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Pulitzer Prize-winner David Finkel has written a truly heart breaking book about the war that just won't end in Iraq. In The Good Soldiers, he follows the 2-16, a battalion of army infantry soldiers nicknamed the Rangers, as they head into "the surge" in January of 2007. He follows them as they say goodbye to their girlfriends and two-year-olds, as they arrive at the base and face the football field-sized trash pit that surrounds them (especially disconcerting in a war where IEDs are so rampant), as they grow anxious and bored, as they get injured and killed, as the lucky ones return home. The Good Soldiers is truly in a class with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a vivid, nonpartisan portrayl of what real soldiers are facing in this war.

Much of the fifteen-month narrative is built around Ralph Kauzlarich, a U.S. Army Liutenant Colonel who is known for his catch phrase, "It's all good." Well, of course, it's not "all good" in Iraq circa 2007. Insurgents are planting IEDs in trash heaps on the side of the road so powerful that they rip through vehicles and tear off limbs. The moral force of the war feels lost on most of the soldiers. Attempts to do nation-building within Iraq--schools, a sewage system, build up the local police force--are all slow at best and impossible at worst.

I have never understood the war so well, despite reading quite a bit about it. The Good Soldiers paints a living, breathing picture of what the 19-year-old kids who put on the American army uniform actually face, and in turn, gives the reader a sense of her own responsibility like nothing else. It's not all good. And we're all to blame.

My childhood friend Mollie sent me not one, but two copies of her former professor's book, when she noticed that I was thinking and writing a lot about work/family balance issues (thanks Mollie!). Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All by Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers is a deeply-researched, very practical guide to getting real about some of the most critical unfinished business of contemporary feminism.

Unlike Linda Hirshman's Get to Work, which leaves many readers feeling judged and misunderstood, or Leslie Bennett's The Feminine Mistake, which leaves many readers thinking doomsday thoughts, Strober and Meers approach the subject with healthy doses of both realism and optimism. They are women who have been through it, and lived to tell the tale. (Both are heterosexual, and so their own life examples are from this perspective. Unfortunately they didn't do much to look at non-hetero couples or non-marrying types).

After reviewing all the research that proves that dual working families are actually healthier, happier, and more economically viable, they go on to talk about some of the roadblocks to making it work and their suggestions for getting past those roadblocks.

One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.

A few things I wanted to mention in the video but didn't (and didn't have the heart/editing skillz to add in):

-Beavan makes it pretty clear this project is for people with resources, in this country and globally. For those who don't even have electricity, or access to clean water, they need more, not less. That has to be part of our bigger picture strategy to deal with the situation.

-He's a never ending idealist, with a bit of sap thrown in.

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Chris Hedges' War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning was a book that really changed the way I thought about, well war, for starters, but also about the kinds of choices we make as human beings in search of purposeful lives. After years of war reporting, and then divinity school, he seemed uniquely equipped to comment on the death and destruction that is war, but also the ways in which it becomes a "meaningful project" for people.

So I was really looking forward to reading his new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Unfortunately, what worked so well for me in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning--Hedges' compassion for people and deep understanding of what makes us tick on a psychological, spiritual level--is almost completely absent from this new book. He takes readers through five grand illusions: of literacy, of love, of wisdom, of happiness, and of America. Each one is more depressing and argued with less empathy than the next.

In the Illusion of Love, for example, he reports on the proliferation of porn, re-traveling ground that so many smart feminist thinkers have already tread without half the insight. "Porn is about reducing women to corpses," he writes. Um, okay. And what about it? It was insufferable to read page after page about "face fucking" without any new learning. Why are men and women drawn into this world? What does it really say about our larger culture and their inner psychology? None of this is really explored. It becomes one big shock-and-awe session. Trust me Hedges, most of us feminist readers already been done shocked and awed.

I agree with a lot of what Hedges is arguing here. I've also written, for example, against the cultish embrace of the power of positive thinking because it invisbilizes systemic inequality (think The Secret, in which a gay guy who was being sexually harassed by homophobes is suddenly freed from oppression by just imagining them being nicer to him). But unfortunately, Hedges presents his arguments in such an insufferable, unempathic tone, that the reader just ends up feeling preached to, judged, or bored to death. I hope that Hedges manages to reclaim some of his earlier empathy, because it's really what set him apart as an extraordinary writer. In this book, he's more of a ranter.

Given my recent interests in food politics, I was psyched to see this new book from Lisa Jervis, of former Bitch Magazine fame. Cook Food: A Manualfest for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating is a quick and dirty guide to the basics of cooking a plant-based local diet.

It's a quick read and the second half of the book consists of recipes. I haven't tried any yet but I look forward to it! The first half of the book is part politics and part cooking primer. Everything from what tools you need in your kitchen to what spices you should have in your rack. Amanda over at Pandagon reviewed the book when it first came out, and here is what she had to say:

I like cooking, but breezing through the short, incredibly easy-to-understand chapter "tips and techniques" made me realize how much I didn't know that's actually pretty simple, like how to use salt while cooking. And even for people that are hip to things that I just never picked up on like that, I think this book is really useful because it teaches you, in the space of about 15 minutes worth of reading, how to cook vegetables, which a lot of people don't understand. Don't fear the greens! You can cook them so they'll be edible. Grains also intimidate a lot of people, but after reading Jervis, you'll realize it's not that scary. And tofu! It wasn't until over the Christmas holiday that another vegetarian friend showed me the secret to making good tofu (drain it), but if I'd read this book sooner, I would already have it down. Plus, her technique is easier than the one my friend showed me. Once you eat really well-prepared tofu, I promise you'll never crinkle your nose and say "yuck, tofu" again. To make it all that much easier on you, she also has a chapter on what to stock in your kitchen, both in tools and food to just have on hand. The tools section is really helpful for people who don't know where to start, and Jervis makes sure to explain what you can feel relatively at ease buying for nothing at thrift stores, and what you probably need to spend money on, or ask your mom to buy you for your birthday.

It's a great deal at only $10 a copy. You can learn more about the book at PM Press. Lisa also has a blog for the book, which you can check out here.

Journalist Thrity Umrigar's novel, The Space Between Us, is the kind of story weighted down with the familiar heaviness of real emotions, family drama, regrets, hopes, and misplaced anger, but it still flies by. It is set in modern day India, where Umrigar grew up, and is essentially a novel analyzing gender and class through the lens of two compelling characters: Sera, an upper-middle class Parsi housewife and Bhima, Sera's longtime servant. They are each others unlikely anchors through 20 years of drama, much of it brought on by asshole men.

Umrigar is a beautiful storyteller, taking time out to reflect on some of life's largest, most universal questions. Passages like this took my breath away:

Perhaps time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones--the angle of your head, the jutting of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile--has collapsed under the weight of your grief.

Umrigar isn't opaque about her intentions. In an interview in the back, she explains: "...a kind of unlikely friendship, a trust, an unspoken language of understanding, springs up between the women. But there is always a formality, a ritualized 'space' that can never quote be bridged. Each woman is governed and restricted by class divisions." Interestingly, Bhima, the servant character, is actually based on a real woman who worked in Umrigar's home while she was growing up in India. Umrigar is quick to point out that, while this is quintessentially a story about class in contemporary India, it has dynamics that can be seen in almost any modern country.

I won't do an spoiling here, but I have to admit that the one piece of this novel I felt estranging and a bit unbelievable was the end. I'd be curious to see if other people were struck this same way. Overall, a wonderful read and a great study in gender/class dynamics.

Like me, Arianne Cohen is a woman over 6 feet tall who makes her living as a journalist. And dammit, she beat me to writing a book about life in the 99th percentile for height: The Tall Book. (I've blogged about some of my tall-lady experiences before, in response to an article Cohen wrote for Nerve.)

Much of the book focuses on the undeniable advantages that come with being tall -- I'd venture to call it height supremacist, even. Because height is a product of not just genetics but good childhood nutrition, there's a strong correlation between height and intelligence, and therefore height and wealth. (Ah, but a gender gap persists: tall women still earn 17% less than tall men.) Tall people are also more likely to attract attention (duh) and be perceived as leaders.

But the picture isn't quite as rosy for tall women -- especially those of us who are extremely tall -- as it is for tall men. Cohen describes how, as early as age 8, she was offered the option of taking estrogen to stunt her growth so she would not reach her projected height of 6'5". This practice developed in response to parents' fears their daughters would not be able to find a husband if they grew too tall. Cohen said no to the estrogen, and today she's 6'3". It was a good choice -- growth-stunting estrogen has been linked to fertility problems later in life. Yet some doctors continue to prescribe this "treatment" for tallness. A 2002 survey of 411 endocrinologists found 137 still offered height-reduction treatments. How fucking archaic is that? Cohen writes, "In the United States boys are rarely treated, because height is considered beneficial."

As I read Cohen's book and thought about my own height, the more I came to think my physical self has had a lot to do with me turning out a feminist despite a very conservative upbringing. It's the social aspects of tallness -- especially when it comes to gender dynamics -- where things really get interesting...

While in residency at the Bellagio Center, I spent almost the entire time reading Astra Taylor's Examined Life. I've written about the film version of this project previously. In short, Astra has complex, accessible conversations with eight of the world's most interesting philosophers (Judith Butler! Martha Nussbaum!) about ethics--all while in various kinds of motion. The second the credits ran, I leaned over to my movie buddy and said, "I really wish I could read all of that."

Oila! The New Press has put out this great book--a compilation of the transcripts of all of these conversations. Everything from ecology to disability to poverty to gender expression to phenomenology show up here. As Astra herself describes it in the introduction: "The salient message maybe be that the multiplicity of perspectives presented here does not lead to a quagmire of moral relativism, as some fear, but instead to an expansive ethic of intellectual inquiry, compassion, and political commitment."

I'll leave you with just a few of my favorite insights:
"Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with."
-Cornel West

"Your destiny is to remain ignorant of your destination."
-Avital Ronell

"Much of what is interesting about what humans do comes not from purity but from contamination."
-Kwame Anthony Appiah

"Unless we are willing to be vulnerable to one another, we will not be capable of love, and the denial of vulnerability is one of the sources of aggression and violence."
-Martha Nussbaum

"You are active all the time just to prevent some traumatic thing, the real thing, from happening."
-Slavoj Zizek

"I sometimes think that the social violence that affects people who look more permeable, who look more dependent, who look less defended, is a way in which impermeability on the side of the people who are violent is managed: you be the permeability of the body, you stand for the vulnerability of the body, and I will be the impermeable."
-Judith Butler

An excerpt from the movie:

Karen Pittelman--poet, author, musician, activist, and writing coach extraordinaire--guest reviews for us this week. Thanks Karen!

It's the mark of a good poem when you absolutely must pull it out of your bag in the middle of the street and start reading out loud to a friend. Which is what I found myself doing last week with the title piece of Katha Pollitt's new collection, The Mind-Body Problem. As I recited her lines on the body's struggle to assert its simple desires--"wanting to be touched the way an otter/ loves water, the way a giraffe/ wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling/ the tender leaves at the tops of the trees"--my friend and I slumped contentedly against the wall of the corner grocery and sighed. Who says poetry has to be esoteric? Pollitt's language here is as lucid and accessible as the prose in her well-known essays. Columnist for The Nation and author of four books of essays including the recent Learning To Drive: And Other Life Stories, Pollitt also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1982 collection of poems, Antarctic Traveller. The Mind-Body Problem heralds her first return to the form since then, and it's about time.

Pollitt has a masterful way with the details of daily life. More than just graceful observations, these are the moments on which her poems turn. Casting an unflinching eye on a world at war, "a world whose predominant characteristics are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment," the poems nevertheless search ceaselessly for moments of everyday beauty strong enough to sustain us. There is "a woman coming out of the subway carrying an immense bouquet of white lilac wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch." In "Near Union Square," peddlers sell "Windex-blue ices" and "three-dollar lime-translucent sandals," and "suddenly out of nowhere the roof of every/ flaking office building flares gold." People are still, "saved every day/ by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth." Even the dead are drawn to return, in the poem "Visitors," "not to startle us with fear or guilt or grief," but just for the simple pleasure of "hefting and sniffing cantaloupes at Key Food."

In her essay, "Webstalker," from Learning to Drive, Pollitt writes of the "small ordinary word, like 'orange' or 'inkstain'... that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but... if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core." That's a good explanation of what is at work in these poems, the quiet glint of life and language she is mining here as fuel for a more passionate engagement with the world. It may not always be enough. Still, in one of the book's most powerful moments, "Trying to Write a Poem Against the War," Pollitt reminds us, with a bit of a sly smile, that though the task may be as futile as "mailing myself to the moon/... yet what can we do/ but offer what we have?"

This week's book is not new exactly, but definitely relevant. It's from 2007: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

Transcript after the jump

Every once in awhile, as a writer, you read a book that raises that bar in your own mind about what is possible in your profession. Enrique's Journey is such a book. In it, Pulitzer Prize winner Sonia Nazario, follows the journey of a 17-year-old boy from Honduras as he tries to make his way to America to be reunited with his mother--who left when he was a small boy to pursue the American dream. As he rides on top of trains, tries to avoid gangsters and police, begs for food, sleeps in graveyards and abandon homes, struggles with drug addiction etc., I got the most lucid, gripping portrait into the journey of the child immigrant that I've ever been exposed to.

Nazario's reporting bowled me over. Her story originated as a Los Angeles Times feature, and continued to expand from there. She's spent months retracing Enrique's journey, exhaustively reporting all of those who he met along the way, in addition to the various members of his own family. This dedication allowed her to make the journey really come alive--from the smell of the mangoes thrown onto the train by rare, generous poor folks living along the tracks to the local politics in a tiny church in Nuevo Laredo.

Enrique and his mother, Lourdes', story is not uncommon. From the book:

In Los Angeles, a University of Southern California study showed, 82 percent of live-in nannies and one in four housecleaners are mothers who still have at least one child in their home country. A Harvard University study showed that 85 percent of all immigrant children who eventually end up in the United States spend at least some time separated from a parent in the course of migrating to the United States.

I simply can't recommend this incredible book enough. Especially at this moment, when the news is filled with headlines about both immigration and Honduras, this book sheds light on the real lives being affected. Enrique's Journey not only engages your heart, but fills your mind with ideas about the power of tenacious storytelling.

Talking about this book today. Transcript after the jump!

I claim no objectivity on this one folks--J. Courtney Sullivan and I are co-editing an anthology on the moments that made young women feminists and I think she's a lovely genius.

To buy Courtney's book, go here. To read the first chapter, go here. To read more about it, go here, here, and here.

Check out the books: Poems from the Women's Movement by Honor Moore and The Little Book of Meaning by Laura Berman Fortgang.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

Mom, I promise I'll brush my hair next time.

Get The Double-Daring Book for Girls.

Check out the books: Returning to My Mother's House, Feminist Art and the Maternal, and In Her Own Sweet Time.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

Check out Same Kind of Different As Me, Front Lines, and Black Women's Lives.

Another video version of Not Oprah.

Check out Jess' book, RH Reality Check, and Shelby Knox's work.

Transcript after the jump.

Video styles this week (I recorded this in the a.m. but just finally got the transcript written, after the jump):

Go check out Homeboy Industries!

I've been binging on Janet Malcolm lately, as I'm in the thick of writing and thinking about all the ethical conundrums that go along with my profession (Malcolm, if you don't know her work, is literally obsessed with such questions). In any case, I read The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes last week. It's basically Malcolm's exploration of all the biographers of Plath's short life, the sticky situations they get themselves into with Plath's widower Ted Hughes and his sister, a domineering woman who serves as Ted's manager of sorts, and the public's tendency to get seriously voyeuristic when it comes to suicides (especially of beautiful, talented women).

The whole things is super meta. While Malcolm travels around England and the U.S. tracking down these various characters and analyzing the ways in which they projected themselves onto Plath's life, she herself is projecting her own obsessions and insecurities on them. The genius of Malcolm is that she actually makes such convoluted, hashed and rehashed material interesting. She explores the way in which writers are forced to create succinct narratives out of the messiness of life. I found this passage particularly amazing:

At the end of Borges's story, "The Aleph" the narrator goes to the cellar of a house, where he has all the experience of encountering everything in the world. He all at once sees all places from all angles: "I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; saw the circulation of my own dark blood." Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is running through his mind, and to accept that it may not, cannot be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood. I, too, have spent days fruitlessly hanging around the door to that forbidden cellar. I have looked at my revisionist narrative and found it wanting. I have found every other narrative wanting. How can one see all the ants on the planet when one is wearing the blinders of narrative?

If you're not a writer, or someone working in storytelling or documentary arts of some kind, I'm not sure that you'd dig this super meta book. But if you're like me--fascinated by the way stories get told, how history is shaped, and the drama behind the curtain, then you just might like it.

Perfection is obviously something I've thought a whole lot about. I have my own little brand of perfectionism--not so much detail-oriented or craving flawlessness in my work (how could I blog?), but more along the lines of having unrealistic expectations for myself as far as achievement (whether it's how many items on my to do list I can expect to check off in a given day or what I am going to accomplish by age 30). Writing a book that looked at perfectionism through a gendered lens really helped me to come to terms with a lot of my less gentle tendencies with myself.

But a few stubborn habits of mind have hung on: I don't take enough time to savor my success. I still think I can do ten million things in an eight hour day. I get far too focused on the completion of a task rather than the process of it, which creates anxiety when I'm working on long terms projects (like, um, the book I'm currently writing...great cold sweats in the middle of the night material). In any case, The Pursuit of Perfect by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar is a really interesting approach to a lot of these issues. He uses his background in positive psychology, plus lots of philosophy (Plato, Aristotle etc), plus real life examples to create a very practical guide to reflecting on your own perfectionist tendencies and developing new thoughts and behaviors.

The main thrust of the book is that there are perfectionists, who reject failure, painful emotions, success, and reality, and then there are optimalists, who accept all of the above. He writes, "In essence, Perfectionists reject everything that deviates from their flawless, faultless, ideal vision, and as a result they suffer whenever they do not meet their own unrealistic standards. Optimalists accept, and make the best of, everything that life has to offer."

It's, at times, a pretty self-helpy read, so if you're not in for that kind of thing, I wouldn't pick this one up. I liked how the philosophical discourse sort of tempered that vibe, and gave me a chance to place my own perfectionism within a philosophical framework. I resisted most of the exercises he recommends, with the exception of a few that turned out to be fairly informative.

I can think of about ten people in my life who should read, or at least skim, this book. Of course they're too perfectionist to think they need it. Alas...

Model daughters of the patriarchy movement, the Botkin girls express a hatred of feminism that is pure, and they hate it in a variety of flavors most feminists wouldn't recognize as their cause. To the Botkins, all bad women--from the seductress hoping to "subdue masculinity" with her womanly wiles and charms to vain pageant queens to career women to even conservative Christian wives who aren't fervent enough about spiritual war--are feministic, seeking to 'weaken and dominate men.'

Reading Kathryn Joyce's exhaustively researched and fascinating new book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, sometimes feels like a science fiction experience. The Christian patriarchy movement is aimed at raising dutiful daughters and obedient wives who will populate the world with strong Christian stock. They make spreadsheets of their future spawn and, like big brother himself, try to manipulate women into feelings like there is profound power in relinquishing all autonomy, opinion, and agency. The most dearly held ideology of this small but growing group of Americans is not necessarily godliness, but severely traditional gender roles. As such, feminism is the enemy.

Joyce is a young feminist schooled in an old-school journalistic style: report, report, report. She enters this world with absolute dedication to getting as much material as possible. She's not an inflamer or a polemicist, but a dispassionate observer, an information-gatherer, a witness. As such, if you're looking for some snark (ala Jessica V.) or some poetry then you'll be disappointed. Joyce is writing a book that is meant to wow you with its comprehensive breadth and depth, not its rhetorical flourishes or narrative personality. It's quite refreshing actually, if not sometimes a bit overwhelming.

What's most exciting to me is that Joyce is breaking truly new ground here. Much has been written about evangelic Christianity or cultish religious subcultures. It's a fascinating and important subject. But Joyce has entered a different sort of landscape, one that is uncharted and completely critical to our understanding of how far we've come, and how far we've got to go if we are going to bring ALL women (and men) along. She's uncovered a horrifying and very real trend in contemporary America. Next time someone asks you, "Is feminism really so necessary anymore?" just hand them Joyce's book and say "Read up, my friend."

Check out this riveting NPR story on the subject as well.

Thanks to Laura for the heads up.

Junot Diaz has become a bit of a cult figure among intellectual hipsters--celebrated as truly unique and representative of a certain genre of masculinity, equal parts science fiction, hip hop, and magical realism (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez). When my boyfriend and a few thoughtful guy friends all started standing in the corners of dark bars, talking about The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I decided to take a look-see for myself.

I was worried that the references to science fiction might deter me from really getting it, but I'm fairly well traveled in the worlds of 90s hip hop and a more feminist kind of magical realism (I love Julia Alvarez and Isabelle Allende), so I had some tools in my belt. Regardless, the second I picked it up, I was sucked in. Reading Diaz is like getting on a train and then becoming so enthralled that you miss your stop.

Essentially this novel is the story of one family--many generations deep--and its tendency for emotional disaster, physical danger, and a cursed sense of never really fulfilling destiny. It spans the Dominican Republic in the early 1900s to the high school hallways of the South Bronx in the 1990s, and many places, hearts, and minds in between. Love looms over all, motivating the characters to get themselves embroiled in the most precarious of affairs and have their hearts and limbs broken.

Women are often objectified in this novel, but that didn't bother me because I saw it as true to the culture of hip hop and the inner lives of the characters that it was representing. Sexism exists and talented novelists are always trading in reality--good and bad. What did bother me was the ways in which Diaz seems far more adept at creating a complicated male character--one with a psyche and a full range of desires, bad habits, and contradictions--than a female character. Too many of his women, who were very central to the plot, ended up coming up more like "types" than real, living, breathing ladies.

When I brought that last point up with one of my friend, a novelist with a fairly macho streak, he said that he wholeheartedly agreed. Though he'd adored the novel, and really sees it as a model for his own work in many ways, he was also disappointed in this aspect of it.

So go on, jump on the bandwagon, everyone's doing it. And then tell us what you think!

The Hip Hop Wars is set up as a discussion between Brown professor Tricia Rose--a poetic voice of equanimity and strategic anger--and the most extreme sides of the ongoing debate about the quality of hip hop--the conservative reactors who unequivocally loathe the music and its parallel culture and the pro-corporate rap folks who feel like analysis of this kind is kill joy-ish. As she writes, "Too many people on both sides of this debate seem to have lost their collective minds, taking a grain of truth and using it to starve a nation of millions."

She takes on the following arguments:

From the Hip Hop Critics:
Hip Hop Causes Violence
Hip Hop Reflects Black Dysfunctional Ghetto Culture
Hip Hop Hurts Black People
Hip Hop is Destroying America's Values
Hip Hop Demeans Women

From the Hip Hop Defenders:
Just Keeping It Real
Hip Hop is Not Responsible for Sexism
"There are Bitches and Hoes"
We're No Role Models
Nobody Talks about Positive Hip Hop

I really appreciated this structure because it named all the pieces of the debate, that thus far, have felt more like rage, chaos, and projection to me. Rose has the capacity to parse out the different threads of argument, examine them, and then tear them apart. Plus she gives great context; Rose does a great overview of the effect of corporate media monopolies, mostly white-owned, on the (d)evolution of rap music over the last ten years.

The fact that she's traveling the middle path here, neither defending nor attacking hip hop, makes for a really nuanced, thought-provoking reading. She criticizes, for example, the "trinity of commercial hip hop--the black gangsta, pimp, and ho" but also calls music makers and takers out on their own responsibility:

This shift was not inevitable; it was allowed to happen. We must be more honest in thinking about how black ghetto gansta-based sales are the result of marketing and manipulation and the reflection not only of speicific realities in our poorest black urban communities but also of the exploitation of already-imbedded racist fears and black people.

With regard to sexism in hip hop, she makes some really important points. For example, those that are horrified by misogyny in hip hop often "rely on the fiction that American mainstream models of masculinity are non-violent, 'respect women,' and reflect a history of civility, honor, and justice." Some conservative critics also seem to purport that if we banished sexist hip hop, we'd be done with sexism. She writes, "It's as if one is saying: Once imagery and music are 'respectful,' order will be restored. Few are making the connection between the entrenched forms of polite sexism and acceptable patriarchy being touted by most religious figures and most middle-class leaders." And one of my favorite points, she looks at the danger of slipping from rejecting exploitative lyrics to explicit lyrics:

Yes we should protest sexually degrading imagery, but when pro-sex and sexual-agency language is not advanced in its place, then the whole arena of sexuality (especially outside marriage and beyond its role in procreation) faces the threat of being painted with a shameful, dirty brush. This places women's own sexual freedom and autonomy at stake.

It's harder to write when you're not making grand pronouncements and one-sided judgments. Rose does a beautiful job. There's a lot at stake. As Rose herself writes, "Debates about hip hop stand in for discussion of significant social issues related to race, class, sexism, and black culture."

For more check out Latoya's great series over at Racialicious.

I've tried reading so-called chick lit--those paperback books with shoes, shopping bags, and skinny women gracing the covers. First of all, I like to keep my finger on the pulse of what the American public is reading, and it seems, based on the numbers, that plenty of them are devouring books by Sophie Kinsella and Helen Fielding. But second, I've tried reading chick lit because sometimes a girl just needs a little breather from Samantha Power and Zadie Smith. I'm not always great at enjoying the lighter side of life, and chick lit seemed like a potential way in.

Boy was I wrong. The few that I've tried to read left me offended and just plain bored. It seemed that I was forever destined to my super serious reading punctuated by zoning out in front of crappy reality television when I needed a little break from it all. Until I read Super in the City...Daphne Uviller's new novel is not so much chick lit as lite fiction for the feminist minded reader. The main character, 27-year-old Zephyr, wonders why she is the laziest ambitious person she knows--pursuing then dropping dreams of med school, law school, and a thousand other jobs. She just can't figure out what she wants to do with her life (not an unfamiliar experience these days, I know).

But twists and turns of fate land her in the initially unexciting position of being the super of her family brownstone. Before long, there are cute boys, sexy mysteries, and always a team of four best friends leading Zephyr on all kinds of adventures that, yes, in the end help her clarify something about herself, love, and the future.

This is fun fiction. It flies. And it's really funny. Best of all, Uviller has an amazing imagination, that's reflected in Zephyr's frequent flights of fantasy through out the novel. She makes all of your crazy schemes, silly dreams, and catastrophic worries seem normal.

And the whole thing is feminist and fast-moving--a great break from Judith Butler.

Jennifer Egan's byline on a New York Times Sunday magazine piece always draws me in because she writes such eloquent, complex takes on issues that I tend to be really interested in. So it was about time that I got around to one of her novels. Cozied up in my parents' house in Santa Fe, I found Look at Me--a National Book Award Finalist--on their shelf and devoured it in front of the kiva fireplace.

It's the kind of novel that worries you about half way in. You think: I'm loving this writing, but I'm afraid there is no possible way for this author to bring the plot together in some palpable way. Egan is a master at metaphor and the sort of novelist that brings vivid images to mind every few lines or so. Though it's a relatively long novel, I felt like I was swimming through it, flipping page after page. The other thing that I LOVED, is that she writes about a bunch of teen girl characters and, with the exception of a few ancillary supporting actresses, no one is reduced to the usual "I'm a teen girl look at my whine and act really shallow" crap of so many other books. Her girls are all human beings, struggling with important challenges of self-discovery.

The themes in this book are wide-ranging--history, image, alienation, money, friendship, infidelity, consumerism, mental health, beauty... It goes on and on, and doesn't end until the last triumphant scene where everything--indeed--is brought eerily and palpably together.

Look at Me is the kind of book you read and know that you will need a lot of time to process. I really wish I'd read it with a book group or in a class, because there's so many twists and turns--both plot-wise and thematically. But alas, it was just me, myself, and I. Maybe you'll read it and leave some comments here...

Let's give a hearty feminist fuck yeah (even though it's not Friday yet) for Jessica, whose book He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, just got included on the 2009 Amelia Bloomer List:

The Amelia Bloomer Project produces an annual list of books for young readers, birth through age 18, that contain significant feminist content. We need not just cardboard "feisty" or "spunky" female characters, but tales of girls and women who have broken barriers and fought to change their situations and their environment.

Members of the 2008-09 Amelia Bloomer Project committee evaluated over 400 submissions, discussed 128 titles, and finally, selected some 68 books for children and youth that comprise the best feminist books published between July 2007 and December 2008.

Congrats to all of the other winners as well, including feministing friend Claire Mysko, whose You're Amazing! was reviewed here at feministing not too long ago, and Jennifer Baumgardner, whose Abortion & Life was also featured in the column.

My friend Maura gave me a signed copy of New York Times reporter Helene Cooper's memoir, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. Lucky me.

It's an amazing book. Cooper grew up in Liberia as part of the elite class descended from American slaves who returned to Africa in the 1800s. She skillfully weaves memoir material of her own unique coming-of-age within an economically stratified society with riveting historical information about the founding and development of Liberia--much of it done by her own ancestors. It's more than fascinating. It had me reading out loud to whoever would listen. (Sorry Dad.)

As you know or might imagine, Liberia finally unraveled due to all of the incredibly unjust class and race dynamics playing out there for far too long, and violence, instability, and chaos ensued. I don't want to give away the book, so I'll leave it at that, but be assured, Cooper has a long journey to go once the Liberian part of her life explodes.

The book is beautifully held together by Cooper's friendship with Eunice, a girl from a lower class who was brought in to be her companion as a child, was her rock throughout her adolescence, and ends up being the tug on her conscience as an adult.

The only Jewish kid I knew growing up in Colorado Springs, CO was a nerdy guy whose mother sued the neighborhood elementary school when she realized we only sang Christmas carols around holiday time (this was in the mid 80s). I felt bad for him, even though I thought it was very brave of his mother. It must have been a pretty alienating childhood.

But then I moved to Barnard and lived in New York City and I was actually the one who sometimes felt alienated from Judaism--the thing that gave the other girls on my hallway an immediate social circle when school started, the thing that made my roommate wait for me to turn on the bathroom light on Saturday mornings, the rich tradition of valuing education, telling moving stories, of doing good for others. I was, to put it plainly, a little jealous.

I felt that again while reading Danya Ruttenberg's beautiful memoir, Surprised by God. In it, Ruttenberg, who is still fairly young--though a rabbi, a theologian, and an accomplished writer--traces her own path from atheist Brown undergrad to Rabbinical school student. After a Jewish-ish growing up, she wholeheartedly embraces philosophy and the heady side of religion while in college, but when she loses her mother to a painful cancer, things start to unravel. Moving to the west coast during the dot com boom, she's introduced into a world of excess, glitter, and individuality. She falls in step--making costumes for the upcoming theme party, scraping by on freelance writing, and getting, well, drunk a lot. But there is just something missing. And before long, she goes seeking for just what that is...

I won't give away the rest, but I really recommend this book for anyone who has that same inkling (as in, there must be more than this) or has wrestled with organized religion (it doesn't have to be Judaism). Ruttenberg does a masterful job of weaving in quotations from religion's greatest thinkers while taking us on her contemporary pilgrimage of sorts. It's entirely relatable, which in my experience, is unusual for a religious text. It's young. It's hip. And it's still profoundly serious.

The added bonus is that Ruttenberg is a committed feminist, so her gender lens is used throughout. She writes:

...feminism was important to me because it gave me space to be who I needed to be; it, like punk, saved me from having to fear my intelligence or my strength, and it helped me to articulate why I was so repelled by what I perceived to be the pretty girl aspirations of so many of my classmates. Simply put, I wanted more than that.

In this small but deep memoir by journalist Michael Greenberg we get a bare-all look at his experience of his daughter's first psychotic break, leading to her bipolar diagnosis and years of struggle for sanity. Greenberg, in the style of the great Joan Didion, sticks to the facts, but manages to make them starkly beautiful even while they are truthfully mundane. His daughter wants artichoke and chocolate in the psych ward. His mentally ill brother drinks Lipton tea out of the same pickle jar for twenty years. Greenberg edits a perfectly good novel into smithereens in an attempt to just do something that doesn't involve intense emotions.

For anyone who has been close to someone with mental health issues, which I imagine, is everyone--this is a really normalizing reading experience. Greenberg doesn't glamorize his daughter's illness, nor does he pretend there is no beauty in it. Somehow he strikes a very honest, very self-revealing chord that reminds me--once again--how much a psychotic break can resemble the truth, however scary the mania.

Case in point: his daughter, Sally, believes that:

Everyone is born a genius, but it is drummed out of us almost from the minute we open our eyes. Everyone possesses this genius. It's our unmentionable secret. When childhood is over we are afraid to salvage it from without ourselves, because it would be too risky to do so, it would rupture our drone's pact with society, it would threaten our ability to survive.

This is what leads to her break with reality. Doesn't sound half crazy.

As we've discussed in this forum before, I have pretty complicated feelings about Oprah. On the one hand, I so totally respect what she has done for books, reinventing a literary tradition in this country that every writer with an ounce of humility should be thanking her profusely for. On the other hand, I find a lot of her shows and comments contradictory (the weight stuff as of late has been driving me CRAZY), and I'm a little freaked out about one woman having that much power.

Janice Peck, professor of communications at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is freaked out too. Her book, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, traces Oprah's rise to unparalleled fame within the larger context of our recent political, religious, and sociological past. Few of us probably remember that Oprah was once seen as just one of many trashy day time talk show hosts--parading a constant stream of dysfunctional Americans on national television to get good ratings. But in 1994, Oprah decided to really set herself apart from the pack. A week before her 40th birthday, she opened the show by introducing a new direction; she would stop "talking about how bad things are" and instead "bring more peace to the world." Oprah, as we all know her, was born.

Peck sees Oprah's rise as directly situated within two rising trends during the 90s: (1) the normalization of therapy and new popularity of new age psychology and spirituality, and (2) neoliberal political, economic, and social philosophies. If this is sounding heavy, it is. This book is not for the non-academic at heart. But it's also totally fascinating and well-written, so if you lean toward the wonky, you're going to absolutely eat it up.

See also:
Oprah and her weight

Reading the journals and letters of Rachel Corrie was--hands down--one of the most profound reading experiences of my life. American-born Rachel was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, at the age of 23 years old, trying to defend Palestinians' homes. Read more about the details here.

When I first heard that Rachel had been killed, I am sad to admit now, I assumed she must have been reckless. I don't know why. Maybe it was some defense mechanism for my own psyche. After all, I feel like I've never done enough. There is part of me that feels like I should be putting my body on the line, and every day that I don't, that I convince myself that writing is "enough," is one more day that I haven't really used my life. The fact that Rachel used her life--used it right up actually--threatened my only excuse...it's not sane to put yourself in harm's way like that. It does no good.

It may not have stopped the destruction of Palestinian homes or the loss of innocent lives, but Rachel's death did matter, and it still does. Even more important, she was absolutely not reckless, or at least not "crazy" by any means. She was incredibly, deeply thoughtful, and also a fiercely gifted writer. I learned this from her own words, which have been brought together in a volume by her family, and published under the title Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie. I'll let her brilliance speak for itself:

Thinking it over, I realized that the most powerful actions I can take toward societal improvement will have to start very close to home, arising not from the need to leave a mark on history, but from empathy and sincere understanding of the places in my life where neglect exists.

I can't cool boiling waters in Russia. I can't be Picasso. I can't be Jesus. I can't save the planet single-handedly. I can wash dishes.

Live for a long time in the place you were born and strange things will happen to you. You forget what it's like to discover. In order to survive, you seek out ways to discover things in miniature. Instead of becoming worldly you become intimate. You see every tragic refraction of the place and it sees the same in you.

She also loved making lists, something I used to do religiously in my journals when I was younger. Hers, of course, were far more interesting than "the five cutest boys in the sixth grade":

Five people to hang out with in eternity: 1. Rainier M. Rilke 2. Jesus 3. E. E. Cummings 4. Gertrude Stein 5. Zelda Fitzgerald... 6. Charlie Chaplin

As we face another deadly flare up of violence in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, I am reminded of Rachel's spirit. Not because she was on the so-called Palestinian side. I think there is no good side in this horrific and ongoing conflict. Everything has been so muddled, so militarized, so dehumanized, that it's hard to even take a stand. But Rachel took a stand against death, against suffering, against unconscious or disconnected living. She took a stand against fear. That's something all of us can learn from, no matter what our political views.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn. Maybe it has to do with freedom.

What if our aloneness isn't a tragedy? Tragic passing of love affairs and causes and communities and peer groups. What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure--to experience the world as a dynamic presence--as a changeable, interactive thing?

Richard Lingeman, a long time editor of The Nation, has edited a new book for all those lefty wide-eyed, save-the-word types. As the intro describes it:

The National Guide to the Nation is for and about a community of committed, passionate people who have active consciences and a lively sense of social justice. It's a mixture of the Whole Earth Catalog, 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and the Old Farmer's Almanac.

I was immediately sold. (And that was before I even realized that feministing got a mention! Which Nation 2007 intern was responsible for that? Thank you!)

Think of it as a guide to sustainable living--with lots of info about how to eat and drink locally, support small business, stick it to the man--but also a quirky intellectual and historical tour de force.

Feminist/activist landmarks--both metaphorical and literal--are listed in happy abundance. Susan B. Anthony's house in Rochester is listed, as is the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls. The Guerrilla Girls, The Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Beacon Press (whoohoo! my next publisher), Bluestockings, Women & Children First, Appalshop, Urban Bush Women, Vox Feminista, WOW Cafe Theater, Women Make Movies, Righteous Babe Records, the Hip Hop Caucus, Bitch, Ms., off our backs, oh yeah, and did I mention feministing.com (p. 157). They write:

This group blog is overseen by executive editor Jessica Valenti. It is one of the most respected blogs on feminism, gender, reproductive rights, and women's issues. Valenti and her coeditors are all young, and her blog self-consciously reflects their youthful perspective and opinion.

I don't know about the self-conscious part, but I'll take young and opinionated any day.

Keep an eye out for this baby's release in January.

I'll just come right out and admit it: I'm becoming more and more of a sucker for spiritual exploration. Call me a cliche of my later 20s...letting go of the perfect girl mentality and wanting to understand deeper questions about what it's all about. Call me a girl from Colorado Springs who felt oppressed by the dominant culture of hard line traditional religions, so waited until later to consider the softer side of spirituality. In any case, I'm here and wondering.

I found The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure by Elizabeth Lesser in my parents' book shelf while home for a visit and was immediately hooked. This substantial book is split into five books: The American Landscape, The Landscape of the Mind, The Landscape of the Heart, The Landscape of the Body, and The Landscape of the Soul. So you can see, Lesser's pretty much got the whole gamut covered.

She's an incredible guide because she's one of the founders of The Omega Institute and has been planning and participating in workshops there for decades. She's been able to sample all sorts of rich traditions, spiritual philosophies, and experiential self-help (don't worry, she talks about the dangers of "spiritual tourism"). The book is, in essence, her philosophy culled from the bits and pieces of all of those experiences, and some original insights of her very own.

I was moved through out the entire book. Lesser is a great story teller and a beautiful writer. There were times when I wished I could have asked her a question, pushed her on her assumptions about the dynamics of the universe, her leaps of faith that still don't sit well with me, but just the fact that I wanted to ask these questions, that I wrestled with the material, seems like the sign of a good book to me.

I like her idea that spirituality is about both "the biggies"--Is there a God? Where do I go after I die? What is I anyway?--and "the dailies"--What is the most ethical way to live? How is my life reflecting my beliefs? What would Jesus do?. I also love her notion of spiritual and political enlightenment being a process of "transcending and including" (it was originally Ken Wilber's from A Brief History of Everything). We must constantly be asking ourselves how our polity and our personhood represents our highest ideals. Do away with the hypocrisy, injustice, inequality and include new ways of being whole, kind, and fair.

There's so much more, but I'll let you seek out the rest...

No doubt you've heard more than you ever wanted to hear about how stress is bad for your health. Cortisol floods your system and breaks down your capacity to heal, be happy etc. Many call it the fight or flight system--that physiological reaction to our psychological scares.

But not enough of us are aware that there is also a calm and connection system, as Dr. Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, puts it. Reporters rarely tell us that, yes, stress is bad for you, but joy, pleasure, and passion are actually good for your health--both short and long term. She explains:

This calm and connection system is associated with trust and curiosity instead of fear, and with friendliness instead of anger. The heart and circulatory system slow down as the digestion fires up. When peace and calm prevail, we let our defenses down and instead become sensitive, open, and interested in others around us.

This system is jump started with oxytocin--an amazingly complex hormone that for years was thought to only be associated with childbirth and breastfeeding. In fact, it is released at all kinds of interesting moments, most associated with a sensual experience of pleasure. I like that.

So get out there, get calm and connect. In the long run, your immune system will be boosted, your capacity for memory and learning will be enhanced, and your risk of heart disease--the number one killer of women--will be reduced.

Check out Lisa Chen and Lisa Witter talking about their new book, The She Spot: Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World--And How to Reach Them above.

When I first heard Lisa W. speak this winter at the Women's Media Center I was absolutely smitten with her (she's clear, smart, inventive, and managed to be all that while a GIANT baby (hers) hung out on her hip). But I have to say that I was immediately worried about the thesis of The She Spot, which is that marketing to women (for both nonprofits and political campaigns) requires essentially different principles than marketing to men (i.e. men are from Mars, women are from Venus--the social justice version).

The Lisa's explain their idea about gender different this way:

When it comes to improving the lives of women and girls and creating the society we want to live in, we couldn't agree more that women should be treated on equal footing with men. But we are selling ourselves short if we deny the fact that gender differences exist.

What I like about their view on gender differences, as queasy as it makes me, is that they're not just arguing that there are neurological and hormonal differences, but that there are differences bred by the continued differential socialization of girls and boys in the country. In other words, fight against it for the long term, but in the short term, recognize that some of the ways in which women are socialized (to care deeply about others, to be self-sacrificing) are actually assets for social change.

I'm excited to think about the ways in which The She Spot might influence politicians and nonprofits. In a world of the Lisa's making, there would be no more candy cotton pink websites that are supposed to appeal to women, no more use of the terrible term "women's issues", and lots of appealing to single women--who they note are THE most important constituency for the 2008 election. In their world, the Survival of the Fittest would be evolved into the Survival of the Connected. In their world, fundraisers and communications consultants would understand that though it takes longer for women to decide to give money or get involved in a cause, they are more loyal over the long run and give more of their proportional income. In their world, people would understand that a passionate woman tells everyone about her cause.

They sum it up:

At the dawn of the 21st century, the social and political tides that define where and who we are as a people today make the values that matter most to women--connecting and community--a winning blueprint for social change and transformation.

Can't wait to hear your thoughts...

Greg Mortenson is an unlikely advocate of girls’ education. A hyper-masculine mountain climber, he spent much of his young twenties figuring out how to get to K2, one of the tallest mountains in the world, and climb it. He failed. But as with so many failures, there was a wild success underneath.

He fell in love with Pakistan and its people, especially the native peoples of Korphe, a tiny village high in the mountains that defeated him. After building a school there (another climb that included many, many obstacles), he found that it was not outdoor sports but education that he was most called to. He wanted to keep building schools, keep interacting with the people of Pakistan, keep—he would later conceptualize—fight terror through the safety of books and open minds.

The 300 page book (exhaustively detailed at times) is a powerful retelling of Mortenson’s journey. As a sucker for these kinds of biographies in altruism, I was riveted the whole time. Mortenson’s resilience and determination inspired me to take a totally new perspective on my own definition of “set back.” He is sometimes frighteningly unafraid.

But what I found missing from this account were the moral complexities. In Korphe, for example, Mortenson helps the village people—historically separated from “civilization”—by an abyss, build a bridge. What seems simple, however, had to have caused all sorts of wild changes in the community. Relin only dwells on the positive, briefly mentioning that there are often unintended side effects of well-intentioned acts. As someone interested in all the gray of international development and civic involvement, I want to read about those side effects, not see them glossed over.

In short, the biography was too sunny for me, to glowing and angelic. Nevertheless, I was incredibly moved by Mortenson’s example and you, no doubt, will be too (if you haven’t already been…it's a bestseller after all).

Next time: The Oxytocin Factor by Kirsten Uvnas Moberg

This powerful memoir by Meredith Hall is the kind of work that you read on two levels. On one, you are actually experiencing the words, reflecting on their meaning, recognizing yourself in them. And on the other, you are continually amazed and grateful that the book exists.

With Hall, it almost wasn’t the case, not just because she experienced a traumatic adolescence and spent much of her young adult life—in effect—trying to die, but also because as an older adult she’s rarely had the resources needed to sit and write. Thanks to a grant from A Room of Her Own (a foundation that support women writers), a scholarship to Bowdoin (from which she graduated at 44), and her own resilient spirit, Without a Map was born into the world.

So was Hall’s baby, at 16, and then promptly stripped from her and never spoken about again among her family (except in moments of shame and rage). Once the darling of her town, Hall becomes an outcast, abandoned by her own mother and eventually disowned by her own father. The memoir follows her through the turbulent 60s—a political time that matched her inner angst, on her travels through the middle east where she wasted away into almost nothing, and then as she resurrects her life in her own image.

I don’t want to give away too much, but suffice it to say that this woman’s journey is totally ordinary and, at the same time, extraordinarily moving. And her writing, well, see for yourself:

Maybe all of us at some time move from our compass point of true north, that place in which we determine to correct the failures done to us, and we circle, waiver and find out own direction outward in the world to create injury. The rhumb lines of navigation are not straight.

Grief coming to wisdom. Wisdom is impossible without reckoning with a past.
Whatever else may have gone wrong, whatever of grief and loss is carried by each of us, so too is love. Nothing is lost.

Next week: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

You sort of want to hate Sloane Crosley. Especially if you're the kind of young writer who devours Vivian Gornick and SarahVowell and Meghan Daum. And then you really want to hate her because you see that Meghan Daum has blurbed her (what a weird, weird verb) and on the back of her book she's compared to no less than Dorothy Parker, David Sedaris, and oh yes, Sarah Vowell. Awesome.

But when you open up her little paperback original (beautifully designed, of course), ready for the hate to calcify, instead it just melts away. She's just too funny, just too honest, just too original. You'd hate her if you could, but you can't, so instead you love her. Especially for lines like these:

My father did this sometimes, so I recognized it—a tweaked out kind of racism in which one is abnormally accepting of others simply because they're different. To this day, he has a keen interest I how my black and gay friends are doing. He loves seeing old Chinese men and Mexican babies.

The side effects of growing up "just outside of [insert major urban center here]" are many but practically intangible. This is logical given the fact that suburbia itself is a side effect and practically intangible. For instance, suburban kids are uniquely mean. They don't have the dangers of drive-by shootings or shark attacks to put things into perspective. The poor aren't considered genuinely impoverished and the wealthy aren't rich rich. Everything is muted. Other side effects include but are not limited to: inadvertent house arrest until the age of eighteen, the mall as ecosphere, jingling car keys as status symbol, an intimate knowledge of golf courses but a lack of global awareness.

And the description of her childhood friend, Francine, going to a school dance in a dress made of pages of Seventeen and YM duct-taped to her body is the nail in the coffin for my anticipated but never realized hatred of Ms. Sloane. She calls the dress a "Betty Friedan paper doll."

Read it. And don't hate. She's just that good.

Next week: Without a Map by Meredith Hall and after that Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

We've got a great guest review from Chelsey Clammer this week. Chelsey is a feminist, queer, and disability rights activist living in Chicago with her partner who wants credit for the ideas in the last sentence of this review. You got it, Marie.

In her debut novel, Jane Kotapish puts the fun back in dysfunctional. The story opens with an unnamed narrator explaining the eccentricities of her childhood: “I named my dead sister Nancy and talked to her in the privacy of my closet for eleven years.� Emerging from the delusion of her best friend/worst enemy/dead sister/imagined ghost relationship, the narrator eventually grows into a generically successful New York City woman. But not all is right in adulthood. In NYC, the narrator witnesses a horrific accident that eventually sends her back to the Virginia countryside to contemplate her life and identity.

In her newly acquired quiet Virginia life, the narrator—now in her 30’s—reacquaints herself with her delusional and idiosyncratic mother, Lois. Ultimately a novel about unconventional mother-daughter relationships, Salvage reveals the ways in which connections can form through peculiar ways. You see, Lois has also taken up talking to imaginary friends. While these friends do not come in the form of the daughter she had a miscarriage with years ago, they do come in the form of Catholic Saints. And eventually both the narrator and the reader start to question if these Saintly friends are actually imagined, or if life is really just that weird. As this delightfully dysfunctional mother-daughter pair navigates their past and present delusions, they learn how to re-adjust their atypical relationship with each other.

My favorite relationship in this wonderfully quirky and poetic novel, however, is the bond that the narrator forms with her next-door neighbor, Edith. As our narrator drinks wine by herself in her enormous Victorian house, she begins to notice the crazed life of the woman who lives across the street with one too many kids, not enough support from her husband, and never enough time to herself. The narrator calls Edith one day when she notices a slight pause in the chaos of Edith’s house:

“I don’t say, I saw you hesitate in the doorframe, you’re lost and half-crazed with fatigue, come keep me company in my neurotic isolation. I say, ‘Hey, looks quiet over there, want some tea?’� As the tea turns into vodkas, these women solidify their friendly love for each other and create a community of support for each other to better deal with their own families.

It is with Kotapish’s lyrical style and understanding of women’s lives and relationships, as well as her approach to detangling the knots of grief and longing in a well-told story that make Salvage amazing. Shifting between the child’s perspective and the woman’s narration, the unnamed narrator is specifically unnamed as tries to connect the pieces of her past in order to understand the fractured person she is now. Smart but simple, Salvage encourages a certain self-reflection of the reader’s past—it is a novel that makes you think about how it is you remember the things you have yet to forget.
--Chelsey Clammer

Next week: I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloan Crosley and then Without a Map by Meredith Hall the week after.

Sabrina Chapadjiev’s anthology, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, strikes me in all ways as a carefully crafted object—which so few books are these days.

It is small and pleasing, covered in gorgeous art, and filled with important, diverse, beautiful, heartbreaking, original essays/poems /comics/drawings by some of the most fascinating writers I know of: Eileen Myles, Patricia Smith, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, bell hooks etc. But even more, the message about women and madness—something that has been mined to death in some ways—is carefully crafted.

In the preface, Chapadjiev writes: “The glamorization of this issue, combined with the fear and shame built around it, has made understanding self-destructive behaviors almost impossible.� And this is what I’m grateful—immediately—that she understands. As the curator of a book like this, you are charged with the seemingly impossible task of talking about women’s creative impulses, as coupled with their self-destructive ones, without making the pairing look pretty. Or so ugly its romantic. It just is, or as she puts it:

We’ve been taught that self-destruction is an awful thing. “It is bad,� we’ve been told my therapists, psychologists, and those who do not understand its seduction. I would like to edit that. Instead of “It is bad,� I would like for it to read, “It is.�

It is. (And it reminds me of the Mad Pride Movement that Vanessa posted about earlier this week).

To my mind, one of the major unfinished revolutions within feminism is the whole field of equal parenting, work/life balance, feminist mothering etc. Just taking a look at some of the recent books on the topic (Perfect Madness by Judith Warner, Get to Work by Linda Hirshman, The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts, Opting Out by Pamela Stone) gives one a sense that there is a whole lot of unresolved angst when it comes to women's relationship to the mothering role.

That's why I'm so excited that one of our third wave icons, Amy Richards, has taken a stab at dealing with some of the lingering dilemmas in her new book Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. (Thanks for writing this before I got there, Amy!)

Some of the most salient parts of the book, for me, were Amy's discussion of the ways in which feminist mothering is about tiny, everyday choices. She is a bit cynical about the notion of a full scale motherhood revolution (unlike the gals at MomsRising and some other great organizations), but she certainly believes Gandhi's old adage that each of us must "be the change you wish to see in the world." That applies to feminists in lots of interesting ways...if you have one, do you pay your nanny a living wage? Do you send your child to a school that has a diversity of students and mirrors your feminist values? Do you model self care and compassionate communication for your kids on a daily basis?

One of the things I've noticed, while traveling the country and speaking about body image issues, is that mothers--in particular--love to blame the epidemic of food and fitness obsession on external institutions ("media", plastic surgery industry, celebrities), but are rarely willing to look at their own modeling in an honest way. I feel like Amy is trying to counter that inclination, trying to get mothers to own up to their own choices and inspire them to really strain to close the gap between their lives and their values.

For my last reflection on these two books and their intersections, I want to focus on their eloquent conclusions and what they suggest about dismantling gender roles as a path toward true liberation.

No matter what you think of some of the logistical leaps and ambitious parallels Faludi makes in The Terror Dream, you can't deny that she is a wildly talented writer. Towards the end she sums up her thesis:

When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distracting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty on 'fifth column' feminists--in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness--we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction.

When we are most fearful, we are most likely to regress into familiar, albeit limiting scripts about who we are, what our dreams might be, what's safe and what's too scary. Faludi painstakingly details the ways this plays out for both women and men--the damsels in distress or the proud, vengeful mothers or the cowboys and heroes. Bottom line: none of these roles are authentic. None of them make us more safe. And none of us are free as long as some of us aren't free. Our cartooned femininity is directly related to men's cartooned masculinity. Until we recognize the relationship, and the ways in which its continuance makes us feel somehow invulnerable, we will be doomed to smaller, more fear-based lives.

And May, whose every leap and parallel are meticulously executed (chalk it up to her academic orientation), ends by looking at the ways in which Boomers dismantled some of the domestic romanticization and containment so lauded post WWII. She quotes one smart woman as writing at the time:

'What is wrong with the women trapped in the Feminine Mystique is what's wrong with men trapped in the Rat Race...Isn't it true, that one of the problems, the biggest really, of our present day society is that there isn't enough meaningful creative work for anyone these days?'

It makes me shudder to think how true this statement still is, fifty some odd years later. Until we look at the ways in which our families are structured--both in terms of our own personal preferences and those that are dictated by institutions like the corporation and government policy--we won't be free to truly explore who we are, what our purpose and passion dictates, how we can be in relationship fearlessly. Both women and men have to be liberated from traditional notions of femininity, masculinity, acceptable work, if we are to live out enlightened personal lives, and the whole damn country has to be liberated from traditional notions of cowboy power, retaliatory violence, and safety in regressive tradition, if we are to live out enlightened political lives.

But all of this is different than love, which seems to be the missing word in a lot of these reflections. I still believe that love--radical, role bending, life-giving love--is the beginning of the answer. As bell hooks writes, "The moment we choose to love, we move towards freedom."

I'm still wading through both The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi and Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May. Check out last week's post for a rundown of why.

One of the things that struck me the most during this week's reading was the notion of comfort and how we seek it in very personal ways after very public events. In the case of Homeward Bound, comfort was to be found in marriages with traditional gender roles after WWII, when in fact, as May demonstrates, many people were profoundly uncomfortable in their own lives (but had told themselves a story about why it was necessary and good for it to be the way it was). She draws on the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which consisted of several surveys of 600 middle-class men and women during the post-war era. Some of the excerpts she picks out are totally heartbreaking, like when one mom/wife named Emily enumerates the things that she's sacrificed for her comfortable family life:

1. A way of life (an easy one)
2. All friends of long duration; close relationships
3. Independence and personal freedom
4. What seemed to contribute to my personality.
5. Financial independence.
6. Goals in this life.
7. Idea as to size of family.
8. Personal achievements--type changed.
9. Close relationship with brother and mother and grandmother.

But she never considers divorce. Wow. The domestic ideology that May describes so well trumps all of Emily's innate instincts to create a life that satisfies her on a deep level and/or represents her most authentic way of being in the world. It is shockingly antiquated and inhumane to me.

And yet, Faludi is arguing that the sacrifice of authenticity for a perceived comfort is still very much alive and well.

I’ve been reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream and Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound side by side—in part because the books have similar themes and I thought it would be interesting to experience them as a pair, and in part because I get to meet Elaine this weekend. Whoo-hoo! It helps to be best friends with her amazing son.

Anyways…

I’m only about a quarter of the way through both, but already my mind is being kind of blown. I’ve never read two books that make the link between the personal—in this case family and gender roles—and the political—war, violence, global insecurity—so amazing clear.

Faludi’s argument is that the attacks of September 11th sent Americans into a frenzy of traditional, regressive gender roles. Images of burly firemen saving damsels from distress were everywhere, feminism was framed as irrelevant and newly immoral, and all of us were led to believe that it was not just “normal,� but our patriotic duty to fall into stereotypical gender norms (ladies, make babies and spend money; boys, don’t cry or puss out).

“Woooow. Come over here Court. Come look at this,� my roommate Yana would holler from across our tiny dorm room.

“What is it?� I asked, while getting up from my desk chair and heading towards her. Putting my hand on her shoulder and leaning over, I was rudely confronted with a picture of rotting flesh. “GROSS!� I screamed, turning back to my post-colonial lit essay aglow on the computer. “Why do you do that to me?�

“Necrotizing faxciitis, flesh eating bacteria,� she announced, a smile still on her face.

Yana is not the devil. Actually she’s the closest thing I’ve ever come to knowing a real life angel. Today she is a pediatric resident at Boston Children’s Hospital. She helps teenage moms learn how to feed their toddlers. She works ungodly hours and eats crappy hospital food. She frickin’ saves babies.

Her altruism, matched with her curiosity about biology, anatomy, and health, has led her to be a doctor. When I went to visit her recently, she handed me a copy of Atul Gawande’s Complications and urged me to check it out. Not only is it really good writing, but it’s fascinating, sometimes frightening reading about the human body in all its fragility.