What Are You Reading (Offline, That Is)?

Erin Van Genderen is a writer and editor currently based in west Texas, but now that she married into the military she anticipates moving soon. This thrills her, as she grew up in the same place as her great-grandfather was born and has an itch to see the world. Erin posts daily about food, travel, books and simple living at Little Dutch Wife. I was probably too young to be reading Seventeen magazine.

I usually had enough discipline to finish my homework before sneaking into the magazines to read about periods, boyfriends, makeup, sex. I got a thrill from reading Seventeen, although it wasn’t so much about the content as it was the potential contraband nature of the publication itself. I credit much of my knowledge today about proper eyebrow plucking technique to those early days — nothing more risqué than that stuck with me.

And yet the best thing I ever found in Seventeen was a list of “25 Books to Read Before You’re 25”, compiled by then-First Lady Laura Bush for readers surely more interested in how to call a boy than how to read Dostoyevsky.

I ripped the pages from the magazine and later taped them to my bedroom door, where they remain today.

Two withered, sun-faded pages, held up by a few waxy strips of tape. I’m still a little short of twenty-five years and a few books short of finishing the list, but the ones I have read have colored my life in ways unimaginable to the twelve-year-old in the library.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the books, per se, that shaped my experience. Rather, they are the mementos that---with a cover image, a remarkable phrase remembered, a certain tear on the dust jacket---bring to mind a certain point in time. A personal library is a museum of sorts. Not one of old books, but one of places, people, events represented by those old books. What was I reading when I fell in love for the first time? What was I reading when I first traveled abroad?

Remembrances of those times are augmented by the books that got me through it all, those familiar pages like a friend. It’s often uncanny how the subject matter paralleled my own journey---but again, I wonder if it was my choosing the book or the book’s choosing me.

Here are five of my favorite books from that list:

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya This novel is mystical, fantastic, and was for me an entry into Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ world of magic realism. Anaya writes of dusky desert towns, awash in witchcraft and religion, the horizon flecked with saguaros and the silence punctuated by coyote yips. It is a rich read.

My Antonia by Willa Cather Bohemian immigrants, Nebraskan farmland, unrequited love and cultural differences; My Antonia was my grown-up version of Little House on the Prairie. As much as I loved Laura Ingalls as a girl, Cather didn’t have to dull the blade of settlers’ hardships to make it appropriate for a younger audience. Her descriptions of sod houses and plowing vast fields of flax are just as authentic as Ingalls’, but only more real.

It’s hard to get into the book without imagining yourself on the prairie with far-away horizon lines and nothing but gently undulating wheat in the wind, the sky so very blue. A dose of this book is my prescription for the cramped, too-much-city feeling that usually hits around summer.

The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty Welty’s characters are so perfectly Southern that, at times, they seem like caricature, but I, being from the South, know that her words are true. Not all of us are dapper gentry or welfare queens, but then again some of us are.

It isn’t all joke, though. Welty’s father-daughter relationship is heart-rending, and struck a sad chord in me when I was preparing to cleave from my family and start my own home. The worst time I read it, I had to fight back tears in the reading room, the quietest place in the library and privy to each and every sniffle. The best time I read it was the first time. 

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles This was one of the first books in which I was continually struck by the author’s brilliance and intention, one in which I took notes about storytelling from his raw-but-humorous perspective. The title hints at scandalous rendezvous, but Fowles’ genius is that he never quite gets around to it, encouraging the reader to roar through the pages hoping for a glimpse of a petticoat or the officer’s pressed uniform, consequently, not so neat.

I read it while, incidentally, falling in love with a would-be American Lieutenant who would later become my husband.

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham I was lonely when I read this book, and so the loneliness of a WWI veteran’s trauma resonated with me. The novel’s setting is a perfectly rumpled version of Europe, with a short stint in both twentieth-century America and the wasteland-cum-spiritual haven of India. Maugham traces a man’s journey to enlightenment, but only as reached through detachment and self-destruction for most of the characters involved.

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron This was a book that I first read when I was much too young. My lifelong (and perhaps morbid) attraction to Holocaust literature was stunted by my encounter with Styron, but after forgetting about the book for a few years I was able to read it again with an entirely fresh perspective. It has become one of my favorite books of all time.

Styron’s style, his characters---so rough, flesh-and-blood on the page with their neuroses and desires---tell a story of danger and history. The main character is consumed by his youthful yearning for a woman so marred by tragedy that he can’t escape her demise. It is passionate, incredible, harrowing, and should be read all at once.

My Celebrity Best Friends, Emma, Jennifer, and Anne

As Lindy West put it best: “Fuckin' Emma Stone. So good at her job and so nice and cute. So funny! So getting to make out with Ryan Gosling that one time. What a dick. JK, I love her. (Dick.)”

The first time I watched Superbad on Netflix around 2008, I remember I was simultaneously underwhelmed and diverted by the sophomoric teen-boy humor of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, but more than that I remember encountering Emma Stone (as Jonah Hill’s much hotter love interest Jules) and thinking, “Who is that awesome girl who I’ve inexplicably never seen before and who I have an irresistible compulsion to hang out with?”

She was funny. She was charming. She had a deep tomboy voice. She was gorgeous. And yet she also looked like a regular person.

Since Superbad, Stone has pretty much carried all of that currency straight to the bank and general superstardom. And while it’s easy for starlets who enter the Hollywood machine with trace amounts of spunky individuality to get assembly-lined, streamlined, and de-interesting-ized, she’s come through it all remarkably well.

The other day, three years late, I finally watched Easy A, which was Stone’s big breakout leading-lady role. The movie was fun, if a bit uneven, but again, Stone basically made the whole thing. And again, I felt that odd compulsion where I wanted her to be my best friend at the same time that I wanted to be half or one-fifth as cool as her.

The tomboy/best friend/still irrepressibly talented and gorgeous shtick is big in young female Hollywood right now. Jennifer Lawrence is currently riding a wave of adulation with her self-deprecating, down-to-earth manner and her cool-girl vibe. She’s been nominated for two Academy Awards, she just won Best Actress, she’s played fantasy characters like Mystique and Katniss, and she’s starred romantically opposite the likes of Bradley Cooper and Michael Fassbender, and yet we still feel like we kind of know her. Why?

I’m just gonna take a moment to say that I love Emma Stone. I love Jennifer Lawrence. I love Mila Kunis, who has also recently re-launched her cool-girl brand (though I’m kinda like, Ashton Kutcher? Eh.) But I also love Anne Hathaway, who is riding a media wave going in the exact opposite direction, mostly because of what was deemed a disingenuous, cloying Oscar acceptance speech. Why?

Anne Hathaway is gorgeous, but relatable. She’s funny (watch how amazing she is hosting Saturday Night Live). She’s incredibly talented. She’s hard-working. And she really, really seems like a nice person. So sometimes she comes off like that overly bubbly, overly earnest girl at your high school who was always running for and/or organizing things. What’s so bad about that?

To me, it seems like there should be room for admiration and affection for multiple types of Hollywood personalities. You don’t have to like them all. To use an over-used cliché, if these girls were my best friends and we were on Sex and the City, Jennifer would be Samantha and Emma would be Miranda and Anne would be Charlotte, who can be annoying sometimes but we still love her and value her as part of the group.

But this whole anti-Hathaway movement feels incredibly mean-spirited, spiteful, and very, very high school. It feels like resentment of too much success; it feels catty. Anne has become a lightning rod for people’s general, often unfocused dislike of the rich and the successful in Hollywood, a transference for personal problems and shortcomings, a target for some kind of chorus of real-life comments sections, and, as this New Yorker blog points out, an embodiment of the "happy girl" who doesn't know her place. Think about this: how many male actors have engendered a similar reaction when their Oscar speech wasn’t pitch-perfect? I mean, why was Ben Affleck so surprised and emotional that he won an Oscar for Argo—he’s won before! What a phony. Not to mention the fact that he let slip an uncomfortable comment on the “work” he has to put into his marriage to Jennifer Garner. Yet no one’s attacking him.

I’m over it. I’m so over it. Anne Hathaway doesn’t have to be universally liked, the way Stone, Lawrence, Kunis seem to be. But she certainly doesn’t deserve to be universally reviled. When are we going to stop vindictively policing the behavior of women in the public eye—or at the bare minimum, policing members of both gender to the same degree? Why can't we all be friends?

What Are You Reading (Offline That Is)?

Julie Klam grew up in Bedford, NY. She has written for such publications as “O, The Oprah Magazine,” “Rolling Stone,”  “Harper’s Bazaar,” “Cookie,” “Allure,” “Glamour,” “Family Circle,” and “The New York Times Magazine,” “Redbook.” A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Julie worked from 1999 – 2002 as writer for VH1’s Pop-Up Video, where she earned an Emmy nomination for Special Class Writing.  She was also a Senior Writer on VH1’s Name That Video. She is the author of Please Excuse My Daughter, the New York Times Bestseller You Had Me At Woof: How Dogs Taught Me The Secrets of Happiness, Love At First Bark: Dogs and the People They Saved, and Friendkeeping: The Field Guide to the People You Love, Hate, and Can’t Live Without (all Riverhead Books). Along with Ann Leary and Laura Zigman, she is a co-host of the weekly NPR radio show Hash Hags. She lives in Manhattan.

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In college I used to read Vanity Fair’s Night Table reading column. Notable people, actors and actresses would tell readers the book that was on their nightstand. It was never Jackie Collins or Us Magazine, it was Proust or Wittgenstein or David Foster Wallace, something that told the world, I am smart, dammit!  It drove me a wee bit crazy to think that anyone would believe that, that a Vanity Fair reader would run out and buy the complete works of James Salter because they thought Julia Roberts had done that. I always vowed if anyone ever asked me for a recommendation I’d be honest and tell them what I’m really reading: War and Peace in the original Russian. And the Old Testament from original tablets.  KIDDING, I’m kidding of course! I used to read somewhat complicated “smart” books, but once I had a kid and got a smart phone I found my attention span dwindling to not-quite-fruit-fly. In the past year, because of a confluence of very difficult personal situations, I’ve only been able to read the most accessible of books.  I’ve come to see my situation as something of a “reader’s block”  and the challenge for me has been to find books that hold my interest when I’d really rather be playing online solitaire. These books were all published in the last year and all books that broke through my mental state.

1. The Good House by Ann Leary – I was a huge fan of Ann Leary’s first two books, a memoir called An Innocent, A Broad and a novel, Outtakes from a Marriage. There is something magical about the way Ann Leary writes, it’s smart, relatable and oh so entertaining. Even though this book was kind of a fat hardcover, I took it every where I went until I finished it. When I was done, I mourned it and told ever person who hadn’t read it how lucky they were to have it to look forward to.

2. Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub – I read Emma Straubs story collections — though I should say I devoured them. To say I eagerly anticipated her novel is an understatement. I’d read about the topic, a 1930s/40s movie star and her life in old Hollywood.  When I got the book, I read the first page and thought I should stop. It was too good and I loved it so much I was wanted to save it. But I didn’t. I carried it around with me everywhere and got so pulled into the world that I began to look for Laura Lamont movies on TCM. It’s a wonderful book, the kind that makes you forget you are reading and feel instead like you are hearing a story from a fascinating person.

3. The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg – I have read and loved all of Jami Attenberg’s novels, and before The Middlesteins came out the buzz was that it was amazing. For that reason alone I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.  I picked it up at the post office on my way to get my daughter from school and read it as I walked, the story of a woman and a family and Jews and food, and by the second paragraph I was not only hooked, I was looking around for people to tell about it. It really isn’t like anything I’d ever read before, I laughed and nodded my head in recognition and I wept.  I’ve given this book to a lot of friends and everyone, no matter what their background agrees that it’s going to be a favorite of all time.

Semiramis: Ancient Woman of Mystery.

The first reason I wanted to write about Semiramis was because of her cool name, and the second was because I hadn’t written about an ancient historical woman since my first post on Hatshepsut. Lack of sources and all that.

But after just a cursory scan of her Wikipedia page, my interest was very much piqued, more because of what wasn’t there than what was. It’s true that with ancient figures, as opposed to modern ones, the lack of sources can be crippling. Photographs and phonographic recordings are certainly easier to interpret than crumbling papyrus scrolls. But even as far as ancients go, Semiramis’s life is a complete mystery. And yet, this hasn’t prevented a whole bunch of people—mostly men—from liberally inventing her life story in a whole bunch of ways.

The real Semiramis was probably actually an Assyrian queen named Shammuramat who, following her husband Shamshi-Adad V’s death, ruled as regent for her young son from 810 to 806 BCE. Her actual looks, personality, and accomplishments are shrouded in that aforementioned mystery—though, at the very least, we know she spent a few years in charge of the Neo-Assyrian Empire at its powerful height, with a rule spanning from Asia Minor to western Iran. The neighboring Greeks, Iranians, and Indians probably fueled the Semiramis legend due to their contact with the Assyrian empire during her reign. Average Greek/Iranian/Indian guy: “Those Assyrians are badass and they’re ruled by a woman? Man, she must be super hardcore, bro.” (It’s my theory that bros are not a new phenomenon.)

Beyond that, Shammuramat/Semiramis’s life gets murky. But like I said, a whole bunch of people over the centuries—mostly men—can tell you plenty about her. Here’s a brief rundown of the, shall we say, creative Semiramis interpretations:

Ancient Greeks and Persians believed her to be the legendary queen of king Ninus of Babylon, who oversaw the building of the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the first century BCE, devoted a lot of ink (or stone chisels, or whatever) to Semiramis in his The Library of History. According to Diodorus, she was the daughter of a fish goddess (!) that was raised by doves (!!) and then married to the Babylonian king Ninus. When Ninus died, she pretended to be her son for forty-two years (kind of a more soap-opera version of serving as regent), and during that time commanded armies, conquered Libya and Ethiopia, built palaces, and waged an unsuccessful campaign in India which included an army of mechanical elephants (!!!). However, Dio S. refuted the popular claim that she built the Hanging Gardens, noting that these were built after her time by Nebuchadnezzar (owner of one of the best names any king has had, period).

Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman historian, claimed Semiramis invented eunuchs— yes—initiating the practice of castrating male youth. Others also said she invented the chastity belt. (I hear those words, my mind still goes to Maid Marian’s steel padlocked underwear in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.)

Armenian tradition depicted her as a harlot—in a traditional story, she killed the Armenian king Ara the Beautiful after he refused her hand in marriage.

Dante put her in the Second Circle of Hell, along with Helen of Troy, in his Inferno. Probably another one of those “harlot” things.

Alexander Hislop, the 19^th-century Protestant minister, wrote about her in his The Two Babylons (1853) and placed her in biblical tradition. According to Alex H., she was the consort of Nimrod, builder of the Tower of Babel, and she deified herself as the Sumerian goddess Ishtar, mother of Gilgamesh. Later Catholic tradition was based on Semiramis’s Ishtar legend—including the Virgin Mary—which, essentially, allowed Hislop to equate Catholicism with paganism. (Which leads me to question, where does that leave Protestantism? But I haven’t read this masterpiece of theological inquiry, so I won’t judge, beyond the fact that I just sarcastically called it a masterpiece of theological inquiry.)

On top of all this, Semiramis has been the subject of silent and talkie films (Queen of Babylon, 1954; I am Semiramis, 1963), operas (Rossini’s Semaride; Meyerbeer’s Semaride), plays (Voltaire’s Semiramis, a brief mention in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus), and 18^th-century paintings (both paintings shown here; Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s Semiramis Inspecting a Plan of Babylon), among other things. Now all that’s missing in terms of namesakes is a feminist pop culture website (a la Jezebel).

Like Jezebel, Mary Magdalene, Cleopatra, and a host of other ancient women, Semiramis has become synonymous with female licentiousness and sexual immorality, a symbol of woman’s role as earthly temptation. But she has also been attributed qualities of leadership, daring, ambition, courage, and empire-building. She’s even been called a fish goddess’s daughter---which sounds like the name of an Amy Tan novel.

So the stories are obviously all a little different. But for me, the striking common thread is, again, the way that Semiramis serves as an empty vessel, whether that’s for themes of sexual immorality, leadership, divinity, or what have you. Basically, she served whatever purpose the dude---storyteller, scroll-writer, Enlightenment playwright, or silent film director---had in mind, informed by the cultural context of the times through which her legacy was passed down. And these contexts tended to be supremely male-centric, Bible-obsessed, and probably Orientalist.

In this, then, Semiramis's story is not so different from the story of women today. Sure, we’ve come a long way. Yet women often continue to serve as symbols of societal morality, to be talked about with or without women’s participation. There are public debates about how women should dress, how women should behave sexually, how women should balance work and home life. There are political debates about rape, birth control, abortion. There are humanitarian debates about women in other countries---most recently, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky made a splash---and how their dress, rights, cultural roles represent the relative freedom and, perhaps, morality of their societies. (And maybe whether or not we should invade them.)

So as awesome as all the stories about Semiramis are, as an ancient woman of historical legend, I think the most interesting thing about her is that she has secrets. That, maybe, I can relate to.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Petya Grady writes about books, art and style at The Migrant Bookclub. The Eastern Europe of her childhood is a frequent point of departure as she explores issues of place, identity, memory and (un)-belonging. She currently lives in Memphis, TN with her husband. I am on a Jackie O kick recently. This comes as a surprise to me so, naturally, I want to talk about it. I grew up in Bulgaria and moved to the States for college in '99. I went to a small private school in rural Tennessee and even though I majored in Political Science, there was not a single thing in my life that ever signaled to me that I should be curious about the former First Lady. Heck, I didn't even care much for her style. Where I come from, a black turtle neck is considered the epitome of chic and although I don't think Jacqueline would have hated that, I did not think we would have much to talk about if we were to ever meet. Until.

About two years ago, I noticed that the New York Times was reviewing not one but two biographies of Jacqueline that focused on her years as a book editor. It came as quite of a surprise to my bookish self. Not only had I never even heard that Ms. O had ever held a job in her life but now I was faced with the very rare experience of having to choose between two books on that very same subject, coming out at the exact same time. What were the chances?!

I picked up William Kuhn's "Reading Jackie" because I liked the cover better. (Please tell me you do that too!!!) Kuhn is straight-forward about the fact that he never had any personal contact with Jackie and that he had very limited access to any of her personal artifacts and/or memorabilia. Jacqueline after all is notorious of her privacy. However, he makes the argument that when one looks at the books she worked on as an editor, first at Viking and then at Doubleday, one can learn quite a bit about her taste, her interests, and her personality. It's the autobiography she never wrote, he says! Reviewers have questioned the rigor of Mr. Kuhn's research and described his work as quite speculative, BUT, the book did leave me with this great feeling of wonder and surprise about its famous subject---a woman touched by so much sadness and tragedy and yet unchanged in her appreciation for beauty, literature and art. What books did she edit, you are probably wondering? William Kuhn's has shared the complete list on his website but here are some highlights: The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales by Boris Zvorykin, My Book of Flowers by Princess Grace of Monaco, Secrets of Marie Antoinette by Olivier Bernier, Blood Memory by Martha Graham (Graham's autobiography). The range in format and subject matter is astounding and Jacqueline comes across as a woman of infinite curiosity and professional drive---so different from her rather vapid public image as a stylish {but somewhat ostentatious} woman.

I've read parts of the book many times since and gifted it more times than I care to remember. I obsessed over it so much that it wasn't actually until I started writing this piece, that I recalled I never went back and picked up the second book that came around that same time---Greg Lawrence's "Jackie as Editor." I've been re-reading some of its reviews and realizing that it may actually be the stronger book of the two. It documents Jackie from the perspective of her co-workers and HER BOSS and is based on Lawrence's meticulous study of her in-line edits, letters and notes she sent to numerous writers, artists, photographers. It sounds so delicious (if a little gossipy) that I am fairly certain I will go ahead and order it as soon as I am done telling you about it.

The book that got me back on this track, however, is Alice Kaplan's recent "Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis". Kaplan draws a surprising group portrait of three of America's most memorable women and sets it in the beautiful, romantic, daunting, lush, and sometimes seedy city of Paris where all three spent significant amounts of time in their most formative years. Each part of the book is wonderful for so many reasons but Jacqueline, again, charmed me most completely for her earnest pursuit of PARIS and herself. Of her time there, she would write later in her essay for a Vogue student writing contest, "I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide." Which, of course, broke my heart a little bit but also made me so happy for her because I knew that after college, after Camelot, and after always being defined as some important man's beautiful significant other, she would grow old in a way that completely nurtured her constant hunger for knowledge without even trying to pretend it was necessary to hide it.

Marissa Mayer's Easy, Breezy Climb

In the PBS Documentary that premiered this week called, Makers: Women Who Make America (about the history of feminism in this country), Marissa Mayer, President and CEO of Yahoo! and the 14^th most powerful business woman in the world (according to Forbes) said that she does not consider herself a feminist.  In her brief interview, she went on to associate feminism with a “militant drive,” a “chip on the shoulder,” and with a perception of negativity.  You can watch exactly what she said here: Her comments came to my attention because my husband’s Twitter feed was all aflutter (also, aTwitter) with varied responses to her statements.  I had intended to see the documentary the night before, but ultimately decided to save it for the weekend, so I hadn’t seen the clip.  He asked me if I had heard what she said and wasn’t I outraged?  My initial response was tepid — after all, I have heard women (and men) talking about feminism this way my whole life.  I totally understood and in some way related to her desire to dissociate herself from the more “outlandish” or “angry” version of feminism, so dismissed by the mainstream.  After all, this version of feminism is threatening and flips the script on men in traditional positions of power.  The more we discussed it, the more I wondered if it was that Ms. Mayer had been so privileged in her career and social trajectory that she had truly never experienced barriers or that she had so internalized the narrative that women should “go along to get along” that she sincerely couldn’t empathize with “radicals.”

Marissa Mayer, you stand on the shoulders of the women throughout our history who acted out in a way that you might consider ugly.  By all accounts, you earned the daylights out of the position in which you find yourself today.  You are eminently qualified for your job in terms of your education and experience.  You have a reputation for being an unapologetic workaholic.  And yet, you don’t seem to realize that the reason you had access to your education, any of the jobs you have held or the resources and social sanctions to work as hard as you have is because of feminism … the bra-burning kind.  Or, even worse, you are so disconnected from that struggle and have no sense of why women have been forced to be so reactive, that you don’t want to affiliate with that identity.

I want to say here quite clearly that I obviously don’t know Marissa Mayer at all.  I don’t have true insight into what she was thinking when she said those words (that I now can’t stop watching on YouTube).  I also haven’t seen the entire context of the interview, which might soften the seemingly cut-and-dried indictment of her sisters in arms.  I do know that when you have achieved that kind of status (breezily climbing the ladder, she seems to believe), the public has a tendency to hang on your every word, particularly in the context of being interviewed about your extraordinary accomplishments in a documentary about FEMINISM.

This also comes on the heels of her establishing a company-wide ban on working from home.  Flexible scheduling and telecommuting have been cornerstone achievements in establishing equality in the workplace.  Introducing the idea that the work environments could and should be more flexible has boosted the careers of both women AND men in recent decades and allowed both parties to be more available for childcare, among other things.  Many studies, including this 2009 study by major corporate employer Cisco found that people are actually more productive and satisfied with their jobs when they have this flexibility.  This is particularly salient for women, for whom the traditional work structure is still punitive when they have children and prevents them from keeping pace with their male counterparts in terms of advancement.

And what about Marissa Mayer and her own, personal, work-life balance?  She made history when she was hired by Yahoo! as the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company ever and immediately announced that she was also five months pregnant.  Working mothers everywhere glommed on to her story, waiting with bated breath to see how this would all play out.  She ended up working from home during the end of her pregnancy, took only two weeks of maternity leave and had a special nursery built next to her office at Yahoo! so she could be close to her newborn after her lightning fast return to work.  I don’t have to tell you what a poor model this is for working women and how nobody else on planet earth has the money or power to build a nursery next to their office and bring their infant to work.  Maybe Oprah or Martha.  Maybe.

I write this on a day when Congress has finally voted to re-authorize the Violence Against Women Act.  Shockingly, despite the description of what the act aims to prevent being right in the title, this wasn’t remotely a done deal.  In fact, it was kind of a squeaker.  138 Members of Congress (Republicans, all) ultimately voted against it.  It sort of makes me wonder where we might rustle up a bunch of feminists to demonstrate the appropriate level of fury?

I hope that as Marissa Mayer evolves in her career, she might reconsider her notion of feminism as negative.  It is, rather simply, the entire reason she has a career.  I get that she pictures feminists only as wearing combat boots and reading poetry about their vaginas.  But, she is in a position of vast power and has great wealth and we could use her in the trenches.  We could use another woman who fits all the classical norms of beauty and prominence to publicly recognize that there is still so much work to be done.

I've Got a Perfect Body

The title of this post most definitely does not reflect my personal relationship with my own body, oh no of course not, though (as we will discuss) I wish it did. It’s a line from a Regina Spektor song (“Folding Chair,” from 2009’s Far) that rolls through my head sometimes, which I absolutely love:

“I’ve got a perfect body / But sometimes I forget / I’ve got a perfect body / ‘Cause my eyelashes catch my sweat”

I love how this little sentiment subverts our expectation as to how one’s body should be judged. What is the “perfect body” anyway? Who is it for? Yourself, or everyone else?

Last week I visited the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, a dark and morbidly fascinating collection of medical specimens and wax models of human oddities housed in a physicians’ college. Most of the specimens date back to the early twentieth century and have that curio cabinet look about them, though they were ostensibly used for legitimate research purposes.

A lot of it was interesting—all of it left me feeling a little queasy. The models and specimens were, for the most part, divorced from the experience of the human who was afflicted, and were presented as isolated parts (syphilitic skulls, tumored eyes). Cold, scientific. But one exhibit I found to be sympathetic and particularly heartbreaking.

This exhibit showed a series of photographs of a boy who lived in the middle of the twentieth century. In the first photograph, he is a beaming 5-year-old boy who has just recovered from a fractured leg bone and is standing tall in his little 1940s shorts. In the next photograph, he is about 7, and we can see that something is wrong with his leg—it’s growing a bit crooked, skinny, weak. The photographs continue over the years, and soon we see that the malformation of his leg has also affected his posture. He can only stand with his head stooped forward, one shoulder collapsed, as he shoots up over six feet with one healthy leg and one long, crooked, bone-thin leg. In each of these later photographs he stares straight at the camera, stoic, defeated, with an air of despair. He died when he was about 40.

This was someone who would not be able to walk through a crowd without attracting strange looks, revulsion and/or pity. This was, I suppose, an imperfect body, one that had trouble functioning, one whose skeleton (or a facsimile thereof) was placed on display in a goddamn curio cabinet. Because of one long, pronounced flaw.

On the other end of the spectrum is the story of the Ukrainian Barbie “trend” that’s been circulating on the Internet—girls who are quite literally striving for physical perfection. Through plastic surgery and hardcore makeup regimens, women like Anastasiya Shpagina and Valeriya Lukyanova attempt to achieve the exaggerated proportions and pert, doll-like features of Barbie dolls and anime characters. It’s alarming and simply cannot be healthy, physically, mentally, or emotionally—yet this is their choice. This, according to their interviews, is what makes them happy and comfortable. Including possibly having ribs surgically removed to get that perfect tiny waist.

What is perfection? I think it’s worth asking ourselves that question. Whether or not we admit to it, there must be some idea of “the perfect” that we consciously or unconsciously believe in. If there was no “perfect,” there would be no such thing as flaws. Or if there were, they would be things like a malformed leg that made walking difficult and required medical attention---not a bit of cellulite or ears that turn out too wide.

In a recent Jezebel piece, Tracy Moore points out that it is often realism, not insecurity, that informs women’s reluctance to describe themselves as “pretty” (or, when they do, to qualify it with their numerous flaws or non-normative traits).

“For them, it wasn't that they couldn't think they were pretty. It was that they all knew, after lifetimes of being shown images of what is pretty, cute, beautiful or not in staggering detail, EXACTLY what kind of pretty they are or aren't, to what type of person they were most appealing, to what degree their prettiness abounds. Just saying they were pretty without acknowledging the exceptions seemed to be like admitting that you didn't understand how pretty works. And ‘pretty’ isn't a permanent state, either: it's a complicated, evolving assessment, discussed with a detached, almost economic appraisal.”

I get that “pretty” or “beautiful” are extremely abstract signifiers that we never like to imagine ourselves as fully qualifying for. But if not us, who does? Hypothetically, what would the erasure of all these supposed “flaws” get us to? A fake Barbie?

Whether it’s insecurity or realism, I don’t think there’s any problem with celebrating the body and face you have. It’s not perfect in the literal sense, but it’s not supposed to be. If it works, for the most part—if you ever feel good about yourself—if anyone has ever paid you a compliment—you might as well have a perfect body.  The women who started and/or participate in The Nu Project, a photography blog of female nudes who embrace and celebrate their bodies as they are, seem to know this. (Warning: NSFW.) What I love about this project—besides for these women’s bravery in bearing all despite deviations from supposed “perfection”—is the sheer diversity of their bodies, the oft-needed reminder that there’s more ways to be and to look and to appear than the narrow parameters of beauty presented to us in the media.

Maybe all of us are perfect. Or maybe none of us are perfect. All I know is, it's a waste of time to feel shame---whether that's shame at feeling unattractive, or shame at feeling attractive and expressing that confidence aloud.

But also, I think it’s important to remember: we have bodies but we are not bodies. We are more. Accept the physical reality, then concern yourself with more important things, like being an awesome person. Right?

The end.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Sarah Brysk Cohen, owner of Blossom and Branch, is obsessed with flowers. She has been working in flower shops on the cutting edge of floral design, from New York to California, for 20 years and opened the Blossom and Branch studio in Brooklyn, New York in 2009. Her designs have been featured in various online and print publications, including Style Me Pretty, 100 Layer Cake, Brooklyn Bride, Brides Magazine, The Knot, New York Magazine Weddings and The New York Times, as well as in the San Diego Museum of Art. In addition to providing event florals and decor, Sarah teaches floral design classes and is a regular contributor on the internationally renowned blog, Design*Sponge. Before launching her design career, she obtained an MSW and worked as a licensed clinical social worker in two states. Sarah currently lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband, one-year-old daughter and English Bulldog. TO REMIND YOU OF SUMMER Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead I read this novel a couple years ago and it filled me with longing for my sun-bleached 1980s youth.  It also tapped into my fantasies of what moneyed people do on Long Island.  I love Colson Whitehead’s writing style – he is wry without being jaded and broaches the sensitive/heavy with a sense of humor.  He takes seriously the internal struggles of a teenage boy and makes them relevant for all of us. I also get the sense that this novel must have been semi-autobiographical and I love wondering about which elements come from his experience.  Plus, I met him on my bus once!  BIG UP, BROOKLYN.

BECAUSE I AM A MEMOIR FREAK Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Whoa.  WHOA.  This memoir by Nick Flynn is about managing his homeless, alcoholic father and the intersection of their lives when the father comes to live at the shelter where Nick is employed as a social worker.  Having worked in and run homeless shelters, this book had me imagining what it would have felt like to try and maintain boundaries with a family member as client.  Despite living a tale of intense pain and loss, Flynn is able to tell his story with clarity, humor and a clear sense of empathy for his nearly impossible father.

BECAUSE I LIKE SMART GIRLS How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley A series of totally hilarious and charming essays by Crosley and a very quick read for commuters or people like me who pass out after 2 minutes when you get into bed at night with your book.  Her snarky voice masks tender observations about human nature, which rings familiar to me.  I kind of wish Ms. Crosley would be my best friend, but until then, I will have to settle for a glimpse into her world through her writing.  And I will obviously continue to lightly stalk her on Facebook.

BECAUSE I LIKE SMART BOYS Live From the Campaign Trail by Michael A. Cohen OK, OK, so my husband wrote this book.  But it is actually totally fascinating and perfect for reflecting on the 2012 presidential election.  It is a history of the most important and influential campaign speeches of the 20^th Century and how they shaped modern America.  If you like history, politics, speeches and/or want to help us send our daughter to college, you should pick this up at any fine bookseller.

FOR A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF RACISM AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA All God's Children by Fox Butterfield This is a stunning non-fiction work about violence and racism in the South told through the multi-generational struggle of the Bosket family.  This book was first released in 1995 but feels particularly relevant today, as we have experienced a recent spate of gun violence in this country and our conversation about how to address anti-social behavior has been brought to the fore.  You will be riveted by the first-person accounts of Willie Bosket, the centerpiece character of the book, and as the author digs back into the Bosket family history (all the way back their slave roots) you will see the legacy of violence continuing to produce dysfunction in modern times.  Please read this.

FOR THE EDWARDIAN CHILD INSIDE The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett When life gets too complicated for adult for my taste, I return to this children's classic book.  I have it downloaded on my iPad and just tap my fingers in anticipation of reading it aloud at night to my daughter.  This was the first "chapter book" I recall as a child that grabbed me and got me interested in reading.  It is, of course, a tragic, romantic and fanciful novel that combines many of my favorite themes - the mystery of a manor on the English countryside, the magic of gardens and the power of friendship to inspire healing.  The story is likely familiar to many of you -- two young cousins brought together by parental deaths are trapped in a vast and lonely English manor.  They figuratively and literally blossom together with the assistance of household staff and ultimately are bonded through the work of rehabilitating a long-dormant garden.  The characters are heartbreaking and timeless and it is worth a re-read, if, like me, the first time you read it was in 3rd grade.

Josephine Baker: Dancer. Spy. Subverter of Racial Assumptions.

 

About six months ago, I wrote about the racist moments that cropped up on the latest cycle of “America’s Next Top Model." (I realize in reality TV-land that this might has well have been the last century, and that about seven seasons have aired since then.) One of the moments that struck me as the most insanely questionable was when a designer dressed up black British model Analiese in a skirt of dangly plush bananas, while he dressed the other two models—both white—in more traditional, Marie Antoinette-style outfits.

It was pointed out to me that the tropical getup may have been purposely evocative of today’s Historical Woman, the amazing Josephine Baker: an American-born French singer, dancer, and all-around entertainer who fought Nazis and racists on the side. One of her most famous stage costumes was a skirt made of dangling bananas, usually accompanied by a complete lack of a top. This throws the whole ANTM affair into a much more complicated and ambiguous place—especially considering Ms. Baker’s agency in marketing her act and image in this way. How to feel about it now?

Let’s start with the banana skirt. The garment has been alternately described as problematic and empowering, as an accessory of European colonialist fantasy and as a tool that Baker knowingly used to subvert racial and gender categories. In this way, the skirt is really a microcosm for her entire career, at least in the early decades.

When Josephine Baker, born Freda McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906, arrived in Paris in 1925, France was obsessed with black culture. For them, Josephine—who appeared in a show called “La Revue Nègre”—was a safe venue for their fantasies about “the savage,” a figure often extolled as the antidote to a spiritually oppressive civilization. That Josephine was from Missouri and not deepest Africa seemed to mean little to her French fans and critics.

“The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks,” Josephine quipped. I like to think she meant: “White people sure can be racist!”

Baker appeared in a number of shows in which she was usually scantily clad, often portraying a “savage” who meets a French colonial explorer and dances to the accompaniment of African drums. See a video of one such dance here. Critics rhapsodized about her primal vitality and her exotic looks. Picasso extolled her “coffee skin, ebony eyes, and legs of paradise,” and she was admired by everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Jean Cocteau (oh, Paris in the 1920s!).

While the banana skirt and the “primitive” dances, as well as the audience reaction, may induce discomfort in a modern mind (like mine), it’s possible that in the context of her time Josephine was exercising an unprecedented kind of power, even as she reproduced the stereotypes that still popularly characterized her race. Her particular brand of entertainment was insanely marketable and earned her great success and admiration. She herself may have been the one who invented the banana skirt—thus it was not, as the liberal imagination (like mine) might like to infer, foisted upon her by a racist white stage manager. Either way, she certainly took advantage of its popularity, advocating for everything from banana moisturizers to pomades to custards that bore her name. (This last was actually created by Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s GFF. Oh, Paris in the 1920s!)

Josephine Baker’s crazy whirlwind of a life was by no means limited to her stage career. During World War II, Josephine was a spy for the French Resistance movement. Thus, she joins Julia Child in the “unlikely spy” category. (Waiting for Josie & Josephine.) Her Europe-wide performing career was the perfect cover for her to casually participate in—and then remember-- all sorts of important conversations, and she passed the info on to the Allies, aiding Charles de Gaulle and his Free French buddies.

What motivated this singer/dancer to enter the world of political intrigue? It’s true that she was a devoted nouveau francaise and that she loved her adopted country—but even more, Josephine hated Nazis. “The Nazis were racist,” she told Ebony magazine in 1973. “They were bigots. I despised that sort of thing and was determined that they must be defeated.”

As a result of her service to France, Josephine became the first American woman to receive a full French military funeral upon her death in 1975, an event that shut down the streets of Paris. She even got a 21-gun salute, which, apparently, is more than just a Green Day song.

There’s really too much more to say about Josephine in this confined space. For example: She adopted twelve children from different countries and called them her “Rainbow Tribe” (way before Angelina Jolie). She lived in a fifteenth-century French castle. She had pet cheetahs. She participated in the Civil Rights Movement and was asked by Coretta Scott King to help lead it following the assassination of King’s husband. (Baker declined, probably for safety reasons.) She refused to play to segregated audiences on her U.S. tour and thus helped accelerate integration.

Josephine Baker’s legacy continues to inspire many women to this day, and her image—often, but not always, including that infamous banana skirt—pops up in the most unlikely of places. Look for her cameos in Midnight in Paris, The Triplets of Belleville, and the animated Anastasia. Even Beyoncé has paid tribute.

I wonder now what Josephine would think of where we are now, both in the U.S. and Europe. She was happy with the progress that had been made even in her own lifetime. But how far have we really come? To what extent do we still exoticize women of color? Even as overt, sickening racism becomes less frequent, what subtler forces are at play that continue to reveal and reinforce power imbalances between whites and minorities?

I’m optimistic that, at the very least, the visceral discomfort induced in liberal-minded minds (like mine) by seeing a black woman dressed in a banana skirt by a white man on TV means we’ve at least made some progress.

Lessons from a Valentine's Day...

Dearest Clara,

Happy Valentine’s Day! I know it seems a little corny to be wishing you a happy valentine’s day, but this is one of my favorite holidays. While some people see it as sappy and romantic, or commercial and forced, and granted, it can feel that way sometimes, I prefer to see it as a celebration of love among family and friends.  It’s an opportunity to recognize people who are important to us openly, and also an opportunity to recognize people sometimes a bit more secretly.  After all, who isn’t flattered by secret admirers?

My fondest Valentine’s memory though was a gift from my mother.  I was 12, and she woke me up early before her call shift at the hospital to give my gift: 3 pink Bic razors with a small can of shaving cream, all wrapped up in red tissue and in a small gift bag with hearts on it.  It couldn’t have cost more than a few dollars and I remember it like it was yesterday.  I had been begging to shave my legs, like all the other girls at school, for months, and I thought she would never say yes.  Turns out, my mom was more progressive (or perhaps more understanding of the need of junior high vanity) than I thought. . . It meant the world to me, and every year, I think of how excited I felt that she really took to heart what I had been wanting.

Here is the way I try to celebrate an extra touch of love on this day:

• Give valentines to everyone: When you’re young, hopefully in school they’ll get you in the habit of including everyone in Valentines.  Want to know why? Because it’s such a nice feeling when you’re included; and it’s such a sad feeling when you’re not.  Try to make room for as many people as you can in your Valentine’s day heart.
• Wear at least a little bit of red: Nothing over the top, but having a little touch of red, even if it’s somewhere not everyone can see, will put you in the holiday spirit and remind you to be extra loving towards those around you.
• Be weary of set Valentine’s menus at restaurants: In my experience, these never turn out for the best, neither in food, nor in your enjoyment of the evening.  If you go out, find a restaurant that treats this as a normal day, or prepare a celebration with a group in a non-traditional spot.
• Leave a surprise for someone you admire: Valentines are about relationships, but not everything has to be defined as a couple.  You can feel admiration for someone and not necessarily feel it in a romantic way—just don’t confuse the two for them.
• Be extra mindful of anyone you care about in “that way”: No matter how much people say they might not like or not care or not endorse Valentine’s day, I think everyone ends up holding out a little hope for it in the end.  So if you are with someone, make the effort to do something a bit more meaningful.  It doesn’t have to be serious, and it doesn’t have to be heart shaped boxes full of chocolates (unless they like it)—but do something that shows that you’re thinking about them and appreciate them in your life.

Wishing all my love to my darling Valentine,

Mom

Can I Hate Chris Brown?

For the record, I don’t hate anybody. Some celebrities—Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher, Kim Kardashian---get on my nerves. And there are other male superstars who have mistreated women, physically, sexually, and/or verbally---Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlie Sheen—who piss me off/gross me out/don’t deserve to be successful.

But hate is such a strong word.

The titular question flitted through my mind as I viewed the recap of his latest douchebag escapade on E! News. Chris apparently got into a dust-up last week with singer Frank Ocean over a parking spot outside Frank’s studio. Shoves/punches may have been thrown, including one from Brown at Ocean. Of course, it doesn't sound like the fight was as crazy as Drakegate 2012, which had Brown and Drake and their respective crews throwing shit from across an NYC dance floor at each other, apparently in a tiff over Rihanna. Which was then, as any good fight is these days, taken to Twitter.

But while Brown-Drake 2012 was like, WTF, Ocean-Brown 2013 is like, Chris Brown just go the fuck away. First of all, I love Frank Ocean. He’s adorable, he’s subverting heteronormative sexuality, and he sings beautiful songs that make me cry. (See here and here. Gah.) Second, Chris Brown took it—yes—to Twitter and posted a photo of Jesus on the cross and noted “the way I feel today”. Obviously, this is completely ridiculous in this context, but let’s zoom out a second and remember that there is literally never a situation where you compare yourself to Jesus that doesn’t make you look like an asshole. Which is what he is. GO AWAY.

This is by no means the first time I’ve pondered whether I really hate Chris Brown. The last time was on Halloween, when he and his buddies decided it was a clever idea to dress up as the Taliban. Long, shaggy beards, dusty turbans, rags, AK-47s and all. On top of being tasteless, there’s more than a whiff of casual racism happening here, as tends to happen whenever the “terrorist” costume idea pops up.

Then there was the time he said this to comedian Jenny Johnson on Twitter: “take them teeth out when u Sucking my dick HOE” Sure, she had just called him a worthless piece of shit, but it doesn’t need to be reiterated that misogynistic, sexually threatening insults are not the correct response. Especially when you’re Chris Brown, and you a) are already known to have beaten a woman, and b) do, in all truth, deserve to be called a WPOS.

And yes, lest we forget, God forbid, the number one reason why anyone should ever feel like hating—or, serious minimum, hating on—Chris Brown: he brutally beat his then-girlfriend* Rihanna and did no jail time**. Nothing will ever make that okay, really. He’ll always have done that, and that will always be unacceptable. That it was such a public escapade, and that Rihanna herself was arguably even more famous than him, made it a much greater lightning rod for outrage than aforementioned messrs. Sheen, Schwarzenegger et. al. who have also mistreated women less famous/powerful than themselves. This is true.

*And now-girlfriend. But that’s an outrage for another day. **He may have also not done the community service he was sentenced to. Let's just add that to the outrages.

But the fact that certain crimes draw less outrage doesn’t mean we’re making too big a deal over Chris Brown’s criminal douchiness. It means we’re not making a big enough deal about all the rest. And: Chris Brown still lives his life unmolested. Chris Brown still has a career. Chris Brown still got to perform at the Grammys last year in a “comeback” tour that seemed to have amnesia about why he had to “come back” at all.

All the other stuff is just frosting on a bad-person cake. Also, let’s not forget that by continuing to support him, when he hasn’t made any significant public effort to address and apologize for his actions, we send a message that what he did was okay. . . that it was on par with (or even, less than) those times Lindsay Lohan drove without a license, or Winona Ryder shoplifted. Just another oops! celebrity screwup. (Which, incidentally, is probably a countdown show on the E! network.) For proof, view this disturbing assortment of statements from (where else) Twitter, collected after his Grammy’s performance last year, where various women say something to the effect that "Chris Brown's so hot he can beat me any day." Takeaway: We all still have work to do.

Hate is a strong word. But it’s definitely okay—maybe even necessary?—to hate on Chris Brown.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Elissa Bassist edits the Funny Women column on TheRumpus.net. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, NYMag.com, The Daily Beast, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, The Rumpus, and most recently in the anthology Get Out of My Crotch! Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health.  Follow her on Twitter @elissabassist, and visit elissabassist.com for more literary, feminist, and personal criticism. Have you ever read “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan”? You should read it. It’s an essay about the problems of telling other people what to read. It begins with Epstein’s student who, about to graduate from college, began “asking people whom he thought well-read to make lists of books that he ought to read” because he felt there were “so many enormous gaps in his education.” Epstein writes: “When someone asks you to make a list of books for him to read he is, whether he knows it or not, really asking, ‘How do I become an educated person?’ Now this is a tricky question.”

Who am I to say how you should educate yourself and spend your time? I am someone who saw Magic Mike three times in theaters.

Epstein says many wonderful things, including, “When it comes to reading, though, nearly everyone feels, or ought to feel, inadequate in one way or another. . . How much better just to relax in one’s inadequacy?” (I’d like to swap “When it comes to reading” with “When it comes to being alive. . .”) His advice: skip the old, boring books, if you want; what you used to find boring may not be boring ten years from now; get over the preoccupation to read “what’s hot now”; reread your favorites, or don’t; don’t give book advice; don’t take book advice.

Below is an inadequate list of books eschewing everything above.

Read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. It’s not what you think. I half-wish it were what you thought. It’s a contemporary epistolary novel/memoir/feminist manifesto/art project where the following happens: a husband and wife meet a man named Dick; the wife connects with Dick and refers to their connection as a “conceptual fuck”; the wife writes Dick a letter and the husband proofs it and suggests changes and also writes his own; together, both rewrite their first letters until Chris has a book of unsent letters. Eileen Myles writes in the intro: “In Chris’s case, abjection…is the road out from failure. Into something bright and exalted, like presence…Her living is the subject, not the dick of the title…”

Read Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. If anyone ever has a problem, I tell her or him to read this book because it answers all of them. Steve Almond writes in the introduction: “I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those foundations of inconvenient feelings…within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.”

Almond says we need books like TBT because “in the private kingdom of our hearts, we are desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.”

Read Bossypants by Tina Fey because: Tina Fey.

If you’re like me, you often wonder about The Purpose of Literature. Some people knock memoirs as being a Lesser Art, but (and now I paraphrase David Foster Wallace) literature is not about showing off and performing verbal and storytelling acrobatics—literature ought to be a service to a reader’s interior life. A writer’s personal story and emotional generosity reach me more than any plot labyrinth, and so I say read Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, a book that taught me how to pray. I’m a non-practicing Jew who attends religious gatherings never, and now I say two prayers every night: Thank you for [fill in the blank] and Help me with [fill in the blank]. Mary Karr’s Lit also influenced me in this department.

Please, as a personal favor, will you read everything Lorrie Moore has written? This includes her first collection of short stories, Self-Help, her first novel, Anagrams, and her second, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and her other short story collections Like Life and Birds of America.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is the most fucked-up book I’ve ever read, and I recommend it for this reason.

Read Leaving the Atocaha Station, poet Ben Lerner’s first novel, because every sentence is a perfect sentence.

Every short story George Saunders writes, especially in Pastoralia and Tenth of December, makes me laugh out loud.

You have to read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip D. Dick.

I’ve written before about my feelings for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. When I read D.T. Max’s DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, I felt privy to the inner innerness of a writer who restructured my world and made me feel stuff. Here are two favorite DFW quotations from the book:

1. “I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how ‘hard’ writing was, and how ‘blockage’ was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983 I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I’d not dared hope for from anything.”

2. “We’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.”

It goes without saying (well, I’ve already said it a lot already) that I recommend all of Wallace’s books. They are for those who have ever felt misunderstood or ignored or lonely or bored or broken. They’ll make you feel human in our increasingly digital world.

One last piece of book advice: Never read Fifty Shades of Grey. Every time someone reads Fifty Shades of Grey, a real book dies.

Like Water

By Judith NewtonHer book, Tasting Home, is available for pre-order on Amazon.

“How do you peel a walnut?” my daughter asked as she looked, not too happily, at the mound of nuts on the kitchen table.  We’d spent three days in the kitchen laboring over the twelve dishes we’d planned for a large buffet, and chiles en nogada, or chiles in walnut sauce, were the final stage of our cooking marathon.  That very evening some forty faculty and students from all over campus would be arriving to celebrate our new multicultural graduate program, and if any dish could instill a sense of community it would be chiles en nogada.

Making simple recipes like tacos de crema, macaroni with serrano chiles, and refried beans had been easy and even pleasurable, but the chiles in walnut sauce were posing a challenge. I’d combined Frida Kahlo’s recipe with one I’d taken from the Internet, and the latter called on us to peel the walnuts before pulverizing them for the sauce. “Mom,” said Hannah, rubbing at one of the walnuts, “this brown stuff isn’t coming off.” “This is a window into the lives of generations of women,” I said, ineffectually scrubbing another walnut with my fingers. “Can you imagine how much time they spent working in kitchens?” “I love cooking with you like this,” Hannah had said when we first began. “I love it too,” I’d said. Our years of cooking together and of struggling through difficult recipes had created a strong sense of solidarity.

We decided not to peel the walnuts, since Frida’s recipe didn’t call for it, but we did roast the two dozen poblano chiles and then pulled off their skins. Then we chopped a picadillo out of shredded meat, fruits, nuts and cinnamon, and, cradling the chiles in our hands, began to stuff them with the sweet and savory mix. We were treating those chiles as if they’d just been born, but, despite our labor, they were developing some ugly splits. We decided not to flour them, coat them in egg mix, and then fry them in hot oil as Frida’s recipe required.

“It’s too risky,” I said, entertaining grim visions of the chiles bursting their sides and spilling their colorful innards into a smoky pool of oil. Did Frida fry her own chiles, I wondered. Then came the sauce---easy, sweet, and cool. Four cups of (unpeeled) walnuts pureed with cream cheese, Mexican crema, cinnamon, and a fragrant half cup of sherry. Finally, seeds from six pomegranates and sprigs of parsley to go on top.  Red, white, and green---the colors of the Mexican flag.

I had been thinking about a Mexican novel for the entire three days, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. I’d been imagining Hannah and me as Tita and Chenca, two characters who spend much of their lives in the kitchen. A takeoff on nineteenth-century Mexican romance, Like Water is a novel about love and also a novel about politics, the latter being represented by the Mexican Revolution and the ongoing struggle of Tita and her sister Gertrude against patriarchal culture.

Each chapter of the novel is organized around a recipe, and the process involved in making the chapter’s dish---the grinding, the toasting, the chopping, the boiling, the frying, the cracking of eggs–is so thoroughly woven throughout the pages that cooking, an often invisible form of labor, becomes as central to the story as romance and revolution. Cooking, indeed, becomes an emblem of the domestic work that makes romance and revolution possible. It is the force that keeps women and men alive not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and politically as well.

Cooking is like that, always there, and if it is as it should be, it not only nourishes our bodies but gives us the comfort of feeling loved, cared for, and secure. Eating what is cooked and served in a caring way evokes one of our first experiences of feeling at home in the world, the experience of being fed by another being. That is one reason that cooking and eating with others can heal the adult self, one reason that it can so easily make us feel connected to another person, a family, a culture, a political community.

Like Tita and Chenca, Hannah and I were laboring in the service of politics and love. The new graduate program was meant to be revolutionary---cross racial, multi-cultural, and oriented toward political activism not just inside, but outside the classroom as well. And I had done enough organizing by then to know how cooking for others, not just from duty, but with generosity and lightness of heart, can develop and sustain those ties of feeling that are, at bottom, what make political community possible.

In Like Water for Chocolate, food is given magical force.  Quail in Rose Petal Sauce invites Tita and Pedro to enter each other’s bodies both spiritually and sensuously as they sit at the dining table. It prompts Gertrude to run away with a revolutionary, sitting behind him, naked on his horse. The Chiles in Walnut Sauce provoke the guests at Tita and Pedro’s wedding to make passionate love. Magical realism like this suggests the power of emotion, of the unconscious, and of cooking as emotion work in the day-to-day activities of our lives.

Like life, the novel is full of mothers, those who nourish and those who do not. The bad mother, Elena, controls Tita, insists that Tita serve her until she dies, and forbids Tita to marry Pedro, the man she loves. Cruel, repressing, she is the mother who denies. Even after death, she reappears, forbidding Tita to be happy. Like a force of nature, she returns again and again, suggesting the lasting influence of how we are mothered.

But Tita finds good mothers to take Elena’s place---Chenca, the cook who tends to Tita in the kitchen, and Dr. John and his Indian mother, Morning Light, who feed Tita healing foods after Elena brutally entombs her daughter in the Dove Cot. Tita herself becomes a nurturing mother to Esperanza, her sister’s daughter. Like Tita I, too, had found alternative mothers---in Dick, my gay ex-husband, in my women friends, in colleagues I had come to love. But most of all I had found mothering in being motherly---to Hannah and to my political community. Cooking for, and eating with, others had all but eclipsed those days in my mother’s house---the shame, the lost identity, the spilled water on the floor. Like Chenca, I wanted to pass on, to Hannah and to others, the recipes, the utopian practices, the ways of being and of labor that make history more than a tale of struggle; that make it also a love story, a story of caring for others.

* * *

CHILES EN NOGADA (Adapted with permission of Marilyn Tausend from adaptation by StarChefs.com from Cocina de la Familia: More Than 200 Authentic Recipes from Mexican-American Home Kitchens by Marilyn Tausend with Miguel Ravago. Fireside, Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1999.)

Marilyn Tausend kindly informs me that the secret to peeling the walnuts is to use fresh walnuts, right from the tree if possible. Meat: 2 lb beef brisket or 1 lb beef and 1 lb pork 1 small white onion cut into quarters 2 cloves garlic 1 T sea salt Picadillo: 4 T. safflower or canola oil 1/3 c. chopped white onion ½ tsp cinnamon ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper 1/8 tsp ground cloves 3 heaping T. raisins 2 T chopped walnuts 2 T. candied pineapple 1 fresh pear, peeled and chopped 1 apple, peeled and chopped 3 large, ripe tomatoes, roasted, peeled and chopped Kosher salt to taste Chiles: 6 fresh poblano chiles, roasted, peeled, and seeded with stem intact Walnut Sauce: 1 c. fresh walnuts 6 oz cream cheese (not fat free) at room temperature 1 ½ c Mexican Crema ½ tsp sea salt 1 T sugar 1/8 tsp cinnamon ¼ c. dry sherry Garnish: 1 T. chopped flat-leaf parsley ½ c. pomegranate seeds 1.      Cut meat into large chunks; remove excess fat. Place meat in large Dutch oven with onion, garlic and salt. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil.  Skim off foam if it collects on the surface. Lower heat and simmer for 45 minutes until the meat is just tender. 2.      Remove from heat and allow meat to cool in the broth. Then remove meat and finely shred it. 3.       Warm the oil in a heavy skillet and sauté the onion and garlic over medium heat until pale gold.  Stir in shredded meat and cook for 5 minutes. Add cinnamon, pepper, cloves.  Stir in raisins, 2 T walnuts, and candied pineapple.  Add chopped pear and apple and mix well. Add tomatoes and salt to taste.  Continue cooking over medium high heat until most of the moisture has evaporated.  Stir now and then.  Let cool, cover, and set aside.  The picadillo may be made one day ahead. 4.      Slit the chilies down the side just long enough to remove seeds and veins, keeping the stem end intact. Drain chilies on absorbent paper until completely dry. Set aside. Chiles may be made a day in advance 5.      At least 3 hours in advance, place 1 c walnuts in small pan of boiling water.  Remove from heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Drain the nuts and, when cool, rub off as much of the dark skin as possible.  Chop into small pieces. 6.      Place nuts, cream cheese, crema, and salt in a blender and puree thoroughly.  Stir in the sugar, cinnamon and sherry.  Chill for several hours. 7.      Preheat oven to 350 F.  When ready to serve reheat the meat filling and stuff the chilies. Place chilies, covered in warm oven.  After they are heated, place chilies on serving platter, cover with chilled walnut sauce and sprinkle with parsley and pomegranate seeds.

Republished with permission from Tasting Home

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

One of the best parts of my job is that each spring trimester, I teach a special topic English course to eleventh and twelfth graders. I have been able to choose my topics and build a course from the ground up. My proudest achievement and favorite course to teach is one called Dystopian Literature. This spring I will be offering it for the fourth time, and in the winter I always revisit my curriculum and the texts I will be using. I am pleased to be able to share these books with you, as they are near and dear to my heart.

First is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It serves as our template for what a dystopian novel is and it exhibits the key characteristics of the genre that my students and I work with all trimester. Huxley’s novel is a sort of dystopian ur-novel; it presents a society that seems to be a utopia to almost everyone except our protagonist. But then Huxley flips the script and introduces a second protagonist midway through the book to advance his themes even further. And, the book has some very funny moments. His vision of the future is remarkably prescient, particularly in the realms of media and entertainment (the “feelies,” movies that you can touch, are starting to feel like something that may exist in my lifetime).

Next, we tackle Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale, which may be my favorite book of all time by one of my favorite, if not my favorite, authors. As we read this book, I have the priceless opportunity of putting the novel in context for the students, including introducing them to personages they do not know at all, like Phyllis Schlafly and, much to their wide-eyed entertainment, Tammy Faye Bakker. Atwood’s novel is so chilling, so unsettling, that it rarely fails to captivate the students.  When Atwood writes “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories,” we are able to discuss the varied levels of autonomy and agency women have had through the years, and the way many women still exist in negative space in certain contexts. I also take great glee in exposing so many young men to Margaret Atwood. I hope some day these young men will grow into men who might one day list the book as a favorite, as Meg dreams of in this piece elsewhere on this site.

Finally, we read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I will not say much about the plot, as if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I want you to approach the novel with as clean a mind as possible. The book is full of the restrained longing Ishiguro is famous for (more often known from The Remains of the Day), and presents a dystopian society that most closely resembles our own (and much of it takes place at a boarding school, not unlike where I teach, adding certain moments of “oh!” for the students). It lacks the overt futurism of Brave New World, and more than makes up for it with gorgeous language and emphasis on character.

Two books I use to supplement our work are Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin. Both present vivid pictures of modern day totalitarian societies with vivid prose. Some of the passages from Nothing to Envy, in particular, parallel eerily with The Handmaid’s Tale, in spite of one being fact and the other fiction and the thirty years that separate the narratives.

Emotional Montage

I am working on an animated trailer for Jen Larsen’s memoir, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head (being released in February by Seal Press). The script for the animation is the introduction to the book, which outlines a series of the author’s strange, hilarious, heartbreaking self-“improvement” fantasies. The first few are described so visually that the stage directions were basically written for me. But the penultimate fantasy is about an emotional transformation, in which the character becomes the kind of person she wants to be—warm, happy, wise, etc. To show her emotional transformation, I wanted to have the character enter a magical world. I decided on a woodland scene, starting out with the character standing next to some trees, looking glum. Then she stretches out her arms, the trees bear fruit, and she becomes friends with some deer. I thought this might be stupidly sweet in a way that would fit with the self-aware, funny, sad tone of the writing. But something bothered me.

I set the cut-outs aside for a day and thought about this scene—and realized that it wasn’t specific enough. In the rest of the animation, the imagery consists of everyday objects depicted in unusual scenarios. Almost every object is based on something I’ve seen in real life: my favorite coffee cup, my grandmother’s armchair, the funeral home near my house. The trees and deer in the woodland scene were not drawn from memories of real trees or deer, but from images in fairy tales.

That’s when I decided I wanted to make a montage of ordinary actions. Instead of changing the setting, I would change the perspective. I would show the character engaged in one domestic activity after another, using the trope of a montage to tenderly poke fun at the idea that it's possible to become perfect.

I love montages. I love how sentimental they are, and how they depict almost nothing of how time passes, but so much of how it feels to look back on things. I wonder how our ability to instantly “montage” our own lives through social media affects our way of thinking about things. I have a love-hate relationship with those perfectly Instagrammable moments—the well-plated, locally-sourced dinner; the perfect mid-day latte; the urban mason jar—you know what I mean.

I think that my issue has to do with making personal happiness a consumer item. This surely isn’t a new thing. Instagram didn’t invent bragging. When we don’t have something, we can become consumed with wanting it. When we get it, we know that our lives our still as complicated as before, and yet it is easy to fall prey to the allure of making ourselves appear simple now that we’ve gotten this (socially-acceptable) thing.

Stranger Here is about being unhappy and thinking it’s because of one thing, and then finding out that when that thing changes, the feelings don’t really change. There’s a quote I read (on Facebook, naturally) that goes something like, “Don’t judge yourself, because you’re always comparing your blooper reel to someone else’s highlight reel.” But much of the time, we put our highlight reel out into the world as the official storyline. And maybe that is inevitable when we are communicating in such short bursts. I'm not anti-Social-Media, but I am curious how, over time, the forms of communication we use might change the way we perceive the world, and ourselves. I think that’s why it is so important to also share longer, complicated narratives that aren’t all good or all bad, but are nuanced and ambivalent. They help us read between the lines of the 140 characters.

Two weeks from now, I will post the completed trailer. Hopefully, the guy doing the soundtrack will have come up with some sweet montage music.

Molly's previous pieces on process can be found here.

Whitney Cummings and the Maligned Female Showrunner

Lately I’ve been catching Whitney Cummings’ new late-night talk show “Love You, Mean It” because it airs on E! right after “The Soup” starring my alternate-universe husband Joel McHale. I’ve long been hesitant to embrace Whitney’s brand of comedy, which feels---particularly with the premise and set of her new talk show---derivative of Chelsea Handler’s blasé, sexually liberated cynicism, which, while fun, doesn’t need to be duplicated. Plus her NBC sitcom “Whitney”? Not great.

But the more I watch Whitney at her most comfortable, doing stand-up comedy and riffing on talk show round tables, the more I like her in spite of myself. She’s funny, self-deprecating, and even touches occasionally on social consciousness. In the first episode of “Love You, Mean It,” she hammered the trend amongst young females to ironically address each other as “hooker,” “whore,” or “slut.” And in last week’s episode, she called out Esquire magazine journalist Stephen Marche for his ridiculous assertion, in a cover story on Megan Fox, that women like Amy Adams and Lady Gaga and Adele are “perfectly plain.”

Of course, there are still moments---just like with Chelsea’s show---that are cringeworthy. Whitney herself doesn’t approach Chelsea’s flagrant disdain for PC-ism, but her round table guests certainly do. And both shows are on the E! network, so they’re not exactly “60 Minutes.” Or “The Daily Show.” They talk about celebrities and silly videos and Instagram.

It’s also worth noting that Whitney is, as guy friends of mine have phrased it, “really hot.” Every episode she comes out with a new blow-dry hairstyle and a cute outfit. Her promos feature her mugging in a bunch of self-conscious poses, poses that showcase her attractiveness, yet also wink at the camera---for instance when she leans all the way back in her chair with her legs apart like a dude and flashes a peace sign.

It’s that mix of self-awareness and self-deprecation on the one hand, insecurity and vapidity on the other, that seems to characterize not just Whitney but a whole neo movement of young modern feminists. Whitney’s simultaneous embrace of fluff, femininity, and super-competence calls to mind Zooey, Mindy, Chelsea, women showrunners who are out there, you know, running the show.

In spite or, more likely, because of this, there seems to be more than your average TV hate for Whitney, and to a lesser extent Mindy and Zooey. Why is this? What is it about Whitney, in particular, that makes her a lightning rod for criticism? It's true that "Whitney," "The Mindy Project" fall short of shows like "30 Rock" and "Parks & Recreation" and "Girls" (though these female showrunners, even universal favorite Tina Fey, can face their own gender-based criticisms---Lena Dunham was another target of that nonsensical Megan Fox article). But would there be such an onslaught if the shows were run by men? Why don't comedians like Jeff Ross and his schlubby, lowbrow, mean-spirited Comedy Central show "The Burn" get as torn apart? I say, more power to the women who take charge of TV. You can find fault with their comedy, but you might also recognize that, even in this day and age, being a female showrunner is still a pretty pioneering thing.

You should sell that

I’ve been reading Etsy’s “Quit Your Day Job” series since my senior year of college. Although I didn’t have a full-time job, something about the mystery of the “alternative” career path held my attention. I graduated in 2009 with the inaugural class of recession babies, and like many in my cohort, I went to grad school with the hope of staying out of the tanking job market for just a few more years. I wasn’t exactly sure where my studies would take me, or how I’d make a living after another round of coursework, but I was fascinated, albeit terrified, by the upheaval that seemed to be taking place in the hierarchy of professions. While many were devastated by layoffs and cutbacks, it seemed that every corner of the internet was highlighting another creative entrepreneur who had left her “safe” day job to make a living through her art.

As jobs that had once been considered stable became obsolete, creative professions and other more “risky” pursuits were being thrust into the spotlight. What once seemed risky came to be viewed as self-sufficient, as less traditional paths began to redefine success and professional freedom.

Part of why I’m obsessed with reading all of those quit-your-day-job stories and interviews with full-time bloggers and creative professionals, is not that I want to do what they do, necessarily, but rather that their trailblazing inspires a bit of confidence in my own choices as I find my way in a new professional landscape.

One of the downsides of the greater visibility of creative professions, however, is the “You should sell that” mentality, otherwise known as the death of the hobby. It’s the idea that every handmade gift or creative passion is the seed for a money-making venture. It’s the sense that your art is not legitimate if you’re not selling it, or that you’re not a real writer if you don’t make a living through your writing.

For my own part, I admire those who make a living through their art, as well as those who are creating beyond business hours. There are as many ways to practice creativity as there are creators, and I think it’s so important to honor them all. As I juggle multiple roles, all under the umbrella of words-on-paper and words-on-screen, I am especially inspired by those whose creative integrity infuses all of their work, whether it takes place in an office or a studio, whether for love, leisure, or livelihood.

XX. Provence

Juliette’s apartment is covered in America---vintage tin Coke placards, the boxed set of all the seasons of Friends, posters of scenes of Central Park. She has small bowls full of Native American arrowheads she collected from a trip to the southwest of the United States a few years ago. There is even a print of the classic Uncle Sam illustration, with his stern eyes and accusing finger. I lean in closer to read the caption. I want you . . . to speak English.

Juliette’s love for all things Americana now includes me, and in the month that I know her before I board my plane back to Ohio she invites me to her house several times for baking cheesecakes and having dinners with her friends. She loves showing me off, telling her friends to pay attention as I switch from speaking English to her young daughter to using French slang with ease as I describe to them the plot of Gilmore Girls. I think she does it to prove that the America she loves is signified by someone like me, not the politicians and the obesity and the reality TV casts broadcast throughout France.

At this point, I’d do anything to make Juliette happy---after months of being an unwanted intruder in Agnès’ apartment, I feel welcome here. And I don’t mind being showcased like one of Juliette’s souvenirs. Sometimes I also need to be reminded of what the real America is like. If I can prove it to someone else, then maybe I’ll start to see it, too.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

By Sibyl Perhaps you read my column the other week about diving in to the creative life and were intrigued, but need an extra push of inspiration.  Or maybe you are already engaged in art-making pursuits of some kind, and could use some encouragement for your efforts.  Either way, read on for Sibyl’s picks for what to read offline to spark your creativity until you positively surge with it.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger For an entire decade, I read this book yearly, usually in a single sitting on a rainy evening, pacing around my apartment saying the words aloud to myself in a very low voice, or curled up in an ancient armchair with all the stuffing showing.

This book sees all your neuroses and lets you keep them.  The story and the characters wind their way around your fears about the selfishness of the creative life versus the selflessness of the religious life, and sews a protective cloak around them.  It reminds you that if nothing else, you need to do it for the Fat Lady.

Letters To a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke This slender missive was first given to me at the tender age of 19 by my favorite older cousin, who had just quit her life on one side of the country and travelled to the other on a wing and a prayer, following her creative whims.  It sometimes gets flack for being exclusionary (he makes the argument at one point that you are only an artist if you NEED to be, can do nothing else, which is obviously a bit dangerously black-and-white), but what I love about this book most is that it upholds difficulty.  Rilke asserts, again and again, that if you are finding adversity, you are doing it right.  He instructs the young art-maker to trust his sadnesses, seek out the important, serious struggles and try not to judge the outcomes.  Great advice for those days when you inevitably feel like if it’s too hard, you should just pack it in.

Wild Mind: Living The Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg Technically, this book is geared towards writers, and there are excellent writing prompts at the end of every chapter. However, there is tons of advice that is good for any artist seeking to find practical ways to loosen up and find the freedom to create.  Goldberg advocates for creating from instinct, and writes about all the ways we clog up our first impulses, with suggestions for how to remove those barriers to vibrant creation.  She also argues for committing to a specific arts practice rather than allowing yourself to get preoccupied with fifty different things.  Since I am a firm believer that commitment, even if you fail fully at it, always leads to depth, I love her application of this to the creative life.

The books that I have suggested in this column have one thing in common: they are all short.  The last thing you need is a huge engrossing tome that allows you to avoid creating.  Read, get inspired, then put the book down and make something! The more of yourself you put into it, the more uniquely powerful it will be.

Sometimes, visual imagery inspires like nothing else.  Therefore, here are three companion documentaries to go with this reading list:

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (2001) When I had a newborn, I watched endless documentaries about artists, yearning for the time when I would have a baby off my boob and be able to go back out into the world to create.  It was actually a lovely time of incubation and learning, and I discovered Rivers and Tides in that period.  I think I watched it over and over for an entire week, whenever my baby was feeding.

The pace of it is enchanting, as Goldsworthy is followed over a year of his work, which takes him all over the world creating ephemeral sculptures out of natural materials.  The most evocative piece for me was that the way Goldsworthy works makes him face failure on a daily basis.  This is something that is absolutely imperative for an artist: to become so familiar with failure that while it is devastating every time it happens, you learn to trust it, to use those mistakes for even greater works of artistry.

Who Does She Think She Is? (2008) Watching this documentary, which follows several female artists as they struggle to create in the midst of mothering, is an inspiring experience.  The personal stories are interspersed with astonishing facts about the lack of representation of women, and particularly mothers, in the art world.  Seeing these women have the courage to create when everyone said they were selfish, unrealistic, and irrelevant was incredibly empowering to me.  My favorite was a ridiculously talented sculptor who has FIVE children, and does her art-making during naps and after bedtime.  This documentary would really be interesting to anyone, not just mothers, because you'll find yourself saying, "If she can do it, with a baby on her hip, and one pulling on her leg, so can I!"

1991: The Year Punk Broke  (1992) In the summer of 1991 the seminal noise-rock band Sonic Youth invited filmmaker David Markey along on a two week summer festival tour of Europe, with their little-known opening band, Nirvana.  The result, a documentary that will rock your face off, was playing on repeat in my buddy Ben's basement for most of our teenage years.  To be fair, I have not re-watched this since about 1997, so I'm going on hormone-fueled memory here.

I'm a little afraid to re-visit it, actually, since doing so sent artist Andrew Kuo into such a tailspin that he was forced to ask, in graphic form, "Wait, did punk ruin my life?"  If it did, I don't want to know.  Maybe you weren't a baby punk in the 90's who swore she saw God when Sonic Youth's guitars sustained a single note of noise, creating a wall of discordant sounds around you for minutes at a time, but if you fancy my Sibyl columns I think that baby punk might live within you, without you even knowing it.  Watch this doc and let the manic expression and vibrant fury of these bands stir in you the desire to smash the world with your art.

Grief: Mapping Your Online Community

I learned the phrase “Community mapping” at age sixteen while volunteering in a small community in rural Paraguay. At the time, the notion of mapping the resources in a community seemed clear. Quickly drawn on a piece of paper---the community school, church, homes, the dirt roads connecting the dots, and the fields that spread in the spaces between houses. The stick-figure buildings my host family drew to mark the previously listed sites represented the physical locations of where community manifests. They leapt off the page as a visible sign of the strength and resources held within this community.  At sixteen, I transferred this model to my life in Colorado---my school, my home, my family’s cabin, and the places where I spent time with my friends.  My map made sense, I didn’t question my places of support and where my community came together. The intervening twelve years of moving and creating new communities---including online---threw a wrench in my map. It no longer fits on one page or within a single community. I access much of the pieces of different communities in online spaces, including gchats from friends who still inhabit past homes on other continents, Facebook messages from childhood friends, and following twitter feeds of friends-I-haven’t-actually-met, who share a common journey.

Grief and loss often throw the individual into an unknown emotional space, where the “community map” becomes increasingly important. It creates a sense of one’s resources and places of support; showing the individual the strength of their community(ies). For many, the communities of support blend between in-person, phone, and online communication.

Admittedly, the online space trends towards the more positive aspects of life, as Jenna Wortham notes in her article, Talking about Death Online, “This is more than trying to decide how carefully polished you want your online image to be. . . . It’s about the way social software is slyly engineered to get us to participate---we are encouraged to brag about our lives, and present ourselves as living our best lives each day and year.” Between updates about babies, engagements, jobs, and school---loss becomes just another post that slides by not really resonating.

Engaging with more difficult, heart-wrenching topics, such as grief and loss via social media opens the individual up to vulnerability. For many, loss creates moments of intense need to reach out to one’s community. The online platform is not necessarily designed for in depth sharing or support, as posts and tweets have character limits. The feeds stream by, not allowing the adequate time or ability to respond to a friend’s post. As Jena Wortham writes, “However, when it comes to talking about death and grief in a non-abstract way---that is, when dealing with the loss of a family member, a partner or close friend---it gets much, much trickier. It doesn’t have an appropriate reaction face, a photo that you can reblog, a hashtag.” I often wonder as I see friends hesitantly posting memories of their lost parent how our ability to comfort each other spills into this medium?  How much of our ability to empathize in person actively translates with each “like” we give to their posts?

As a firm believer in allowing each individual to chart their own path for grieving and healing, online spaces may become mechanisms for both. In my own process, I try to push the boundaries of what feels comfortable to share on Facebook, twitter, etc. I don’t shy away from posting pictures of my father, marking what would-have-been his sixtieth birthday, the sixth year since his death, or my travels to places he would have loved. However, the accompanying text is often positive, such as “missing your adventures” rather than engaging with the harder, empty feelings of loss. While I can’t express my “full self” in this online space, I trend towards sharing what I can with this online world. As my community is spread throughout many places, online becomes the place that I receive (and provide) support from so many communities at once. Online, I am reminded of the people beyond the Facebook photos who love and care about me---through likes, comments, and quick emails after they see the post.

Beyond our individual experiences with grief and healing---Facebook has become a community in itself, creating a way to memorialize those who have died. Two of my “current” Facebook friends are people who have passed away. Their profiles remain places where friends and family leave notes---sharing life updates, memories, or simply typing “I miss you.” In a world where visiting gravesites may not be practical, the online memorial space may bring us closer together.  In her blog post, Online Mourning and The Unexpected Refuge of Facebook, Cheri Lucas (another Equals Record writer) discusses her experience with a friend’s death;

“A few hours after receiving the news, I wrote something and shared it as a Facebook note. I posted scanned photos from college—precious moments of youth, debauchery, and experiences I had never shared publicly—from nearly 15 years ago: onto his profile, our friends’ profiles, and my timeline. I sat in front of my computer, clicking on photos people tagged of him: images that conjured memories, that stunned and confused me, that made me feel grateful for knowing him, that devastated me because I realized I didn’t know the man he had become.

Alone, I sobbed. Yet I sobbed with Facebook open—his life revealed and exposed in bits on my screen, his friends spilling tears on his profile. I sobbed at home, by myself, but also with everyone else. I had never given in to the community of Facebook until that moment. For the first time, its communal space had comforted me.”

The possibilities of online spaces to bring us together are endless, we can share memories of those who have died, sharing our own healing processes, and of course, share our joys. Yet, as Wortham also notes, we don’t yet know the outcomes of creating online communities that don’t support the whole breadth of human emotions. However, we should trend towards sharing our authentic selves, our whole journeys---and in return, we should support others who do just that---comment on posts people share about those they have lost, about their difficult moments---engaging with the full spectrum of emotions, will only make the blissful moments stronger.

Much of my community is online, thus my grieving and healing cannot be completely separate. However, as with all pieces of grieving, this is personal---and we will each have to carve out how we interact with our online spaces. Yet, striving to make these spaces open to deeper human interaction, will only bring us closer to each other, and as a community---closer to healing.