AboutShe can be contacted at cheryl [at] americasfuture [dot] org. Read my other blog. The one that's not obnoxious and self-absorbed! Recent publications"Scary Rise of the 'Sanctimommy'" in The Washington Times "Why Malamud Faded" in Commentary "Blogging Infertility" in The New Atlantis "Outsourcing Childbirth" in The Wall Street Journal "The Painless Peace of Twilight Sleep" in The New Atlantis "The Genius of Old New York" in The Claremont Review of Books "Parenthood At Any Price" in The New Atlantis "Modern Girls and the Moral Revival They Are Leading" in The Washington Times ARTICLE ARCHIVE Links |
Sunday, March 30, 2008 I Don't Care What Your Teacher Said, Reading Is Not Good For You But for adults, this argument makes no sense. Unlike children, they're well aware that there are better books out there, and they are decidedly not reading them. So the only other possible explanation must be the foggy notion--drilled in by generations of English teachers--that "Reading Is Good." According to this theory, mere contact with words on a page--no matter the content--enhances and improves one as a human being. You can tell when you're talking to one of these people because they usually explain they could be doing something much more mind-numbing with their time, like watching daytime television or playing video games. What they don't seem to realize is that reading can be just as harmful to the mind as General Hospital or Grand Theft Auto: Witness The Da Vinci Code and anything by Sean Hannity or Michael Moore. I like to think of this as the reading-as-alchemy theory of books: Dross becomes gold simply by being printed on the page! (Note: This is also why you should be deeply suspicious of anyone who claims the Internet has somehow heralded in the Golden Age of Reading. Just think of all that text people are reading on Second Life! Anyway, books are "tragically isolating.") In sum, adults reading Harry Potter should be just as embarrassed as if they were caught reading Danielle Steele or Tom Clancy. They should definitely not suggest J.K. Rowling should win a Nobel Prize (though I'd love to live in a world where Edith Wharton, Cole Porter, and Dorothy Parker won). Labels: lit crit posted by Cheryl # 12:51 PM Literary Dealbreakers (Or Why My Romantic Life Is A Bust) A friend who has suffered through a few too many of my dating stories sent me this essay by Rachel Donadio about literary dealbreakers. To say I sympathized would be an understatement. This column is now almost as dear to me as the On Language one about men who make spelling errors in their profiles or initial emails. (During my brief online dating phase, this killed me. I mean a couple of emails in, fine--but for the first email, you can't run spell-check?) Like Laura Miller, I've never gotten past the first date with a few men because of their enthusiasm for Ayn Rand. No one past the mental age of 15 thinks Atlas Shrugged is a good novel. The same with Harry Potter: It's explicitly a book for children. If you are an adult, it cannot be your favorite book. You shouldn't be reading it in the first place, but since I cannot shun 90 percent of English-speakers, I've made my peace with it. Then there was the guy who thought the cartoon characters, Calvin and Hobbes, were named for physicists, which I still do not understand. My other dealbreaker is J.R.R. Tolkien. Any book involving elves and orcs is for kids, and any book also involving a fictional language that people then learn is for losers. (I've long had this idea about the superiority of the Jewish novel over the Catholic novel that my [Jewish] ex-boyfriend positively adored. He was always urging me to write an article on it. Otherwise, this stance has not been particularly successful with men.) My greatest moment of dating horror--even worse than the brunch buffet with they guy who wouldn't speak--was when I asked a guy I'd been dating for awhile about his favorite book, and he started, "The Lord of--." I must have shrunk back in horror, because he got flustered (he already knew I was a book snob) and finished somewhat sadly, "the Flies." My sense of relief was so great I immediately forgave him William Golding. (Please note, this isn't a genre-fiction thing. I hate twee adult contemporary lit too. If I ever met someone who loved Larry McMurtry, Elmer Kelton, and Donald Westlake, I'd be ecstatic. If that person also liked True Grit, my life would be complete. And I allow that you can have fond memories of LOTR, The Catcher in the Rye, and other books you read as a kid. Is there a conservative alive today who didn't have an Ayn Rand phase? You just need to have progressed past them.) Finally, since everything goes back to either Edith Wharton or Norman Rush for me, here is a great passage from Mating on literary taste and dating: I was groping gingerly for his intellectual keystone, but not gingerly enough. There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is The Prophet. That wasn't the particular danger with Denoon, but there were others. A guy who tells you the best novel ever written in Clarissa, which also happens to be the first or second novel ever written, is also not unlikely to tell you that the only music he likes to listen to is motets and that art has never really advanced over the cave paintings at Lascaux. I suppose I was on the qui vive for some variant if this reflex because Denoon has said his favorite novel was War and Peace, so I was thinking, Oh no, it's going to be Beethoven for music and Shakespeare for plays. It isn't that these positions are not defensible, but taking them may mean someone is not very individual. One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare. Labels: gender wars, I want to marry Norman Rush, lit crit posted by Cheryl # 10:08 AM --Alan Bennett, The History Boys, on stage now at the Studio Theaterposted by Cheryl # 9:34 AM Thursday, March 27, 2008 Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 4:02 PM
Labels: food blogging posted by Cheryl # 10:08 AM Wednesday, March 26, 2008 Still, I'm not sure this is the entire explanation. I wrote a profile of Megan for Doublethink, to which Tyler Cowen then kindly linked, and suddenly the comments became one long "hot or not?" exercise. The ones that didn't touch on her looks were just ridiculous: "I have a problem with people who twist the truth," declared one idiot commenter, "She lies about having allergies so that restaurants will omit ingredients that she doesn't like." (Go ahead and check: he's totally serious.) Elsewhere, people make fun of her for writing about being tall, her feelings about soy milk, and pretty much anything else she happens to mention as an aside to an otherwise straight-forward post about monetary policy. So basically having anything personal on your blog as a woman opens you up for attack--even though sharing these kinds of quirks and trivia with your readers is a key part to any successful blog. Women are still seen as unserious, and so blogging--an unserious medium--puts them at a disadvantage. (Why this is so, I don't understand. How is my liking shoes any less serious than [insert male blogger name here] liking baseball or Halo3?) Rita, naturally, directs me to Hannah Arendt: "You can get taken seriously as a woman if you avoid the use of the word 'I'....Write about politics, not about yourself, period." (Advice you'll note she herself does not follow.) This path is closed off to me as well. My blog is pink, and I only write about "girly" subjects: babies, shoes, relationships, literature, and my inability to deal with mechanical things. Since I can no longer be a serious person, I guess my only option is to embrace the girliness, and devote this blog to ruminations relating Edith Wharton and Jane Austen to my latest handbag purchase. UPDATE: Rita names some serious women besides Hannah Arendt. I'd add to her list Edith Wharton and George Eliot. Also Cynthia Ozick and Brooke Allen. Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 5:17 PM Sunday, March 23, 2008 I think the conflation of 'real' with 'miserable' has something in common with the way that young adult books are praised for their realism when they include characters who suffer ever[y] trauma known to man all at once, or why people are so into memoirs of horrible lives. The idea that horrible things are a reality for somebody somewhere (or, millions of people everywhere, as we are often told) seems to weigh heavily on people whose lives are not horrible, in a way that convinces them that the answer is to voluntarily give up (or claim to give up) all their pleasures in exchange for horrors. In some ways, maybe an ancient impulse--asceticism, for example. But in some way, maybe new, since I don't think that ascetics don't deny the reality of a better life, and I've always associated asceticism w/isolation, not weird downtrodden group identification. Also, I don't think asceticism was ever hip.I think the asceticism parallel is spot-on. These people aren't just after group-identification; they want purity. It's a fundamentally religious impulse--as James Poulos explains here in a slightly different context (hipsters who start farms). P.S. Rita has an unpublished article on YA lit just lying around. You all should encourage her to do something with it. RELATED: Daniel Mendelsohn on fake memoirs. Labels: first world problems posted by Cheryl # 3:26 PM Friday, March 21, 2008
Labels: travels posted by Cheryl # 10:04 AM Monday, March 17, 2008 The Wit & Wisdom of Barack Obama My hunch is that the sentence is one of those things that no one will admit to being confused by, like the movies of Godard or the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you're a loser or a moron. Certainly Obama fans won't admit how obscure the sentence is--though several have claimed that it's lifted from a prophecy of the Tribal Elders of the Hopi Indians. Hopi prophecies are famously obscure. Labels: lit crit posted by Cheryl # 3:01 PM Sunday, March 16, 2008 Things I've Forgotten From High School (Plus Amateur Literary Criticism!!) Fortunately--as with so much of high school--very little of this stayed with me. Pretty much all I remembered was that Willy Loman wants to be "well-liked," so I was surprised to find how thoroughly unlikeable Willy is. Almost all of his troubles are of his own making. He's a blowhard and a jerk, always looking to one-up someone. His sons, Biff and Hap, are ungrateful and selfish because he raises them to be so; as Biff tell Willy, he could never hold down a job because Willy had so puffed him up with ideas of his importance he couldn't stand to take an order. He doesn't even seem to have ever been a good salesman. The only people who care about Willy seem to do so in spite of him. He belittles his devoted wife Linda and cheats on her with secretaries while traveling. Charley, his kindly neighbor, loans Willy $50 a week to help ends meet, yet Willy never shows any gratitude. Instead, he makes fun of Charley's bookish, "anemic" son Bernard and insults Charley every chance he gets. With so unlikeable and morally weak a character, I wonder if DoS really works as a tragedy. Arthur Miller certainly thought so. Here he is on the tragic hero: Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy. [...] Tragedy enlightens--and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. In no way is the common man debarred from such thoughts or such actions.This is my big question about DoS: Can a play about a character as morally contemptible as Willy still be a tragedy? Is "the so-called nobility of his character" (understood in its broadest sense) as dispensable to the tragic hero as Miller claims? My tentative answers to both are no. I suppose the play would have you think--as the famous eulogy scene suggests--that while Willy had more than his share of flaws, it was American society that made him what he was. Biff says of Willy, "He had all the wrong dreams." But Charley counters: "Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman's got to dream." This struck me as absolutely absurd when I heard it. Does the content of the dreams matter not at all? Of course, you can argue, Willy is just an innocent, taken in by the big, bright American Dream and corporate America's other self-serving lies. But this makes no sense on the play's own terms. What about Charley or his son Bernard? They are both decent, kind people, and both are made successful and rich. Doesn't their presence in the play suggest that it's possible to make a buck and keep your soul? Why are they not made dupes and Willy is? Could it be because they have the right values and the right dreams? My other trouble with the play is that Willy has a chance to escape; suicide is not his only option. Charley has offered him a position at his company, but Willy refuses because it would hurt his pride (though it doesn't hurt so much that he refuses Charley's charity.) Is this really a heroic or admirable trait? Isn't this just another example of Willy's insane need to keep up appearances? My theater companion suggested that Miller is trying to put us in Willy's head, to see things as he does. So even though we might be able to see a way out, Willy cannot and therein lies the tragedy. But isn't this defining tragedy down, I asked? Surely, Aristotle would not approve. A mad person might make bad choices based on his or her delusional state, but is this really tragedy with a capital T, comparable to the fates of Antigone or Oedipus? Take The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton--a text which also offers a critique of capitalism and explores many of the same themes--for contrast. Lily Bart, the novel's heroine, has two choices: She can sell herself in a respectable manner (marriage) or in a disrespectable manner (prostitution). Either way she has to make herself a commodity; there's no escape from this basic situation. Nor is there any Charley in THoM--a model for what Lily could have been had she not been weak or foolish. Instead, every woman in the book reinforces Lily's dilemma. Bertha Dorset is rich and powerful, but she is also heartless and cruel. Lily has the power to blackmail her and regain her place in society, but in doing so, she will become a Bertha too. Lily looks for other ways to survive, working as a professional companion like the divorcee Carry Fischer (another model for Lily) but finds that too forces upon her moral compromises she cannot make. Every door closes in on Lily as she tries to find a way out. She works for awhile as a hat maker, but she is slow and clumsy. Soon, she is fired. In the end, she only escapes prostitution (a fate symbolized by Nettie Struther) through a possibly intentional overdose. An entire society has conspired to make Lily what she is: an object, an ornament. As the price of her place in this society, she must assent to this definition. Lily's tragedy comes about then because she refuses this definition--not because she is weak or foolish as Willy is. You never get the sense from DoS (or at least I didn't) that it is society that made Willy what he is--in the way that society makes Lily what she is. Again, you have the question of Charley. Why does he thrive and Willy does not? In the end, it seems Biff is right. Willy suffers and dies because of his own failings. Had he been less of a fool and a jerk, he might have been a happier man (and his sons better people). Lily suffers and dies for the exact opposite reason: It's what we admire about her--her moral scrupulousness--that dooms her. [One possible caveat: My very alert companion noted that Charley and his son wear a kippah during the eulogy scene, though there's no indication that Charley is Jewish in the play. (Is this right? Or is my companion not as alert as I think?) So perhaps Charley--as an outsider in American society--is somehow safe from its corrupting influence? Of course, this has nothing to do with the text but it's an interesting interpretation.] Labels: I heart EW, lit crit posted by Cheryl # 6:06 PM Thursday, March 13, 2008 A 35-year-old woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for so long that her body was stuck to the seat had a phobia about leaving the bathroom, the boyfriend said.I'm going to try to remember this the next time I'm mad at my boyfriend. At the very least, he would never let me lock myself up in my apartment and sit on any piece of furniture so long I grow physically attached to it. That's love, IMHO. This is the best bit: McFarren said she moved around in the bathroom during that time, bathed and changed into the clothes he brought her. He brought food and water to her. They had conversations and had an otherwise normal relationship -- except it all happened in the bathroom.Also, is anyone surprised that this all happened in a trailer park? Labels: news of the weird posted by Cheryl # 3:03 PM I don't have a lot of hope for the public morality[....] But can we at least end this barbaric practice of dragging your wife before the cameras while you confess your shameful guilt? If she wasn't there in the hotel room when you did your crime, don't ask her to do your time.Read the whole thing. Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 2:30 PM I was looking at some family income distribution numbers yesterday and was a bit surprised by how the distribution looked. To enter the Top 20 percent, you need to be making $88,000 a year. To enter the Top 5 percent, you need to make $157,000 a year. I've known a lot of families making around $150,000, and none of them would have described themselves as much beyond upper middle class, or "doing pretty well." And though I'd call Top 5 percent rich, in income terms, I probably would have said $250,000.I'm trying to be pleased about this, but it's really hard. As a supporter of low taxes, I suppose I'm happy that given Americans' bizarre notions about what it means to be wealthy, "everyone below the 95th percentile is untouchable." And I am gratified to see yet more proof of Megan's excellent post last month that whatever liberals claim, no one really thinks their taxes should be raised. So, all in all, I should be happy. Viva la Reagan Revolution and all that. But then there's the comments section. It's just soooo hard to be a young professional in Manhattan and live in a walk-up apartment and only get to go out occasionally to nice restaurants while people in Grand Rapids, MI are living off the fat of the land in huge McMansions and have three SUVs. Even the cereal is more expensive in NYC! Plus, the loans from Harvard Law School are killing me. People are aware they can move, right? There's this company called U-Haul and you can lug all your sad IKEA furniture in one of their trucks and head out West to start anew. Americans have been doing it for centuries. But wait, your cool job in publishing/journalism is only here on the East Coast? And you really like all those nice restaurants? And then there's the museums, the live music and the great social scene...All good points, I agree. Let me introduce you to the notion of trade-offs. Anyway, the idea that you're only really rich if you have a good chance of being featured on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" is exasperating. When did we become a nation of whiny ingrates? I suppose part of it must be growing up in the insular world of the "upper middle class," where parents apparently give their children all kinds of unreasonable expectations. (I grew up in Mesquite, TX, which I think makes me less crazy about these matters.) For example, I have a friend from Scarsdale, NY who insists his family is "middle class." When I pointed out the metrics Ezra mentions above, he explained that people like the Tischs of NYC (who once owned CBS) were rich, and his family was decidedly not in their ballpark. I pretty much gave up then. posted by Cheryl # 10:40 AM Tuesday, March 11, 2008 I direct you to the following headline: "Men Who Do Housework May Get More Sex." (Once the shock wears off, you might even look at the actual article too.) Helpfully, me Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 9:46 PM --Wheaton prof Alan Jacobs at the Sceneposted by Cheryl # 9:24 PM Friday, March 7, 2008 The promise of the Internet... P.S. The Elvis Costello impression is quite good. P.P.S. I have absolutely no clue how to tag this, or even just adequately describe its awesomeness. posted by Cheryl # 3:55 PM It's probably for the best that our experiment was so short-lived since his main observation at the time was that he found Kim Novak to be "matronly." I was slightly reassured when he explained that (the decidedly not stick-thin) Scarlett Johansson was more to his liking. That is, until I realized serious cleavage makes up for a lot. And that Scarlett Johansson is only "fat" compared to Kate Bosworth, who is now more bobblehead doll than human being. Alas. Anyway, all of this is a roundabout way of saying I think the old movie stars are a much more glamorous group than the current crop (and I hate Scarlett Johansson). As proof, I submit this Vanity Fair slideshow recreating iconic moments from Hitchcock films. (Don't miss the "behind-the-scenes report" where the director boasts about spending half of Africa's GDP to get these shots.) My quick assessment: Renee Zellweger as Kim Novak? Seriously? (Also, she just looks weird in that shot.) Naomi Watts makes a good Tippi Hedren; Scarlett Johansson isn't bad as Grace Kelly--better than Gwyneth Paltrow anyway. Note how all the men cast as Cary Grant fail miserably. Labels: alas, gender wars, the arts posted by Cheryl # 10:48 AM Thursday, March 6, 2008 I invite you to give this a try. (Explanation here, but don't click until you've played the game.) Helpfully, me Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 3:02 PM Doublethink Happy Hour Tonight Labels: Doublethink posted by Cheryl # 12:20 PM Wednesday, March 5, 2008 Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 2:39 PM Tuesday, March 4, 2008 I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club."The description of "Grey's Anatomy" is pretty amusing too. (I confess I watched Seasons 1 and 2 even though I knew it was slowly turning my brain to mush.) Anyway, Allen let us off pretty easy. She didn't even mention "Grey's" spinoff, the completely brain-dead "Private Practice." The fact that this show is still on--and is a hit besides--pretty much makes Allen's point for her. Ladies, we should be ashamed. And if that's not enough for you: Who do you think made that "What Shamu Taught Me" column the most emailed article ever? And ensured that every "Modern Love" columnist gets a book deal? These are high crimes. RELATED: Amber on whether romance novels count as "books." Linda Hirshman on women voters. P.S. Is there anything that does not make Feministing commenters cry? Labels: gender wars posted by Cheryl # 10:26 AM Monday, March 3, 2008 Labels: shameless self-promotion posted by Cheryl # 11:56 AM Archives December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 |
