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Nina, maybe you're right that more women might pick up a pen during this recession (though I'd imagine the free time offered by unemployment is more likely to be the impetus than money, as Bonnie notes). What struck me, though, about that Laura Miller Salon essay "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?" is encapsulated in this bit:
[M]any critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Meghan wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago, when the New York Times polled critics to find out what they thought the most important books of the last 25 years were, and big novels by men dominated the results. America's big, and any novel that represents it has to be big, or so that line of thinking goes. Even Norman Mailer, the most macho of all the 20th-century literary macho men, seemed cowed by how big a "Great American Novel" would have to be, saying once that "The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed." (If you'll allow me a moment of blatant gender stereotyping, that sort of literal-mindedness—I must capture every single detail!—seems pretty classically male.)
The term "Great American Novel" first appeared in 1868 in an essay in The Nation when, America was trying to define itself, culturally and otherwise, against still-dominant Europe. The original coinage definitely didn't exclude women—George Sand was one of the European authors namechecked, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was cited as the closest thing we'd had to date. It also called for the Great American Novel to be "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." On the face of it, that's a pretty humble definition, and one that wouldn't seem to exclude those "domestic" novels we think of as typically female literature. So when did we decide that we couldn't beat Europe by merely painting the ordinary? (This all might just be the simple fact that women usually don't go in much for pissing contests, literary or otherwise.) Or was American life so gender-fragmented in the 20th century that it became hard to have a shared "ordinary"? Jezebel and Esquire seem to think so—their wildly different lists of the books every man and every woman ought to read certainly suggest that. I've read far more on Jezebel's list. So, XXers, should I be mad at myself because my reading habits have tended toward the stereotypically female, or should I be mad that more books on Jezebel's list haven't gotten wide-ranging critical acclaim?
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Two years ago, doctors and hospital workers refused to let Janice Langbehn come into the hospital room with her partner of 17 years, Lisa Marie Pond, while Pond died. Why? Because under Florida law, Janice wasn't immediate family to Lisa—never mind that Janice tried to show everyone the signed medical power-of-attorney documents that she carried with her to the hospital. Janice is now suing for emotional distress and negligence.
I hate these stories. My head is full of scores of them. I heard my first one nearly 20 years ago, when my friends Matt and Mark (names changed—it was a long time ago!) told me that when Mark was shot while on a business trip, the Dallas hospital that was treating him refused to tell Matt (technically a stranger) whether Mark was dead or alive. Matt called for six hours before he got the news. After being terrified by that hair-raising story, my then-beloved and I got our documents written and notarized within the week. (She's now my beloved ex, after 19 years together, but that's another story entirely.) During those 20 years, I wrote a book about the history of marriage and why same-sex couples belong. A marriage movement took shape, including some now-famous lawsuits. We won in Massachusetts, my home state, and Connecticut; we won partial partnership recognition (called things like "civil unions" or "domestic partnership" and so on) in another 10 states; we won the dubious privilege of celesbians getting full-color and front-page photo coverage in People while dating and getting married (cf: Ellen and Portia's big fat white wedding). Meanwhile, most of the United States came to agree that same-sex partners ought to, at a minimum, be able to hold hands in the hospital, for God's sake.
And still, because Lisa Marie Pond—who was on a cruise ship with her beloved and their three children—had the misfortune of having a heart attack while off the coast of Miami, she had to die alone, without the woman she loved.
It breaks my heart.
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At the beginning of this year, Tropicana redesigned its packaging, replacing its decades old logo—the highly identifiable straw-impaled orange—with an artistically framed cup of juice and a sleek, vitaminwater-esque aesthetic. Orange juice drinkers and grocery store goers the country over were aghast, universally agreeing that that the makeover sucked, badly. Customers were so horrified that they complained to Tropicana directly, telling the company, according to the Times, that the new packaging was "'ugly' or ‘stupid,' and resembled ‘a generic bargain brand' or a ‘store brand.' "
Tropicana, heeding the advice of its "most loyal consumers" and recognizing that it had "underestimated the deep emotional bond" between juice drinkers and juice containers, decided to trash the new look and return to the old favorite. Yay! Victory for the people! They really told that Tropicana how to ... sell juice to them better?
The new packaging does stink and I'm glad to see it go, but there's something unsettling about consumers getting together to complain about a company's crappy ad campaign—no one should care this much about something created expressly to manipulate them. Beloved packaging is, it turns out, just like a beloved TV show: Some people will sign petitions, send letters and make phone calls to save them both. It renders the standard complaints about product placement incredibly quaint—how can anyone get aggravated when a show like 30 Rock maybe pushes McFlurries to its audience, when, in all likelihood, a certain segment of that audience would happily advise McDonald's on the best way to sell said ice cream, especially if the company was doing it wrong?
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After reading yesterday's glowing review of My Little Red Book in the New York Times, I finally took a peek at the cute little hardcover I had been brushing off as gimmicky. The pieces are fun to read—some breezy, some touching, all evoking that sweet, misplaced anxiety of youth that Billy Collins so beautifully captures in "On Turning Ten." The authors include names you know (Erica Jong, Joyce Maynard) and amateur surprises, and range from fleshed-out essays to two-sentence snippets. But the earnest introduction by 18-year-old author Rachel Nalebuff strikes me as off-base. She writes that she "decided to commit social suicide" by asking about periods and that the book "shares the revolutionary spirit of its Chinese namesake."
Is it really that revolutionary in the United States these days to talk about menstruation? Holly at Woman Tribune seems to think so, writing this of My Little Red Book's origin: "Something needs to be done in this society that would let this silence continue for so long and keep so many women captive in its process of women-shaming."
If "this society" means modern-day America, I disagree. I've never felt silenced when it comes to my period. Sure, I don't bring it up with male co-workers, but nor would I expect them to tell me about their nocturnal emissions. I've often swapped first-period tales with friends and family, though. My favorite is from my friend who got hers while visiting her dad one summer. Eager to play the situation right, he came home that night with a heart-breakingly well-intentioned purchase: a T-shirt with a silkscreened baby photo of her on the front, and the special day's date on the sleeve. Talk about not feeling silenced—she actually wore the shirt all the time!
Do any of you think this book is a bigger deal than I'm giving it credit for? I respect Nalebuff for avoiding the crass oversharing that seems so popular among young women these days and for assembling well-written and varied tales. But I'm not sure I respect whatever greater social mission she and others say was accomplished here.
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Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo detainee released by President Obama, flew back to his native Britain this week and, like many a former detainee before him, said the U.S. had tortured him. He used the adjective "medieval" to make sure to get his point across.
In a sense, this is useful for the Obama administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder travels to Guantanamo for military briefings about the 245 remaining detainees. Disturbing accounts like Mohamed's—though aspects of them can't be verified—spotlight all the problems with the Bush approach to the detainees, and all the reasons for Obama to deal with them differently and eventually to close Gitmo. And there's another kind of utility, as well: The attention to Mohamed and torture takes attention away from the dense, tricky legal questions on which the Obama lawyers have been siding with their Bush predecessors. So far, there's the new administration's defense of the state-secrets privilege in the case about extraordinary rendition and torture by the CIA, its quiet effort to dismiss the lawsuit demanding that Bush officials find 15 million e-mails missing from White House accounts, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Senatory Leahy's truth commission proposal. Mohamed's story is terrible, and also easier to make a headline out of.
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Nina wonders if the financial downturn will force more women to pursue writing careers in order to become breadwinners, but I don't believe anyone turns to the life of letters to ward off economic calamity. While writing skills can indeed be marketable (a young stay-at-home mom I know takes projects translating academic research into coherent grant proposals and reports), nobody would choose a writing profession for the money. It has worse hourly wages than busing tables, and there's no tip out. Despairingly, as difficult and time-consuming the labor of prose, many writers consider it a gift to get paid at all. A writer writes, at the core, because she needs to hear her voice on the page and see her thoughts expressed on the computer screen. You write because the muse tells you that you must.
That said, I hope Emily's skepticism that Facebook "infantilizes" human brains and impairs attention spans is well-placed. I worry a little that cell-phone best-sellers popular in Japan are already a sign of the digital impact on the printed word, and tomorrow's written narrative will be 10 consecutive status updates.
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An Oxford neuroscientist is suggesting that social networking and the hours kids spend doing it is rewiring their brains so that we are at risk of raising a generation of solipsists. Dr. Susan Greenfield fears this exposure is permanently "infantalizing" young brains, leaving them with truncated attention spans and the inability to interact face-to-face with other human beings. Her conclusions feel instinctively right (as I've found even adult brains can be rewired for such stunting), but then again, isn't this always the cry of the older generation when a new technology comes along? Television, radio, and telephones were all supposed to ruin the generation that grew up glued to these devices. Even the printing press—which allowed people to absorb cultural knowledge privately—was supposed to destroy the group cohesion that was enforced through the oral tradition. Do others feel Greenfield is right? Or is she just the latest adult warning that rock 'n' roll, et. al., is producing degenerate kids?
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At the early end of the current economic downturn, the New York Times published an article about how lipstick is a potential economic indicator. The theory is that in times of fiscal woe, women won't be able to afford that $200 frock, but they'll splurge on a $10 lipstick, a cheapo manicure, or some other kind of small luxury. And lately we've heard reporting not on just the lipstick effect," but also on how the credit crunch is killing boob-job loans, how Nordstrom's profits have tanked since the ladies who lunch are brown-bagging it, and how moms are cutting back on their kids' birthday parties, causing a seismic blow to the clown community.
It seems that every day now there's a trend piece on the way women are spending—or not spending—our increasingly meager earnings. That's why we're introducing the Lipstick Level, an occasional Recession-o-Meter in the mold of Slate's Change-o-Meter rating how the economic downturn is shaping the way women make purchases. A low Lipstick Level score indicates spending as if you still believed those returns from Uncle Bernie were for real, like the article on Bloomberg.com today about how Shiseido is still profiting from a face cream costing $1,350 for a 1.4-ounce jar. “High-priced cosmetics are resisting the economic downturn,” says Shiseido president Shinzo Maeda.
A high Lipstick Level score says we're fast approaching diets of ramen and Target-brand pants held together with twine. An article in Women's Wear Daily by Rosemary Feitelberg on the notoriously spendthrift fashion crowd cutting back is an example of this. According to Feitelberg, "Constance White, eBay’s style director, said she has been trying to explain to her husband what Wal-Mart is." Even those who are aware of Wal-Mart are finding new ways to save: Tailors are doing better business as people try to revive old clothes rather than buying new ones.
So what's today's LL? I'm going to give it a 40 on a scale of 1 to 100. If people are still blowing rent money on cold cream, it could get much, much worse.
Addendum: The Big Money's Hans Eisenbeis wrote brilliantly on the lipstick index theory late last year. His take? "For this recession, lipstick has been upscaled right out of its own economic index. Hello, Hosiery Index!" Sigh. TBM also wrote on Uggs as an economic indicator here.
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Laura Miller at Salon has a great essay—provocatively titled, "Why can't a woman write the great American novel?"—on lit-crit rockstar Elaine Showalter's new book, A Jury of Her Peers, a mammoth study of American women writers. Lots to chew on, but the following bit jumped out at me, considering Emily's recent musings on how recession affects marriages and XX's conversation last month about writers' sugar-daddy fantasies:
... surveying this history, it seems that before the 1970s there was nothing more conducive to a[n American] woman's literary success than the failure of the men in her life. More often than not, what prompted these writers to sit down at their desks and send out their manuscripts to magazines and book publishers was the bankruptcy, desertion, idleness or death of her husband or father. When the touted sanctuary of the nuclear family let them down, and they needed the money to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads, their talents were finally loosed.
A potential silver lining to our current economic woes?
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Hanna, what did you make of Anne Applebaum's take on Hillary's so-practical-it's-just-short-of-cynical diplomatic style in today's Washington Post? It was kind of a grudging shout-out, too, although I thought Applebaum didn't give Hillary quite enough credit. Amnesty International, I understand, was "disappointed" that Clinton failed to adequately whine about human rights abuses to the Chinese government, but I really liked that she replaced the ritualized righteous complaints with simple frank talk. Applebaum did praise Hillary, though, for comprehending the power of gesture over words:. "In China, a country where religious believers are harassed, all prominent visiting Americans should make a point of going to church—as Clinton did," she wrote, suggesting another potentially galvanizing gesture Hillary could make: "In Russia, a country that is ambivalent about its repressive past, all prominent visiting Americans should make a point of visiting a memorial to the victims of Stalin."
Hillary's church visit apparently hit a real nerve in China. I like this fledgling model for a secretary-of-state-ship, one that emphasizes gestural actions over endless diplomatic gabfests. And I like it all the more for the way it gently flips the gender stereotype that all women like to do is talk.
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Imagine if you took American Idol, added shinier clothes, cheesier production values, slighter pop songs (I know, I know how could it be possible!), and then topped it all off with an oversized helping of nationalism. The result would be the extremely trivial, highly political, tremendously campy annual Eurovision Song Contest, in which musical acts from various European nations, plus the likes of Israel, Turkey, and Russia, slap on headsets and some discarded Backstreet Boys duds and vie for simultaneously meaningful and meaningless cultural bragging rights.
This year's contest, which will take place in Moscow, goes down in May, but participating nations are in the midst of choosing their representatives now. Israel's selection, an Arab and Israeli duo that were picked the day after the Gaza war began, has already generated some controversy. The Times reported over the weekend that Georgia, on the heels of August's war with Russia, has mischievously selected "We Don't Wanna Put In"—as in Vladimir Putin—as their Eurovision entry. Should the song make it to the finals (voters are allowed to vote for any song but their own country's), it would, theoretically, be broadcast on Russia's state-owned Channel One—where it will be the most critical item to air on Putin in recent memory. Not bad rabble-rousing for a lousy pop song.
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