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All the Ladies! Or, really, more like, hardly any of the ladies, sigh

wmc

Yesterday I read a report from The Women’s Media Center, “The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2013.”  One of the most important aspects of this report, and it’s worth the read, is how it focuses on women’s opportunities to become “influencers.”  We hear about how few women or anyone non-white make up the “Academy” that decides the Oscars, we hear about how rarely women are CEOs, how not often enough women’s books are reviewed in national papers and this compelling report adds important context to this landscape of inequality (while also ripping NPR a new one like whoa).

Some key findings:

“At its current pace, it will take until 2085 for women to reach parity with men in leadership roles in government/politics, business, entrepreneurship and nonprofits.”

“By a 3 to 1 margin, male front-page bylines at top newspapers outnumbered female bylines in coverage of the 2012 presidential election.  Men were also far more likely to be quoted than women in newspapers, television, and public radio.  That’s also the case in coverage of abortion, birth control, Plannet Parenthood, and women’s rights.“

Forty-seven percent of gamers are women, but 88 percent of video games developers are male.”

“Obituaries about men far outnumbered those of women in top national and regional newspapers.”

It should be surprising to no one that women are underrepresented at newspapers or that they’re more often relegated to writing about “pink topics” like “food, family, furniture and fashion.”  One aspect of inequality in the media I hadn’t contemplated enough though (and I’m an idiot) was how rarely women are quoted in articles in print, in television news segments or…on NPR.  During the 2012 Presidential Election coverage on NPR, men were quoted 70% of the time.  Now, I lived this, like all of us did during last year’s election.  I noticed on television how many men were discussing or being asked for their opinions about reproductive rights and Planned Parenthood, but for some reason I don’t think I realized how guilty NPR was of this same imbalance.  In some ways, I think I just got used to it: it’s all I know, after all, it’s mostly men in Congress and on the Supreme Court who make decisions about my body and my right to make decisions about it .  I don’t know what makes me more sick: that it continues to happen, or that, in certain news outlets, I’ve stopped paying attention and quieted, as Jessica Valenti says in this wonderful article at the Nation, my “justifiable rage.”

Another aspect of this shitstorm that I’ve noticed but never seen data about was how often this depending upon mostly men for quotes happens even when a woman is either hosting or producing a television show, writing the article, or delivering the news on the radio.  The WMC’s report shows that, from January 1st to November 6th, a show on CNN, hosted by a woman, “CNN: State of the Union with Candy Crowley,” quoted men 84.7% of the time.  Now, NPR’s female correspondents do better at this, they used male and female sources equally during their election coverage (whereas the male correspondents (ARI! YOU’RE BREAKING MY HEART) only used female sources 20% of the time).

aridisappoint

Thinking about all of this had me remembering an anecdote from Tina Fey’s Bossypants.

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.

She then goes on to cite one of my most favorite things in a world, an amazing segment on an early episode of Sesame Street where the kids are learning about prepositions by running through a junkyard full of rusted crap.

If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.)

If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that.

Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares?

I kept thinking, reading this report, that even when women finally reach the forefront, they’re still going “through” the old dudes–they’re often not using women in their programs and articles.  Take for instance, the gender gap in articles discussion abortion, in the print media, men were sourced 72% of the time.  Of course men should have a voice in these debates.  But, really, almost 3/4 of the time? Articles on “birth control” weren’t that much better (68.46% of sources were men) and I would bet my right tit they weren’t discussing male birth control.1

As for the women who are worthy of obituaries, which is fascinating, the report uses a story in Mother Jones and a quote from the editor of the obituaries at the New York Times, Bill McDonald.  When asked why he runs so many more obituaries of men, he said:

“We simply choose the most prominent, the most well-known, the most influential…The people we write about largely shaped the world of the 1950s, the ’60s, and increasingly, the ’70s, and those movers and shakers were–no surprise–predominantly white men.”

In response to Mr. McDonald’s comments, Lesley Kinzel, an associate editor at Jane, called this response a “convenient cop-out” that “lets these editors abdicate any responsibility for failing to do the legwork necessary to track down those women who maybe didn’t get the attention they deserved.”

The report concludes with a list of simple suggestions:

“Be more mindful about how stories are framed.”

“[Writers,] Monitor your reader/viewer comments…You’re more likely to act on constructive criticism, fresh insights and new angles suggested by readers” [if you have the energy to scroll through the trolling]

There’s more, and these are, well, duh, but still.  It’s a useful read, even if its treading the shitty waters we know and feel and experience everyday. Except we have to keep talking about it.  Out loud.  In print.   This all matters so much.  The power of narrating the world is in the hands of men.  And even when we have the opportunity to take their hand, we’re still letting them guide the direction of ours.

1.  An aside.  Some friends and I had a great discussion about male birth control a few weeks back.  We were talking about side effects: women over a certain age, who smoke, really really shouldn’t be on birth control, the pills can affect your sex drive, etc.  Now, even with these side effects, that we know to be true, women often still take them.  But when the guys talked about what side effects  would keep them away from using male birth control,  the dudes in the room were pretty worried about losing their getting-it-on-ness (though that wouldn’t completely prevent them from using it, they said).  And I don’t blame them.  It sucks a bit fat butt.  But, for ladies, in many ways, it’s just how it is.  It’s the only thing we can do if we don’t feel like using condoms with our partners or husbands (because, I mean, duh) and losing a bit of your sex drive for a while is way better than getting pregnant when you don’t want to be–our cost/benefit ratio is so different and there doesn’t seem to be any inclination that anyone is feeling super-compelled to get on the pill for dudes.

 

Presidentially!

Callin_the_blue_pool

Some lovely links:

“John, Lyndon, John” by Callie Collins at The Collagist

Forty-Four Stories about Forty-Four Presidents @ Melville House

(my favorites are Lincoln Michel’s John Adams, Robert Kloss’ Martin Van Buren, Anne Valente’s Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sarah Rose Etter’s Warren G. Harding and  J.A. Tyler’s Bill Clinton)

“Why the Deeds of Men” by Justin L. Daughtery at Monkeybicycle (vice-presidentially fiction, mostly, as Aaron Burr stars)

Nancy and the Dutch, an online chapbook by Carrie Lorig and Nick Sturm (from NAP)

“Lincoln,” a poem by Delmore Schwartz that begins “Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!”

JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME ENDORSES BARACK OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT by Jeremiah Tucker at McSweeney’s

And there’s always the Elvis/Nixon letters

**Also, Black History Month started out as “Negro History Week,” the date and duration chosen because it included both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass’s birthdays.

Robert Hayden’s poem:  ”Frederick Douglass“

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

 

 

 

 

 

On Sarah MacLean’s One Good Earl Deserves a Lover

one goodearl

I was an idiot to wait so long to read Sarah MacLean’s books.  It was the titles of the first series that kept me away.  I didn’t think I’d be at all interested in a book called Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake. And when I finally gave in, oh.  Oh.  I was an idiot.  The doubled constraint, of not only the “formula” of the romance novel (I do not say that sneeringly, I love how playfully writers engage with it) but, in Nine Ways, Callie’s list of things to do–drink whisky, fence, attend a duel, make for a wonderfully, even inventive novel.    And now I buy her books the minute they’re released.  Though I still harbor a tender , special spot for Callie and Gabriel.

I’ve read A Rogue of by Any Other Name, the book that precedes One Good Earl.  And so was looking forward to and it  didn’t disappoint.  Although…well, I’ll get to that.

Some scattered remarks about it:

I thought the use of diary entries to begin each chapter worked well; a number of other romance novels use quotes to begin chapters and they mostly feel like placeholders.  In fact, I rarely read them.  But these diary entries captured Pippa’s voice (I laughed when she wrote “Solution not ideal” and when she crossed words out) and served her character without having to depend solely on her inner dialogue or exposition.  I felt compelled to read them because they were important.

And the painfully sweet image of Pippa naming the bones of her foot when she’s embarrassed–that was such a poignant way to help the reader know who she is and how she’s feeling.  A classic “Show, Don’t Tell” move (which is a totally silly and useless rule, but there it is and it works here).

And the italicized inner thoughts of the gingered Mr. Cross are funny and heartfelt and revealing.  Although I felt his background wasn’t as fleshed out, I still enjoyed how these two came together.

However.  I have a general bone to pick.  I feel like the heroine-scientist or the science-y heroine, like Pippa and like characters in other novels, feels…well, how to say it.  It feels so general and sometimes haphazard.  No, what I mean is it that it feels unrealized.  That’s the word.  These kind of characters run together for me–since, of course, they all wear glasses (sigh).  I wish they’d get the same kind of treatment as the Duke of Jervaulx gets in Flowers from the Storm.  And I know that there are historical constraints, as women couldn’t attend university, etc., but Kinsale does such a wonderful job of going into the specificity of his scholarly interests.  I wished writers wrote science-y ladies this way.

Pippa likes science.  She knows the names of bones and she’s done some grafting of flowers, and, of course, she wears glasses (sigh again) but I mostly just felt like she, you know, liked science.  A number of writers (Connie Brockway, Loretta Chase, Meredith Duran, etc.) have their heroines interested in archeology, and I think that sometimes works better, but mostly because I don’t know much about it and their interest makes me think of Indiana Jones, and it’s not like he gets the super-specific treatment, so there’s that.

One “science-y” heroine I very much enjoyed was Minerva in Tessa Dare’s A Week to be Wicked.  Oh, this book is silly and rambunctious and was a kind of salve for my heart when I had to quit a job I loved last summer.  But I felt like, at least Minerva’s scientific interest was specific.  She says things like “For the love of ammonites, man!” and is chasing after what we know to be dinosaur fossils and she’s secretly writing scholarly articles as a man.  I couldn’t help but think that Dare had so much fun writing this character, w/ dirty-talk-foreplay (that veers into math, but you take what you can get) like:

“You know,” he said, “this design begins to appeal to me after all. Sea slugs aren’t the least bit arousing, but logarithms …I’ve always thought that word sounded splendidly naughty.”

He let it roll off his tongue with ribald inflection. “Logarithm.” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “Ooh. Yes and thank you and may I have some more.”

“Lots of mathematical terms sound that way. I think it’s because they were all coined by men. ‘Hypotenuse’ is downright lewd.”“ ‘Quadrilateral’ brings rather carnal images to mind.”

But then, of course, there’s this line from that book:

“…she’d realized that science meant nothing— absolutely nothing— to her without him.”

Which, I mean, well,  statements like that receive only eye rolls from me.  As if you couldn’t have one without the other.  And Minerva does get them both, but, urgh.

Anyway, to bring it around: One Good Earl Deserves a Lover is a sensual, well-written book.  And while it won’t go into the desert-island-keeper pile for me,   it serves the series well.

On Meredith Duran’s That Scandalous Summer

Meredith Duran’s books are auto-buys for me.  When my husband and I were living on an island in Wales, Anglesey, in 2010-2011, I told him that what I wanted most for my 31st birthday was to drink slowly for a long time while reading books on our veranda that overlooked the Menai Straits.

(I couldn’t find a picture, so you’re stuck with this video of me running to get a sense of place)

That day I read The Duke of Shadows.

durandukeofshadows

It remains one of my most favorite romance novels, out of the hundreds and hundreds I’ve read.   And while I very much enjoyed Duran’s other book s, The Duke of Shadows,  after at least 10 re- reads, remains a singular romance novel for me.

In many ways this is because that book and her others to some extent, well, they’re expansive.  The Duke of Shadows moves between continents, is set in a time when English colonial rule in India was rightly threatened.   A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal, for instance, features Nell coming into her own within the setting of the unsafe pits of the early industrial revolution.  There is always the romance, so well done and so wonderfully written. But it’s that the world is at stake.  A way of thinking, a break in the way people understood the world has been the backdrop for Duran’s romances.

duransummer

So I found myself surprised while reading That Scandalous Summer to be thinking of Courtney Milan.  Now, I adore Milan’s novels.  But they’re focused and tunneled in a way–in a way I like very much.  I’m not a romangstperson, unless you’re Joanna Bourne. Milan’s novels are funny and vibrant but the settings don’t often invoke the kind of urgency of a world about to turn that Duran’s earlier books do so well.

And that’s what I think is missing in Duran’s newest.  I even wondered if that’s what Jennie at Dear Author meant when she wrote of the book in a review yesterday that she “ended up feeling…disappointed.” It’s only the ellipses that make me think that.  Because, and I speak for myself, this book, written by any other author, might not evoke the same reaction.  And I don’t think that the setting of Duran’s other books meant that we forgave her for “implausible set-ups,” but maybe we’ve come to expect Duran’s characters to be plagued, threatened, in the midst of a philosophical conundrum that seems larger than the financial well-being of a widow or a second son (even if he’s a doctor at an indigent hospital).

Regardless.

There are plenty of things to like in this book: that we are first introduced to Liza when she’s drunk and snoring in Michael’s bushes; that Michael thinks things like “abstinence made him a very bad poet”; that Liza wonders if she’s over her broken heart because “She tested herself, the way one might tongue a sore tooth. The ache was still there, but much diminished.”

There are glorious sentences and sentiments in the book that, out of context, would be wonderful in any book in any genre, for instance that love “was a handhold amid the torrent, but everyone eventually fell into the river.”

And I did hope for the characters.  I did. Yet.

At the end of the day, this romance novel succeeds for me because of one scene.  A scene that I think  is momentous, bigger than this book.  A scene that I have been waiting to read in a romance novel since I began reading them almost 20 years ago.

Liza’s grief over her mother’s passing is nearly crippling; and after she realizes she loves Michael and may have lost him, she finally visits her mother’s grave.  This is the scene that I found so profound:

“With her mother’s death, she had imagined that she would never again find someone to love her unconditionally. But she had forgotten that there would always be someone who did so: she, herself.

You are a wonder, Michael had told her.

She was determined to be nothing less. But if she failed, sometimes, to live up to his view of her…then she would love herself anyway. Never again would she allow herself to do otherwise.”

Even if I wanted more to be at stake in That Scandalous Summer, even if I felt like something was missing, there is this scene.  Sure, there’s a HEA, but that the most profound HEA comes before the end of the book and before the final conflict, and it is a woman recognizing that she is enough for herself.  This is what I’ve always wanted.  Other books have come close to this.  But not in this way and I’m grateful for this moment.  And so I’m grateful for this book.  Even if I wished, at times, it went about its ways differently.

#ddwritersbkgp reads Leonard Woolf’s The Wise Virgins

thewisevirgins

This month, well, tomorrow, Monday the 11th, we’ll be tweeting about The Wise Virgins.  Join us & me!  Just put this hashtag #ddwritersbkgp into tweetchat and feel free to chime in, even if you haven’t read it, because…why not?

Because sometimes the twitterverse can make it hard to work out ideas, I figured I’d write about the book before I joined the international readers of dead writers to talk about it.

Okay.  My first thought, upon finishing this book, and, well no, about 100 pages before I finished, was: I HATE THIS BOOK.

I spite-finished it.

I hate prefaces.  I never read them.  Or, at least, I never read them before I read a book.  Or, in truth, I rarely read a preface for a book I don’t have to talk about now that I’ve finished school.  Because I am terribly self-conscious.  But, twitter conversation feels different and better. Anyway,  I didn’t read the preface to this book.  All I knew was that this was basically a book about his life and how he came to Virginia.

So, I didn’t realize: the woman that Woolf, or shall I say Harry, marries (I know nothing about he and Virginia as a couple) in the book isn’t Virginia.  Before I realized this, I was so angry.  I couldn’t believe Gwen was Virginia.

(aside)

I didn’t read Virginia’s To the Lighthouse until I was in my late 20s.  And I am ever grateful for that.  Because it was a miraculously singular experience.  I read that book in awe, enraptured, in every kind of bliss and finished it feeling like I had just had my cataracts removed.

(GAME ON!)

But then after a little sleuthing, i.e. just googling the book, I learned:  he wasn’t hating on Virginia, at least not through the character Gwen, he was instead hating on his first wife.

I hate this book.

Because he hates on everyone, through Harry.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this quote from Amelia Gray while I read it:

“Writing is an outlet, but it’s not an outlet of escape. People keep a journal when they want to escape. I write to rub my face in it.”

Now I mostly, and possibly erroneously, see this as a knock at people who read genre, gasp*trade paperbacks*gasp, people who aren’t worthy of the New York Public Library Underground Tumblr because they’re not reading the right books.  But the fault isn’t with the author of the quote, at all, it’s with anyone who has self-deprecated and called the books they read an escape.  I digress.

But I will say, I kept thinking while reading this book: WRITE IT IN YOUR GODDAMN JOURNAL DUDE.  YOU ARE TERRIBLE AND YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE SHARED THIS.

This is an ugly book.  Everyone is ugly.  It starts off pretending to not be as ugly as it is.  In the exposition of the first few pages, Woolf, or his narrator (another big issue for me, who the heck is narrating this), seems to be condemning the people who assume that the traditional, the non-intellectual, continually gets the short shrift:

It was their naked and feeble bodies and their cunning brains that herded them into the blocks of great houses, into the avenues of snug villas, into the rows of mean streets; but behind the long lines of brick and window and gable and front door, and under the thin uniform of class or profession, each is still a monogamous and solitary animal, mysteriously himself in his thoughts and his feelings…”

But then the “anti-hero” who is Harry who is Leonard Woolf goes on to just spit on people.  His judgements of the not-so-wise virgin daughters (are we really supposed to think he thinks he thinks them wise by the end of the book) who are his first wife and her sisters, are so mean and naive.

**Ahem.  Interruption.

cuttysark

This is probably the right time to tell you I’ve been drinking Cutty Sark and soda for a bit longer than I should have.  And that I might not feel so vitriolic tomorrow.  But screw it.  I’m making another drink and am continuing on.

(let’s take a break so I can make that drink I don’t need because I need to get up at 4 a.m. and listen to this song, whose chorus is repeated in a poem within the book)

See, the thing is, I don’t feel like writing a plot synopsis.  If you’re reading this, I apologize.  This book made me feel a kind of strange sadness.  This, if you’re reading it, is now, officially, the worst review you’ve ever read because your reviewer is slightly-to-more-than-slightly inebriated and tired and mad.  So I’m just going to list ideas and questions I had while reading it, to see if this sparks a conversation or disagreement on twitter tomorrow.

  • If he’s written himself as an anti-hero, he treats himself quite nicely.  Am I supposed to feel sorry for him? I feel like he wants us to judge everyone else and pity him.  All I felt was anger.
  • The switching between points-of-view is so inferior to his wife’s mastery of it, I found it distracting.
  • I don’t like anyone in this book except Katherine, because I don’t pity her and she feels realized in a way that no one else does.
  • He does love a simile, doesn’t he?
  • Urgh, the 4th wall business within the parentheses.  Feels haphazard.  Unplanned and unedited.
  • The idea of the filter of fiction comes up interestingly.  In lines like:

  • “If he had read Stendhal’s De L’Amour he might have at once crossed the border and decided that he was [in love] (91).

  • There are some exquisite descriptions of Camilla that seem brusque but maybe brusquely true? Like this one:

  • “By her side Camilla seemed stranger and fairer than she really was. Even when she was sitting now motionless and silent thinking, her eyes seemed to have to dart quickly to keep pack with her thoughts.  Middle-aged and elderly ladies, on first meeting her, because of her very fair hair and her smile, called her most erroneously a sweet young woman; young women and many young men found her fascinating but frightening; old men felt like a father to her without noticing they had fallen in love with her.  Harry was right, you did not think of innocence in Camila’s face; you thought perhaps of purity, coldness even, of hills and snow, of something underneath, below the surface, that might at any moment break out destructive of you–of her?

  • It would be hard to write a review of this book and not use the word solipsistic.
  • The question of narration, if solved, might help me feel less annoyed sometimes.  When you read a description of Camilla like “She did not want to have to think of such things, to have to make up her mind about anything,” maybe if it isn’t Harry but an “other” judgmental narrator, that would help?
  • The Poor Dear Things should be the name for a death metal band.
  • So, he obviously wrote a book where he’s terrible to his first wife, thinks terrible things about her, and the reader is meant to sympathize, right? Does that mean we shouldn’t dislike him so much? That my heart broke from Gwen, is that enough to step back and not dislike Harry and the narrator and the writer of this book so much?  Or am I supposed to believe him and agree when when he calls her childish so often.  She is…let’s put it nicely, not treated well in this book.  I don’t think my pity for her, or at least what happens to her, it doesn’t feel like that’s what Woolf wants me to feel.  Who does he want me to side with? I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I didn’t know about this novel’s connection to real life.  And honestly, though I am tiring and now it’s after midnight and I have to get up in a few hours, I’m not ready to let go of my anger.
  • The role of fiction.  Mimesis.  Gwen, after she’s “changed,” seems to want to talk like people talk in books.
  • Did I miss something huge? I mean, does anyone else feel this mad after reading this?

6AM Update: I’m feeling less vitriolic.  But I don’t think I can be convinced about this book.  Still, it was fun to dislike Harry so much!

I like to walk.  It quiets the whoosh in my head.  So today I decided that most days from now on, I will walk to my job.  I live 2.5 miles north of the Capitol and work in a building across the street from it.  Walking to work means I look like this when I arrive:

working-girl

So there I am, looking like this, walking down sidewalks, listening to the audiobook of George Saunders’ newest, Tenth of December, shit eating grin on my face for the first twenty minutes of Victory Lap, laughing my donkey laugh into the dark that was almost done, until 6:45, when the story turned, and I walked faster, face frozen in horror, breathing hard, feeling afraid.  Most of Saunders’ stories happen this way.  And I dig them.  And nothing, nothing is better than hearing him read them aloud.

Kindle things:

Some people love Sam Lipsyte.  I don’t think I’m one of them.  I don’t know.  There is so much fucking despair in Venus Drive (on sale for $3.99).  I guess I read him because I want to learn from him.  It’s freeing, even.  To not have to like the stories in this collection.  To feel separate from them and still feel floored, gut punched and drunk on the last sentences of his stories.

Kevin Sampsell is a good dude, runs a great press, and his memoir A Common Pornography is a collection of sometimes brutal microbursts.  It’s a painfully good, cheap ($1.99) read.

I reviewed Chad Simpson’s truly wonderful Tell Everyone I Said Hi for Necessary Fiction this week.

I’ve also been wondering for a while how to review the many, many romance novels I read each month.  It seems like Vine is the way–six seconds videos where I recreate a moment in the book that, at least for me, sums up everything about it.

Here’s my Vine review of Kristen Ashley’s Motorcycle Man and Kristen Proby’s Come Away With Me.  I’ll be posting these, the goal is to do 100, on my twitter if you’re interested in following.

It’s been a slower week for Kindle goodness–probably because it’s the end of the month.  I was excited to see Heilemann & Haleprin’s Game Change is now on sale for $2.99.  My husband and I listened to the audiobook (which is very good) last fall before the election.  While I know that HBO made that Sarah Palin movie from the 2nd half of this book, I found the coverage of the democratic party primaries in the first half much more compelling.  Probably because I found myself talking about Hillary Clinton much more than President Obama during the 2012 election.  I was surprised at how often she came up while my friends and I lamented the past four years, the things we hoped for, the compromises made.  I think about Clinton all the time.  And then I saw the Ready for Hillary Super PAC filed with the FEC today.  I think that she is incredibly important, at least she has been to me.  The 18-million cracks in the glass ceiling she (and we) made are real, and that was an incredible moment in my life, listening to her deliver that concession speech.  (I have to link to this absolutely ridiculous video, not only because it does its damndest to make literal every metaphor, but because one of the guys in it looks like Gary from Justified, I’m just saying):

Anyway, Game Change only solidified the emotional connection and respect I feel for her.    A WashingtonD.C.  insider friend dismissed the book as gossip, which, it is, I get that, but I felt like that comment was kind of resentful and insinuated that plebes like me shouldn’t have any sense of how things really work.  Regardless, it’s a hella-interesting book.  Highly recommended.

 

 

Kindle Things

So I use discussion forums (on Amazon, on Mobileread) to look out for deals for the Kindle.  If you have a problem with buying a cheap book on the Kindle from RandomPenguin, then I guess you feel that way.  I, emphatically, do not.  Also, I read a ton of romance novels, and many of those are self-published and exist only in e-book form.  Anyway, I thought I’d post here some Kindle deals that might appeal to all kinds of folks.  I’m always searching for these deals.  It should be my job.  It is, for somehow, a way to calmly start my day.  So here it is, the beginning of my day.

Some good deals:

Richard Wright’s Black Boy & Native Son have been on sale for a while at $2.99.  (Required reading alongside these books are Wright’s “How Bigger Was Born”, and also here’s a Yale lecture on Wright revising the end of Black Boy)

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is only $2.99 too (and just for some fighting words, here’s Wright’s review of the book)

Peter Tieryas Liu’s Watering Heaven ($1.99) A friend of a friend recommended this collection of stories on Facebook.  It sounds inventive and interesting, so I bought it–even though it’s from a smaller press.  But I bought it because I’ll probably write about it somewhere.  That’s usually my code for buying smaller press books cheap on Amazon–when I like them, I have to celebrate them publicly somehow.

Penguin has Henry James’ What Maisie Knew on sale but I’m not going to link to it, because it’s already on the public domain.  This slender novel remains one of my all-time favorites.  I think everything it does is remarkable, and so it was with a heavy, heavy heart that I relay the terrible news: it is being made into a movie.  Here’s James talking about the book in his notebooks:

 “…I feel as if it [WMK] still (above all, YET) had a great deal to give me, and might carry me as far as I dream! God knows how far—into the flushed, dying day—that is!” (162).

I wrote a paper during graduate school, spurred on by Maisie and James’ introduction to it and his other noves, titled:  Sprezzatura:  Henry James & the Real Imagined & the Imagined Real

Here’s the intro, because why the hell not:

Sprezzatura, the word was first used in Castiglione’s handbook of the 16th century The Book of the Courtier, circulates most often now in discussions of painting and the descriptions of the behaviors of the members of the Renaissance court.  Harry Berger defines the term as a behavioral practice, arising out of the need for the courtier to “develop strategies of self-representation and class self-definition” (96).  But it is in the definitions that have arisen from the scholarly attention to the practice that the clear connection to Henry James’ philosophy of fiction emerges.  In the “Art of Fiction”, James writes that, “In proportion as in what [fiction] offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with arrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise, a contention” (Partial Portraits 398).  Thus, in fiction, one important aspect of the representation of a life, or the story of a life, is that it seems to exist organically in the world.  The story, the painting, that is the art that hides its art; real life is concealed by the artifice of the artist’s creation, which is then concealed again, to suggest that, as Berger writes, “sprezzatura is to be worn as a velvet glove that exhibits the contours of the hand it conceals” (99).

**Looking back, Jesus H. Christ that could use some editing, nevertheless.

Now for the dirty books I love (in general, mostly):

Grace Callaway’s Her Husband’s Harlot (.99) is a hot-as-hell historical that pissed me off very much.  The “heroine” dresses up as a harlot and sleeps with her husband, who thinks she’s too precious to do all the dirty things he wants to do to her.  Then it takes her forever to tell him, dude, you cheated on me with me.  I’ve read it, I’ve even bought the audiobook version for long drives, but I mean, come along.  The sex scenes are smoking hot.  Sometimes, that makes a book worth it.  Although I can definitely sympathize if someone DNF’ed this book.

Julie Anne Long is one of my favorite historical romance writers.  She’s set an entire series of books in a small town in England mostly populated by the progeny of two perpetually warring families who can’t stop falling in love with each other.  There’s light , funny moments in these books that strengthen their hold on you.  What I Did for a Duke is on sale (.99), and though it’s not my favorite (that would be How the Marquess Was Won), I definitely bought it and read it last year.

Ruthie Knox’s About Last Night was one of my favorite contemporary romances of 2012.  I’m working on a video review of it, but I dug the hell out of this book.  It has its annoyances (the class-thing seems a bit overboard, seems somewhat unlikely and more fit for 100 years ago), but I liked the heroine and it’s one of those romances where the dude, who is not an alpha-dick, is all about winning the gal.  The between-the-sheets scenes are great, the relationship builds in lovely ways, and I am so appreciative that Knox isn’t interested in ridiculous epilogues (I’m talking about you–Lisa Valdez, who had a sex scene in an epilogue where the heroine was, I shit you not, breastfeeding while doing it, I MEAN COME ALONG).  Anyway, About Last Night isn’t on sale at Amazon, but it’s only $2.99 and if these kinds of books are your thing, I highly recommend.

And finally, just a heads up, if you’re looking for a book, and it’s non-agency (here’s a list of some), it’s often a lot cheaper if you buy it in Kobo (I use their reader app for my iphone).  There’s a Kobo code: Vouchercodes40 that gives you 40% off and that’ll beat Amazon prices any day of the week–plus you can use it more than once.

The Next Big Thing

The wonderful Jill Talbot invited me to be part of The Next Big Thing series.  I’ve been delightedly following other folks’ answers for the past few months, and am thrilled that Jill invited me to take part.

What is your working title of your book (or story)? 

Because of You, I am a Photograph.

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

I really love photography, but even more, I really love scholarly writing about it.  Reading Kracauer, Barthes, and Berger gets me off.  I love reading how Diane Arbus thinks about her photos more than her photos.  Maybe I like the once-removed-ness of it–the talking about the photos instead of looking at them?  Because I dig all of this, when I read Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, and discovered the invention in the book, the “literate projector,” which turns image into text, I knew I had found my way into a book that would incorporate everything I’d been reading and thinking about.

What genre does your book fall under? 

My first response is, it’s a hybrid book, kind of like an essaying fictional memoir.  Each chapter is an essay about a type of photography, told through the filter of a woman’s life experiences.  So a chapter about Mugshots details the history of the mugshot, philosophical concerns about it, while also being about the narrator’s grandfather, lies, family, etc.  That being said, in a recent interview at Publisher’s Weekly, Susan Steinberg talked about experimental writing, about how the word “hybrid” is a kind of safe-word for experimental, one meant to seem less off-putting.  It’s a great piece, and I couldn’t agree more with everything she so beautifully said.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

I’m not sure there could be a movie rendition.  Which sucks.  Because I really want Charlie Hunnam to be in it.  If I’m being completely honest, I want him to take his clothes off in it.  So that will have to be the next thing I write, something where Charlie Hunnam would take his clothes off and also Carey Mulligan would do something brilliant.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

Seeing through seeing.  That’s a fragment, but what the hell.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

This is a book for a smaller press that’s interested in form and image.  I have the presses in mind and hopefully one will bite.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

I’m still working on it, mostly because I lose myself in the research, which is my favorite part of writing.  I keep finding books or essays or articles about photography that I want to subsume into the book.  I am artificially deciding, right now, that I have to finish it by the end of February.  A few chapters are already out in the world, and now I just need to buckle down and get ‘er done.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

I think that a collection of essays would connect best.  Comparing it feels weird and braggy and makes me really uncomfortable.  I would say it does something completely different than what Geoff Dyer does in The Ongoing Moment, but is interested in similar concerns.  I think that most everything I write has been influenced by Michael Oondatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, well, everything he ever wrote.  Any writer who is interested in exploring the tensions of text and image is a source of joy and inspiration for me.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

Whoops, I think I’ve answered that.  I guess to say something else, while I am finished with my formal education, I love to go through people’s syllabi online, read the books they assign, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two years–searching for the syllabi of advanced photography classes and reading everything the professors assign.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Hmm, my hope is that it finds the right balance between philosophical investigation and friskiness.  I think it might be unlike a lot of other things, but still feel familiar in the right way.

And now! I’m passing the torch to writers I like very much, writers who do things that are inventive and emotionally wrenching, writers who smart and funny and kind.

Richard Froude (I reviewed his exquisite Fabric at Necessary Fiction, also, my husband proposed to me on Richard’s balcony)

Seth Landman (because this series needs POETS! And I’ve already pre-ordered Seth’s new book, and I’m not sure I’ve ever met another person who makes every single person fall a little bit in love with him on the first meeting–as Seth)

Andrew Keating (runs the Cobalt Review, has a great new book out, was nice enough to interview me a while back, is awesome)

Michael Davidson (runs Tiny Toe Press (Heart of Scorpio is fantastic), lives in the same town as I do, and is a great dude)

Jennifer Denrow (another poet! My husband and I wanted to pay her to read from her book California, while we were in bed, because we wanted to dream about it; Denrow is one of my favorite writers and is definitely one of my most favorite human beings)