Extreme Modes of Being

I was at a reading in an artbook store a while back. The reader was an art critic to these people, reading from her latest novel. She is a novelist to me, well, a documentarian with words maybe. One of the smartest writers. A woman who made me understand literary theory for the first time, too far out of undergrad to be of use. Because of her I read more, I understood more, and I thought I could go back with all these new skills and take that master's . The universities laughed at me. The thing is, I get the words now. Until the art gallery where they spoke in a language that the book nerds know nothing of. (And where credit is due, the woman understands both. Seamlessness. She knows.) I asked a stupid question, about the book, and the answer was delivered with a smile (because she is lovely, always) but short. The last time I'd seen her I'd asked a question, that she validated in this book, but at the time was stupid. At that time the audience kind of laughed at me. This time there wasn't a single person in the room I knew, and they looked at me, at this interloper with a lexicon so different from their own, like I was some kind of  scumbag. Are you not, like us, committed to Art? Holy Art.

The night before I had that conversation that starts “I have a useless degree too...” Well, it started when we talked about what we do for a living. The bio section of all my webspaces has a joke in it, because I have no definition. Not a natural redhead, you can stop asking. Moz so hard motherfuckers wanna fine me. Not because I consciously refuse, but because I haven't one. “I'm a nothing,” I said. With my spreadsheets, 9-5, balanced diet with occasional treats, mommy-track fitness without the kids. I had to stop when I said my degree was useless, because I do use it now, occasionally. Other people ask me to write for them, and that's something.

Of course in the art room, it was nothing. I told the woman what I was writing next. The woman told me she remembered meeting me at another event months earlier. Thrilling.  “So are you a writer?” In the Q&A one of the art people had said “You've talked about extreme modes of being, can you talk more about that?” And the woman said that if you work a 9-5, have a balanced diet with occasional treats, you're living a non-extreme mode of being. “No, I'm not a writer,” I said. “I have one of those balanced lives.” She laughed.

Fake it till you make it. People declare themselves poets simply because they wrote broken lines. Applying the signifier like a magic spell. Being is insisting. I couldn't ever play this game because I do not use words so lightly. I'm a reader first, and I think because of that I'm very protective of who should be called a writer.  Titles have meaning, and to misuse them is to deny them power. If everyone is special, no one is. I always feel like I need to provide some definition, reach some currently undefined peak before I'm really allowed to exist. How did I get to 36 and still have to say “I'm nothing”? Why did I look that woman in the face, that woman who was never a writer until the day she was and say “I'm trying” not “Yes, I am a writer.” And when you want to live, how'd you start, where'd you go, who'd you need to know?

The Art Kids nodded so knowingly when it was suggested that one must dedicate oneself entirely to an art. That one must have an extreme mode of being, one must give up all the trappings of a comfortable life, risk it all. They nodded, wearing their small boutique bought clothes, their Fleuvogs.  It made me doubt any of them were lacking a safety net, should it all fall apart. So much art is privilege. I asked the woman if her book's character, middle-aged and comfortable, was tempted to hand over all her money because she had the guilt of privilege. If a comfortable writer, interested in social justice, who hasn't always been comfortable, sometimes wants to level themselves down again. Or if it's just all easier to fall back into a bourgeois hole? The safety nets for women are so often their men, and if I deny myself that (a safe man) to be on my own, and 9-5 on my own, and make my own balanced meals, is this any less of an extreme mode of being? Isn't being a fully independent female pretty god damn extreme? I'm not sorry if I don't spend 9-5 thinking about my art, because I'm paying my bills, extremely. Pardon me, Art Kids. I'm just trying to live in the world.

Sweet and Tender Hooligan

This blog is named after a Morrissey^* song.  I had the live version on a tape, the b-side of "Interesting Drug."  Driving on the streets of my home-town I'd roll down the windows and crank up the volume and scream et cetera! et cetera! et cetera!.

On Friday I went to see a Morrissey show, my second, eight years after my first. Angry at him for not playing Canada any more, furious at the hypocrisy, but still owing so much.  Below is the last song of the set, before the encore.  When it started I couldn't believe what I was hearing.  This hadn't been on any of the set lists.  For the first 30-odd seconds I just kept saying "Holy shit, holy shit!"



I read later he's not done this live since 1988.  That tape I had.  During the encore of "How Soon is Now" I tried to get over barrier to get that hug I was scared of in 2004.  I didn't make it, but Moz did shake my hand a minute or so later.  I cried, I left the show crying. I sat on the curb in the middle of a boarded up apocalyptic street-scape in Niagara, NY (that they forgot to bomb), and I wept.  Because I was given so much.

We're older.  It just wasn't like the old days any more.  But there are joys, still, to leave you weeping on the curb.

^*Yes, originally a Smiths song, but not how I know it.

Get Off

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What She Said

Shulamith Firestone is one of those super-scary 70s feminists, the kind people seem to carry with them as proof that feminists are castrating harpies. (Strawman! Drink!)  Firestone was a revolutionary, and The Dialectic of Sex (1970) calls for nothing less than dismantling the entire notion of "family" and complete freedom from biology to release women from second-class status. It hasn't happened, but you get the feeling she really thought it might.

But Firestone isn't scary at all.  Like a lot of works that go out on a limb, The Dialectic of Sex would have been threatening to a patriarchy intent on retaining power.  She was also writing from a Marxist perspective in a country that had gone on a communist witch hunt 20 years earlier.  I read about half of the book many many years ago, and the idea that women are controlled because we are the means of production, has always stayed with me.  I'm sure it informed my later choices about family. 

Firestone rejected the idea that the 60s had liberated women's sexuality, insisting that all it had done was make sex more readily available for men, who could then refuse women their only protection in a still oppressive world: marriage.  Why buy the cow?  And why are we cows anyway?

Very little has changed since Firestone wrote, and some things have gotten worse.  Female Chauvinist Pigs is a good contemporary examination of the idea that liberating women's sexuality isn't -- in many ways -- really for us.  The ideas of acceptable beauty have gotten narrower -- as have our acceptable bodies.  And with the rise of attachment parenting, women are being taught that returning home for 24/7 parenting is the ideal.

Firestone's work  is learned, serious, well-informed and solidly researched, but with the ability to imagine wildly and vividly.  She's also funny, which is unexpected.  After re-shaping Freud's Oedipal and Electra complex as a societal, rather than inbuilt unconscious phenomenon, she says:  "Really, Freud can get embarrassing." She was 25 when she wrote Dialectic.

But the point I wanted to get to, is about the chapter entitled "(Male) Culture."  It begins with an epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir:

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.

Given the time I've spent thinking and writing about the nature of criticism (and the sometimes sexist responses that follow) over the weekend, it was significant that I'd read the following paragraph today:

We may also see a feminist Criticism, emphasizing, in order to correct, the various forms of sex bias now corrupting art.  However, [with] that art which is guilty only of reflecting the human price of a sex-divided reality, great care would have to be taken that criticism be directed, not at the artists for their (accurate) portrayal of the imperfect reality, but at the grotesqueness of that reality itself as revealed by the art.  

Come at Me, Bro

When the TV show Girls came out, I bemoaned the excess of coverage, not just of the show, but of the responses to the show.  However, I'm about to critique a critique of a project in part spurred by a critique of a critical method. Still with me?  Allons y!

In the National Post this weekend, Michael Lista took issue with one of the editors interviewed on the recent CWILA website:

 On the eve of what many hope is a new era of criticism in Canada, I was surprised to find that one of the three essays framing the CWILA discussion is one by Jan Zwicky entitled “The Ethics of the Negative Review,” which we can charitably call spooky and meretricious, but is probably deserving of a much less friendly repudiation.

Lista then goes on to show his readers what a negative review looks like, with stealthy name-calling and florid half-insults. "The good in bad reviews" is an excellent example of how negative reviews are sometimes more an exercise for the reviewer to flex and sharpen rather than really engage with the text.

In reponse to Zwicky's assertion that if we are assigned a book we dislike we "keep our mouths shut," Lista says:

What a miserable, low thing to tell another woman, another writer, another human.

How strange, to tell a woman what they should and should not be saying, in a response to a project that tackles women's under-representation in reviews.  If "[t]he purpose of a review, good or bad, is to begin a conversation, not to end it" then this piece, with its gleeful silencing of Zwicky and other possible voices, fails.  For if others have the slightest timidity, they are advised to "put your poems in a goddamn drawer."  I'd assume this advice is not limited to the "too many" poets, but to novelists and playwrights, other reviewers, writers all.   (And there are indeed lots of poets; Natalie Zed has a handy list of  poetry books by female writers right here.)  It is not unreasonable to think that at least some of the people who dedicate their lives to the solitary practice of writing might fear social approbation, yet may possess many talents.  Even George Eliot was protected from bad reviews by her lover.^* (On this topic, Jennifer Weiner -- she of Not Serious Literature --  wrote an excellent blog post about not trashing other female writers in public.  It's worth a read.)   Having gone the long way around, it's now time to point out that Zwicky's point about not writing negative reviews isn't about sunshine and unicorns and everyone getting along.   (Lista's "Cue the violins" is a total misdirection; Zwicky's piece is actually fairly pragmatic.)  Rather, the limited space in publications is better used to highlight books deserving praise.  The cream, it's thought, rises.  Zwicky writes:

I don’t think reviewers should take it upon themselves to right such wrongs by slinging invective at Q’s work. Far more effective to use the column space to draw attention to the great stuff P has been producing. [...] Again, the reviewer who’s feeling truly spiteful could probably do much more damage by drawing the public’s attention to Moderately-Well-Known Author P and saying almost nothing about Famous Author Q, than by fuming about Q in public. 

"Call me old-fashioned," Lista says, "but I think the truth sounds beautiful, and there’s an intrinsic value in discovering what writers think of each other’s work. ." Okay, I will.  The idea that there is one objective truth about any given title smacks of the oldest, whitest, male-est pedagogical method.  Now, I'm all for negative reviews: I've written a few furious blog posts myself.  But I'm also fine with the editorial choice to have reviews that are for the most part informative.  I don't need to have my opinions spoon-fed to me. I want to understand something about the content of the work. I want to be given enough information to excite me about the literature.  That not weakness, and it's the most important kind of honesty, with all subjection and possible grudge set aside.^**  I'm a fledging reviewer myself^†, and I'd hope that if I choose to be informational rather than emotional (so female!) in my professional (off-blog) writing, I might get noses into books they hadn't considered before.  And coincidentally, that is also what I do in conversation.

Update: Jan Zwicky responds in the National Post: "Where he and I part company is over the idea that a kick in the nuts is a good way to start a conversation."


^*A.S. Byatt, in her introduction to The Mill on the Floss.  
^**But this is a blog post, and I'm allowed to get a little snippy.
^†And instead of writing paid reviews, I wrote this. I'm sending an invoice for my time!

Mini Review: The Complete Lockpick Pornography

There's a moment where the narrator of "We All Got it Coming", Arthur, is being jerked off in a public bathroom by his boyfriend Clay.  Clay's recounting a story told to him by a woman he fucked the night before.  In the story Clay is tied up and forced into various sexual acts by other men.  Arthur comes before Clay is finished the story.  "Christ, he's hot."

"On the way out of the bathroom, I notice that under his uniform sweater, there's a T-shirt tag sticking out.  He's been walking around all day with his T-shirt on inside out.  And he's mine."

It's these small moments -- like Arthur ruminating on the sad moments in otherwise funny comic strips, or what your favourite Muppet says about you -- that make The Complete Lockpick Pornography what it is: smart, hot, and beautiful.  I preferred the second part, "We All Got it Coming to the titular "Lockpick Pornography" in which a gang of queer men and women devise schemes to fuck with the straights, not just the identifiable the bigots.  "Lockpick Pornography" is more thoughtful; it spends more time on the meaning of gender, and sexual identity, diversity, and flexibility. However, it's "We All Got it Coming" that stirred this reader's emotions.  "We All Got it Coming" is the section that speaks of love: filial, fraternal, and romantic. 

It was a good idea to combine these two pieces into one book, because it gives the reader a chance to see what Comeau is capable of, how he can grasp a wide range of human experience, how smart he is.  Comeau can find the sweet moments in a bathroom handjob, and it's truth. 

Alone

There's a scene from Sex and the City where Miranda chokes on some Chinese food in her (super huge) bachelorette pad.  This gives rise to her fear of living, and dying, alone.  Of course, everything turns out just fine for Miranda, arguably the most independent of all the gals.  And by "fine" I mean she gets a man and a baby and a house in Brooklyn so, yay, nuclear family ending!  There was always ambivalence about the whole situation in her character though, and I get that.  I live alone too, and I don't think about it much.  I'm still young enough to feel like being frail is a long way away.  I like my space, I don't want kids, etc etc. 

Going Solo seemed like one of those books I'd read to shore myself up, have someone preach to my choir.  The sunny sounding subtitle: "The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone" makes it sound like the kind of book where I'd find stories like mine, get some interesting statistics, learn about why people my age(ish) choose singledom.  That's all there, but it's in short supply.  Author Eric Klinenberg interviews the creator of Quirkyalone, talks to some divorcees, and is — thankfully — aware that the experience of, and the journey to, living alone can be very different depending on one's gender. There is also a thoughtful analysis of how and why the nuclear family structure common in the mid-20^th century has changed (mothers got to work outside the house, and this move is treated as the radical change it was) and interesting thoughts about community planning for the future.  A lot of the singles in these sections are happy, having chosen to live alone. "Most people who live alone are financially secure, not poor, and those who purposely use their domestic space as an oasis from their busy, stressful work lives report that it is a regenerative, not an isolating experience."

However, more of the book talks about the elderly, and the challenges they face as they age.  Most of those profiled are widowed, so they are alone not by choice. Several are poor, or finding it difficult to get by, while not wanting to go into a nursing home where care is often substandard (and getting worse, as corporations increasingly look to the bottom line and nothing else). Klinenberg also talks to the indigent, mostly men, who populate New York's Single Room Occupancy buildings.  The main thrust of the book is more that

[t]he extraordinary rise of living alone is not in itself a social problem.  But it is a dramatic social change that's already exacerbating serious problems for which there are no easy solutions: Social isolation for the elderly and frail. Reclusiveness for the poor and vulnerable.  Self-doubt for those who worry that going solo will leave them childless, or unhappy, or alone.

There's not a lot of feel-good going on here. And what was worse for me, the only person in the book who resembles me shows up only as a corpse.  "Mary Ann" dies at 79 without any family, and Klinenberg accompanies the state worker who is charged with trying to find someone to lay claim to Mary Ann's meagre estate.  There's some weird language used about the older people in Going Solo: for example, an older woman who bemoans her lack of companionship is described as being sad that she had no one to complain to.  That felt pretty unfair.  Another profiled senior is noted as making racist jokes, though this has nothing to do with the topic at hand (unless the implication is that his racist jokes made him an outcast?).  Klinenberg also talks about his grandmother, who lost her second husband as Parkinson's Disease began to take hold of her.  Fortunately, she had children who would chip in for the very best of care.  This is not to say the experience in an assisted living home is perfect, but she's lucky she had help. Perhaps "lucky" is the wrong word, since most of the elderly alones in the book have some sort of family support system.  (The same can't be said for the men of the SROs though.)

I often read motherhood narratives because they reinforce my choice to be child-free.  Perhaps parents will want to read this book and be glad they had those kids.  I will never have children, I will not marry^* and I have no siblings.  When it goes wrong for me, in my old — or possibly not so old — age, it's going to go very, very wrong.  The old joke about dying and being eaten by one's cats before anyone notices?  This guy.  Before I read Going Solo I honestly didn't mind my lack of family too much, but thanks to this dreary and scary book, I'm terrified.

 

^*"I will live my life as I, will undoubtedly die: alone."

The Deen Crush and Kink Obfuscation

Graphic sexual content ahoy.  If you're not cool with that, read no further!

 
In my early 20s I watched porn. As a young adult I was still testing boundaries and learning how the world worked.  As weird as it sounds, porn had value.  I learned that the human body is a funny thing. Budgets are so much smaller for porn, and it's shot much more quickly, and as a result the "flaws" on a body are all present and accounted for.  Even the "perfect" porn bodies had zits and marks and wrinkles and blemishes.  Porn was the most honest expression of the human body in media.  And it was funny, at least to me.  I'd watch it with friends or lovers, making a Mystery Science Theater out of it, deducting points for bad form or lube wastage. I even wrote a paper for a Women's Studies class about how Pornogothic was a better and less offensive movie than John Carpenter's Vampires.  But I never watched it alone, and it never turned me on. Until this year; until James Deen.

I've always enjoyed written smut, but the visuals never did anything for me.  I accepted this, because porn is not marketed to women.  Erotica is, but I don't really go in for soft-focus and love-in-a-field.   Then, this year, a friend told me about James Deen. "He's amazing," she said. "He really likes to make women come."  That sounded a bit soft-focus to me, so I sort of brushed it off.  Then I saw him in a video suggested to me by another friend, and I suddenly Got It.  She didn't mean he was "making love," she meant he was really, really good at his job.  I've seen him make a professional porn star (I'm assuming she has a level of detachment that can enable her to perform as directed) lose herself in the act so completely, she screamed "I love you!"  He laughed, and It. Was. Gorgeous. 

Months later, I read the Good article "What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier of Female Sexuality." It focuses on Deen, and his seemingly incongruous teenaged female fan-base.

Deen is not supposed to be the star of his scenes—his sex partners are. But on Tumblr, a network of teenage bloggers^*has emerged to turn the focus on him. The young women trade Deen videos, post candid photographs, and pluck out all the minute details that turn them on: the way he looks at a woman, touches her, stares into her eyes, whispers in her ear. “There was just something about the way he moved,” Emily says of her first exposure to Deen. He seemed to be “speaking to the girl, but not with his mouth, with his hand over the girl’s throat, and with his eyes.”

Deen’s young fans gush over the sight of him thrusting into a woman while holding her hand. They sigh over a private photo of a clothed Deen commuting by plane. They create animated GIFs of Deen’s greatest moves so they can watch him execute them again and again and again without rewinding. They pepper their Deen fantasies with Harry Potter jokes and circulate them to other girls. Several propose marriage.

Via 100 Interviews

Cue the moral panic: teenage girls are not supposed to be sexual, they're not supposed to enter the clubhouse where the boys are.  ABC's Nightline did a feature on Deen, with all the hand-wringing expected when young women decide they're into sex.  But, as usual, the people who are most concerned are the ones who aren't hearing anything the young women are saying.  When interviewed, the young women report that they like how "normal" Deen is, how his scenes border on romantic. Tumblr swoons when he kisses a girl.  All the innocence that the Concerned Adults are worried about stays firmly in place, even after viewing all that porn.  Make no mistake, there are a lot of naked-bit .gifs, but they're often accompanied by expressions of longing for the person, not the act, and when he does something that makes the girls uncomfortable they're vocal about it.  One wrote that the money shot, the one thing you can count on in porn, isn't something she'd want to do in real life.  Given how internet savvy most young people are, it's likely they'd have found an interview which he says he respects his partners' limits.  "[For example] there’s no reason to choke somebody if they don’t like getting choked," he says. "Then you’re basically being an asshole." Much is made about Deen's boy-next-door looks, but he's not superstar handsome. The important part is that he's a part of a sexual context for teenaged girls in a way that the Biebers of the world aren't. The Deen Crush validates their human nature, that being a teenager is a hormone filled hornball experience, while letting them squee about those big blue eyes.  Sex, as it turns out, doesn't ruin a damn thing.^**

I'm as obsessed as the teens, for ostensibly different reasons.  The connection is that as women we can't stop watching because it's all hard to believe. Something for us? Really!? It wasn't meant that way, it wasn't pitched that way, it's not even produced that way, but that's how it ended up. I think it speaks to an idea that men and women are not very different after all. It turns out that women also like to watch.  However, unlike how porn is traditionally experienced by men, the women who are into James Deen are talking — a lot. There's ownership of interest. It's not shameful and private, it's shared and memed.

My introduction to Deen was through an S&M scene, and it's the only context I've seen him in.  So while the teenagers are watching the vanilla stuff, there's a whole other side that is almost never acknowledged in the media.  Maybe they're afraid the teenaged girls will find the kink? (Though as above, the girls who aren't into it feel they have enough agency to say so.)  The Nightline video — which you should only watch if you want to kill your ladyboner, and fast — pulls clips mostly from  TV show parody porn, probably because they want you to think the porn industry is targeting children by making cartoon spoofs.  (Who knows, but Deen in yellow paint as a porn-Moe Syzlak is not hot.) The first mention I've seen of his work in S&M was in the New York Observer's piece "The Boyfriend Experience."

“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole sexual life and so I’m not, like, bad at it,” Mr. Deen told me by phone last month, on his 26th birthday. “I don’t know how to say it without being a hideous prick, but I’m pretty good at having rough sex. It got to the point where a lot of girls who aren’t into that type of sex were afraid to work with me because they thought I was going to slap them in the face or something.  But I only do that if the girl is into it."

"James Deen is gonna get me kicked out of feminism."

According to the Observer, one third of his output (hurr hurr) is in the realm of kink.  But unless you're watching it, you probably wouldn't know it exists. (I've watched it. A++.  Would porn again.)  Maybe it should be that way; kink is only kink because it's not so common.  But why the erasure?  Especially in the age of this awful Fifty Shades of Grey thing.  Is S&M only okay if it's in print? If it's so badly written as to be completely implausible and thus, safe?  I've read part of Fifty Shades, and as my friends know, I spent a good deal of time rolling my eyes and yelling "That's not a thing!"  Anastasia Steele is a reluctant virgin, which is probably an oft used porn setup in itself.  Christian Grey is into bondage because he's got a very damaged psyche.  From what I can figure, Fifty Shades of Grey is getting a cultural pass because their foray into BDSM is a phase, and what they really want is to hold hands and make love in a field or something.  (And we're back to the teenaged girls.) It's a new cultural conception, this the boy-next-door porn-star, and the world isn't quite ready for him to be into suspension,spreader bars, and fisting.  What's amazing is that we have this boy at all.  Small victories.


^*They might be teenagers, but that link is absolutely NSFW.  
^** Through all this, I totally acknowledge that there are teenaged girls who aren't into that at all. How could I not?  


Further reading:
 James Deen: The Tom Cruise [whaaaa? Brits are weird] of Porn 
Porn That Women Like: Why Does It Make Men So Uncomfortable?  

"I'm gonna sing the Doom song now!"

Full disclosure^*: Natalie Zina Walschots is a very good friend of mine. I actually made a sort-of rule never to write about my friends' books, and at this point in my life, I know a lot of people with books. I consider it a real privilege to know them, and I will always buy your book, I will always come to your launch (if I'm not in Paris, sorry Dani!!). But to write about your book, when I know you? Too hard. Too responsible. Too nit-picky. But this started as a Goodreads review that got away from me. So here, friends, is what I think of Doom: Love Poems for Supervillains.  

Doom is a loving taxonomy, geography, and pathology of villainy. The way Natalie places her words creates texture and sensation, and twice I lost my breath reading ("Beef" and "Purgatory"). The language of Doom is sexual and scientific both. Tricky territories each; often writers who delve into them veer to shock value in the first and wild error in the second. Natalie does neither. Rather, she communicates to the recipient of each love poem (and to the reader) that beauty is only skin deep. These opponents to all that is Good are often violently marked, superficially ugly ("forget naked", "a face only a geneticist could love" - "Doombot"). The parts, then, become the sum: dendrites and keloids, loving like “gamete and spore” “longing for polyploidy lethal multiplicity” (“Fusion”).

In "Beef," a poem written not to a character, but a disease, the host swoons into

a           mind         full   of   prion   ic    ho   le      s

It takes a lot of balls to write a love poem to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.  The poems in Doom must, as their inspirations demand, disturb. The back-stories of super-villains are rarely cute. "Clayface" is just that, something having gone wrong in an operating room: "their graft left you semipermiable / wet membrane." That is a sticky image that hurts my cheeks. In "Mr. Freeze" "my core hoards warmth/ for romantic debridement". Any time I hear or read that word, "debridement" (warning, the picture on that link is really gory, and kind of speaks to my terror), I have an instant horror scenario play out in my head. So it's stunning to me someone could conjoin it with "romantic." And yet, there are deeply sensual poems, like “Green Goblin”

my tongue to Lycra
                your ear fricative
                as liquid latex

                your every cleft a stretch
                my every thrust
a rubber gumball

or the poem spoken by the personified "Stryker's Island":

my fault lines oozing magama
you ease my tectonic plates apart

you finger each steaming caldera
kiss each metamorphic plane

And "General Zod" is everything you'd expect a poem about a mean guy in black leather to be.

I was trepidatious about reading Doom, as it is necessarily inter-textual; the characters all exist in previous works. My frame of reference is totally lacking and so I thought my understanding would be impaired. Now I realise that not knowing who these mythical and comic/graphic-novel baddies are might be a really interesting way to approach them. If all you have is Natalie's word on the subject, you're going to believe her; the poems in Doom are just that confident.  

Scarecrow 

you branded my amygdala 

laser inscribed on my hippocampus 

your drunken boxing 

     batters my limbic system 

     a vicious chemical imbalance 

you shake and secrete 

my chemically ravaged decoy 

mawkish flayer 

my jointless scare-all 

my trigger 

-Doom, (36)

^*Fuller disclosure: This is also the first time I've been in an acknowledgement section, and if anyone had walked by my office when I saw that, they would have seen a teary sniffly person! 
^**I've tried to recreate the spacing that is so integral to poetry, but it's sometimes a bit tough to do in HTML, and "compose" boxes. I suggest you go buy the book for the full effect. I also tend to fuck up transcription so any spelling errors are solely my own.

Biography Showdown Pt 2: Wendy Wasserstein

Right after I finished Mad World the strike ended, and my hold for Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein came in. One of the reasons it took me forever to read Mad World was that I always think I have to be in a certain mood for biography. But here was another one, and I take these things as they come.

I'd never heard of Wasserstein before, but I read an engaging review, and I'm always in the mood for a good New York story. Wendy Wasserstein, with her emigrates-and-makes-good Jewish family and career in the theatre, is about as New York as it gets. As well as the usual historical context that is involved in most biography, Julie Salamon gives the reader a good crash-course in Off-Broadway history, especially the creation of Playwrights Horizons, now in its 42nd year. This is where Wendy would get her start in the New York theatre scene. What makes Wendy and the Lost Boys wonderful to read is that amidst all the privilege of upbringing and glamour of the stage, Wendy Wasserstein is always shown as very down-to-earth, without fawning or over-critique. Wendy was never perfect, but she was tremendously funny and smart, with a stunning work ethic learned through being a child of immigrant parents (and shared by her siblings: both Wendy and her sister Sandy worked almost until the moment of their deaths.) Wendy always felt like the low-achiever in a family of super A-types, and even after she won the Pulitzer and the Tony for The Heidi Chronicles; her mother was disappointed Wendy hadn't won a Nobel. Salamon supposes what Wasserstein must have felt in her formative years:

Wendy would be such a good student, if only her work were neater, less convoluted, better.
Wendy would be such a pretty girl, if only she would lose weight.
Wendy would be perfect, if only she were someone else.

The plays Wendy wrote expressed this vulnerability, in ways she couldn't to her friends and family.

She expressed the often-unspoken, conflicted desires of her peers. Many women like Wendy rebelled against social constraints but were driven toward conventional notions of success. They wanted power and respect — and had begun filling newsrooms, law schools, management-training programs, and medical schools in significant numbers. But they still measured themselves by how much they weighed, what they saw in the mirror, and whether or not they were married.

Wendy dated, but her closest and longest-lasting relationships were with the gay men she worked with. She often crushed on the unattainable, and didn't much enjoy the relationships she had.  Graduating from all-female Mount Holyoke College in 1971, she was of a generation directly influenced by the burgeoning women's movement in the United States. Yet that feminism left a certain privileged set of women floundering: without the clear instructions of the past, how would they go about defining roles for themselves? Unlike her J.M. Barrie namesake, Wendy was the one who wouldn't conform to what society saw as "grown up" While she worked hard, she never got married, and had a baby very late in life after  IVF treatments that went on for years, starting in her early 40s.

Wendy recognized the inherent tension for women who wanted professional achievement and a family. She resented feeling forced to make choices men hadn't been obliged to make, because they had wives to take care of their children. The characters in Uncommon Women keep postponing the age by which they will be "pretty fucking amazing," because the goal seems both impossible to define and unattainable.

The story of Wendy's life comes from pieces archival and nebulous. Wasserstein had many friends, but was intensely private, often giving out made-up or exaggerated details of events.  (No one ever knew who the father of her child, Lucy, was.)  Both Wendy and her mother indulged in story-telling where the truth was something that might get in the way of a better punchline, or more impressive ending. This is the skill that served Wendy all her life.