given day, between information and entertainment, hope and despair, and significance and irrelevance.

And I notice occasionally that when I unfollow someone, they immediately and automatically unfollow me in return (and sometimes on other networks, too). I find this kind of reciprocal following and unfollowing meaningless, but I understand people use Twitter, and other social media, in different ways.

* * * * *

I have my reasons for following each account on my list. I follow a handful of bloggers because I regularly read them; a group of people for interesting ideas on all things digital; a bunch of folks for general news, art and design, and pop culture; book handles of bigger publications like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books; and then a sprinkling of accounts who add the necessary color, humor, and "padding" to my feed.

I've thought about what kind of irrelevance to keep in my stream. I don't enjoy reading complaints and the daily minutiae of a person's day, yet I don't mind the wickedly inappropriate trolling tweets of assholes. I hate when "LOL" or "LMAO" appear in my stream, but am completely fine with other abbreviations.

A systematic randomness, I suppose.

And I don't follow my closest friends. Not because I don't like them, but because I don't use Twitter to communicate with them. I also may love someone's photography so will follow them on Instagram, but that doesn't mean I will follow them on Twitter. (Can't I be drawn to just one facet of a person?)

* * * * *

But ultimately, do I have to explain this process?

So, I'm curious: do you actively follow and unfollow people on Twitter, too?

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Maggie Shipstead was born in 1983 in Orange County, CA. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, VQR, American Short Fiction, The Best American Short Stories 2010, and other publications. "La Moretta," a story published in VQR, was a 2012 National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. Maggie is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and a recent resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She doesn't really know where she lives but is open to suggestions. Seating Arrangements is her first novel. After seeing it on every list of best summer reads (including this one and this one), we ran out to buy our own copies and suggest you do the same---unless you hate laughing. I tend to have a smorgasbord of books going, dog-eared and sometimes set aside for weeks or months until I’m in the mood to pick them up again. Which book to read before bed on any given day is a question I address much like I figure out what to wear: with lots of blank staring at the possibilities, maybe making a false start or two, wishing for an infinite selection, and then yielding to the necessity of making a choice. I don’t feel much enmity for e-readers, but, for me, an integral part of the pleasure of reading is the pleasure of selecting a book from bookshelves, either mine or a store’s. Last fall I spent a month in Bali, and the Ganesha Bookshop in Ubud was a treasure trove of weird paperbacks discarded by travelers from all over the place (but, okay, mostly from Australia). I love the associations that grow between books and the places I read them. A certain mystery with a cracked cover and pill-y, yellowing paper is inseparable from a corner of shade in my landlady’s pool, where I stood in the water for hours, trying not to fry in the tropical sun. In January, when I was doing an artist residency in Paris, a Left Bank bookseller handed me The Hare With Amber Eyes, a haunting family history by ceramicist Edmund de Waal that’s about Paris and Vienna and Tokyo and war and precious objects. I read it on a hard single bed in my Spartan artist studio while the city and its past slept outside in the cold. Perfection.

These days, my bed in San Diego is a much less exotic venue for reading, but here, nonetheless, are some of the books that have recently been the object of my fickle attention.

Just finished . . . A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer duBois A wise, crazy-smart, and heartbreaking debut novel built around the question of how to wage a battle that you know can’t be won. Sounds grim, but duBois’s writing is a treat: full of wry humor and incisive observation. Irina is a young woman from Boston living with a terminal diagnosis who embarks on a quest to Russia to track down a former chessmaster turned dissident politician, Aleksandr Bezetov, and see if he can give her any answers. DuBois also delves into Aleksandr’s past, starting in St. Petersburg in 1979. I have a lifelong thing for Russia, and—past and present—that sprawling, inscrutable country is the third lead in this book.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon Okay, so maybe this won’t actually be released until September, but a friend scored an advance copy for me back in the spring. Sweeeet! The novel follows two families living on the seam between Oakland and Berkeley, one white, one black. The wives are partners in a midwife practice, and the husbands own a record store. Chaos ensues. This is a fat, meaty, absorbing book, jammed with off-kilter characters and happenings and with Chabon’s signature riffs on pop culture.

The Honourable Schoolboy by John LeCarré I’m a big fan of LeCarré, especially his Cold War novels. This novel falls between Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy (best title ever) and Smiley’s People in a trilogy about George Smiley’s pursuit of his KGB nemesis Karla. Just on a language level, LeCarré is an amazing stylist—a very, very, very fine writer who is extremely nimble within the omniscient point of view—but he’s also a master at assembling complex plots and setting them spinning in a perfectly rendered, dreary-yet-fascinating, invisible spy world.

In the middle of . . . Look At Me by Jennifer Egan I’ve been meaning to buy this novel forever, and finally it appeared in front of my face at the right moment at the right bookstore (Books Inc. in San Francsico). One of the many things I admire about Egan’s writing is that she’s always experimenting with form and daringly fills her books with unexpected twists. In Look At Me, a model comes out of a car crash with eighty screws in her face, not disfigured but undeniably altered, and must figure out how her place in the world has also changed. That would be story enough, but other characters take turns behind the narrative wheel as well: a high school golden boy turned unhinged history professor, an outwardly plain teenage girl with a reckless streak, and a private eye, to name a few.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff I will always be obsessed with a short story of Groff’s that was in the 2007 volume of The Best American Short Stories and is called “L. Debard and Aliette.” The opening is set in New York in 1918 as a flu epidemic erupts and an Olympic champion teaches a girl recovering from polio to swim and, eventually, to do sexier things. The story is retelling of Eloise and Abelard and has a mesmerizing dreaminess to it that I’m also loving in Arcadia, which begins in a hippie commune in the 70s and, the reviews tell me, progresses all the way into the future. Groff’s writing has a matter-of-fact lyricism that allows her to write about very strange things very naturally and with apparent effortlessness.

Can’t wait to start . . . The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje I love ships and the ocean and Michael Ondaatje’s books, so I see no reason why I won’t love this book. It’s about an eleven-year-old boy traveling from Sri Lanka to England on an ocean liner, and I think it’s going to be beautiful.

Girl Problems

Everyone thinks my 6-month-old daughter is a boy.  She is the spitting image of her father, so if they catch a glimpse of him before they decide which pronoun to use, the situation is compounded.  I don’t routinely dress her in pink---although I have to say it is a universally flattering color.  I don’t scotch-tape or Velcro bows to the downy tufts on her largely bald head.  I do consider her gender when picking out an outfit in the morning and never quite land on any particularly comfortable solution.  On one hand, I want people to understand “who” she is and identify her as a girl.  In this case, my impulse is to reach for something pink or even a dress.  Often, I will select a pair of neutral pants with a pink drawstring, a relatively subtle item, so I don’t feel like the pressure is getting to me.  On the other hand, I don’t want to kowtow to the notion that a baby girl should be a living doll.  After all, she is only MONTHS old: How could we possibly have any idea whether she will be “girly” or a “tomboy” or anywhere else on that spectrum in her style or proclivities? The question of gender identity never fails to excite debate.  Even within my own mind, I find it almost impossible decide how I feel about stereotypic gender roles.  Some days, I am strongly convinced that gender identity (sexuality, a separate issue, could be an entirely different and equally hot topic) is ingrained or at least some interaction of genes and environment.  At other times, I sense that the socialization of gender happens so early and is so pervasive in our culture that I am surprised anyone develops the free will to resist his or her prescribed role.  My own experience bears this out . . . while the baby is still in utero, before it even joins the party, the burning question is, “Do you know what you are having?”  People desperately need to begin with the categorization as soon as possible.  I am just as guilty of this as anyone, fretting over a “gender neutral” baby gift for my sister-in-law.

When I was pregnant, we ultimately decided to find out the sex of the baby.  In the abstract, I wanted to be one of those people who doesn’t need to know.  I pictured myself indignantly telling inquirers, “We don’t need to relate to the gender of this fetus.  You see, we are very progressive . . .”  In reality, I was struggling to “plan” for her without knowing.  It felt silly, but I wanted to decorate her room, buy her clothing and think about her future with at least this clue about who she might be.  And the whole process of growing a human being is so bizarre, I felt much less like an alien pod with a sense of this label and all the things it (not necessarily) implies.  Of course, we know that all bets are off when an actual person emerges from the womb.

In time, we may come to discover that Isadora is all tutus, all the time.  She might bedazzle her dresser and have tea parties with the dog.  It could also be the case that she adores trucks and machines.  Like it or not, these are preferences we most closely associate with one gender or another.  But what if she demonstrates an interest in astronomy, math, or dinosaurs?  How about ballet, cooking, or child care?  I want so much to be a parent that doesn’t automatically think of these as “boy” or “girl” activities.  I would love to have a girl who excels in the sciences, beats her father at chess and has an amazing arm.  More important, I don’t want to be surprised by the fact that she does any of these things.

As much as we’d like to believe that kids are a tabula rasa, it is virtually impossible to opt out of gender.  Frankly, most children initiate their own affiliation with one gender or another before a parent has the ability to influence this in the slightest.  I am constantly regaled with anecdotes from family and friends about how they dutifully tried to open the field for their female children by exposing them to a wide array of toys, games, clothes and experiences.  In many of these stories, the girls immediately and stubbornly chose and clung to princesses, dolls, fairies and the like despite the efforts of the parents.   This could be the effect of many factors outside the home or subtle cues inside the home or simply hard wiring.

Distilled down, the real issue for me is to ensure that our girl has lots of choices and feels secure making them.  Her mother does flowers for a living---an industry typically associated with and dominated by women.   As a young girl, I loved anything with glitter, rainbows, or sparkle and my favorite Muppet was Miss Piggy.  I also played many sports and was an academic decathlete.  I am aware that my modeling may or may not have much impact on how she develops.  I just hope that if there is a tea party with the dog, I get an invite.

Ramadan

Ramadan started last week. Around the world, Muslims are fasting, allowing nothing to pass their lips from sunrise to sunset. My husband is one of them.

At seven am the alarm goes off, often my husband is already awake, being one of those people with an annoyingly accurate internal clock.  He’s out the door for work before seven thirty.  He doesn’t have a cup of coffee or a granola bar for breakfast and he doesn’t kiss me goodbye before he leaves.

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, which means it gradually moves throughout the year. The first year my husband and I were dating, Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, happened right around Thanksgiving.  The fact that holy month moves around the calendar combined with fasting times that are based on sunrise and sunset means fasting in July is different than fasting in November.

By the time my husband comes home at five, the hunger is present, but there’s still three and a half hours to go.  As the clock ticks towards 8:30, my husband starts preparing his meal.  He’s decided to celebrate the season by cooking Kitchari, a rice+lentil combination the color of scrambled eggs.  He’s also made Chicken Curry so spicy the fumes made my eyes water.

I stand in the kitchen, watching the digital readout on the microwave flip numbers as he arranges his plate and glass at the table.  I call out the time. 8:27.  My husband breaks his fast with a sip of water.  The first thing he has tasted all day.  Before he moves on to the spicy food, I lean in for a kiss (or three). Our first kiss of the day.  Finally, he’ll turn to his plate.

I’ve already eaten. Since I’m not fasting, I eat my dinner earlier in the evening.  I’ve never been a big believer in the old absence makes the heart grow fonder.  I think my heart is just as fond no matter the distance. But as I walk into the other room, I can’t help but think about the power of abstaining. It’s like pressing the reset switch.  My kiss at 8:30 in the evening seems to have more meaning, more something because I’ve waited for it.  It is not second nature or ordinary.  It is a treat, something infinitely special. I am reminded to be appreciative and grateful for all the small blessings in my life. The things that seem so ordinary that I’ve taken them for granted.  A nice place to live, food on the table, kisses from my husband.

Ramadan is less than a week old, but I’m already feeling the impact.  I’m going to appreciate the fact that I get to kiss my husband every single day rather than mistake it for ‘everyday’.

What little things are you appreciating this week?