Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006)

I’m a relative newbie to graphic novels, having read only some of the classics (Ghost World, Persepolis, Maus, The Invention of Hugo Cabret) but even I can see that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a work of literary brilliance. And I’m still only halfway through. Like one of my other recent favorites, David Small’s Stitches, this is a memoir; Fun Home describes growing up with a mercurial — and, it turns out, mysterious — father who, in addition to teaching high school English (unhappily), helped to run his family’s funeral home, which they called the fun home. Family, death, home: Bechdel tells her story via somewhat conventional panels, not unlike her Dykes to Watch Out For strip that graces many alternative weeklies throughout the US; but don’t be fooled by its familiar format. This story, like the best memoirs, is richly layered with vivid and seemingly arbitrary memories juxtaposed with classical references and terrific insight. She makes it look easy, but it’s not. She had me from the earliest pages, in which she describes one of those quotidian childhood moments: playing airplane with her father, balancing on his feet and pretending to fly:

For Bechdel this evokes the classical myth of Daedalus and Icarus, an analogy she draws out in a graceful way over the course of a few pages even as she notes, “In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky.” I scanned that image together with the marginal notes by some previous reader of the library’s copy partly because I find it touching when readers react to the text, but also because it somehow underlines how Bechdel signals from the outset that she’s telling an unusual tale. (A few pages later this same reader wrote in the margin, “WHAT?!?” in response to an unexpected revelation.) Her father may have played airplane with his children, but he could also be explosively temperamental — even, at times, a minotaur:

Yet despite that moodiness, his hobbies were the pursuit of perfection in their house, an exacting dedication to renovation and decoration. Her father took extraordinary care to renovate their ramshackle Victorian home into a near-museum of Victoriana, with perfect crystal chandeliers, lace curtains, horsehair fainting sofas. The children had no say in the decoration of their rooms and lived with peeling paint and curling wallpapers for years. In one of the book’s most delightful mini-memories, she recalls combing through a collection of Addams Family cartoons from The New Yorker — but failing to understand the humor, she mistakes it for a cartoon about her own family, since their house seemed so identical and even Wednesday’s gloomy visage seemed nearly identical to Bechdel’s. The trick of telling such a tale via the graphic novel is getting the images and text to dance with each other, to lay out insights and revelations in alternately subtle and brutal ways in the course of telling a story with many conclusions.

More than anything else, that’s what I love about this book so far — those moments when the text diverges from the images and one starts to see that families tell themselves contradictory stories with mixed messages. In some sequences, her text tells a dark story while her images evoke something sunnier — or vice versa. Her seemingly conventional panels can be evocative of high art even as they’re deceptively simple; her text can summon a host of literary references, other narratives, other outcomes. All of this is done in the most efficient manner — the total text in a graphic novel is almost like a haiku compared with the overflow of paragraphs in a traditional memoir — but the takeaway is huge. Bechdel’s own coming-out story — so often a tale of personal triumph in other people’s lives — is only made more complex by her father’s cloaked life, his lockjaw appearance in so many of her images of him, his moody stranglehold over the family.

For this recommendation I’ve got to thank Tamcho, who recommended it and a pile of movie titles, too, under my Best Films and Recent Books lists. (Keep sending them.) Following her lead I’m sending this out as a recommendation to the rest of you.

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

Julian Assange, rape, and feminism

I don’t know whether Julian Assange is guilty of rape — no one does.  I do know, from Jessica Valenti’s piece in the Washington Post, that all those crazy descriptions of the Swedish charges against him are untrue (there is no “sex by surprise” law in Sweden, nor is Assange accused of suffering a broken condom).  I fully believe that the case should be heard to determine whether he is guilty.  What I don’t understand — and what alarms me to no end — is the eagerness on the part of many to disbelieve all charges of rape levied against Assange in particular and powerful men in general, and to attribute those charges instead to ulterior motives.  In Assange’s case, obviously, commentators have suggested this is a cloaked attempt to dismantle WikiLeaks; in other cases, rape charges have been dismissed as mere vindictiveness by angry women.  During yesterday’s Slate/Double X Gabfest podcast discussion of the charges against Assange, not only did those “journalists” peddle in long-disproven rumors about “sex by suprise” et als, but they never once took it seriously that Assange might not be innocent. 

Again, I repeat:  I make no assumptions about Assange’s innocence or guilt; my concern is less with his case in particular than with the pattern.  When powerful men are accused of rape, those charges are pooh-poohed by members of the public — and this happens a lot.  Just google “athlete accused of rape” and take a look at reader comments on those stories, and you’ll get a chill.  Nor is the pooh-poohing limited to dudes.  Naomi Wolf wrote an unfunny yet purportedly humorous piece for the Huffington Post about the Assange case — a story so objectionable that Bitch Magazine pronounced her their Total Douchebag of the week.  And then, of course, there are the Slate women — Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and Margaret Talbot — who actually went so far as to write off the women as confused, paranoiac Assange groupies who felt some kind of vague post-consensual-sex resentment and then saw their stories snowball into international drama.  I’m not kidding.  Laughing about the “sex by surprise” account, Talbot joked, “That sounds kind of pleasant,” while Bazelon — ordinarily a highly informed expert in the law — first offered the bafflingly unenlightened observation that “I think one of the reason this story’s so titillating is that there’s no real way to know what went on” (Emily, have you never heard the details of a rape case before?) and then suggested that she saw two possible interpretations of the case:  either they are “avenging radical feminist devils, basically, who are out to get Julian Assange,” or, more likely (according to her):  

[I think] this kind of weird thing happened where all these people are kind of paranoid, right — they all, if you hang out with Julian Assange then you must have some streak of suspicion and anti-authority-ness in you.  And so these women, you know, had what seemed like, you know, just, like, sex with Julian Assange, they were hanging out with him the next day in both cases I think.  But then they got mad at him because he disappeared on them and somehow in the conspiracy-laden world they live in they decided they had to track him down, and that then they had to go to the police to do that, and then things kind of spun from there.

A quick enumerated response:

1. Really?
2. How much do you get paid to spout off on the Double X Gabfest podcast?
3. Considering that Slate is a Washington Post affiliate, what is their excuse for not having read Valenti’s Post story of a week ago — at least to get their facts straight?
4. Why do I still listen to this piffle?  (Answer:  it’s like picking at a scab. And it gets sent automatically to my iTunes with the wonderful Slate Culture Gabfest podcasts.)

This is not to say there hasn’t been an American feminist response to the story.  Jill Filipovic of Feministe had the tidiest statement yet asserting that we can take rape charges seriously at the same time that we can also see ramped-up international interest in the story being linked to the WikiLeaks controversy.  And the women at Tiger Beatdown are bound and determined to bring attention to those major media figures of the left, like Michael Moore and Keith Olberman, who have pooh-poohed the rape tale.

I keep insisting on neutrality about Assange’s guilt or innocence because I’ve become overly invested in other rape cases in the past, and had my heart broken at the results.  It’s a tragedy of our current political culture here in the U. S. that so many charges of rape have been stunningly and overwhelmingly proved to be false.  A tragedy for three reasons:  first, that such incidents contribute to the generalized skepticism I’ve already described, which hinder other women from using the law; second, that these women latch onto the charge of rape — a serious criminal offense — because they do not have other legal or cultural means of redressing lesser wrongs; and finally, a tragedy for the specific women who are so spectacularly discredited in public.  I’m thinking here in part, of course, of the woman who charged members of the Duke lacrosse team of rape in 2006; but that’s only the most vivid of many such cases in recent memory.  Thus, I know perfectly well that some women initiate charges of rape which are later proved to be false or exaggerated.

But in the meantime as Assange sits through house arrest while the charges are worked out, let’s get the facts straight, refrain from pre-judging the case, and — for heaven’s sake — stop giving powerful men the benefit of a culture that doesn’t take rape seriously.  Beware of doing otherwise, for the future looms before us.

End-of-semester blues

Early in the film A Room With a View (1985), Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) sits in the parlor of her Florence pensione playing a sonata on the piano, to the delight of Rev. Beebe, an old family friend.  “Mother doesn’t like me playing Beethoven,” she explains to him when she finishes it, an inexplicable look on her face.  “She says I’m always peevish afterwards.”  I love that line; and I’m reminded of it every single time I finish a great movie or a great book because it so aptly captures that sense of dissatisfaction once you’re finished with a piece of art so magnificent and moving.  I finished Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog last night, for example, and have felt peevish ever since.  But if peevish captures that feeling so neatly, how to describe this feeling us teachers experience at the end of every semester, these end-of-semester blues that hit us every time?

My neighbor, a grammar-school teacher, calls it post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s hard to capture in words, but surely it’s a close relation of depression.  I’ve found myself irritable, weepy, paralyzed with ennui, and/or outright pissed off, even during those semesters when I haven’t done an onerous amount of grading or had to wrangle a difficult student.  There’s a profound sense of failure no matter how well one’s classes went.  During semesters when I knew I had to spend the winter break finishing a piece of writing, I often found it impossible to do anything besides lie on the sofa for a week feeling like a professional failure as well as a lousy teacher.  I think perhaps it comes at least in part from the enormous emotional outlay required by these long semesters — giving advice and one’s time generously to students — all of which becomes perverted by the end, as we pour over grade sheets and try to determine whether Johnny deserves a B or can be bumped up to a B+, while Katie failed so miserably on the final that we can’t possibly give her the same gift.  We spend so much time thinking about students’ needs and merits that by the end we have nothing left to give ourselves.

I’ve turned in all my grades … and now I dread the inevitable email from students complaining about them.  Bereft of Muriel Barbery, I scan the shelves looking for something to replace her as bedtime reading.  I disgruntledly rearranged my Netflix queue tonight and complained about the fact that none of the celebrated Oscar-worthy movies are in the theaters yet.

So here’s a thought:  find the email address of a teacher you remember and send her/him a note.  Explain that it may have been a while, but that class meant something to you and you’ve always remembered it.  Tell the teacher what you’re doing now.  And end your note by saying, “I know you’re busy and might not have a chance to respond, but I wanted you to know that you had a big effect on my life and thinking, and I still remember it.”

The Brainy Bunch, girls edition

Has anyone else noticed that articles like this one in New York Magazine don’t get written about young female actors?  “The Brainy Bunch” is about five young men (Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Fassbender, James Franco, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Tom Hardy) who, according to the journalist, bust a bunch of stereotypes because they play twitchy, complicated, and most of all brilliant characters.  The author marvels that these smart actors “bring the raw nerve of indie sensibility” to the screen; moreover, “in so doing, they are reimagining the mainstream.”  Articles like this one are inevitably about men — not because actresses aren’t smart, but because they’re not playing smart onscreen.  This has lathered me up into a rant because I think this is yet another example of the exceptionally disturbing moment we’re living in, during which women’s primary value is their hotness, not their smartness.  Considering that I grew up in an age when the tomboy/ smartypants Jodie Foster was the pre-teen It Girl — a multilingual woman who graduated magna cum laude from Yale — I’m not prepared to let men be smart while women commit their energies to being hot.

Yet I’ve been putting some muscle into coming up with a similar list of remarkable young female actors who play smart onscreen and it’s really hard.  Not hard for older women, mind you; as a culture we seem perfectly willing to grant brains to women over 35 (witness Helen Mirren, Holly Hunter, Tilda Swinton, Charlotte Rampling, Frances McDormand, Judy Davis …).  The one vivid exeption to the rule is Mia Wasikowska (above), she of that remarkable 1st season of In Treatment, Alice in Wonderland, as the teenaged daughter in The Kids are All Right, and the upcoming Jane Eyre.  Other than that?  Can you think of a single young actor who plays smart onscreen from one role to the next?

I can’t.  As much as I loved the fast-talking smarts of Carey Mulligan in An Education and Emma Stone in Easy A this year, there’s one thing that ruins those tales for me:  ultimately these smart characters are shown to be dumb when it comes to men and sex (respectively).  Get it?  Smart girls aren’t smart about everything. I can think of a couple of one-off performances this year — Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and Noomi Rapace in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo franchise, but I have yet to be convinced that these actors can translate one excellent part into the kinds of careers that New York Magazine‘s favorite young men have achieved.  Consider the career of Harvard grad Natalie Portman, who’s now getting close to 30 (and therefore into the age range wherein Hollywood allows women to be brilliant) — has she ever played smart onscreen?  And don’t even get me started on the fact that the last time I saw a smart young Latina, Asian, Native American, or black woman onscreen was Shareeka Epps in Half Nelson (2006) — and where have the roles gone for Epps in the meantime?

If any of you doubts the perversity of this trend, consider one of the prevailing cultural anxieties appearing in major media of the past six months:  the idea that boys are falling behind girls (or, in Hanna Rosin’s trademark hysterical terms, THE END OF MEN).  At the same time that we watch smart boys and hot girls onscreen, we’re also supposed to feel anxious about the fact that girls do better in school and young women are going to college in vastly larger numbers than boys (they make up roughly 60% of college populations).  This has prompted Rosin and her ilk to proclaim that women are “winning” some kind of battle against men.  Thus, the fact that our films persist in peddling some kind of retro fantasy about boys’ smartness seems to reject our anxieties that girls might be pretty and smart, and reassures us that smart dudes will always bag the hotties.

If you need an explanation for my bleak mood, it’s because I just finished reading Gary Shteyngart’s incredibly disturbing dystopian novel, Super Sad True Love Story.  In this America of the future, women wear clothes made by the JuicyPussy brand, Total Surrender panties (which pop off at the push of a little button), and have their hotness level perpetually broadcast to everyone around them via a version of a smartphone called an äpparät.  It’s a brilliant characterization of the future (I cringed and laughed at the fact that the hero’s love interest, Eunice Park, majored in Images and minored in Assertiveness in college — we all know that’s where we’re heading) but ultimately one that reiterates that tired trope:  shlubby, bookish, imperfect, aging hero falls for very beautiful, very young, very anti-intellectual woman — and wins her, at least for a while.  You know what?  I love shlubby men in real life (hi, honey!), but I have grown to despise their perpetual appearance in narratives.

So to cleanse my palate of the oily aftertaste of Super Sad, I’ve plunged myself into Muriel Barbery’s wonderful novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which moves back and forth between the interior monologues of two brilliant women:  the autodidact Renée, who hides behind her mask as an unkempt, sullen concierge in an elegant Paris apartment building; and Paloma, the precociously intelligent 12-year-old who lives upstairs and despises the pretentions of her family, teachers, and classmates.  They seem to be on a path to discover one another — but I’m at the point in the novel when I’m so enjoying just listening to them think out loud that I’m not sure I care whether the narrative goes anywhere (Paloma has a diatribe about why grammar is about accessing the beauty of language that’s so wonderful I’m thinking of plagiarizing it for use in my classes).

Here’s what it would take to cultivate a generation of young actresses known for their braininess:

1. Just jettison the smart vs. hot binary for women onscreen already.  If I see glasses used as the “smart” signifier one more time…
2. Write some stories in which young women aren’t just interested in dudes all the time, but have wholly stand-alone loves of language, art, math, con artistry, biology, music, sports, comic books, religion, killing demons, other girls, or food — even drugs or booze, for gods’ sake — just like actual women.
3. Stop resigning smart girls to the sidekick position in kids’ films like Harry Potter, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and TV shows like Buffy, etc.
4. Show that smartness isn’t just a magical quality endowed by nature, but is something that takes work.
5. Show that smartness can pose a problem beyond scaring off potential dudes — when young women face idiotic, paternalistic bosses, teachers too tired to teach to the top 1% of a class, or families in which no one has ever gone to college.
6. Let girls play brilliant anti-heroes along the lines of Jesse Eisenberg’s take on Mark Zuckerberg — or, hell, just weird antisocial types like Lisbeth Salander.
7. Let girls play funny.
8. Let young female actors fail occasionally in a part the way we just keep forgiving failures by Jonah Hill, Zach Galifianakis, Ashton Kutcher, even Robert Downey, Jr. — the list goes on — without career consequences.
9. Give me a central female character besides The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo who’s a computer whiz.
10. Display explicitly feminist characters onscreen, and have them explain their opinions.

Maybe then we won’t experience that odd whiplash of suddenly having our actresses arrive at the age of 35 and suddenly become smart (does this read as unattractive and/or ball-busting to male viewers, I wonder?).  I, for one, am looking forward to my movies looking a bit more like reality.

Feminism: generational strife edition

In a brilliantly Onion-like way, Jezebel.com announced in a headline last week, FEMINIST GATHERING SADLY LACKING IN MATRICIDE.  The story describes a public forum at the NYC 92nd Street Y on feminism hosted by Naomi Wolf and More editor Lesley Jane Seymour but manned primarily by much younger feminists; although Wolf apparently tried to drum up inter-generational sniping among feminists, perhaps in the spirit of Susan Faludi’s essay in Harper’s Magazine last month (apologies:  the full essay is only available online to subscribers, but you can get a taste), the younger feminists didn’t bite.  Here’s my question:  why all this eagerness to find generational fault-lines amongst feminists, and what do those generational differences obscure?

It’s not that I think there aren’t distinctions by generation; it’s that I think those differences are more about style than substance, and that focusing on them permits pundits to write yet another eulogy for feminism.  I visited with an old student not long ago who’s now trying to make it as a feminist organizer.  She spoke quite a bit about some odd experiences she’d had with older feminists in their 50s and 60s.  “Sometimes they don’t like my clothes,” she said plainly.  “They think we younger activists dress too provocatively.  They don’t like my tattoos, or when I dye my hair green.”  Faludi mentions these differences as well; young feminists tend (justifiably) to turn up their noses at the mother-earth muu muus or drab professional suits of older women.  Yet my former student hastened to say that the criticism she’d received had been mixed in with high praise for the younger generation’s enthusiasm.  “I think a few older feminists think we’re taking the movement backwards if we want to wear high heels or tatoos, but ultimately it’s a minor issue.  Honestly, I seldom feel that we’re working at cross purposes.”  

She’s right.  It’s not that generational identification doesn’t exist; it’s just not the doomsday scenario that Wolf and Faludi make it out to be.  After reading Faludi’s agonizing series of anecdotes about such inter-generational strife, I felt that I could probably have written an article of similar length making exactly the opposite argument.  Faludi’s case is just so histrionic:

…these external obstacles also mask internal dynamics that, while less conspicuous, operate as detonators, assuring feminism’s episodic self-destruction.  How can women ever vanquish their external enemies when they are intent on blowing up their own house?

Oh for heaven’s sake.  If anything, the 92Y forum described on Jezebel.com indicates that I’m not the only person to think these anticipatory eulogies for feminism are overblown.  Do I wince when my feminist students wear short-shorts and boob tubes to class, dye their hair as blonder than blonde, and argue that sex work is feminist work?  Yes.  Do I think they’re dragging down the movement by doing so?  No.  If I look at my own history, I know that feminism is a process that has different personal meanings over the course of one’s life/career, and I’m perfectly happy to let them work through their own processes. 

In fact (to use anecdotal evidence myself):  I suspect that many young feminists don’t just admire their mothers more than older women do, they’re also far closer to their mothers; many of my 20-something grad students talk to their mothers every single day, and students in my classes express an affinity for their mothers that’s more “Gilmore Girls” than momist.  

Now I would be the first to admit that not only are generational ties meaningful to many people, they’re meaningful to me.  I’ve spent some of my blurrier hours irrationally preoccupied with sussing out how how old my favorite feminist writers are — that is, how close they are to my age.  I spent way too much time, for example, on Snarky’s site assessing whether we’re the same age because I love her prose and her take on popular culture.  (Answer: unclear, but we certainly watched all the same TV as kids.)  Likewise with Twisty Faster (who’s a teensy bit older, I think, and way cooler, yet I still wish she’d be my new best friend because I’m convinced we live within 50 miles of one another).  But I also read religiously the younger feminists at Feministe and Bitch Magazine, and I miss the teenaged Hell on Hairy Legs, who seems to be busy with her new university life.  I’m hardly the only feminist who doesn’t just want to listen to people who are exactly like me in age. 

As much as those identifications seem to tell us things about ourselves and our particular sensibility in history, they’ve been used by the media to create false distinctions by age, distinctions that are oh, so delicious when it comes to women (because, you know, we’re so afraid to get old!).  Faludi’s own views reveal serious problems with sharp generational divides:

Sex is the movement’s Mason-Dixon Lin, now as it was in the Eighties, when battles over pornography were known as the “sex wars.”  Those old skirmishes have now been reimagined by third wavers too young to have been part of them as a generational showdown — even though second-wave feminists were on both sides of the Eighties fight.  Sex isn’t the source of the divide between feminist generations so much as its controlling metaphor, as when third-waver Merri Lisa Johnson casts feminism as “a strict teacher who just needs to get laid.”

So, just to get this straight:  Faludi thinks that there have been battles going on over feminists’ differing embrace of sex/sexiness for 35+ years and that even back then older feminists were split on the question; yet this is in support of the notion that young girls today are divided from their elders?  Stop me if this doesn’t make sense.

Here’s a radical thought:  All this talk about generational differences is easy to back up with anecdotes, but it’s just a distraction from the real issues that women face — those “external obstacles,” as Faludi calls them, of lower pay, sexism in the workplace, lack of female role models in high places, and sexual and domestic violence.  Stop describing feminist catfights or mother-daughter battles and start focusing on what Twisty calls the patriarchy.

…in which I become a demon, and Buffy saves me

Normally I like fall semester.  Students are enthused and hopeful (even the seniors, before their sad descent into apathy during the spring), the nights start to get cold after a long hot summer, I make unrealistic plans to focus on my research even though the teaching gets overwhelming.  But this semester’s tough.  It started with a student in true emotional crisis, continued when I frantically pulled together a public talk in three mad days, and now that I’m in the middle of an exceptionally bureaucratic period of paperwork, I feel buried alive.  No, it’s worse than that:  especially after a long, whiney, cranky dinner conversation in which my poor best friend listened to me patiently, I feel as if I’ve become some kind of demon zombie.

How poetic, then, that I’ve been watching “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” for the first time.  And let me ask:  how did I never watch this show before?  I think I’ve made it clear how much I love films/TV with strong women; love scary stuff; love to immerse myself in long-running TV shows; love to look at pretty men, etc.  This one has it all, yet somehow during the late 90s when it was on, I was distracted (and had a TV with only one channel, as I remember it).  No, this one has MORE than it all, for there’s an entire academic sub-discipline of Buffy Studies including the peer-edited (!) online journal, Slayage: The Online Journal of Whedon Studies, which apparently branched out due to the show’s creator’s subsequent projects.  (Disclaimer:  I’m being facetious, honestly, and don’t really think there’s enough to this fun show to spark much academic blah-blah-blahing, so I won’t be spending much time with Buffy Studies.  I’d much rather keep watching the show than reading quasi-academic prose about it.  And with that I promise to keep my big words to a minimum.)

It took me a few episodes, but I really get it now why people raved about this show all that time.  What a brilliant analogy for high school, what a brilliant quasi-feminist show.  Even my hero, Susan Douglas, raves about it in her terrific book, Enlightened Sexism:  The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done.  For Douglas, “Buffy” was that crystalline example of a female-centered moment of 90s media and popular culture that held up women as powerful and kick-ass.  It might not have been a feminist dream, but it wasn’t the horrors that we have now, like “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”  “Buffy” takes all the things that are horrible about high school and characterizes them as demonic, which must have been crazily therapeutic for people who were actually in high school at the time.  Let me just describe the first episode that clicked for me:  “The Pack,” in which a group of high school kids already prone to petty cruelty and mockery becomes inhabited by the evil spirits of hyaenas.  Not only do they continue to prey on the weak, but they might actually eat you if they get you alone in a room.  They won’t prey on Buffy, because they sense she’s too strong for them; they focus, instead, on the shy and small.  “Buffy” would have helped to explain a lot about high school for me.  (My new favorite character is the town’s mayor — an okily dokily, Ned Flanders type who makes plans to end the world in the same sentence as reminding you to get more calcium.  OF COURSE such a man is a demon.)

But that’s the thing, isn’t it?  Old people like me like “Buffy”  because it’s a metaphor for our lives, too.  I’ve entertained myself for hours with the fantasy of stocking my office with wooden stakes and kicking a certain colleague in the head with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s taekwondo finesse.  That’s why Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series appealed to me so much this summer, too — these tales of a world turned upside down and the necessity for extreme female action in a time of crisis are inherently attractive when one works for large, bureaucratic institutions and deals with soulless bureaucrats (and senior colleagues!).  And they’re healthy reminders to me to keep the demons at bay lest I be turned to the side of evil.  (And yeah, I’m fairly certain that the dude who plays Angel was created in some kind of test tube designed to infect the dreams of viewers.  Not that I’m complaining.) 

I’ve got papers to grade and letters of recommendation to write and applications to fill out and lectures to finish, and my department is at each other’s throats more than usual.  I’m beat.  Thank god I can explain all this by understanding that my department sits atop a new Hellmouth.

The love letter

One day way back in high school I left my late-afternoon sports practice and found an anonymous love note pinned under the windshield wiper on my car.  I was 16.  I stood in the nearly empty parking lot, reading it and wondering if it was a joke – if perhaps someone was laughing at me from a perch on the bleachers or giggling while skulking in another car.  It was a note designed to provoke my fledgling vanity and make me love its author.  I no longer have it (a fruitless search has confirmed this), but it said something to the effect of:  You are different than the others, and I have noticed you.  I love you, but I am afraid to approach you.  You know who I am, but you haven’t really noticed.  I wish you would notice me too, as I’m different like you.

I never found out who wrote that note and never will.  And I probably would have forgotten it but for reading Cathleen Schine’s 1995 novel The Love Letter, which made me dig around in a box I haven’t opened since approximately 1990.  Funny how the book has made me wonder all over again about that now-ancient note, and marvel at what Schine does in this absolutely delicious literary novel – a novel akin to some kind of soufflé, a berry trifle … or rather a tiramisu, with something dark and rich and devilish mixed in with the fluff – she shows us that love letters are at least partly about the love of reading, the attempt to pair a meeting of the mind with the frisson of bodies touching, the fantasy of the unknown, pining lover.

My high school note is not nearly as delicious as the one Schine’s heroine, Helen, finds in her mail one day.  Hers begins:

How does one fall in love?  Do you trip?  Do you stumble, lose your balance and drop to the sidewalk, graze your knee, graze your heart?  Do you crash to the stony ground?  Is there a precipice, from which you float, over the edge, forever?

I know I’m in love when I see you, I know when I long to see you.  Not a muscle has moved.  Leaves hang unruffled by any breeze.  The air is still.  I have fallen in love without taking a step.  When did this happen?  I haven’t even blinked.

I’m on fire.  Is that too banal for you?  It’s not, you know.  You’ll see.  It’s what happens.  It’s what matters.  I’m on fire.

No wonder Helen re-reads it frequently, lavishes over those passages, delights in half-sentences in the middle of the day.  No wonder it turns her on, makes her experience her ocean swims with a new intensity, injects a new pleasure into her daily interactions in her little bookshop.  No wonder it makes us feel, as readers, that physical pleasure of immersing oneself in a book too clever and wordy to leave you alone.  How did it take me this long to read this book?

one of Keats' letters to Fanny Braun

Yes, it’s about a bookish woman – a woman who finds herself reading anew all those collections of letters that we read to dream of the romantic connections between people.  Keats and Fanny Braun; now there are some letters.  Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  Those epistolary moments in novels by Austen or George Eliot.  Somehow few films can capture the intimacy of a love letter.  And oh, how much a letter, a real letter, seems romantic now, even more so than it might have in 1995, when Schine’s book was published.  In an age of email, do people still get anonymous love letters?  Do high schoolers still go to dances and imagine that a tall dark stranger will emerge from those shadows to pull you close in an unexpected slow dance?

I really ought to have read this book during the summer (it’s set during a lazy New England summer, and is designed for that kind of reading, when you allow yourself to stay up half the night to finish it).  Instead I’m reading it during that part of the fall semester when temperatures are dipping, my reading load is intense, we’re trying out our sweaters again, and we hardly have time for indulgences like this.  In fact, I spent all day reading it, lusting after its passages, feeling the almost visceral sense when reading about a character brushing against someone’s skin or licking another’s arm or feeling the summer sun heating up our hair.

Isn’t it a pleasure to read these paragraphs?  That’s because reading the love letter is partly about our love of reading – the letter indicates how often love and attraction emerge not from our genitalia but our frontal lobes.  The love letter toys with our expectations, with conventions – even as it adheres to those conventions.  Our eyes grow soft as they read such passages.  My fingers tickle as they write them.

The love letter is just for you – it’s secret, it’s personal, it’s intimate.  It’s not a mass-produced paperback like The Love Letter by Cathleen Schine, that item I spent all day with; yet the book somehow had the same feel, the same trickster quality of tweaking one’s mind and nerve endings.  Somehow Schine wrote that book just for me, to turn me on the same way the love letter turned on her heroine.  Can a love letter arrive in your inbox?  or even more improbable, via a widely-available website entitled feminema.wordpress.com?  My great regret is that you will read these paragraphs not via smooth paper and ink touching your fingers, not from underneath a warm duvet, but from the glum blue light of a screen.  (It’s no wonder that 1938’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” with its delightful anonymous epistolary love affair between James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, worked so much better than 1998’s crass, commercial “You’ve Got Mail.”)  Letters are about words; novels are about words.  Movies are more about images, beauty, marvel.  One does not cuddle up in bed with movies, nor with websites — but websites are about words, and I want to caress you with words.

So this is my love letter to you, gentle readers – to our mutual love of love, our love of words.  Let’s pretend an anonymous blog can spark the same frisson.  Let’s pretend that I am reaching out to you, just you, and that for the rest of your day you will experience a special charge, a rush of desire, as you wonder what else I might whisper in your ear.

Lost in The Hunger Games series

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better way to conclude my summer than to read some terrific young adult fiction — and I’ve just discovered Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (to be released this week).  It’s the most riveting young adult series I’ve read since the magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.  Lionsgate is developing a film (eagerly anticipated by the book’s fans, many of whom have released their own versions of what the trailer should look like).  If you ask me, the best part of these books is the way they trace a teenage girl’s core struggle — a struggle over how to be true to herself in an environment that demands she appear to be a more stereotypical kind of girl.  Whereas Harry Potter got solipsistic and repetitive as he considered his own inner struggles, Katniss doesn’t have a moment to spare in the dystopian world she inhabits:  she’s been chosen to participate in the Hunger Games — a brutal televised reality show in which each of her country’s twelve districts send one boy and one girl, twenty-four in all, to fight to stay alive by killing one another until only one is left.

Partly inspired by the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Hunger Games explains that some seventy-five years earlier, one of the nation’s districts rebelled against the government, only to be utterly destroyed in a show of federal force; the Hunger Games thereafter became at once a reminder of the government’s absolute power and a riveting TV opiate for the masses.  The inhabitants of Katniss’s district are so poor and malnourished that only one has ever won the Games — traumatized by it, he’s now a drunk who can’t stay sober long enough to provide much coaching for Katniss and her co-participant, a shy baker’s son named Peeta.  That’s too bad, because they need help in both survivalist strategies and TV self-presentation.  Luckily, Katniss has some talents up her sleeve.  For years since her father’s death in a mining explosion, she’s supplemented her family’s meager food supplies by illegally poaching meat, fish, and berries from the woods.  The details of her skills with a bow and arrow — and the way she’s taken on conventionally male tasks in providing meat and pelts for her family — evoked for me similar passages in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, a book I re-read dozens of times when I was 10.  Collins manages to explain methodically Katniss’s forest knowledge while also plowing ahead with a fast-paced narrative.  It might be a cliché, but this is the truth:  I read each book in less than 24 hours and then lay awake at night thinking about them.  If I were 10, I’d have created a variety of outdoor imaginary games in which I play the role of Katniss.

If this recap of the books’ dystopian elements makes you fret about its author’s political commitments (is she some kind of Tea Bagger, with these calls for rebellion against the government?), it’s cold comfort to remember that the book was written during the final year of the Bush administration.  In the end, Collins’ own beliefs don’t matter:  the same anti-Obama forces who bark about taxes and authoritarianism might well embrace these books.  But if this makes me depressed, I have to remember that the same people use the Constitution to claim there is no separation of church and state:  this is a group singularly weak in reading skills (and logic).  I have read the books carefully, and I see less a political allegory than a great read about a girl in a tight spot.

It’s more likely that girl readers eager for another Twilight-like Edward v. Jacob faceoff will obsess about Katniss’s confusion about two boys — but the books aren’t really a love story.  It’s true that she finds herself torn between Peeta, the meek boy she competes with in the Games, and Gale, the boy she used to hunt with back before the Games started (I even found a “Team Peeta” t-shirt when trawling the web for images).  Rather, the books seem to me more a reflection on how some girls find themselves thrust into romance before they’re ready.  From the outset of the series Katniss announces that she will never marry or have children; nor is she prepared to have crushes on boys, fall in love, much less deal with sex.  It’s only when she feels a make-believe romance with Peeta might help win the hearts of the reality-TV audience — benefiting them both during the competition — that she agrees to it.  Boys become impossibly confused with the crazy logic of the Games, and she wrestles throughout with the implications of that lie; she doesn’t have much time to think about her own feelings or what she wants.  As a result, the books offer a fascinating commentary on how hard it is for a girl in her teens to set her own terms for engaging with romance.  Some girls simply take a while before they’re interested.  

Oh, if only there were more of this rather than the syllabus-writing, the committee meetings, and the specter of the fall semester looming before me — good thing that final volume comes out on Tuesday.  But be assured that my enthusiasm for the series isn’t simply a distraction from my more quotidian responsibilities.  This is the best young adult heroine I’ve discovered in a long time — and with a good director and production team (go, Lionsgate!) we could have a riveting series of films before us in another year or so, too.  Here’s hoping.

“The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009)

As during most summers, I haven’t found much more than a few films that pass The Bechdel Test — that is, a film 1) with two or more women in it, 2) who talk to each other, and 3) about something other than a man.  In fact, even some of the best ones pass only by a slim margin, like “Winter’s Bone” … and that was pretty far-flung from summer movie fare.

But then there’s “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” the second installment of the Swedish film trilogy version of Steig Larsson’s three-volume Millennium series that has sold cadrillions of copies worldwide.  Look, don’t get the wrong idea:  this film is inferior to the first one, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and it gives only short shrift to some of my favorite parts of the novel, like Lisbeth’s relationship with Miriam Wu.  But c’mon, it’s a hot summer and our critical defenses are down, as we’re tacky with sunscreen and eager for a couple of cool hours inside a blessedly dark theater.  Saintlike, the brilliant character of Lisbeth Salander is fighting our battles for us, veering back and forth between her unparalleled tech savvy in hacking computers and kicking the asses of bad guys ten times her size. 

For me, the character of Lisbeth addresses head-on a lot of the problems I have with our otherwise limited range of female action heroes (and here I’m also thinking about recent comments by Snarky’s Machine and Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency).  She’s gay, she’s an intensely focused computer-smart researcher, she’s come through a horrific childhood of abuse, she’s barely 5 feet tall, and she doesn’t dress in clothes that send anyone mixed messages.  Her fury against men who hate women isn’t played for comic effect with a series of great one-liners; in fact, she’s very often silent, like the laconic heroes of old Westerns.  When her father abused her mother one too many times when Lisbeth was 12, she set him on fire.  She doesn’t try to get anyone to like her — and if there’s any message we can glean from this film, it’s that people like and trust her anyway.  Thinking about these things out loud is like Alison Bechdel articulating her Bechdel Test for films:  once you think about it and realize how few characters do much more than confirm men’s ideas about what makes a sexy or compelling woman, you want to become Lisbeth yourself.

Like I say, I’m not going to make any claims about the high quality of this film, which in some ways is a placeholder for the final film, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (2009), which still has no release date set for the U.S. — a shame, as next year we’ll be subjected to David Fincher’s American remake of the first film, starring Daniel Craig as the muckraking journalist (depressed sigh).  The novels become increasingly focused on Lisbeth as they go along, and this film mirrored that tendency, delightfully.  As we left the theater last night, we burbled about all the parts of the novel that can’t help but make that final film better than this one.  As we wait for it, let’s all channel a little Lisbeth the next time that male colleague waits for you to laugh at his joke, one of those offensive Jim Beam commercials pops up on TV, or you feel a racial tension headache coming on from the latest right-wing nutbag ideas about repealing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  Ladies, turn on your computers and brush up on your kickboxing:  your skills may be needed soon.

Slate doesn’t know what “feminism” means

You’d think they would, considering how much they talk about it.  “Is Nikki Haley a Feminist?” asks one headline.  “Is the Tea Party a Feminist Movement?” asks another.  “Sex Addiction is a Feminist Victory” announces a third.  All of these articles are written by Hanna Rosin, one of the co-founders of Double X (the site’s terrible women’s blog, about which I’ve complained before) and a contributing editor for the Atlantic monthly.  In asking such preposterous questions — and, by the way, failing to answer them — Rosin denudes the word feminism of all meaning and contributes to the erasure of the political need for the equality of the sexes, which itself is anti-feminist behavior.  She’s not alone at Slate; Amanda Marcotte’s essay claims that Sarah Palin’s version of feminism has us all asking “anxious questions”:

Does the word feminism mean anything at all?  Does merely wearing a power suit and smart-girl glasses automatically make you a feminist?

THESE ARE STUPID QUESTIONS that good journalists would not ask.  Feminism means a belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes, and it denotes the movement to achieve that equality.  It’s in the dictionary.  But in Rosin’s hands, “feminist” seems to mean “woman,” and possibly a vague kind of “pro-woman” perspective.  Sometimes it means “a woman who has some degree of power.”  Or, “powerful woman who complains that she has received criticism” (this is how Palin and Haley count as feminists).  None of her essays treat a woman or group expressing any interest whatsoever in the equality of the sexes.  None of her essays discuss even the possibility the public rise of such virulent anti-feminists might indirectly result in the equality of the sexes.  Marcotte comes up with the tortured term “feminist anti-feminist” to describe women like Palin:

She’s just the latest incarnation of a long and noble line of feminist anti-feminists:  women who call themselves feminist but also object to the existence of the feminist movement and organize in opposition to it.

I’m sorry, but doesn’t that make them ignorant anti-feminists?

Which begs the question, are Rosin and Marcotte ignorant too?  I believe it’s far worse than that:  I think they’re canny journalists who get paid a lot to cover the gender dynamics of anti-feminist right-wing women.  When they play the provocateur by asking such offensive questions as “Is Sarah Palin a feminist?” they get a lot of responses, which translates to more attention from their publisher, which translates to more advertising revenue.

They’re canny, but they’re also doing anti-feminist work for the devil.  If journalists act as if the  term is so confusing, the vital importance of fighting for equal rights is eaten away.  No one took it seriously when Palin claimed she had foreign policy experience because Alaska is next to Russia; why should we take it seriously when she claims to be a feminist?  It is journalists’ job to be skeptical, not to denude language and politics of meaning.  Rosin likewise enjoys asking the provocative question, “Who owns feminism?” ask if us selfish feminists have encircled it with velvet ropes.  If the KKK announced itself to be an “anti-racist” organization despite all evidence to the contrary, would Rosin ask “Who owns anti-racism?”  By publishing such frequent pieces, Slate contributes to an anti-feminism in American culture more generally.

Of course journalists should think seriously about the gendered implications of so many women in right-wing politics.  Of course they should ask such questions as whether such women might alter our society’s views of powerful women.  Just don’t throw around the word “feminism” as if it has no independent meaning.

P. S.  At first I planned to respond to Rosin’s most recent Atlantic piece, “The End of Men,” in which she visits a community college, notes that there are more female students than male students, and extrapolates that the end of the world is nigh for men.  But then I read the long list of crazy online responses to it and became too demoralized.  Please read it yourselves and email me with intelligent thoughts.