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.

New Year's Day 2012

Last year on this date I was in a glorious house in the Hollywood Hills, convalescing from the effects of free-pour gin at a Bootie party. Awesome. Today I'm writing this in rainy Toronto, listening to the CBC with a napping boyfriend beside me. Both have their merits. Okay, full disclosure: I'm a bit hungover today as well. That may explain some run-on thoughts in this post.

I like to do my year-end wrap up stuff on the 1^st, because who knows what kind of crazy stuff can happen between Xmas and New Years. Nothing crazy happened. I did finish a couple books over the break though, so those made it onto the Read List.

I wrote things this year that got a little bit of attention, which was pretty great. I was, in a way, long-listed on the Canada Writes True Winter Tales contest^* (they called it "featured"). I actually didn't think I had a chance of winning, because I assumed they were looking for a more Vinyl Cafe feel-good kind of story (and indeed they were). It was a lovely surprise to be featured, but of course a let-down not to make the short list. I also wrote a quick blog post for Shameless Magazine that got quite a wide and appreciative response (surprising me quite a bit). This is encouraging stuff. The feedback makes me want to keep trying. I still can't write fiction, but I think maybe I shouldn't even try. Last night a friend said (jokingly, and with wine involved) "fiction is dead." I sure hope not, because I need it! However, her having said that lets me off the hook from this weird idea that I need to write fiction to be a "writer." Negotiating all this self-definition is terrifying for me, probably because the line between that and self-aggrandizement (or full-on delusion) is pretty thin, and stepping over makes you look like an asshole. Let's move on!

I read 64 books this year, which is more than any other year since I've been keeping track. I also counted poetry and plays in there, so maybe that's a bit of a cheat. Today I began to write a post like last year's about books I really enjoyed this year, but instead I think I'll just throw out some mini-reviews through this week on books that didn't get blogged in 2011, but should have. In the meantime, click here for all the books I read this year.

Happy New Year, pals. Thanks, always, for taking the time to read here. It's nice to know I'm not shouting into a void.

^*Adapted from the original post here.

Gimmie

I've been trying to avoid the navel-gazey "what is the nature of blogging" posts, and for the most part I've been successful. Probably because I just don't bother to feel pressure to write anymore. Weirdly this has resulted in more blog posts this year than any other. To get even more "nature of blog," about five minutes ago a fellow blogger published her own thoughts on the topic I discuss in this post, and even though I've been sitting on it since late yesterday afternoon, just needing 15 minutes downtime to edit and clean it up, I feel like I shouldn't even bother now. Meh! Anyway...

I want to talk a bit about an article that I read via Twitter yesterday: Has book blogging hit the wall?. There was a little debate after the link was posted. Bloggers were cast as a whole, an amorphous blob of want and entitlement, satiated only by free goods. I got a little miffed, like I do. I responded that I've reviewed three free books here, one of which was offered to me on the blog itself. The other two are from the one publisher list I'm on. I'm careful to only ask for books I know I'll read even though many more are offered. This is only fair: copies are limited and the books should go to someone who wants them. I don't really understand that idea that if something is "free" it must be taken, especially since the books they send are ARCs, so it's not like they look pretty on your shelf or anything. Raj Patel says interesting things about "free" stuff in The Value of Nothing. Paraphrasing Marcel Mauss' The Gift he says

in sociology as in economics, there's rarely anything that comes free from expectations of reciprocity and respect.

Patel is talking about companies much larger than Harper or Penguin, like Nestle or AT&T, but the concept is the same: companies are not your friends, they (probably) don't know you or care about you as a person, they are entering into an agreement with you. There isn't ever something for nothing. Yes, there is a sense of entitlement among some, and my Twitter pal did state that entitlement is definitely not limited to book bloggers. But it's also not a defining characteristic of all book bloggers. I can't be the only one out there who doesn't feel that my internet connection means I'm owed something. The article, however, makes it sound as if my pal's initial assessment was correct. Wow, these are unsavoury people!

I know a bit about how all this works. I've sent out free books myself, when I had the opportunity to do such things. It's a relationship, and it should be one of respect. To diverge a bit, in the days of Panic Yore, I was a club and college radio DJ. Those are pretty much the only venues non-top 40 music gets played, or were before the Rise of the Machines — er, internet — so genre labels would "service" DJs with new releases. However, the DJs had to keep playlists and send those back to the record label. As with book blogging and free books, you need to prove to the publisher or label that their investment in you is worth it. Further, it seems to me that if book bloggers want to be taken seriously they need to act professionally. If they want to treat their blog as a hobby, with no deadlines or professional courtesy, which is probably closer to what I do, then bloggers need to be prepared to pay for that hobby. If you wanted to be treated like a professional (from the article, "Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or The NYTimes?") then you must be prepared to meet deadlines and act responsibly. (Note, I say "be prepared" to do so: there doesn't need to be a deadline involved, but if one is provided, it should be respected.) The relationship William Morrow wants to have with its bloggers is sensible and reasonable, and it's exactly how the one publisher I deal with runs things now. You can't just send books out into the dark and hope they stick. Targeted and focused marketing just makes sense. Larry from the article just doesn't understand the concept of "relationship" or "fairness."

It's not enough that it is 'your job' to review their books within a one month span before or after its release date," wrote Larry at The OF Blog, "but they couch in sweet talk the threat to pull review copies because you don't want to play their game."

"Play their game"!? Getting adversarial is no way to conduct a relationship, Larry. Perhaps publishers who operated like William Morrow, with a buffet style, have to shoulder some of the blame for not figuring out a better strategy from the get-go. Though maybe they were just optimistic about human nature. Fools!

It's really too bad the article has the tone it does. It does make bloggers seem whiny and entitled, where most of the ones I know are anything but. I wrote a garbled Tweet about the number of books I own but haven't read (I blame the head cold), which sounded a bit like I had no intention of reading them. What I meant was, I buy so many books, and have so many in the library queue, that I sometimes get a bit bogged down in the To-Read List. What I wanted to convey in that Tweet, was that I spend my money at readings, and launches, and indie bookstores (and the chains when all else fails) because it's important that I put my money where my mouth is.^** I want those publishers and writers to have my dollars, because they are providing me with the thing I love the most: the written word. I'm saddened that there are bloggers out there that feel it is their right to receive freebies, especially in an industry with such low margins, where the producers of of the content almost always have a second, 40-hour a week job.

Update! I've compiled responses from other bloggers here. If you know of others, let me know and I'll link them. It's interesting, to me at least, how others have reacted.
From Pickle Me This: What I Hate About Book Bloggers
From Books Under Skin: On book blogging
From Bella's Bookshelves: The Book Blogger’s Responsibility: What?
Larry, of the OF Blog, responds to the uproar (and to me): Fallout from last week's posts on reviewing/William Morrow letter


^*I've been the same with running, coincidentally. The year I don't set a goal or do any races is the year I have the best results, and most gains. I thought I worked well under pressure. Turns out, maybe not so much.
^**I use the library system pretty extensively too. I wouldn't ever have enough space in my tiny apartment for all the books I want. But I want to.

Making 9/11 All About Me*

In the last ten years I've finished university, been married and divorced, moved cities, traveled across the Pacific twice, got out of retail, got out of publishing, made and lost friends, found a great love, and chose to get sterilised. It's been a big decade.

In 2001 I was 25, living alone and in my last semester of university. My routine was as it had been for years: get up after about five hours sleep, attend one or two classes, race home and change to go to work till 11, study, five hours sleep. I didn't interact with people at school, because I never really had time. Class, work, sleep. So on September 11^th I went to school as usual. I had one class that morning, so I likely woke up around 9 am, without listening to the radio or turning on the TV, just racing to school. The professor didn't mention anything. There were no scenes of people crying and being comforted. There weren't TVs in the hallways or classrooms tuned to CNN. Everything was perfectly normal. People were probably talking to each other about it, but I hadn't talked to anyone that day, other than the people serving coffee. They didn't say anything. Maybe they assumed I already knew. I had no idea.

In writing that, I think I've just come to understand the biggest mystery of my whole 9/11 story. People asked "How could you not know? How could people not have said something about it?" I think the answer is timing. By the time I left my house, and got my first coffee of the day, it was 9:30, mountain time. The towers had collapsed an hour before. It was already done, and maybe at that point it was unlikely you'd say to a stranger, "Have you heard?" Because everyone would have heard. Except, I hadn't heard.

I got home from school a little after 1 pm, 3 pm eastern time. That's when I turned on my TV. I remember this part clear as anything. The first thing I saw was some politician or another saying "America is still the greatest nation in the world." My first thought, as a Canadian used to complaining about the cultural imperialism and hubris of the United States, was Oh, these fucking Americans! And then the scene switched to footage of Tower One collapsing, Tower Two just rubble and smoke behind it. Something was very, very wrong.

What everyone already knew, I learned six hours after the fact. Was I the last person to hear about 9/11? I sat on the floor in front of the TV and watched the highlight reel, because that's what it was by that point. The second plane strike, the collapse, the people fleeing in terror. I called my then-boyfriend, later husband, who was living in New Jersey. I hadn't been out there yet, so I didn't know if where he lived was that sort of "across the river from Manhattan" New Jersey, I didn't know how widespread the attacks were, how bad the national damage was. He was fine, he told me not to worry, everything was fine. I don't remember being emotional when I called. I was too confused.

After talking to the boyfriend, I was finally able to start putting things together, and I got online. Livejournal was the preferred social network at that time, and there was a lot of material to get through. People had been posting events as they happened, and the fear and confusion of watching it all go down in real time was a live wire in every word. I had friends in Toronto who'd been evacuated from their workplace. I had Calgary friends stranded in Toronto, because all flights had been grounded. At some point I realised a Calgary friend was in New York City that day, and no one had heard from him. I'm sad to say that this is when I started crying; the possibility of my loved one caught up in it all made it real and human, finally. I suppose it may be possible that's when the shock wore off enough to let in some comprehension of the real scale of what I'd been seeing. I called work, because I was so scared for my friend, told them I couldn't leave until someone had heard from him. Work understood. And so I waited. Around 4 pm Calgary time, I learned he'd been in contact with Toronto people. He drove out of NYC that morning, before rush hour to avoid traffic, and had gotten stuck at the border trying to get back into Canada. The borders, of course, were total chaos. He'd been in the WTC the day before. He still has the ticket stub dated September 10, 2001. They'd gone a day earlier than planned.

I went to work, at the 7-11, shell-shocked, two hours late. My loved ones were accounted for, I could go on. It was a weird night. A special edition of the paper came in around 9 o'clock. Customers were infrequent, and quiet. Everyone, by now, knew. Everything was still up in the air, there were no answers yet. We were so far away from what happened, yet we had tilted a little, and it took a while to stop feeling like every day was going to change us again.

In the past couple weeks I've been obsessed with watching 9/11 coverage. I found a site that has archived the live feeds from CNN, CBC, and the BBC from that entire morning. I still have such a hard time understanding that day, because I missed so much of it. I literally slept through the events of 9/11, and it creates this need in me to fill in the missing pieces. I've seen some people talk of a memorial fatigue this week, and I get that. I, however, don't suffer from it. If anything, I require more information, more pictures, more taped phone calls.

If I remember right, it's 10:28 eastern time that Tower One collapses. I watched the five seconds of that on the CBC feed, over and over. They're saying they don't know what happened to Tower Two, because it's in the background, and then Tower One goes. You hear the entire newsroom make a sound... it's a horror movie sound. It's the sound of a heart and a brain breaking into pieces simultaneously. I wasn't there for it, so I needed to feel it, repeatedly. I don't know what that's about.

I was in NYC last month. The PATH train I took in from Jersey City lets out at WTC. On a day I spent alone, just wandering Manhattan, I spent some time at St. Paul's. Hard to imagine how it escaped damage, let alone total destruction, being just feet from Ground Zero. That whole block, even on that sunny day ten years later, full of tourists and citizens going about their day as normal, is a heavy place. I took pictures of Revolutionary era gravestones, while America's involuntary mass burial ground sat behind construction-boards in front of me. Heavy, yet peaceful. In that place, in those moments, all I could feel was hope that peace had come for all those souls, and the ones who loved them.

I'm sure, though, I'm not alone when I say that I still don't understand any of it.


Photo: James Nachtwey, Time.

^*This post isn't about the politics of 9/11, the aftermath, or the reasons why. This is just a personal reflection on that day. It's my answer to "where were you when?"

Catfight

     Kelly Valen was compelled to write Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships after she published a New York Times article about the extremely poor treatment she received from her sorority sisters after she had been date-raped in college. The reaction to that article (much of it critical of Valen herself), and the communication she received afterwards, made her want to investigate dysfunctional relationships further.

Intentionally or not, I'd found myself scratching the surface of something significant. The notion that women of all ages and backgrounds were writing to me not so much about the date rape or the Greek system but to share their own hidden hurts and discomfort with other females really floored me

     She was also surprised at how many people asked her to look more deeply into the patriarchal causes of girl-on-girl hate. In Twisted Sisterhood she prefers to put these concerns aside, stating that she's out of her depth looking into feminist theory too deeply. In fact, the book ultimately suffers from this attitude, as Valen is unwilling to look into much of anything too deeply, beginning too many thoughts with "Well, I'm not saying x but maybe y?" As if she's afraid to offend, again. Instead, she spends most of the text quoting from her over 3000 survey respondents, but refuses to come to any conclusions, or even put forth any theories, other than "women must just be different somehow."

     I'm not sure what I was hoping to get out of Twisted Sisterhood. Perhaps some insight into my own actions: I too fear friendship with women due to past hurts, yet unlike most I instantly open up and share too much, too fast. I also become annoyed pretty easily, and I'm not shy about kvetching. Twisted Sisterhood made me feel ashamed of the latter, but didn't even try to give me strategies or alternatives. Instead, Valen tosses around a lot of nebulous ideas and buzzwords like "personal responsibility" and "co-operation" without really engaging with any of the negativity that the book is essentially about.
     Never once does Valen acknowledge that it's okay to be pissed off when people are shitty. Regardless of gender, I feel that I have every right to talk about being hurt or pissed off when people are shitty. It's not a "girl thing" it's a people thing. I shouldn't have to take shitty behaviour from anyone, man or woman. What Twisted Sisterhood had a real opportunity to do, and failed to address completely, is put forth better and more constructive ways to deal with these situations.

     Here's my own personal theory on mean girls, and I certainly don't expect you to agree. In fact, I'm not even sure how valid it is, but it's honestly the best thing I've been able to come up with. (Other ideas are, of course, what the comment section is for. Have at it!)
     Yes, women are worse to each other than men are to other men. At some point^* we had to compete with other women, and other women only, for resources. Those resources being men. Without a man the world was a dangerous and unfairly difficult place for a woman. Valen is correct when she relates that women now feel that they're not competing for anything; for the most part, women are just competing. However, to me this seems like a hangover from the bad old days, which didn't end that long ago.
     My cohort's mothers would definitely have learned it from their mothers. Our grandmothers might have had the vote, but didn't have many opportunities outside the home. Even those of us lucky enough to have grown up in a more feminist household still encountered the larger majority of kids who didn't, and who learned those lessons of female competition from their mothers. And so on down. I think, I hope, that this might lessen through successive generations, as we women realise that the behavior we've learned isn't getting us anywhere, and is an antiquated reaction to conditions that, for the most part, don't exist anymore.^**
     We've lost what we were fighting for and now we just fight. This can be especially evident at work, as it is a place where there is tangible reward for "winning." Valen does report that in her survey, many woman did not like working for a female boss, or that they feel a lot of tension in the workplace between females. Though, it's possible too, that women have to work harder, and overcompensate in being seen as less emotional and tougher than the men (think the Anna Wintour boogeyman), if they are to be taken seriously enough to rise to executive levels. (Depends on the workplace of course, but ask your nearest female CEO about her experience. Oh, never mind. Maybe there's a VP handy?)
     There's still a patriarchal element at work of course. Valen is also correct when she says that many women lash out because they are insecure in themselves (our Moms were right about that). Insecurity is also very, very good for business. Valen knows that "we can, to some extent, be counted on to [...]compete, compete, compete" which serves to "drive our purchasing decisions." Again, she lays this at the feet of women, who "notice, evaluate, and one-up each other" without examining where this behaviour might come from. Since men are still over-represented in owners and executive branches across these — and most — businesses and corporations, when we buy to improve our self-esteem, we make those men richer. My feeling is that it's not a direct "How can we screw women over?" ploy, but women feeling bad about themselves is a well-known revenue stream, one I'm sure corporations won't be giving up any time soon. And given how ingrained the current capitalist method is, I don't think this would change if women were in charge. Women CEOs will be just as responsible for the bottom line as male ones. Again, cultural hangover.

     The overriding message in Twisted Sisterhood is that women are ultimately responsible for the way they treat each other. While I think on an individual level this is true, and that as individuals we have a responsibility to think and do better, there's more at play on a societal level. Women are not mean just because they're women. Something has made us so, and it would be helpful if we had more insight into what that is; fighting an invisible and unacknowledged opponent will only be an exercise in futility.
     Valen's thesis, if there can be said to be one, can be drawn from a quote in the last chapter, called "Betting on the Power of Females and 'Sisterhood'." She quotes a man^† who says "Women are mean to each other because they're slaves to their overblown insecurities. It's in your nature and it's your greatest weakness." (Emphasis mine.) Valen sees nothing wrong with this analysis, that women are simply weak and insecure, not bothering to question who benefits from this condition (which I absolutely refuse to believe is innate). "This kind of in-your-face diagnosis of our female culture might rub you the wrong way," she says, "but it's hard to disagree with this fellow, really." Maybe it's hard for Valen to disagree, but that's in keeping with her inability to show any strength at all, even in a chapter with "Power of Females" in the title. If women follow Valen's trend of shying away from firm opinion and action out of fear of causing offense, then we will continue to be weak and insecure. The answer to female aggression is not knee-jerk passivity.


^*I admit this point in time is pretty tough to pin down: when did we lose property rights, if we ever had them? When did we become chattel, if we ever weren't? When did we become regarded more for our bodies than brains?
^**Though our rights are still under backlash-y attack. Not to mention those places in which women are still second-class citizens.
†This is extremely frustrating, because while Valen refuses to place any blame on the way women have been treated at the hands of men, she is, in the end, really concerned with how "our brothers, husbands, bosses[!], and fathers of girls are feeling about the females in their lives."

35 years, 33 days

I am alive at night.
I am dead in the morning,
an old vessel who used up her oil,
bleak and pale boned.
No miracle. No Dazzle.
-Anne Sexton, "Moon Song, Woman Song"

I followed a Twitter link, the other day, to an article that said "the age of 35.09—or approximately 33 days past your 35th birthday—is the precise tipping point," the point at which a woman's looks inevitably, irrevocably, go downhill. The study, such as it was, was paid for by a skin cream company, natch. It still hit me hard. I just turned 35 in December. My D-day had been January 25^th. It was all downhill from there. I updated Facebook with the link, and commented "Nothing left to do but die." This birthday has been dragging me down. What was the point in all that exercise and healthy eating and not having baby weight if my visage is just going to get hag-like anyway? Nice legs, shame about your face.

I have "marionette lines," that look to me as if someone carved them in with an Exacto knife. It's the years of smoking, taking their toll. Everything a 20-year-old does, they do with supposed impunity, without any real knowledge of the fact that aging comes for all of us. I remember, so well, feeling invincible.

As a kid I was taunted for my looks, for being ugly, acne-covered, and fat. I internalised all of that. I did my time in the Disordered Eating Dungeon. I never felt thin enough, though I relied on being thin, because I always felt so ugly. Last year, at 34, I discovered running, and the for the first time I felt real peace with my body, and consequently with my face. Photos were taken of me that year that I liked, not just tolerated. When I looked in the mirror I consistently enjoyed what I saw. For once, for a year, I felt good about myself. If this was aging, I was all for it. Then came the lines. And the 35^th birthday. So much for all that.

Maybe it would behoove me to read I Feel Bad About My Neck. See how the older half lives. I have beautiful friends in their 20s. They're dewy and gorgeous. One of them expressed surprise at my feelings on aging. She asked, doesn't one become more confident? I replied that you have to be confident, to compensate for looking old. I hate being the voice of sadness, but I can't help expressing how this feels. How surprised I am that I look in the mirror and see what is just the beginning. The decline. I am not comfortable in my skin, as I was for that one gorgeous year.

Thanks, Susan, but knowing it doesn't stop it from kicking the shit out of me. Because it really is. Sontag even acknowledges the dreaded number by name: "After thirty-five any mention of one’s age carries with it the reminder that one is probably closer to the end of one’s life than the beginning." People laud celebrities for looking amazing at 40 and 50, but of course they have the money and time to spend on looking perpetually 30 -- maximum. "Most of the women who successfully delay the appearance of age are rich, with unlimited leisure to devote to nurturing along nature’s gifts. Often they are actresses. (That is, highly paid professionals at doing what all women are taught to practice as amateurs.)"

"But although this system of inequality is operated by men, it could not work if women themselves did not acquiesce in it. Women reinforce it powerfully with their complacency, with their anguish, with their lies." But what's a girl to do? Even a girl that recognizes all the binaries and bullshit. I've read The Beauty Myth. To not buy into the anti-aging industry

is the real social threat: that women will first accept their aging, then admire it, and finally enjoy it. Wasting women's money is the calculable damage; but the damage this fraud does women through its legacy of the dread of aging is incalculable. (Wolf 113)

It's capitalism. It's a patriarchal set up; a possible excuse for the males who leave us for new models when we lose our fecundity -- if you believe the biological determinists. And yet: what's a girl to do, when she is no longer a girl (despite the embarrassingly erroneous suffix on her email address), and the world does not come easily knocking at her door, what can she do but anguish? Fuck me, I want a cigarette.

Simone Weil wrote something that speaks beautifully and simply to me: "To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death." When I was 34, I tattoo'd Klimt's conception of Death on my arm, from shoulder to elbow. When my tattoo artist placed the stencil on my arm, he remarked on Death's gaze: "He's got your back." It's not dying I'm frightened of; I accept death as truth. For me, the fear is what's expressed by Alex in The Witches of Eastwick^*: "Getting old. That scares me. I mean, it's a short life, isn't it? [...] I look in the mirror sometimes and I see everything falling apart. Fast." Live or die, but don't poison everything...^**

Sontag's article was written when I was three. When I was eight, Susan Brownmiller's^† Femininity was published. In it, Brownmiller noted that we live

[...]in a culture where the chief criteria of feminine success are ephemeral youth and beauty, a woman's sense of failure is likely to begin at the moment she is percieved by others as no longer young and desirable. (165-66)

The Beauty Myth came out when I was 15. And here we still are, when I'm 35. The terrors of aging have made women react with horrors of their own, long before I was born. Lady Bathory's legend is of bathing in the blood of virgins to maintain her youth, and today Joan Rivers has, though surgery, bought herself an inhuman mask. In the morning, when I see a face I don't want, I understand all of it.

^*From the screenplay, found here. I don't know if this actually appears in the book.
^**Anne Sexton, "Live"
^†In one of the alternate universes in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, breasts are called "Brownmillers." Oh tee hee, Wilson.

The Nature of Blog

I've had this post about Freedom sitting in the queue for weeks now, needing to be tied together, edited, and published. I haven't looked at it since I wrote the first draft in a frenzy of undergrad-like motif spotting. Which is often what I do here; write tiny, not-great undergrad papers. Partially I do this because I'm not sure how else to write about books; I don't know how to write a real review, though I do respect those who can. I feel like I don't have enough adjectives. I also don't just want to rehash those reviews. I want to bring something else to the table. With the Freedom post, I feel like I've caught onto something that reviewers missed, but I've written about it on such an elementary academic level, I'm a little hesitant about putting it up. Because, who cares, really? This is a blog, not a class. I've been told that the way I write about books can sometimes be difficult for the reader, because it relies so much on familiarity with the text. That's a fair assessment, and I don't deny it. Again, it's just my default of writing papers, something I enjoyed a lot, but haven't done for a grade in ten years.

I know I just need to write, for the practice. I find that my more successful blog posts (successful meaning interesting, insightful, thoughtful, maybe funny) have been written without too much thought. They were initial reactions, with a little research, maybe a couple pull quotes. This makes sense, when I think about how I wrote all those A papers: the night before, or the day they were due, from scratch. I'm good under pressure, good on my feet, better off-the-cuff. So I have to endeavour to do that; not over-think, just write.

One of the problems I'm encountering, with just getting it down, is the weird editorial board I seem to have contracted. I do advertise new blog posts on my Twitter, and almost every time the first commentary I get is a spelling, punctuation, or grammar correction. (It's always a man, not always the same man, that does this. I don't know what to make of that precisely, but I don't think it's just a coincidence^*.) When I posted about Fauna a Twitter pal immediately launched into refutation mode, citing books written about Calgary. When I angrily suggested he was missing the whole point of the post, he admitted he hadn't even read it, he was just commenting on the title. And then I made this face: >_<

I started this blog, like so many do, because I simply love books. Reading is integral to my personhood. Boyfriend put new shelves up for me the other day and now I can see a small percentage of my books from my bed, and I'm filled with a sense of comfort and happiness every time I look at them. So I started writing here because I wanted to talk about books. Then I quit talking about books for a while. Then I wanted to talk about them again. My model has always been Pickle Me This^**, and though I know I'll never be half the reader or writer Kerry is, the way she writes about living with books, not only about their content, is something I strongly identify with. I wish I could post multiple times a week, but I just don't have the content in me. I want to post about everything I read, but I never do. Sometimes I just have nothing to say about a book, like A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I just finished, enjoyed a lot, and then put away. What's to say? Egan is amazing. The end.

Thanks to Kerry, I'm currently reading Ex Libris. If she is "startlingly unoriginal in loving Anne Fadiman’s books of essays, not to mention about a decade late" then I'm not sure what rock I've been living under to have never heard of them till now. Fadiman and I agree on a lot of things: a well-used book is a loved book, annotating is a good thing, finding unexpected bits of paper in a book is a joy (I love when people leave their library slips in books, so I can see what else they've read), and so forth. I do envy Fadiman her hyper-intellectual upbringing, I'm a little annoyed with how often she name drops Mark Helprin, and I'd probably stab myself in my eye if a friend ever said the following to me:

I had repaired to the King's Arms, the pub closest to the Bodleian Library, with a fellow student, a dashing but bullheaded young Scotsman who proclaimed over coffee that Homer was vastly inferior to Virgil. As a Homeric partisan, I was much miffed[.]^†

I'm hoping this is a caricature, but even still, I don't find it an endearing one. Anyway, I'm mostly positive about Ex Libris, because it does what I want to do here: discuss how books shape my life, how I interact with them, how they make me feel, how I react, where they lead me, how their physicality touches me, and how reading is now -- and will ever be -- the most important thing in my life. The writing comes much further down the list.

^*I'm sure I'm going to catch shit for reporting this, in this way, but it's the truth. No woman has ever (metaphorically) fallen upon me shouting "Oxford comma!" If pointing out errors is seen as a way to enter into the discussion, without having a literary framework, that's a flawed approach.
^**I'm sure I've said this before, several times probably.
^†Really, who talks like this?! I sort of thought, "Well, if she's maybe British..." but no, the friend is American. If accurate, this is inexcusable affectation.