Why not, I say

The waver of the line: Art, imperfection, and Marissa Falco's "Meta"

2011-09-15T17:24:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about Marissa Falco's new zine "Meta," I was immediately intrigued. Falco writes about her search for more information about the San Francisco artist Margaret Kilgallen, who died in 2001 at the age of 33. The premise of the zine sounded very Susan Orlean to me in that the reader is invited to join the author as she relentlessly seeks out information about obscure yet intriguing subjects.

My early assessment ended up being more accurate that I could have imagined. One of the most fascinating things about Orlean's writing, and specifically her book "The Orchid Thief," is the way she takes this little corner of culture that is unknown to most people and uses it as a scope through which to explore a larger, more universal experience. In "The Orchid Thief," the insular world of orchid collectors gives Orlean a place to ask what it means to be passionate about something. In the zine "Meta," Kilgallen and her folk- and graffiti-inspired creations give Marissa a similar space through which to explore the virtue of the imperfect.

At first glance, the notion that imperfection is something to be embraced seems counter-intuitive, particularly in our culture, which places a high premium on perfection. Take the obvious example of the fashion magazine. The pages of these magazines feature beautiful women whose livelihoods depend on meeting a specific ideal, whose faces provide canvasses for the brushes of top make-up artists and whose bodies are sculptures upon which elegant clothing is draped. Yet the desire for perfection persists so strongly that the products of these collaborations are not enough, and the resulting photos are digitally altered until every last blemish is obliterated.

But then, what is left? The end result is often spooky and disjointed, bearing only a limited resemblance to the woman whose photograph was taken. The humanity has been erased and lightened and tinted and filtered out, and what remains has all of the warmth and allure of a video-game character.

Marissa explores this in her own career as an artist, where she struggles to overcome her need for perfection in her work in order for it to feel worth her while:

It didn't occur to me that these errors made my work more interesting; they were what identified the work as mine, separating it from all manner of things mass-produced, and making it real.

This passage called to mind the Arts and Crafts movement of the latter half of the 19th century, where artists and crafters began placing high value on hand-crafted furniture, pottery and textiles. The Arts and Crafts movement was the artistic counterpart of the Progressive political movement. The adherents looked at the Industrial Revolution and its mass-produced hideousness, both in terms of aesthetics and social conditions, and sought to push back that by promoting art that was handmade and carefully crafted.

The Industrial Revolution won out, and it has been supplanted by the digital revolution, which I'd argue has further standardized our means of expression. Zine librarian Jenna Freedman writes about this in her essay "Zines are Not Blogs," about the way most bloggers use the templates provided by the platform's developers. Our Facebook pages all look the same; the only differences lie in our curation of media we like and our collection of status updates and photos.

In this way, art that is made by hand, art that resists the mandate of perfection, art that wears its flaws proudly...this all becomes a way to resist the social pressures that would prefer we spend our time and money trying to be exactly like one another. To embrace imperfect art in a world that demands nothing less of perfection can be an act of rebellion, one borne of love for the wild complexity of humanity.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Marissa writes about this - and about Kilgallen - in a zine. The title of the zine "Meta" is a nod to Kilgallen's tag name, but I also think Marissa is making a comment on zines, how they are by their very nature imperfect. The imperfection of zines - the typos, the uneven cutouts, the wavering lines - is where you see the zinester. Without those imperfections, well...the zine might as well have been created by a machine.

And what exactly does "perfection" mean, anyway? How did we decide that symmetry and smoothness were perfection, and that everything that deviated from that was a flaw? I consider this a lot in conversations about women and their bodies, how they can point out their thighs or their noses or their hair as being imperfect, and I can't help but wonder why one arbitrary standard became the standard by which we measure all other things.

I think this holds true for everything. The things that we define as "imperfect" are evidence of our unique stamp on the world, our off-kilter way of plotting a novel, our own way of composing a sentence, our specific method of drawing portraiture. They make us recognizable as individuals. They are the things that make us us.

Marissa's zine is available through her etsy shop. Obviously, I highly recommend it.

Don't call it a comeback: Thoughts on the "resurgence" of zines

2011-09-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

I ordered a copy of Girl Crush a few weeks ago, after seeing mentions of it popping up on tumblr and various lit blogs. A few writers I adore, like Jennifer Egan, Emma Straub and Mary HK Choi, were listed as contributors, so I forked over the $10 and waited for it to show up in my mailbox.

When it arrived, almost immediately I noticed that it was about the least zine-y zine I'd ever seen. I showed it to my husband and he said, "That's not a zine!" It's really not. The cover is glossy and full color and it was professionally bound, and really, it looks more like a self-published book than the photocopied, handmade creations I've come to love and adore.

The second realization came as I was reading the actual zine, specifically how insider-y and insular it seemed. I was particularly not all that thrilled to see that a few of the contributions were about other contributors. I was even less excited when I realized that, for $10, I had purchased what could be summed up as a NYC media-scene mash note.

Certainly many of the pieces were quality - Jennifer Egan's story is a standout, which is unsurprising, as I imagine she could make a grocery list compelling and evocative - but overall, the collection was rather uneven and more than a bit disappointing. And you know, that's okay. It was for the most part forgettable, and I had stashed it on one of my zillions of bookshelves, where it would have probably stayed for a few years until the next time I pack up my books in preparation for a move.

Until I read this.

Meredith Melnick, a reporter for Time, evidently found Girl Crush to be compelling evidence that zines were somehow experiencing some kind of resurgence, the kind that hadn't been seen since the 1990s and riot grrrl. Her proof? A lot of New York lady journalist types were now making them:

Girl Crush is part of a resurgence in the zine form, particularly among media professionals. Like their rough-around-the-edges predecessors, these zines are independently published and precise in their editorial vision, but they have more star power and more mainstream editorial influence. Strikingly, often the same men and women who are helping to keep large media outlets afloat by day are also the ones going home and working on indie publishing efforts by night.

Basically, we can lay credit for the resurgence of this form of art and media not at the feet of the hundreds - if not thousands - of zinesters around the world who have been rocking the glue stick and paper cutters for years now, but a handful of New York media professionals who decided they wanted the freedom to express themselves outside of the constraints of their jobs.

You know, I get that. As a media professional who makes zines, I totally understand the allure of DIY media, which gives you the ability to tell your story without having to sand off all the rough edges and shape your pitch so it meets the needs of editors and publishers, who usually only have a limited amount of space to work with.

I mean, sometimes you just want to fucking say something without being told how to say it.

Zines let you do that. They are inherently democratic. They are accessible. They are big fuck-you to mainstream media, which is dominated by huge multinational corporations. They open up spaces in a society that no longer has room for viewpoints that cannot be summed up in a five-word slogan. Zines are an act of resistance against a culture that increasingly demands conformity. They give people a place to nurture their weirdnesses and their idiosyncrasies.

But when I hear about professional writers putting out a glossy zine and celebrating it with a launch party at a SoHo hotel bar that features $15 gimlets, I can't help but feel like the entire point is lost. The fuck-you becomes a knowing wink and a nudge, the act of resistance is reduced to a mere signifier of one's edginess. The allure of possibility that makes zines so appealing evaporates in the face of SoHo hotel parties and $10 cover prices and professionally bound books. Tell me, who is going to look at Girl Crush and think, I can do that?

I was happy to see that Melnick spoke to zine librarian Jenna Freedman, who is a huge advocate of zines and zine culture. (Full disclosure: she just interviewed me as part of her series on zinesters who have recently come out of retirement.) I was happy that she gave a shout-out to Shotgun Seamstress, which is pretty much the anti Girl Crush. I was also happy to see that she talked to Johanna Fateman and Katie Haegele, whose zine The La-La Theory is lovely and well-made and interesting.

(I was less happy to see that she interviewed Joe Biel of Microcosm. Hey, journalists! Microcosm is not the only distro out there!)

But I do have to admit that it's tiresome to see, yet again, a certain class of New Yorkers acting as though they are responsible for bringing back something that was never gone in the first place. The insularity wears on me, and it is particularly frustrating when it absorbs something I am passionate about, then regurgitates it in a defanged form that is a mere shadow of its former self.

My goal isn't to defend zine culture against all interlopers. I'm not crouching over a pile of photocopied papers with my fangs bared and claws out. I would love it if more and more people made zines, if zine culture spread beyond punk rock and made its way into other communities.

But articles like the one in Time don't do that. Instead, they make zines seem like yet another form of media that only the privileged can take part in. They prop up barriers to entry that have no business being there. They say zines are only for moonlighting media professionals.

If there is anything more antithetical to the spirit of zines, I'm not sure what it is.

P.S.

2011-08-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've still been focusing most of my energy over at Fit and Feminist, which is kind of my online baby these days, but I don't want to let this blog languish like a flower in the August heat. See, I can overwrite with the best of them!

So I've decided I'm bring this bad boy to life and using it to write about zines! And writing! But mostly zines. Because that's just what the world needs - another blog about zines. (Actually, come to think of it, the world actually does need another blog about zines...)

My goal is to have a new post a couple of times a week, so keep checking back.

xoxo,
Caitlin

Zinesters do it for love

2011-08-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Ask any zinester and they'll tell you, being part of zine culture doesn't come cheap. Sure, we charge for our zines, but more often than not, the price of our zines doesn't cover the costs of copying or postage.

This isn't even taking into consideration the investment of time, not just in making the zines, but also in promoting your zine, seeking out other zines, establishing relationships with other zinesters and taking part in zine fests (assuming your city is lucky enough to host one).

And yet, very few of those zinesters would say the expense is not worth it.

I thought about this while reading this excellent essay by Jenna Brager (of Sassyfrass Circus) over at Cannonball. In it, Brager writes:

On a more theoretical level, what the object of the zine, the humble, shittily-photocopied, do-it-yourself pamphlet, represents is the possibility of refusal — not of blogs per se or the ever-forward march of technology but of what scholar Lauren Berlant refers to as “the aesthetic of modernity”— a bourgeois project which “always involves a market, even if the name of the value it gives its objects of exchange is merit.”

For me, this refusal means creating something just for fun, for the sake of it, to have something to share, to give away, to never do anything with. It is a rejection of definition through consumption — refusing to consume or to be consumed. This is an investment for me both as an anti-capitalist and as an artist who struggles with the idea of art as commodity (while simultaneously resenting the expectation or assumption that artists work for free).

How beautiful is that?

It's such a wonderful antidote to the increasingly professionalized attitudes surrounding the deeply personal world of art and writing. Surely I'm not the only one who has noticed this? That more and more blogs about writing are really blogs about getting published? That writers are increasingly thinking of themselves as marketers and business people? That now it's all about developing a platform and using social media to make a name for yourself? That a lot of writers are spending a lot of time getting stories into literary journals that seem to be read primarily by other writers?

What seems to be missing from so many of these conversations is what compelled most of us to start writing in the first place: a love of writing.

I'm not against careerism per se, nor am I against professionalism. I would some day like to be published in more than blogs and zines, and the few times I've seen my name in print in professional media outlets have been very, very thrilling. Plus I'm not exactly researching the possibility of self-publishing for my book manuscript. I would like to see it in actual bookstores one day.

So I understand the desire to get published. But I worry that, in the attempt to pursue a kind of legitimacy in the writing world, the entire point of the whole thing - that spark, that desire to create something beautiful and honest - is in danger of being extinguished under a crush of rejections and workshops and carefully crafted query letters.

Over at HTMLGIANT, someone posed the question, would you continue to write if no one would ever read it? It took me all of two seconds to consider the question before answering "no." I mean, I have written for myself and I probably will do so, but the vast majority of what I write is done so with the end goal of sharing it with another person, and maybe knowing you were able to choose words and give voice to ideas that helped someone else feel a little less alone in the world.

But this is the thing! You don't have to rely on the literary-industrial complex to do that. (Yes, I called it the "literary-industrial complex," because it really feels that way sometimes.) You have the right to tell your own stories, in the way you want to tell them. You don't have to negotiate with gatekeepers or push your way past harried slush-pile readers to get your words into the hands of another person. You can certainly do so if you wish, but it's not necessary.

I thought about this some more while reading Livia Blackburne's controversial post called "Author Blogging: You're Doing It Wrong," in which she questions the now-conventional wisdom that blogs by authors help sell books:

The thing is, we haven't created effective platform. What we've created is a never-ending writing conference. Good for many things -- forming friendships, professional development, and learning your craft. But nobody (I think) would argue that attending SCBWI conferences every weekend will catapult your book onto the New York Times bestseller list. In the same way, blogging for writers will not sell your book to the general reading population.

But...what if you like blogging? Can't a person just like blogging for the sake of blogging, and not because it's a rung in their Professional Writer Ladder?

So much of what we do in the world is framed with the language of capitalism. We face enormous pressure to groom ourselves to be the best little economic production units we can possibly be. Don't get too many tattoos; no one will hire you. Don't study medieval French lyric poetry; you'll never get a job. Spend your weekends learning new job skills so you'll be indispensable to your company.

There are a million and a half reasons why I love zines (and why I'm growing to love blogging) - because it's a part of my life where I am free to be creative and to experiment and make my tiny little mark in the world. Isn't that what this is ultimately all about?

What every man should read, if he doesn't want to be well-read

2011-05-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

So Esquire put out a list about the top 75 books every man should read, right? Get this - they only put one book by a lady author on their list! And they only put three books by black men on their list, too! (And books written by black women? Ha! As if!) I know, I know...this is completely shocking given the historic levels of gender and racial parity within the literary world. I know you are just as stunned as I am.

In all seriousness, the list is actually populated by some really great, classic books, so anyone who wants to look for some new reading material could do worse than to look at this. But the thing is, the writers behind this list thought they would be able to persuade their dudely audience to take on difficult works like "As I Lay Dying," but to ask readers to consider stepping outside of a very narrow definition of masculinity (which is one that evidently involves a lot of fucking, fighting and shooting things, how very Hemingway of them) is too much of a challenge.

I like Roxane Gay's take on this, but then I like Roxane Gay's take on just about everything, because she is awesome and on this matter she does not deviate from that standard:

What’s troubling though, is the implication that men should only read literature written by men, that men don’t need to bother with books written by women, and of course, that the only great books are those written by men. What other message can we take from a list where seventy-four books are written by men and only one is written by a woman? Women writers are being done a disservice but the far greater disservice here is to men. This list not only perpetuates the erasure of great writing by women, it cultivates the erroneous and myopic notion that men only want to read a certain kind of book. If I were a man, I’d find this list insulting.

Guys, don't you ever tire of a world that you are not capable of empathy with those who are not like you? That you are so unimaginative that you cannot envision a perspective that does not line up with your own? That you are little more than a walking pair of testicles?

I don't know what it's like to be a man in this society, but I do know what it's like to have vast swathes of society make judgments about my character based solely on the plumbing I carry between my legs, and I find it rather tedious, to be perfectly honest. I can only assume you feel the same way. (Although maybe many of you don't, because after all, the kind of values attached to your plumbing have the added benefit of being seen as highly sought-after and positive, so maybe you like the way this is all arranged for you? I have no idea.)

And I don't ever expect a list to be objective and perfect in their diversity and representation. Lists by definition will not be all inclusive. Many worthy things will be left on the editing room floor, in hopes that you, the list-recipient, will be so inspired by the items that did make the cut that you'll go and seek out what did not.

But I don't think it's any accident that the books that did make the cut are overwhelming written by white men with a perspective that reads as very stereotypically masculine. I suspect that it just didn't occur to the editors of the list that, hey, some of our readers might enjoy some Joan Didion or maybe they'll really enjoy some Mary Gaitskill or I bet Lydia Davis will blow their hair back. I suspect it never even crossed their minds.

Maybe what is saddest of all about this list is that it undermines one of literature's greatest strengths: its unparalleled ability to give one person the ability to inhabit the skin of another. Yes, literature is also powerful for its ability to help you feel a little less alone in the world, but when your perspective is so pervasive that you see it reflected back at you almost everywhere you look, then it might be time to stop with the literary navel-gazing and train your sight lines on someone who isn't exactly like you.

And you know what you might find if you can do this? That most of us, despite our differences in gender, race, sexuality or nationality, are more alike than we think. We might find those distances across gender or race that we cannot seem to cross in our day-to-day lives are not nearly as unfathomable as we once thought. But it's difficult to make those leaps if you cannot be bothered to consider a world that does not look like you.

My latest project

2011-05-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I updated this blog, and I've been thinking about why that is. You know how "blog experts" (because something hasn't arrived until it can claim a whole coterie of experts making a name for themselves on its back) say you should find a specific niche and run with it? Well, this blog has no niche. It's just a mish-mash of things I find interesting, usually related to writing, running or reading.

And then this quote started circulating on tumblr from Latoya Peterson:

Advice for young feminists? Do something else besides feminism. I’m serious. The feminist blogosphere is oversaturated in my opinion. Please, find something else you love and take feminist theory there. It gets lonely over here in tech and video games – I have a great crew of other feminists but we are a little island in a vast sea. We need more feminist minded business bloggers, feminist theory wielding finance bloggers. Labor organizers with a feminist lens blogging. Can you imagine what Deadspin (the sports blog) would look like with a feminist on staff? Restructure writes about science, tech and feminism – join her! Publish a blog doing literary criticism with a feminist lens! Take on the NYT! Talk about class issues and feminism. Whatever it is, apply your feminism in a different space.

This really hit home with me, especially as I have been critical of Professional Feminism in the past. One of the things that really bothers me about it is the implication that your work isn't as important if you aren't doing it within the accepted channels of feminist media, even though one could very well argue that by gravitating to those accepted channels of feminist media, one is merely consigning one's viewpoints to an ideological echo chamber, where one's efforts are directed almost entirely to people who already agree with them.

And then, of course, there is the fact that I am a white, college-educated, middle-class, straight American woman who is thin, healthy in mind and body, cisgendered and presents somewhat in accordance with my gender identity. Basically, my entire existence seethes with privilege, aside from this one specific way. Like anyone really needs to hear from me on All Matters Related to Feminism, not when there are so many others out there doing it much better than I ever could.

So I've decided to take Latoya's advice, and I'm focusing my feminist lasers on something I'm passionate about - the world of sports, health, wellness and fitness. I've been blogging for about a week over at fitandfeminist.wordpress.com and so far I am beyond excited about it. It has energized me in a way I wasn't sure I was capable of feeling when it came to blogging.

So if you are at all interested in a feminist take on questions of athletics, fitness, health and the diet industry, feel free to join me at my new blog, where I'll be updating a few times a week.

As far as this space...I'll still update, but I'm going to focus more specifically on writing and books and literature. I don't think I'll be doing anything groundbreaking here, especially considering that this genre is already home to so many insanely talented, brilliant writers, but it's something I enjoy, and I think that if I focus my attention on this I'll be far more likely to stick with it than neglect it the way I have.

Space shuttles, NASA, Twitter - and me!

2011-04-29T06:13:00.001-07:00

Two years ago I had the opportunity to participate in a NASA tweet-up, held at the launch of space shuttle Atlantis. Since then, the tweet-ups have become a big deal, with celebrities like Levar Burton dropping by and journalists and big-name bloggers flocking to take part. But when I did it, I was the only journalist in my group of 100 participants, and the only one reporting for a news organization.

It was - and remains - one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I spent two days immersed in space-exploration culture, all of which led up to the launch of space shuttle Atlantis. I watched the shuttle launch from three miles away - as close as a human being can get without being an astronaut.

One of our reporters did a story on two local residents who are attending the latest launch tweet-up, which inspired me to dig up the two stories I wrote. I'm posting links here because I'm rather proud of them, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed reporting on them.

The eternal memoir wars

2011-04-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

The debate over the validity of memoir as an art form is one of those arguments that never seems to die, no matter how many boots have kicked its poor equine carcass. Every time it comes to light that some memoirist or another has fabricated part of their story - which happens so often I'd think publishers might want to consider investing in some fact checkers - the literary chattering classes start up again with their grand pronouncements about What Is and What Is Not Art.

In case you couldn't tell, I hate this debate. I take writers and critics who dismiss the entire genre of memoir about as seriously as I take music fans who say things like "I hate all country." Really? You do? You hate Johnny Cash and George Strait and Reba and Wanda Jackson and the Old 97s and Wilco? You hate all of them? No exceptions? Never heard a country song you like, once in your entire life? I find that hard to believe, not because country as a genre is somehow above reproach - I personally find most nu-pop-country unbearably saccharine and tedious - but because the genre of "country" covers such a wide swath of music, music that contains such divergent qualities and styles and instrumentation, that to dismiss it all out of hand is more of a comment on the music listener rather than the music itself.

I feel the same way about memoir. Certainly many memoirs that are published are utter dross. The authors either depend too heavily on the shocking! true! nature of their stories to bother crafting their writing, or they are too obsessed with being clever, or they lack perspective, or they really don't have much to say. No one is arguing that all memoirs are great.

But then, can't one make the same argument about novels? I have read some terrible novels in my short lifetime, novels so bad I'm left feeling like the wood would have been put to better use as cedar chips or mulch than be used to inflict such banality on the world. I don't even have terribly high standards for books. I just ask that they do one of the following: entertain me, make me think, make me feel. Yet many books have failed to meet even one of those meager criteria.

But you don't see me swanning about in the New York Review of Books (or, maybe more realistically, my blog and the comment sections of other blogs), going on and on about the artistic bankruptcy of the novel, and how it is only attempted by overimaginative individuals with interior lives that vastly outstrip their actual lives in terms of interest and experience. Not only is that rude but it's also inaccurate.

The main criticism I see coming up time and time again is that many memoirs are written by people who have not led extraordinary lives and have not achieved extraordinary things, as if those are the only lives we should ever care to read about. In which case, I should go ahead and toss the following from my library:

Chilly Scenes of Winter, Ann Beattie
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson...

I can keep going but you get my point. The realm of literary fiction is filled of the stories of ordinary people, rendered with beautiful language and empathy and sensitivity that allows us to occupy the souls of those people for as long as it takes us to finish the book (and in the case of the truly great books, for a long time after).

Can you imagine if only novels published were written about those people considered extraordinary in their personalities and their lives? How dull! How isolating! Most of us are not extraordinary in our personalities and our lives. Should we only read about those who are, as if the act of reading a novel is little more than inspirational self-help meant to help us Become Our Best Selves? I don't think any sensible reader or writer would argue that this should be the case. So why do we insist that the only ordinary people anyone should bother reading are the ones created from the minds of others?

Lorrie Moore goes further and criticizes the memoir for failing to give the secondary characters the kind of full emotional lives that can be created in fiction. In which case, I have to wonder if Moore thinks novelists should no longer be allowed to write first-person narratives.

(And she couldn't even seem to stand by her thesis about the suckiness of memoir, instead finding a way to praise each of the three memoirs she reviewed, and also writing about ones by Jill Ker Conway, Mary Karr, etc., that she thought were artistic achievements. Which is it? Is the entire genre little more than pornography? Or, like all genres, does it have its examples of shining brilliance?)

This is the thing - blanket anti-memoir sentiment is like any generalization. Those who hold them are bound to be wrong. No generalization holds up to even a single second of critical thought, not when it's about people or places or art forms or food. We'd do better to banish such pronouncements from our mouths, and replacing them with open hearts and minds that recognize value, merit and worth can be found everywhere, even in the most unlikely places. After all, if we dismiss whole classes of things without so much as a second thought, who knows what kind of brilliance we might miss out on?

In praise of the Rumpus Book Club

2011-04-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

Reading is one of the more solitary pursuits a person can engage in, the kind of activity that lets a person sit happily by themselves for several hours with virtually no contact from the outside world, beyond the occasional bathroom break or the need to change positions so one's leg doesn't fall asleep. It's so solitary that many readers probably have memories of themselves as young children, their parents yelling at them to quit being so antisocial, and go outside and get some fresh air! (I certainly do.)

This isn't to say that solitude is bad. On the contrary, I'd argue that it's healthy to be able to stand your own company (or the company of an imagined author and their case of characters) for extended periods of time. But it does have one very simple, functional drawback.

Allow me to explain. In my lifetime I have read hundreds - actually, probably more like thousands - of books, and most of them I took up on my own. I developed some ideas and opinions over the course of the book, then laid it aside and maybe thought about it some more, then moved on to the next one.

But when I read a book along with other people and we discuss what we've read, I find myself engaging more deeply with the book, thinking about it longer and with more depth. I worried that this was because I was just some kind of shallow, surface reader, but I realized that it's not that I am not a careful reader. Rather, my limitations as a reader come from the fact that I am just one person. I bring one set of ideas, experiences and perspectives to each book, and everything I read is filtered through that lens of my education. This isn't because I am not thoughtful or imaginative. It's just because that's how my brain works. No matter how hard I think or how long I consider something, I will always be limited in this way.

But bring in more people, all of whom have read the same book, and have them discuss it, and suddenly the world expands from my one small little set of ideas into a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Ideas I would have never considered, not if I'd been sent to a cave for the next twenty years with nothing but a pen, a notebook and that specific book to work with, become beautifully apparent. Gradually the book becomes richer, more textured and varied with meaning. Its value as art increases exponentially.

Maybe not all book clubs are like this? I don't know - the only one I've taken part in is organized by the Rumpus, and the Rumpus Book Club is filled with extraordinarily adventurous, well-read, thoughtful omnivores of the literary variety. Everyone who loves to read should find themselves a group like this. I feel like I've become a better reader because of my group.

Sometimes they deepen my appreciation for a book, as with Lidia Yuknavitch's "The Chronology of Water." This stunning non-memoir is the most recent selection for the club, and while I felt little thrilling shivers of love and excitement as I read it, I was slightly turned off by some of the sex writing, which was very explicit. I was one of a couple of members to voice this opinion, but other book club members disagreed, and they made their cases as to why those passages were so essential to the story. I reconsidered with those arguments in mind, and when I re-read the book, I saw what they meant, and I understood and I agreed.

That challenge helped me with another book I've just finished reading, "The Gospel of Anarchy" by Justin Taylor, which also has extended scenes of explicit sexual writing. Had I not been part of that conversation about sex writing, those scenes would have possibly turned me off to the entire book, but because the other club members showed me new ways to look at sex writing, to see it as a revolutionary and essential part of art and literature rather than something overshare-y and TMI and slightly embarrassing, I was able to appreciate the scenes for the way they were written and the role they played in the larger story.

To use a different example...my first book with the group was "Richard Yates" by Tao Lin, which was a book I found so tedious and painful, I hated myself for reading it. This is how much I hated it - I closed the back cover, brought the book over to my laptop and entered the ISBN into my account on Paperback Swap. Like, I didn't even hesitate. The other members pointed out that the writing style, which was flat and affectless for everything from description of meals eaten to fights between the narrator and his girlfriend, was meant to be that way to illustrate this new way of communication via gchat and text messages. This point of view didn't make me hate the book any less, but it did give me an appreciation as to what exactly Lin was trying to do.

I used to consider myself a bit of an autodidact, as I used to spend hours and hours and hours reading by myself. I was in a relationship with a non-reader (talk about misery!) and I was interested in topics he disdained as liberal feminist brainwashing. (Seriously, wtf was I doing with this guy?) So I opted to read the books in isolation, and take whatever bits of information and ideas I could glean from them.

But then I encountered my first serious exposure to dialectical education, since, goodness, since I was in high school, I think. And even then it almost doesn't count because I was smart enough to slack and get away with it and also because I was too arrogant to think there was much of anything I could learn from other people.

The first time the whole concept of dialectical education really took hold with me was through the world of zines. I've written before about the crash course in critical theory I received at the figurative feet of zinesters back in the early 00s, the way you could watch other people work out complicated academic ideas on papers, using their lives as context, and then how they engaged other zinesters on those ideas. Those of us who took part in zine culture often had the privilege to watch cutting edge theory evolve before our very eyes. I did my best to educate myself by reading the books the zinesters included in their reading lists, then re-reading the zines with new perspectives and contexts.

Through zines I learned to become a much more critical person, and not in the negative sense but rather in the sense that I questioned more of what was told to me. I'd always had this part of me that reflexively questioned authority, but it was not a part of me that was appreciated or valued by those around me. But zinesters thrived on questioning authority. In fact, the entire existence of the zine subculture is one big giant "fuck you" to the authority of mass media.

I brought this newly honed critical sensibility to college, where I learned even more about the power of an education fueled by questions and discussions and opposing viewpoints and ideas. I learned that it wasn't necessarily a horrible thing for someone to point out that I was wrong or didn't know what I was talking about. It didn't mean that I was stupid. It just meant I was ignorant about certain things, which is fine. I'm a human - a limited, flawed human. Not knowing everything - or even knowing a small fraction of everything - is kind of expected.

(In fact, I find that to be a pretty positive quality, both in myself and in others. What I do find obnoxious are people who don't know when they don't know something, or maybe even worse, those who refuse to admit when they don't know something.)

This appreciation for learning among others and the way it makes me a fuller and more rigorous thinker is what makes me yearn to join a graduate program (where I'd like to study writing, rhetoric, literature and critical theory). Sure, I could read a million and a half books on my own, but my engagement with those books will always be limited by the narrow confines of my own perspective.

Yesterday my husband and I were talking about the ways people learn best, in the context of his job as a counselor, and how he's found that people are most likely to absorb ideas if they come to them on their own. I respect and understand this, and even to a certain extent agree. But at the same time I realize I have lost the arrogance that fuels that kind of intellectual mulishness. Nowadays I don't care if I come to an idea on my own or not. What matters to me is simply that I eventually find my way to the idea. Whether that happens in a group or on my own is immaterial to me. I just want to understand as many things as possible, and I'll do whatever I can to make that happen.

Feminism in the newsroom (and everywhere else)

2011-03-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

I have often had moments where I felt envious of those who work for feminist publications like Bitch or Ms. or make/shift, or feminist writers who make a living writing books or publishing blogs. They are all doing something to further the Cause, they are being visible voices for gender equity in the media marketplace, they are being Feminists with a capital F.

But then yesterday, the New York Times published an article that shook me out of this way of thinking and reminded me of the wrongheadedness of thinking the only kind of feminism that counts is Professional Feminism.

Reporter James C> McKinley Jr. covered a horrifying story out of Texas, about a group of young men who gang-raped an 11-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer. It's the kind of story that, even if just written from the affidavit released by law enforcement, would be enough to make one want to give up on all of humanity.

But then McKinley spoke to a neighbor who knows some of the boys, and...well, let the victim-blaming begin:

…the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s

Totally germane to the story, right? The story about grown-ass men gang-raping a child, right? As if her attempts to live up to the mass-media generated, hypersexualized images of girls had to have played a role in what happened to her? As if girls who are trying to figure out their sexuality are just begging to be gang-raped? As if men who see half-naked young girls can't help but gang-rape them?

Obviously this is a completely repulsive piece of reporting, and people are rightfully taking the Times to task for letting this slide. But while others have talked about how this is just another example of rape culture playing out in public discourse, I want to talk about how this could have very easily been avoided had someone with even a modicum of understanding of feminist thought had touched this story at some point.

Now I don't know how many people had to give the okay to this story before it went to print, but I imagine quite a few had to give it the okay - the managing editor, the reporter himself, the editor the reporter deals with directly, maybe a copy editor, maybe a web editor? A lot of people saw that article, yet not one single person saw that passage and gave it the good ole Media Ethics 101 once-over and said, you know, what little context this information adds to the story does not outweigh the damage that it could cause, not just to the girl's well-being but also to the issues surrounding reporting on sex crimes in general.

And you know what I think? I think that, had one of those people been a self-identified feminist - or at the very least, a feminist sympathizer - we would have never have seen that passage.

Some might argue and say, well, that's what the sources said! Yes, that's what the sources said, but you know what else? The sources probably said a lot of other things, probably spoke for 20 or 30 minutes or maybe even longer, but you don't see reporters and editors including every word the sources say, simply because the source said it. Otherwise we would be printing transcripts of sources as they rambled on and on and said inane, cliched things and punctuated their sentences with "um"s and "yeah"s and "you know"s, and readers would fall asleep and cancel their subscriptions, because that shit is not only boring, but it's totally uninformative.

The entire point of being a reporter and an editor is to gather information, sort the chaff from the wheat, and then put it all together in a way that is easy for the reader to understand while still remaining true to the overall story and making efforts to be as fair as possible about it.

So the reporter and the editor had this whole mess of information they gathered over the course of their investigation - interviews with sources, public records, previous news articles - and they had to take all of that data and winnow it down to what they thought would be most important.

And guess what they thought was one of the things that was most important? That the girl was dressing like a slutty slut and liked to hang out with older boys.

Yeah, I feel pretty confident that had a feminist been involved anywhere along the line in this story, that would never have been printed. I feel pretty confident in saying that if something like this had been circulating in my newsroom, I would have said something. (And there have been times in the past that I have.)

See, as important as high-profile Professional Feminists are, the fact is, a lot of the work being done in the trenches isn't being performed by them. Certainly this is not meant to undermine their work, but to make the point that it's one thing to blog about a victim-blaming news article after it goes to print, but it's another thing entirely to be in a position where you can quash it before it even gets out.

Sometimes it is very easy to get caught up in the big battles that play out with big media names, and to think of activism as something that only happens with marches and petitions and signs and letter-writing campaigns. But isn't it just as important that we be willing to act upon our ethical and political beliefs in our private lives? That we speak up when we see something that goes against our ethical beliefs in our workplaces? That we exercise every bit of power we have, whenever we have the opportunity to do so?

I'm not saying we all need to be crusading bra-burners waving copies of "The Second Sex" like talismans (although, frankly, that would be pretty rad), just that we recognize that the battles we encounter in our daily lives are just as essential to helping the cause of gender equity as writing books or speaking at conferences. Sure, it's not as glamorous and exciting, but it's just as important.

Beauty in the darkest places

2011-02-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

Last week was one of the more challenging times of my adult life, as my husband and I dropped everything to catch last-minute flights out to Los Angeles to be by the side of my beloved grandmother, who was hit by several critical health issues at one time. We spent large chunks of time in a hospital room in Glendale, then later in the courtyard of a shabby little nursing home in Burbank. We sat on patio furniture with broken seats and talked about how nice the sun felt and how pretty the stone fountain in the middle of the yard was and tried to ignore the fact that we were in the middle of a nursing home.

Most adults have to deal with this at some point or another; I don't think my experience is particularly unique. The grandparents are usually first to be hobbled by old age, then the parents. It's not easy, in fact it hurts like hell - or in the words of my Kiki, "like a motherfuck" - but it's as much a part of life as anything else we do. We do our best to fight it, like we can stave off the inevitable decline if we work out enough and keep our hair trimmed neatly and do crossword puzzles and get enough antioxidants in our diets, but the decline is always there, waiting for us. No escaping it, no matter how vibrant and full of life we may be.

It would have been very easy to languish in depression, and indeed that happened quite a bit, but I saw good things, beautiful things that warmed my heart and reminded me that the decline isn't the only thing that is inevitable.

Take, for instance, my grandmother's roommate at the nursing home, a wheelchair-bound woman by the name of Clementine. Every time I saw Clementine she was sitting in the hall by the door, wearing a baggy sweatshirt from a place like Vermont or Disney World, and she was singing. She didn't sing songs I would recognize; rather she trilled, her voice making beautiful noises, on and on, for hours on end. I came to think of her as a songbird, the human companion to the pair of lovebirds the nursing home staff kept in a cage in the rec room.

Brian stopped to talk with her, and found out that she once was a singer who performed with the stage name "Kim." (I thought that was unfortunate, as "Clementine" is a lovely name in its own right.) He told her she had a beautiful voice and she thanked him, and told him she loved to sing, that when she was singing she could never be bored.

I also watched carefully as my grandmother and grandfather interacted, and realized I was seeing one of the purest, most achingly beautiful manifestations of true love I'd ever witnessed. Now, my grandfather is not my biological grandfather - in fact, he and my grandmother are not married. He moved in with my grandmother nearly forty years ago, and he is at least twenty years younger than she is. (Did I mention that they live in L.A.?) They led very separate lives despite living together, and I had never had the opportunity to really see them together. My grandmother, who is dealing with the middle stages of Alzheimer's, had been rather cranky toward him in recent years, but I saw no signs of that now.

Instead, I saw my grandfather, who like many men of a certain age has a terrible time coping with sorrow and pain, tear up when speaking about my grandmother. I watched him as he gently brushed stray tendrils of gray hair away from her face, as he maneuvered her wheelchair out of the direct sun, as he held a straw to her lips so she could sip some cool water. My once-gregarious grandmother is no longer capable of speaking any louder than a whisper, and when I saw her she was always anxious, wanting, scared, confused. He sat closely to her and listened to everything she said, and he did so with a look of love and tenderness on his face.

My heart shattered about a million times just watching the two of them. It was already pulverized from holding my weeping mother, and from my own intense feelings of loss, but to see my grandfather treat the woman he loved with such honor and dignity, even in the midst of what many might call a most undignified situation...it melted my heart. It made me want to be that giving toward my loved ones, should the situation ever demand it of me.

The final beautiful thing that came out of this painful, ridiculous week was spending some time with my grandfather. I am sorry to say that, until last year, I had not seen him since I was 14 years old, and then again before that since I was a knee-high ankle-biter. I'd always loved my Grandpa Tom fiercely as a child, but I never knew him as an adult. He was always just this presence in my Grandma Kiki's house, a funny one who seemed to adore me, but I never knew more about him than that.

But over the last week, my husband and I spent many hours with him, in the front room or on the patio of the Burbank house he shares with my grandmother, and we talked. We talked politics, we talked work, we talked family, we told stories, we watched poker and American Idol. He played the guitar for me. He complimented us tremendously, calling us a "brain trust" and saying he was happy I'd met someone as smart as me because it gave me room to be creative. I blushed hard at that, blushed at many of the things he said. He's very proud of me for working in news and for writing a book, and he told me about his own youthful forays into novelist-dom.

At one point we discussed "Ulysses" by James Joyce, and I said I'd never read it but I had wanted to. He said he tried to read it twice but then he gave up, until he decided to get "one of those black-and-yellow books" - "Cliff's Notes!" I interjected, laughing - and re-read it with that as a companion. He said it was only then that he got it, and that he could see how brilliant the book was.

I had to laugh because I had had the exact same experience with William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying."

The day before I left, my grandfather had a present for me. It was his copy of "Ulysses," and along with it, the Cliff Notes he'd used to help him understand the book. I thanked him, and told him I would make a point to read it before the year is over. And I will. Even if I struggle with every page and I don't understand a lick of it and I find myself cursing Joyce until he comes back to life just so he can tell me to shut the fuck up, I will read it and I will love it, because it will remind me of my grandfather.

Grief, guilt and survival in Roy Kesey's 'Pacazo'

2011-02-06T09:00:00.001-08:00

I'm a member of the Rumpus Book Club, which is a fabulous online book club that anyone who loves literature and has $25 a month to spare should join. I wrote this about Roy Kesey's "Pacazo," which is the first took I've read since taking part in this club that I can honestly say I loved.

----

People say one goes “insane with grief,” that grief deranges the grieving. Joan Didion wrote an entire book in which she described her year of “magical thinking” after the loss of her husband, in which she was convinced that, if only she could perform the correct ritual, her husband of 40 years would walk through the door and sit down at the dinner table. If she could do the right things and say the right words, his sudden death would have never happened.

The narrator of “Pacazo,” John, spends much of the book immersed in this kind of magical thinking. He is obsessed with the idea that, if he can somehow deconstruct the site of his wife’s brutal beating and rape enough, if he can pluck enough pieces of worn shoe leather and shards of glass from the ground, he may somehow be able to find his wife’s killer and thus undo the horrible wrong that has been committed.

John’s derangement is amplified by the acute sense of responsibility he feels for his beloved Pilar’s death. Her family blames him for letting her go alone to the market late at night, for being so slothful and lazy and self-centered that he could not accompany her, and he does not disagree.

The dual burdens of grief and guilt would be enough to cause anyone’s mind to fracture, and that is exactly what happens to John. He cannot go through a single day without being dragged aside by thoughts of his wife, of his wife’s killer, of the conquistadors who committed unspeakable acts that were not all that different from what was done to his wife.

John sees violence everywhere, not least of all inside his own heart. Before the story is done, he beats up what seems like half the taxistas in Piura. Those brutal beatings are not even the worst of what his obsession demands of him. At moments he embodies that famous quote by Nieztsche, in which one is chided not to stare into the abyss for too long lest one finds the abyss staring back.

But for all of his flaws, John is mostly a decent man, the kind of person I desperately wanted to see succeed and do well, and whose every backslide into madness was greeted by an equal and opposite sense of despair and frustration on my part. Here is a man who has many reasons to live – a charming, inquisitive daughter; friends who stick up for him no matter how often he screws up; a job that allows a certain amount of leisure without demanding too much from him – yet his obsession is always there, like land mines beneath the foliage, waiting to be tripped over and detonated.

Toward the middle of the book, during the catastrophic deluge of El Nino, it seems as though John’s liberation is imminent. His talismans from Pilar’s crime scene are washed away, as is all of the research on his failed attempts at a doctoral thesis. Much like the Great Biblical Flood gave God the chance to wipe the slate clean and try once again to make things right, John is given a very literal chance to start anew. It seems for a time that this is exactly what will happen, and it does, but not before John commits some atrocious acts of his own.

This is what I took away from the book – that grief and guilt can destroy us, but we have the power to snatch our lives away from that destruction through friendship, family, love. But part of what makes “Pacazo” such a beautiful book is that someone else who reads this may very well have a different take on the story. Many book club members focused primarily on the way the book describes the process of building a narrative to make sense of one’s life, because without doing so, the world can seem like a place of unrelenting, senseless brutality with no larger point anywhere to be found. I like that interpretation, too. It reminds me of my favorite Didion quote, one that is apropos of just about everything: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

This is ultimately what “Pacazo” is about – finding a way to live in a world that seems determined to destroy. Whether that is through stories or through history or through magical thinking or through the love of a child, we all have our ways of beating back the encroaching sense of meaninglessness. We all have our ways of smoothing out a corner of the chaos to make space for ourselves. It's what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.

Some thoughts on books that are triggering

2011-02-02T16:14:00.001-08:00

I learned about the controversy surrounding Bitch Media's feminist YA reading list earlier today when scanning my Twitter feed, and as I had thought the idea of a feminist YA reading list was a really fabulous idea when I first heard about it, I was curious to see what all of the furor was about.

In case you don't know about this, here's a quick synopsis. The Bitch ladies posted the list to their blog, and some commenters protested the inclusion of a couple of books that they said were triggering and promoted rape culture. The curators of the list said they re-read (or in some cases, read for the first time) the books over the weekend, and then they decided to take the books off the list. Some YA authors caught wind of this and now a bunch of them are demanding to be taken off the list. Comparisons to small-minded school boards banning books like "Heather Has Two Mommies" have been tossed about. It's kind of a mess, as dust-ups in the blogsphere are wont to be.

(Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has a pretty thorough take on it, but if you are like me, and you dig reading source documents, just go read the original thread yourself.)

Aside from the question of whether or not Bitch Media is just a 21st-century feminist version of all the school librarians who yanked "Huck Finn" off their shelves for containing the n-word, I'm really interested in this idea of reading material that is "triggering."

For those who aren't clear on the concept, the idea is that there are certain images, ideas, words, whatever that trigger a series of physiological, emotional and mental reactions in people who have suffered trauma of some sort. In feminist circles, triggering is usually used in reference to writing about rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, eating disorders, but you also hear about in situations involving, say, soldiers with PTSD who hear an engine backfire and find themselves feeling as though they are on the battlefield again.

I respect the way media can inspire a huge range of emotions and reactions within us, many of which might painful or traumatizing. That's why I bothered to include a page warning people who read my zine about the potential for emotional triggers when I wrote about my experiences with domestic violence. I had written about those experiences in visceral, raw language, because I wanted to bring the reader as close inside me as possible, so they could see and understand what I was saying as much as is possible.

That's one of the things that is so amazing about art and writing - it gives you a limited ability to inhabit another person's skin, something we are deprived of in a very physical, matter-of-fact way. It gives you the opportunity to try to imagine certain experiences as if you were going through them in this very literal, direct way. I mean, it's one thing to look at another person and try to imagine what it is like for them to experience something, but it's another thing entirely to actually know how a person experienced it. It's a good reminder of the limitation of our native imaginations, to know that just because we cannot imagine something does not mean it doesn't exist.

The difficult thing about this is that often, what it means to inhabit another person's skin often means inhabiting their pain. I don't have to tell you that this world ain't puppy dogs and rainbows all the time. I don't have to instruct you in all of the ways that people let each other down, that people hurt each other, that people destroy each other. It's impossible to live without collecting at least a few dings and dents along the way, and that's for those of us who are lucky.

It's this power to expand one's imagination and to stimulate emotions that makes me feel so torn about the idea that triggering books are to be avoided de facto. On one hand, people who have been traumatized should not be forced to relive their traumas over and over again, as if an emotional wound can be healed simply by re-traumatizing it until scar tissue hardens over it.

On the other hand, how many of us actually find something healing about reading stories about people who have gone through similar experiences? How many of us have found new ways to look at the things we have gone through and alternate ways of coping by reading zines, books and blogs about our specific traumas? I know I have, and I continue to do so. If only because it helps me feel a tiny bit less alone. Certainly reading those books and zines was emotionally painful for me - and I often found myself crying, feeling a bit panicked, heart pounding, palms sweating, fits of barely restrained rage, the whole deal - but afterward I felt wrung out, exhausted and peaceful. It is ultimately cathartic.

So I have to ask, are we depriving women and girls of a valuable tool of healing when we say, no, we don't recommend you read this because it might make you feel painful things? And beyond that, are we denying the whole point of art in the first place, which is to make us feel and think? Or would we prefer only to encounter things that make us feel good and think happy things?

And what's more, once we survive rape and violence, does this mean we are now too fragile to be confronted by shocking and painful things? Must we always be protected? Are we always and forever damaged goods, ruined for the world around us? Is real and complete healing never possible? Or are we always at the whims of the trauma inflicted upon us by others?

I am sure the answers to these questions differ from person to person, and I wouldn't want to say that simply because one thing is true for me, it is therefore true for everyone. But I do think these questions are worth asking.

Why become a writer?

2011-01-27T09:19:00.000-08:00

Reading this post at HTMLGiant has me thinking about my own history as a writer, and how it wasn’t something I chose as much as it was something that just kind of forced itself on me.

I mean, if you had asked six-year-old Caitlin what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said a pediatrician or an astronaut. The answer to that question changed as I grew up - movie director, President of the United States, child psychologist, lawyer - but never once did “writer” show up in my list. I guess it just never occurred to me that people could become writers, all of the evidence on my bookshelves notwithstanding.

But I look back, and there were signs all along. The notebook my third-grade teacher gave me so I could have some place to write poetry. The assignment in eighth grade that turned into a 20-page short story, returned to me with an A and a scrawled “you really got into this, didn’t you?” The essays about summer vacations my teachers always took me aside to tell me they enjoyed reading. The literary analysis of Hemingway’s novels that ran twice as long as the mandatory page count.

My teachers lavished me with praise, but never once did they take me aside and say, “You know, people grow up to do this. You could, too.”

I’m sorry to say I didn’t get much encouragement at home. More than a few times I proudly offered my essays to a parent, only to be mortified when they laughed at the big words I used and made fun of the ways I described things that had happened or, once, scolded me for trying to make others feel sorry for me. Rather than seeing writing as this gift I had, I quickly learned that it meant opening myself up to ridicule and embarrassment.

Even still, the writer inside refused to give in. She found other ways to get what she needed. She wrote in journals and scrawled letters to pen pals in other states while laying on her stomach in her bedroom. She kept using schoolwork as an excuse to write, even though she learned to stop showing her papers to her parents. The part of me that was a writer was the most vibrant, sparkly part of myself, even if I refused to acknowledge her.

I didn’t decide to become a writer until a few years ago, when I enrolled in journalism school. I still didn’t believe enough in myself as a writer; I needed some sort of professional pretense for devoting myself to what I was coming to realize was one of the things I loved most to do.

I still struggle with it at times, with feeling like it’s not a legitimate way to spend my time, like I’m not talented enough or hard-working enough or creative enough to even bother, not when there are so many brilliant people out there churning out pages upon pages of beautiful writing, some of it achingly so. Some of it is so gorgeous I find myself seething alternately with jealousy, then with self-hate for feeling jealous of another’s hard work and creativity, then back to jealousy again.

But what can I do? I can no more not write than I can not breathe or eat. It’s part of who I am, who I’ve always been. I hate to say that, because it sounds so melodramatic and pretentious, but it’s true.

Note: I initially posted this on my tumblr but I think it fits here as well. I'm curious to know, from anyone who reads this - why did you become a writer or an artist or a poet? Was it anything you chose, or are you like me, one whose vocation chose them?

On change, goals and personal triumphs

2011-01-16T13:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning, I was standing on the streets of St. Pete Beach listening to the running playlist on my ipod. I sometimes listen to punk rock but I mostly like electronic dance music, like trance and breakbeats, but also some of the 90s electronica that was really popular when I was in high school, like the Crystal Method and Propellerheads and the Chemical Brothers.

So I was standing there in my shorts and technical shirt, stretching my hamstrings and listening to Ferry Corsten and Tiesto, when I was struck by the alternate path my life had taken. Five years ago, on that very weekend, odds are good that I would have been listening to the exact same music, at the exact same time, not ten blocks away from where I stood.

The difference? Rather than preparing to run a 5K race, I would have been coming down from a night of, uh, let's call them chemical amusements. (Think about the music I was listening to, and draw your own conclusions.) And by the time I finished my second race of the morning, I would have been downing beer after beer, sometimes chasing other chemical amusements, in an attempt to soothe my nerves enough so I could finally fall asleep.

The vast gulf of lifestyle that separated my former drug-abusing self from my current incarnation as a distance runner was only highlighted when I crossed the finish line of the 5K and saw that I had finished it in less than 24 minutes.

Once I caught my breath I nearly burst into tears, I was so shocked.

I flashed back to my first ever 5K, which I ran four years ago. I was still smoking cigarettes, still smoking other things, still eating junk food and drinking heavily almost every night. I ran the whole thing without stopping (although it was extremely painful and agonizing and I hated every second of it).

I was pleased with myself, but I kept looking around me and seeing all of these sleek women with their muscular quads, women who could run a 5K without feeling like they were going to heave their guts out at the end. I wanted to be like them. I wasn't satisfied to be at the end of the pack. I wasn't satisfied just to finish. I wanted to be good.

"I want to run a 5K in less than 25 minutes one day," I told B.

"I know you can do it, but..." He looked at me. "Most people can't smoke occasional cigarettes and run 25-minute 5Ks."

I knew he was right but I didn't know it. I figured that, as long as I wasn't doing hard drugs anymore - because there was a time when I wasn't just abusing myself, I had chained myself to the back of a truck and sent it driving along a rocky dirt road - I would be able to run as fast as I wanted.

It took several months before I finally gave up the cigarettes - even the single smoke while out drinking with friends - and another few months before I ditched the heavy drinking. And then it took another couple of years to stop eating garbage, cheeseburgers and chili cheese fries and the like, and to start being consistent with my running.

But once I did these things, a curious transformation took place. I realized one day, as I was bounding around one of the dozens of ponds in my neighborhood, that I was actually enjoying myself. That the very act of running felt good. It wasn't just some torturous drudgery I did so I could stay healthy. I felt alive, like a little kid again, like I was spending a day at the playground on the swings and monkey bars.

I'd forgotten how pleasurable the sense of pure physical motion could be. I had been an athletic girl in high school, but when I became a party girl, I lost all of that. I still considered myself a hedonist but it was a very cheap, empty sort of hedonism that always left me feeling like my premature death was just a few steps away. Running was the exact opposite - it was hedonism borne out of hard work, that always left me feeling more alive and vibrant than when I started. It was true pleasure. It was joyous.

My pleasure and my joy had paid off with actual accomplishments, the kinds of things I wanted to do but was never sure I was capable of. I viewed women who ran 5Ks in 23 minutes as these exotic, powerful creatures, like cheetahs in human form. And now I am one of them.

B has undergone a similar transformation in his life, although I daresay his is more marked than mine. He sobered up ten years ago this past Christmas, and since then he has run eight marathons, including New York and Chicago. He does not drink at all, where I will still drink beer and wine regularly. He gets his eight hours of sleep. He eats fruits and vegetables and loves them.

And he has also had one of those parallel epiphanies. Several years ago, he lived in San Diego, and he'd stay up all night drinking and doing other less savory things. The morning of the marathon, he'd take his beer and cigarettes outside, and he'd sit on the curb and scoff at the marathoners. What a bunch of idiots, he'd think. Why would anyone want to do that to themselves? And he'd take a swig of his beer and a drag off his cigarette and cough.

A few years later, he found himself in that exact same spot, except now he was running in the marathon. He ran past that spot and saw the ghost of himself sitting on the curb, a half-empty beer in one hand, smoke curling up from a Marlboro Red in the other, and he laughed.

A parallel self abandoned. A slow suicide averted. I know why he laughed, because I did the same thing myself just yesterday. Every time I put on my running shoes, every time I step out the door and run down the stairs to the sidewalk, every time my feet rhythmically pound the sidewalk for miles, I see the ghost of the girl I once was, falling farther and farther behind me, until one day, she'll be gone.

Discipline and sacrifice, or why I find it easier to run 5 miles than write 500 words

2011-01-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

The last-updated date is staring at me like a reproachful rebuke. Yikes. It's been THAT long?

I am not really sure what happened, but my writing habits kind of crumbled on me over the past couple of months. I kept berating myself, telling myself I was lazy and undisciplined over and over again, like having the worst memories of parental interactions from my childhood on endless loop in my head, and it would send me down this ridiculous shame spiral until I could not figure out why I even bothered to call myself a writer in the first place.

Two seconds of self-analysis blew that all apart, though. The truth is, I work hard, and I am consistent about it. I could not have run a marathon, or improved at running, or graduated with honors, or completed a thesis as an undergraduate, or been named employee of the year if I was an undisciplined, lazy slob.

Upon further analysis I realized that my utter and complete failure to write anything longer than a Facebook status update isn't related to some sort of personal deficiency, but rather something much simpler - it's scary.

I know how ridiculous that sounds, but allow me to parse it out:

When I run, it's just me running against me. Sure, the first mile usually hurts a bit, and I am almost always nervous before a race, but no one is counting on me to perform a specific way. No one is watching me and expecting me to be amazing. Frankly, the fact that I am just out there as a runner who tries her best and is always working to improve is enough for me.

Writing is a different story. When you write - and especially when you do the kind of personal/memoirish writing I like to do - you might as well stand up naked in a crowd of strangers and ask them to pore over the cellulite on your thighs, the zits on your ass and the stray hairs on your chest. It's intimidating as all hell, and that's without dealing with the fiesta of rejection that accompanies any attempt at publication.

I sometimes have shitty days as a runner, like today, which started out badly, with tight hamstrings and a late start, and continued on until I found myself in a downward spiral of suck. By the fourth mile - of what was supposed to be an eight-mile run - I was wondering if maybe I am not half as good of a runner as I once thought I was. But I almost always come back from those horrible runs with a renewed desire to do better.

With writing I am constantly plagued by self-doubt. Constantly. It sucks. I actually get a lot of really nice praise for my writing, but I've also gotten feedback that my writing was too unfocused, too boring, too personal - feedback that might very well be true - and it devastates me and it makes the entire prospect terrifying. I don't think I'm alone in this, am I?

But, as with running (or really, just about anything that is worthwhile in life), the only way to get better is to keep doing it, over and over again, no matter how scary or painful it is. And if I want to be a better writer, the only way that is going to happen is if I am disciplined about it. Sure, I can always just quit writing, just not do it, but that's not an option. When I don't write, I feel anxious and frustrated. Quitting is not an option.

I thought about all of this while watching "Black Swan," which has a lot to say about the tension between technique and emotion when it comes to the creative process, and the way fear can fuck the whole enterprise six ways to Sunday. The lack of self-consciousness is necessary for transcendence, says Tomas, the tyrannical director of the ballet company. Fear crushes brilliance like a cool breeze snuffs a candle, and all that. All things I need to keep reminding myself about, every time I sit down to my keyboard with the goal of writing.

But more than that, I thought about the discipline required of artists, the dedication required of anyone who takes their creativity and their art seriously. I thought about the sacrifices they have to make, and the sacrifices I'd have to make. Maybe one fewer hour of sleep, maybe less time with my husband, maybe less time on TV or tumblr or Facebook, maybe fewer home-cooked meals. They are rather small sacrifices, especially when contrasted to the sacrifices I've made for the sake of running (fast food, cigarettes, the ability to come straight home and veg out after a long-ass day at work).

In the end, I keep coming back to that Tom Hanks quote from "A League of Their Own" which I am way too fond of repeating: "It's supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great."

If I am serious about any of this shit - writing, running, whatever - I can't expect it to be easy. I have to expect that it is going to be hard, because the only accomplishments that have ever been worthwhile have been the ones I had to work my ass off for.

2010-10-24T13:01:00.001-07:00

I spent the last two days reading Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus, and then followed that up by reading the Girl Culture issue of SPIN, which a friend informed me is on the internet, in its entirety. So basically, I spent large chunks of the past weekend immersed entirely in reminders of my life as a teenage girl.

One thing that jumped out at me, time and time again, were the hierarchies that existed with regards to what parts of girl culture were more authentically feminist, and which were pale facsimiles that replaced political action with personal reflection, and which were just blatant corporate ripoffs meant to capitalize on a fashion trend.

Now, I understand the critiques and I agree with them. What had started out as a genuine underground political movement of significance was co-opted, depoliticized, watered-down and sold back to mass audiences as vehicles of consumerism rather than revolution. I'm not saying anything new here, and riot grrrl/girl culture was and is not the only sociocultural movement to see their signifiers reduced to meaningless tropes and fashion statements.

But this time is really rubbed me the wrong way, and I think I know why - because I was one of those suburban girls whose access to the girl feminism of the 90s was mediated almost entirely by the mainstream media.

Dig, if you will. It's the early 90s, in one of the whitest suburbs of one of the whitest states in the country. And not only is it the whitest suburb, but it is also the most Republican, the most conservative, the most religious. It is so right-wing that Bo Gritz, a man known for bankrolling a failed one-man campaign to rescue POWs from Vietnam, actually had support for his presidential campaign. That I dared to even think of myself as a feminist when I was 12 or 13 years old is remarkable in retrospect, as it was a word I never heard said out loud, unless it was said with derisiveness and undertones suggesting something sinister and dangerous, much like "atheist" or "communist."

There was no such thing as "outsider culture" where I grew up. Many small-town kids say punk rock saved their lives. Well, I didn't even know what punk rock was. My understanding of punk rock was entirely informed by a single public-service announcement, one that featured the re-enactment of the rape of a young woman in downtown Salt Lake. Two men in Mohawks and engineer boots with As wrapped in circles drag a screaming young woman into an alley while onlookers watch passively, and then we are informed the two punk rockers raped the young woman. The ad asks the audience to call the police if they see anyone fitting the description of two men with Mohawks and motorcycle boots.

That was punk rock for me - two scary men who gang-raped a woman in the middle of Salt Lake City.

So when I learned about riot grrrl via Sassy it was kind of a shocking thing for me, to learn about punk girls who were anti-rape, anti-assault, anti-harassment and totally and completely pro-girl. It turned everything I knew about punk rock upside down on its head.

I started keeping my eyes open for possible riot grrrls, starting first with my suburban junior high school. I found nothing - not a scrawled word on a hand, not a flannel shirt, no ironic baby barrettes, nothing. The closest I came was this girl who wore a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt once a week, but her shirt was always clean and ironed and her jeans had no holes. I knew she wasn't a riot grrrl. I never saw anyone at the mall, at the grocery store, standing on the side of the road, at Lagoon. It all served to cement my suspicion that something like riot grrrl was reserved only for cool girls who lived in cool cities. Something like riot grrrl was off-limits to a Mormon girl from Utah - not that they would have had me anyway. I settled for admiring them from afar and taking what little I knew of them and planting those tiny little seedlets in my soul for later cultivation.

But then the much-derided depoliticized girl culture started to trickle into my life. It started with Liz Phair, and then Luscious Jackson, both of whom I'd heard of only because I'd had the good fortune to read Sassy magazine during its heyday. (I have also heard Sassy derided as part of that corporatizing, depoliticizing force, about which you can guess how I feel.)

And then came Alanis.

"You Oughta Know" was timed perfectly to coincide with my first heartbreak at the hands of a clueless boy I loved way too much for my own good. But rather than flopping facefirst onto my daybed and crying on the belly of my favorite Hello Kitty stuffed doll, I had a new way to look at the break-up - with RAGE. I was ANGRY and Alanis let me know that it was okay to feel ANGRY about something I had previously thought I was only supposed to mope about.

And then came Fiona Apple, who was the first artist I'd ever heard speak frankly about surviving rape. (Tori Amos came a few years later.) And then Gwen Stefani, who made being a girl seem not like soul-crushing preparation for the drudgery of being a woman and more like this really fucking awesome party that we all were invited to crash, and even the Spice Girls, for god's sake, who I unabashedly adored once I moved beyond my sullen, too-cool-for-this posturing.

Before I knew it, I was listening to Ani DiFranco and Hole in my bedroom, and then PJ Harvey and Sleater-Kinney in my dorm room at OU, and then Bikini Kill and Bratmobile while I traveled around Boston on the T.

My introduction to feminist theory followed a similar trajectory, starting with Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf when I was 15, heading off to bell hooks territory when I was 19, and then from there on out, picking up Amber Hollibaugh and Dorothy Allison and Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon and Leslie Feinberg and as many feminist theorists from as many schools of radical feminist thought as I possibly could while I tried to get a handle on my own ideas about things. (Which is still an ongoing process, and I imagine it will continue to be that way until the day I drop dead.)

My point to all of this is that I am really tired of seeing certain kinds of art and music and theory and books discussed derisively, as if the only kind of political awakening that is worth having is one that explodes fully-formed into existence, as if the only way to be radicalized is to be that way from the very start. It doesn't take into consideration someone like myself, who had not heard Bikini Kill until I was 19 years old but needed to hear those anti-rape, pro-girl messages long before that. And so who cares if I got that from someone like Fiona Apple or Tori Amos? Who cares that they were not as explicitly political? There was plenty of time for that later. What mattered now was finding music that was a life preserver for all the times I thought I might drown from the weirdness and anger I felt.

Political purity has its place, but when you are just trying to get through adolescence, you don't really care all that much about how corporate this thing is or how that thing lacks a political framework for collective action. You just want to not feel so goddamned alone, and anything that helps ease that, even a tiny bit, is worthy of respect.

Some thoughts on seeing the Flaming Lips live

2010-10-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

Last night the Flaming Lips came to St. Petersburg to play at Jannus Live, a venue that is easily in my top-20 list of why St. Petersburg rocks my face off. Seriously, it's an outdoor venue in the middle of a city, and it has trees! And beer only costs $5.50! A win in every possible way.

Rather than compiling my thoughts into a cohesive review, I'll just share the thoughts I had while I was watching the second-best thing to come out of Oklahoma (the best being me!)

1. The band played "She Don't Use Jelly," because they are evidently not snobs and they believe in respecting the things that brought them fame, even if that thing is a song that rhymes "Vaseline" with "magazines." They played this even though two-thirds of the audience was in elementary school when "She Don't Use Jelly" was a Big Deal, and thus did not know the words to the song. (I was not among those two-thirds. The song came out when I was a junior in high school. Yes, I am getting old, and yes I sang along.)

2. Listening to "She Don't Use Jelly," I had to marvel that such a song ever became a hit, let alone got any sort of radio airplay. It's a silly little ditty propelled by Drummer-Boy-style drumming, and Wayne Coyne has this wavering, purposefully-nerdy voice. But then it occurred to me that the 90s - and bear with me, I'm going to diverge on a bit of 90s-nostalgia here (told you I was old) - were a time when you could make some pretty weird-ass music and not be shunted off into obscure college-radio-land where only like six dudes in Big Black t-shirts knew who you were and would argue whether your band sold out when you signed to Merge or when you opened for Screaming Trees. I mean, we used to hear bands like Primus, the eels and the Butthole Surfers on alternative radio. Granted, they were some of the more mainstream songs those bands put out, but still - the Butthole Surfers! On the radio! Man, sometimes I really fucking miss the 90s.

3. For a few years I thought of the Lips solely as the "She Don't Use Jelly" band, until the day my ex-husband brought home a gag gift for me. He and a bunch of guys he worked with - Paul Oakenfold fans, the lot of them, if that tells you anything - had gotten a box of CDs at the office, and he gave it to me, smirking while he did so. I grabbed the CD out of his hands and shrieked - it was "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." I had heard fantastic things about the CD, and rightfully so, as it contains some of the prettiest, most emotionally resonant music I had heard in a while.

4. Which is why I nearly teared up when they played "Do You Realize?" as the encore. The song contains the lyrics: "Do you realize/That everyone you know someday will die/And instead of saying all your goodbyes, let them know/You realize that life goes fast/It's hard to make the good times last/You realize the sun doesn't go down/It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round." That song, coupled with the confetti falling on our heads and the bright lights of the stage and the swelling percussion, practically caused me to have a spiritual experience while standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers.

5. I was actually at the show alone, a fact that caused me no end of consternation and had me considering staying at home. The last time I went to a show alone, I was 19 and it was to see Liz Phair in Providence and it was under some really upsetting circumstances, and I felt so awkward and weird the entire time I was there, like everyone was looking at me and wondering who the big dorkface was who went to shows by herself. Thirteen years later, I was plagued with some of those same concerns but this time I went anyway. And I'll tell you what, I actually felt kind of cool being there by myself, because it was clear I was there to see a show and not to see or be seen. (Not that anyone who saw me would know who I was anyway.)

6. I had nothing to fear, because unlike every other general admission show I have ever been to in my entire life, the other members of the audience were unfailingly, beautifully polite. Usually people throw elbows on their way to get beer or they push your arm and cause you to spill beer on yourself or they step on your foot and then glare at you when you have the audacity to say "ouch!" Not this time. No, instead, people said, "I'm sorry, I need to move by you" and "I just need to get over here really quick, my apologies." When someone bumped my foot, she turned around and said, "Oh, I am so sorry!" I was flabbergasted by all of the close-contact kindness - until I shuffled past the merch table. There hanging on the wall, was a t-shirt that said, "Flaming Lips - Be Nice to Each Other." You have got to love a band that urges people to BE NICE. Not to break things or give your girlfriend rugburns because you are screwing her so hard or any of that nonsense. Just be nice! So refreshing!

7. Some of my favorite live-show moments have come when the audience sings along with the band for an entire song. When I saw U2 in 1997, I was part of a stadium full of people singing "Pride (In the Name of Love)." When I saw Wilco last year, everyone sang "Jesus Etc." When I saw Ani DiFranco, everyone sang "32 Flavors." Last night, everyone sang "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," and it was no less awesome. And I mean that in the literal sense of the word, that I was filled with awe by the sense that I had joined a stream of humanity that was all taking part in the same thing at the same time, that was all thinking the same thing and feeling the same thing. I wonder if that is what nirvana might feels like, where you lose your sense of yourself as an individual, and in exchange gain the joy that comes from being part of something bigger than yourself. I don't know but I bet it's pretty damned close.

8. The sheer amount of effort put forth by the band in their attempts to throw what amounted to a big old party for us was impressive, and touching even. I mean, at this point the big plastic ball, the people dressed as animals, the strobes and the smoke and the confetti and the balloons are pretty well-known, but even so, I imagine it would have been hard to be a jaded jerk standing in the midst of all of the confetti raining down on your head. I have to imagine, because I don't really know, as I make it a practice to avoid approaching the world as if I have already seen everything and so why bother. (Because honestly? How boring. Why not just kill yourself and be done with it if the world has so little to offer you.) And anyway, I'd never seen anything like that before, and it was really, really cool. I think even the crustiest hipster, even the ones who saw the Butthole Surfers when they had the lady that danced naked onstage with them, would have dug it. It would have been hard not to, especially after the big Jumbotron half-moon gave the entire audience a close-up view of the reverie in Wayne Coyne's eyes.

9. Oh, and did I mention that they make really good music? Because they do. I bet even without the spectacle and the party atmosphere, it would have been a really great show.

On tattoos and anarchic femininity

2010-10-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

Taking a break from working on my writing to make a blog post...

...but before I begin, can I just say that my tattoo has motivated me to write like crazy? Because I'll tell you what, the feelings that come about when I missed a day of writing but then would look and see the word "write" commanding me in dark, declarative letters on the inside of my wrist...it's almost as if it mocks me when I fail to spend time writing, like it's laughing at me for being so foolish as to get a tattoo of something I can't be bothered to do.

I realize this all sounds rather severe and perverse, and I would have agreed with you a few months ago, until I read that Victor Hugo used to give all of his clothing to his servant so he had to write naked, the idea being that if he had no clothes on, he would not leave his house and ignore his writing.

So you could say I am just following in the footsteps of my forebears.

But truthfully, it's like something strange happened, and I find myself writing better than I did before. Like, with better sentences and turns of phrase that are poetic without seeming forced. Does that seem weird? It does to me. But as long as it works, I shall question it no further.

----

So I titled this post "anarchic femininity" because I've noticed that lately I have been drawn to art and writing that tells the stories of messy, loud, unladylike women who stomp all over what it means to be a "woman" and leave masses of destruction in their wake. I'm talking about women who cry and scream in public, who sit with their legs splayed beneath miniskirts, who drink and smoke and swear and fuck with impunity. They let their makeup smear and they don't care - if they even bother to wear makeup in the first place. In recent days this means reading O Fallen Angel by Kate Zambreno, Middle of Nowhere by Nami Mun and tons and tons of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. It means that in my future awaits The Girl Must Die by Erika Lopez, Inferno by Eileen Myles, King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes and The Barf Manifesto by Dodie Bellamy. It means I am really, really into Jack Halberstam's theory of feminist negativity.

The thing is, true freedom means you not only have the freedom to excel but also the freedom to be a colossal fuck-up. That sometimes in a world like this the only thing that makes any sense at all is to completely reject it. That, as my husband often quotes, it is no great accomplishment to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

I know that many people say that one of feminism's great failings is that it gave women permission to adopt all of the worst traits of men. I'd say that critique has it backwards, and that one of the requirements of liberation is having the space to screw up time and time again, that we will not be truly liberated until women have the freedom to fail as much as they have the freedom to succeed.

Of course, just because I have these beliefs does not mean I am working to implement them in my own life. I have been that messy woman who screams like a banshee and walks around with bruises for eyes, and I didn't feel liberated by it as much as I felt off-balance, like I was on the verge of falling into the abyss and never finding my way out again (but truth be told this is because I was reacting to a rather messy set of circumstances and not because I was just being who I was). I like who I am now, a woman who gets enough sleep, doesn't drink too much, eats her vegetables and is very goal-oriented about her life. But man do I appreciate the bad girls of the world, the punks and the sex workers and the poets and the artists, the way they fuck shit up and kick down barriers and make everyone take notice of them. They make life a little easier for someone like me, who limits her bad-girl life to the page and the occasional tattoo.

My birthday present to myself

2010-10-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

I like getting tattoos that represent some part of my identity, and so this one speaks for itself. It is not only a symbol of my love and passion for writing (and notice that I chose "write" and not "writer," because I believe what a person IS is what she DOES) but it is also an admonishment, that whenever I am feeling sad or blocked or inspired or antsy or down on myself, the solution is always the same: WRITE.

On the ethics of zine reviews

2010-10-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Over the past two days I have seen two different opinions about zines and whether or not they should be reviewed. One school of thought says that zines aren't meant to be critiqued the same way as a book or a movie, and that they are entirely personal expressions of self, and that attacking a zine - especially one that is written in an attempt to heal from some pretty damaging life experiences - is the same as attacking the person. The point of a zine, in this perspective, is not to create some polished piece of media but to establish connections with others who might be able to understand where the zinester is coming from.

Then the opposing school of thought believes that zines should be seen as art, and that if you put something out into the world and you ask people to tell you what they think of it, you should not be surprised if not everyone loves your zine. This perspective says we should not treat zinesters like they are delicate little flowers who might shrivel up and die at the slightest bit of resistance, and that there should be nothing wrong with expecting more from a zinester. (One proponent of this perspective pointed out the irony of punks and social outsiders acting as though they are in need of having their feelings protected from any potential bruising.)

There was once a time when I would have agreed with the first perspective, and to a certain extent, I do. I mean, it can sting to write something really personal and to have someone critique it, especially if you had worked hard on something and you thought it was good. But this is the thing - I have gone through enough in the way of editing and critique to see that, while some people definitely use critique as a sneaky, underhanded way of tearing someone else down, most people who offer critique do so in the name of helping to make your writing better. In fact, any writer will say that critique is an absolutely essential part of creation, and that it is hard to get better if no one will help you see what you are doing wrong.

And, you know, if your goal isn't to become a better writer or zinester or rhetorician or rabblerouser, if your goal is just to spill your guts out into the void and then wait for someone to answer with a spilling of their own guts, then that's fine. If that's what your goal is, by all means, pursue it. But if this is your attitude when you put a zine out there, then don't be disappointed if people don't respond to you. Remember, a person is doing you a favor by reading your writing.

You know, I think that deserves its own paragraph, in bold:

A PERSON WHO READS YOUR WRITING IS DOING YOU A FAVOR.

The burden of effort is entirely on the writer here, and if you as the writer want people to understand you, you are going to have to put some effort into it. You are going to have to try to make sure your writing is legible and that it isn't a copy editor's nightmare and that words aren't running off the margins and that you can spell at least one out of every four words properly. I don't say these things because I am some mean-ass grammar fascist who runs around beating people about the head with a copy of Strunk & White and lecturing them on the proper use of the semicolon. I say these things because I think writing is one of the most important and critical and life-affirming things a person can do, and I want people who write to be understood by those for whom they are writing.

I am not a fan of those who brutalize others for the sake of art. I read about literary or artistic pissing battles, pieces of criticism that belittle the creator of art for any number of perceived sins, and I usually come away from that kind of criticism thinking, my god, that person must have a stick the size of the Leaning Tower of Pisa wedged firmly up his ass. That's not what this is about. What it's about is having respect for the person who takes the time to read your writing and to look at your art, and to do whatever possible to make sure you've given them an engaging, powerful, moving experience. No, we are not all going to be superstars and geniuses and brilliant, but we can at the very least be competent. I don't think I am asking too much when I ask that.

On keeping a journal

2010-10-05T16:04:00.001-07:00

(I'm probably going to switch gears with my blog, as I realized the way I was going about this was doing nothing but contributing to my already massive insecurities as a writer. Just as an FYI.)

I read "The Silent Woman" by Janet Malcolm earlier this week, and not only did I come away from it thinking that Janet Malcolm was a bloody genius and also that I was due to revisit Sylvia Plath and her art, but I found myself re-considering the whole process of keeping a journal. Plath was evidently a prodigious journal-keeper, and the excerpts Malcolm included of her journals fascinated me. She laid herself open and bare in the pages of her notebook, and in this kind of raw, impressionist way that I found very compelling.

I myself have a very fraught, complicated relationship to journalling. I was raised in a culture that put a lot of emphasis on keeping journals and diaries, not necessarily the way a lot of people do so today, where it is as much about mental health as it is about documentation, but rather for the sake of posterity, for the sake of genealogy. The idea of journalling within the LDS church seems to be a very practical way to keep you in touch with your forebears, so you don't think of them as simply dusty old folks rolled out of a backroom closet for family gatherings and then tucked away again with the nice linens and the fine china once the guests leave. You have a sense of the kinds of sacrifices they made and their feelings and their ideas and the way they spent their time and their interactions with others - all of the little bits and pieces of information that go into constructing what it means to be a person.

I didn't really understand this on a visceral level until I started researching an ancestor on my stepfather's side, who is this remarkable woman who was the first female doctor in the state of Utah and who was responsible for training hundreds of midwives and nurses throughout the western half of North America. (Oh, and by the way, this was in the 1800s. Her accomplishment is impressive by modern standards; just try to imagine it pre-electricity and in the middle of the salt-cracked frontier.) She was a dedicated journaller, and she was incredibly honest in her journals, writing frankly about her love for her husband and her distaste for polygamy and her struggles to reconcile her desire to be a good Mormon woman with her desire to be the only woman in her husband's life. Through reading her words, I've been able to bring her to life in a way news clippings and museum plaques and declarations from historical societies have not been able to do so.

But despite the importance placed upon journalling in the culture I was raised in, I never really took to it. My boxes of personal possessions are littered with notebooks that contain one or two journal entries, spaced a year a part, all of them starting the same way: "Dear Diary, a lot has happened since I last wrote in you..." I was hardly the most disciplined child, we'll put it that way. But laziness wasn't the whole story. Rather I knew the vulnerability that came along with journalling, the way that putting your feelings and your ideas down on paper could leave you exposed to the world, and consequently exposed to anyone who would use your words as weapons against yourself. Which has, unfortunately, happened to me, a few times. I have heard of other instances of people who were much more dedicated to their notebooks than I was, and who have also had their own writing used against them.

Journalling is a very powerful thing. Used properly, it can help us to know ourselves and to know each other. But it can also be wielded like a machete and used to destroy your sense of security in the world.

I've decided to take it up again, and to make a concerted effort to write in a journal on a daily basis. Not with the expectation that, you know, I'll become a famous writer, drop dea and then have them published. (God forbid. Besides, they would be insanely boring, with far too many passages about my fears of writerly mediocrity. Like anyone wants to read that.) Rather, I like the idea of honestly documenting my life, without having to think about an audience, the way I do with my blog or my zine or my manuscript, and just putting it down the way I see it, warts, zits and all. I like the idea of a space of raw, unvarnished truth, unmediated by fancy technology and editors and self-consciousness.

And I'll admit, there is a part of me that hopes that maybe, some day in the distant future, I'll have a descendant who gets curious about the people who came before her, and that she'll want to know about the way we were, not the way journalists said we were, or the way historians said we were, or what she saw in the movies or on TV or whatever is going to pass for mass media in the future. Maybe she'll read my journals and realize that, for all the changes that have taken place between her time and mine, what hasn't changed all that much are people themselves.

Paralysis by analysis

2010-09-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

I have a few minutes to spare before I have to go grate cheese and mince cilantro for dinner - I'm making this one-pot dish with black beans and corn and ro-tel and brown rice and it is THE YUM - so I'm just going to write a bit about some recent stuff that has happened with regards to writing.

Working on my book has become this totally discouraging process, where I sit down at my laptop and I spend an hour or two working on my manuscript and revising and editing it, and when I am done all I can think is what shit it all is. And it's true - it's all shit. What a frustrating place to find yourself in after six revisions and 21 months of work.

So I took a bit of a break and started reading memoirs - classic ones, not the cheeseball blogs-to-books detailing how one person spent a year living as a biblical shepherd who never used electricity or paper money - and I did so thinking that if I could see how really talented, brilliant writers did it, maybe it would help me storm through my writer's block, sort of like a literary giant Kool-Aid man.

It didn't help. All it really did was depress the fuck out of me. Reading Vivian Gornick or Isak Dinesen or Mary Karr did nothing but remind me that I was never going to write like Vivian Gornick or Isak Dinesen or Mary Karr.

So on top of the stuff I was already struggling with, things like voice and perspective and theme and constructing scenes, I was beating myself up for not being completely brilliant and literary and amazing.

I was complaining about this to my ever-patient husband, and he said I was suffering from paralysis by analysis. Basically, I had thought and deconstructed and analyzed myself into a corner and I had no idea how to find my way out. I do this sometimes, and it is almost always to my own detriment. This is no different. I had thought myself into a mess.

But last night I went to a zine fest, and I ran into people who had loved the zine upon which my book is based. It reminded me of the mindset I was in when I wrote the thing, how I just wanted to tell my story and how I wanted to share it with other people, but I wasn't desperately hung up on sounding literary or deep or stylistically sophisticated. I just wanted to tell a story that was emotionally resonant, honest and pleasurable to read. I had no pretenses; it was just me, writing.

And I've noticed that whenever I write with an Audience in mind - be it an audience of possible agents or publishers or editors or whatever - I try to write perfectly and professionally. And then guess what? My writing blows. None of the voice I've worked hard to develop shines through, because I've stripped it all out. I feel inclined to cut all stylistic choices, and then my writing reads like stereo instructions. It's like the second I become conscious of trying to write with another goal in mind - beyond simply writing - I freeze up and I write like crap.

So when I sit down to write next time, I am going to just. write. I am going to banish thoughts of publication and audience and literature and pretense, and I am going to just. write.

Easier said than done, I'm sure, but one thing is for certain, it's got to be easier than analyzing myself into paralysis.

The problem with Jonathan Franzen is not Jonathan Franzen

2010-08-31T15:23:00.000-07:00

Like many people I've been reading all of the stuff about Jonathan Franzen and "Freedom" and the various commentary and meta-commentary about lit critics and sexism and the publishing industry and what-have-you. I've been soaking it all in with a kind of perverse delight, because really, how often do you see BOOKS - and not just BOOKS but LITERARY BOOKS - occupy such a prominent place in the cultural landscape?

The last time I can remember such a thing happening, it ended with James Frey being publicly dressed-down by a fuming Oprah on national television, which actually kind of sucked for books (especially memoirs), because it came just as a bunch of other well-received memoirs were being revealed as quasi-memoirs (and by quasi-memoirs I mean "fiction").

This is different. This has encouraged debate over things like gender parity in the pages of the most prominent book reviews and why we seem to only reserve the designation of "Great American Novel" for books written by white dudes and just what the hell is the "Great American Novel" anyway? (I sincerely mean this. The phrase is tossed about so much, and with almost no qualifiers, to the point where I have no idea what it means. If someone wants to enlighten me I'd appreciate it.) So it's difficult for me to wholeheartedly join the choir of criticism, just because I am so grateful to see people talking about literature in a serious way.

I mentioned in a twitter conversation with a friend that I thought the real underlying issue at play was not so much a question of how deserving Franzen is as much as it is the paucity of mainstream coverage of books. Local newspapers have drastically slashed their book coverage in recent years, in some cases running reviews (and some of them syndicated) only once a week, in other cases not running them at all.

That's a loss not only for readers, who are exposed to a smaller range of books - I mean, how many times do I need to read a review of "Super True Sad Love Story" in one year? - but also for authors, who need that public exposure to sell books. And so when a dude like Franzen comes along and sucks up 90% of the oxygen in the literary room, it leaves everyone else gasping for air. No one should be surprised when people start feeling resentful and annoyed as a result.

Franzen's book may or may not be one of the best books published in modern times. He may or may not be the Great American Novelist. Who knows? Who cares? In my opinion, any time an artist or an entertainer or an anything is deemed The Best Ever, there are going to be people who disagree vehemently. And I think that is wonderful. I mean, how boring would it be if everyone agreed that the Beatles or the Stones were the greatest rock band ever? (Although I will cop to thinking that, yes, the Stones are pretty fucking great.) Dissent keeps art vital. It's a good thing.

But the problem is not that a few prominent publications have touched Franzen with such high praise. The problem is that Franzen is the ONLY one who gets this kind of praise. He's the ONLY one who gets this kind of attention. (I am not including the likes of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling here, simply because the attention they get is more about the huge amount of money they make and less about the quality of their writing.) There are hundreds, if not thousands, of talented writers publishing lovely, heartbreaking, ambitious books each year, and they have to fight for every bit of attention they get. They have to self-promote on Twitter and do interviews with lit blogs and hold poorly-attended book signings and produce embarrassing book trailers. They have to bust their asses to sell a thousand books, when a single review in a major daily newspaper can do the same thing and with no extra effort or humiliation or near-expert marketing abilities.

The answer is not to call someone else a Great American Novelist or to deem more books Great American Novels, because the issue isn't that Franzen was given these honors in the first place. These days any novelist who gets this kind of hype would have gotten the same kind of criticism. It's not about the novelist or the book. It's about one novelist getting so much attention while so many others, ones who are equally worthy, go ignored.

I don't know what the answer is, but I am pretty sure that Jonathan Franzen is not the problem.

----

There. I've thrown my hat in the ring. Now that the burning question of "What Would Caitlin Say?" has been answered, you can all rest at night.

My name is Caitlin and I'm an information junkie

2010-08-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

I half-jokingly said to my husband the other day that I was like a crackhead, and the internet was my crack. If my laptop is around, I feel compelled to open it and check my email, my twitter feed, my facebook page, clicking refresh like one of those little hamsters in a laboratory, banging away on a feeder bar for hours for my little jolts of pleasure, and doing so to the exclusion of things like companionship, food, sunlight, fresh air, etc. etc.

I say "half-joking" because I was laughing as I said this, but the truth is, I am deadly serious.

A lot of research has been done into the effects of constant access to information on our neurobiology and many researchers have indeed found that the omnipresent stimulation releases happy chemicals in our brains. This is hardly new information, obviously, and I don't mean to present it as such. But what is new is the way I've found myself responding to it.

See, I've been an internet junkie for a very long time now. I had an email address before most of my classmates even knew what the internet was. I remember dial-up, BBSes, telnet, gopher, Prodigy, all that junk. My first website was built using Geocities.

But the internet didn't truly start to wrap its binary fingers around my mind until I discovered two things: message boards and file-sharing. Prior to these two things, I could spend a couple of hours at a time working on my web sites or chatting on IRC, and then I could walk away to amuse myself by making a mix tape or watching MTV or talking on the phone with friends. (Oh for fuck's sake, this whole paragraph makes me feel like some ancient old biddy, finger-wag in process.) But then I realized I could engage in ongoing conversations about ANYTHING with a group of people, and soon I found myself spending hours, entire days, entire nights, on message boards like Smile and Act Nice or Hissyfit or Fametracker, talking about the annoying shit people did with girls and women from all over north America.

And I realized I had an inexpensive way to access all of the music I could once only read about in Alternative Press or Sassy, via Napster. Suddenly I could hear what Bikini Kill sounded like, or what the big deal was over My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. I could take part in a cultural conversation that had bypassed me by virtue of the fact that I lived in a smallish town in Oklahoma.

These things were so enjoyable to me that I spent all of my free time engaged in them. And my addiction was facilitated by my dot-com job, which set me up with a laptop, a high-speed internet connection, a cubicle in which I was expected to spend 12-14 hours a day answering email and an unlimited supply of Mountain Dew.

This was all in the late 1990s. But it wasn't until a few months ago I realized that, for all of the wonderful things I had experienced as a result of the internet - for all of the ways it had enriched my cultural understanding of the world - it had stunted me in other ways.

One of the first things I realized was that my ability to engage in sustained, complex patterns of thought had never been developed, and it remained undeveloped until I returned to college and took classes in ethics and law and critical theory, and then later wrote a 50-page thesis about media theory. The initial effort required in developing this ability was monstrous, and I thought I would cry sometimes from the difficulty of it all, but once I began to do the things necessary to nurture it - like refrain from drinking while reading my school work and closing my internet browser while writing - I realized that this path too led to another kind of pleasure, a deeper, more soulful pleasure that not only made me happy but also made me feel accomplished. And my mind responded to it the way a potted plant responds to the first droplets of water after going without for so long, by straightening up, brightening and looking for more.

Another thing I learned was that I had developed an aversion to reading anything long on the internet. I'm hardly alone in this; if I were, an acronym - tl;dr - would have never been developed to describe this. I noticed that I would start reading an interesting article, but then if I got to the bottom and saw pagination that surpassed 3 or 4 pages, or if I spent 20 minutes reading and realized my scrollbar had not passed the two-thirds point, I'd quickly lose interest and close my browser.

And finally, I saw that I, like most other people, would open multiple browser tabs (in fact, I have 12 open right now) and that I would click through them rapidly, never giving one of them more than a few minutes attention before flitting off to the next one. And some of the most blastedly addictive programs ENCOURAGE this, by putting the number of updates since you last refreshed in the title bar, ensuring that you will want to click on that tab, if only to see that someone has liked your status or you have received a mass mailing email from the Defenders of Wildlife or someone has posted a picture of their cat on tumblr. These sites want us to click refresh maniacally, as if we have tourette's of the pointer finger or something. They know our psychology better than we do, and they exploit it for page views.

So I've come up with a few strategies to handle this. The first is recognizing that I do in fact have a problem - how 12-steppy of me! - and being aware of it and taking steps to combat it. When I'm reading a long-ass excerpt of a novel that is soon to be released, and I catch my eyes jumping up to see if anyone has sent email, I immediately refocus my mind on the task at hand. (Or I just close the tab altogether.) I also try to limit the number of tabs I have open at any given time, by making a point to either read the tab so I can move on or bookmarking it for later use. Being aware of these tendencies is the first step to overcoming them, you know?

(I realize as I write this that there are a lot of connections to Buddhism, and specifically the concept of "mindfulness" in the way that I approach these things. I make an effort to appreciate what I am doing in the present, like writing this blog post or reading a book or working on my own writing, and if I catch my mind straying toward my email account or my facebook profile, I gently guide it back to the task at hand. It's meditation put to use in a 21st century context!)

The other change I have made in my life is to consciously appreciate "old" forms of media and to use new media to expand my horizons when it comes to things like books and music and television and movies and magazines. I make a point to buy books and magazines that don't have a lot of photos, and I read them. In fact, I subscribe to more magazines and literary journals than I ever have before, and I read nearly all of them. I've learned to take pleasure in thick novels, books like Of Human Bondage and Kinflicks and The Corrections, books that have scope, that track the minutiae of thought and experience and description in loving, painstaking detail. (I am even seriously considering taking several months to read Proust.) Books that would have once intimidated me with their size and their density, I now seek out and love passionately.

Our brains may be conditioned to respond to pellets of information, but we are also wired to luxuriate in deep thought and sustained contemplation. Our minds want both of these things, but our world has developed in such a way that just one of these modes of thinking has begun to dominate our way of life. Only through dedication, mindfulness and awareness can we combat the rising tide of overstimulation and carve out spaces for real, actual thinking.

I've spent most of the last decade and a half encouraging the hamster. It's now time to start taking care of the houseplant.

I want to write a novel

2010-08-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time reading about what you would call "the writing process" - probably almost as much as I read actual writing - and I particularly read a lot about writing fiction. It's strange that I would find myself gravitating that way, considering that I am trained as a journalist, I have only worked as a journalist and I haven't written a piece of fiction since I was 18 years old. For as long as I can remember, I've been spellbound by the real world, by the people that inhabit it and the events that unfold on its surface, and how they are often as strange and as beautiful as anything a writer could possibly imagine.

Which is why it is so strange that I want to write a novel.

I first had the idea that I would like to write a novel several months ago, when it occurred to me that writing fiction could be like going on an adventure of sorts, where I could live vicariously through these characters I create, and have the chance to live the kind of lives that are now outside of my reach.

Then I found myself having dreams, vivid, piercing dreams that left me near tears when I awoke. I found myself wishing I could do one thing or another, but knowing such things would never be possible for me. I found myself imagining different life paths for myself, different ways my character could have formed, different people I could have come into contact with in my life, different conversations I could have had. And I found myself considering the future, all of the good things and the bad things that await in that big void.

And then like that, I realized I wanted to write a novel.

It's gone beyond mere wanting, though. I told my husband this morning that I have started to dream about my characters. I think about them while I am showering, and when I am zoning out at work. I can tell you what they look like and how they talk. I see their interactions with each other. Their personalities are coalescing, and I find myself caring deeply about them and wanting them to do well even though I know they are going to be like all of us and find some way to screw up colossally.

I have long thought of myself as lacking in imagination, and yet here I am, constructing a tiny little universe inside of my mind.

I am trying to wait until I finish revising manuscript #1 before I begin work on manuscript #2. It is hard but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

just another day on the job...

2010-08-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Check out this email I just sent to one of our affiliates, pitching a possible story for them to link to:

-----
Good morning,

You might be interested in a story about a man who was arrested after police said he stabbed his roommate to death – as four children watched – and then drank the man’s blood. http://www.baynews9.com/article/news/2010/august/132542/Police:-Man-who-killed-roommate,-drank-his-blood,-arrested

Thanks, and have a great day.

----

Yep, just another day on the job. I swear, sometimes my life feels like a David Lynch movie.

Writing is not a finite commodity

2010-07-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling rather energized after finishing my zine and sending it to a few people. Say what you will about DIY media versus more established literary outlets, but there is no denying that elated feeling that comes along with finishing a piece of art and saying, fuck yeah, I did that!

So I have all of these ideas tumbling around in my head, but I'm trying to make a point to focus on them, one at a time, so I can actually get stuff done. (Don't say I never learned anything from the stack of adults-with-ADHD literature I plowed through several years ago.) And sometimes when I think about all of my ideas, and I think about all of the other writers out there, and how they all have a lot of ideas, and how we are all spending several hours a week clickety-clacking away on our keyboards in hopes of creating something that will speak to another person on the planet.

Such trains of thought always end the same way: I get completely overwhelmed and wonder why I ever bother, if I am just going to be one of those faceless, nameless clickety-clackers trying to carve out a little space for myself using nothing but cleverness and a decent vocabulary. I mean, how do you make yourself stand out? How do you differentiate yourself from so many other writers? How do you get others to take notice of you (and not for writing execrable prose or being a big fucking liar)?

(Seriously, what is it about art and writing that turns otherwise confident, capable adults into needy, whining infants? I'd like to know the answer to this, please.)

But not only is this line of thinking completely maladaptive, as my psychology-grad-student husband likes to put it, but it's also flat-out wrong. I mean, you only need look around my condo to see proof that this is ridiculous.

Check it:

I have four bookshelves, completely jammed pack full of books ranging from the Sookie Stackhouse novels to Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud. A.M. Homes shares shelf space with Diablo Cody, who sits next to Philip Pullman, who chills alongside Maxine Hong Kingston. And these are just the books I've kept!

Let's head into my bedroom - specifically my nightstand. On my nightstand sits five books: Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators by Jeff Klinkenberg, Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan and Girls on the Verge by Vendela Vida. Littered throughout my books are about a dozen zines I recently received from Parcell Press, and sitting on the floor next to my nightstand is a basket full of magazines.

What about my purse? My purse holds the most recent Paris Review, an issue of Cometbus and the 2008 Best American Non-Essential Reading collection. And in my bathroom? Several issues of the New Yorker, New York, Elle, Ms. and even an issue of Creative Nonfiction.

And none of this takes into consideration my browser, which in the past few days has read countless essays and articles and interviews by famous people like James Wood and about a dozen other people I've never heard of before.

Do you see where I am going with this? I read the way others breathe. The printed word is my food and water. And I like variety in my sustenance. I am not just content to eat the same tried-and-true box of Kraft Dinner night after night. I'm willing to branch out and give oxtail soup a try as well.

And I know that most of those writers (the good ones, at least), as well as a lot of non-writers, read with the same kind of passion. That's a lot of people who expect access to writing and storytelling, who consider it an essential part of life. And that means there will always been room for a writer like myself, or like yourself, to make a dent in someone else's consciousness.

Obviously this doesn't mean we can slack, like we can just toss off a poorly written short story and expect readers to fall upon it like a pack of ravenous hyenas, but if you've been writing for any period of time, you already know this. But I think it does help to keep a bit of perspective, and to remember that we writers are not fighting over a finite amount of attention. Yes, only a few of us will ever see publication in the Paris Review or have our manuscripts lovingly polished by editors at Random House, but let's not act like this is all a zero-sum game, like another's success is our failure. There has been a thirst for good, vivid writing since the cuneiform was invited. That desire will not be suddenly wiped away by the internet and video games.

All I Want Is Everything #1

2010-07-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

If this zine had a subtitle, it would probably be "Growing Older, Getting Tougher." Because that's pretty much what it's about.

All I Want Is Everything #1 is my first zine in six years, and my first zine since I turned my whole life upside down. (It was Saturn Return, I was 27 - I hear it happens.) In it you'll find essays about the following:

- Surviving domestic violence
- A letter to La Roux's Elly Jackson, in which I call her out for victim-blaming
- The intersections between Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and my life
- Thoughts on nostalgia for 1990s girl culture and riot grrrl
- My love of running
- Meeting one of my feminist heroes and being a total knob about it
- The fetishization of female weakness

All mixed in with a healthy dose of feminism, snark and fifty-cent SAT words.

All I Want Is Everything #1 is 56 half-size pages. If you want a copy, send me $3 via Paypal at saltonmyskin at gmail dot com, or you can email me at that address.

Some thoughts on race and "not relating"

2010-07-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

A reader submitted a question to the ladies of Racialious, about assumptions s/he makes about the race of characters in the books s/he reads, and what role the race of the reader plays in those assumptions. It's a very interesting discussion about privilege and race, but what really sparked my train of thought was an aside about white readers who complain about books with protagonists of color and how they "can't relate" to them.

I. Hate. This. So. Much.

Such a mentality smacks of laziness to me. Oh, you can't relate to a book simply because the protagonist doesn't look like you? You can't put in the two seconds of effort necessary to locate any common ground you might share with the characters by virtue of your shared humanity? Really? REALLY?

I've never understood this myself. Even as a child, I used to read books with characters of all colors and backgrounds - particular favorites of mine where Cassie Logan in "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" and the girl in "Island of the Blue Dolphins" - and I never once thought, "Gee, I don't really like this book because I can't relate to a teenage girl who was abandoned on an island in the Pacific Ocean for over a decade." No, instead, I read those books over and over again, until their bindings cracked and their front covers fell off and they became waterlogged and sticky from my spilled cans of Shasta. And in all of those repeated readings, I never once thought, "Self, I just cannot relate to these girls."

I mean, there were obvious differences between myself and Cassie Logan. I was a white Mormon girl raised in Utah in the 1990s, the daughter of divorced parents ensconced in a comfortably middle-class existence. She was the black daughter of sharecroppers in Mississippi in the 1930s. By the standards put forth by some of the aforementioned readers, I should have never been able to read this book, or relate to Cassie as deeply as I did. But I did.

Cassie was smart and tough, and she questioned things out loud, and she wanted to be grown-up and she refused to accept the role that had been carved out for her. Cassie was everything I wanted to be. I lived vicariously through her. I could totally relate to her sense of being plopped down in a world that didn't make a lick of sense to her, with restrictions that were unfair. Sure, I wasn't the daughter of sharecroppers, but I had my own issues, my own oppressive social structures to deal with. By the time I was old enough to read "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," I was already aware of divisions related to class and gender and religion in my own life. Cassie's story helped me understand that race was yet another thing that divided people.

See what I did there? I didn't obsess over the differences between myself and Cassie Logan. I didn't throw it across the room in favor of the latest Babysitter's Club book. Instead, I saw that Cassie and I had a lot in common, which helped me build an emotional attachment to her. And then that emotional attachment gave me a bridge into her world, which allowed me to put aside my own existence and to imagine what it must have been like to be a girl like her.

And that is what literature is supposed to do. It gives us a window into lives that are not like our own, and lets us see that we are not all that different from the people who live these lives. It doesn't matter what country we come from, what our skin looks like, if we are a boy or a girl, if we are rich or poor, because ultimately, we all hurt, we all get disappointed, we all feel love and we all experience joy. The common factors of our humanity are far greater than the things that divide us. We would do well to remember that, rather than insist on separating the world into People Like You and People Not Like You, because guess what? With the exception of psychopaths, all people are People Like You.

I will never read Mailer or Updike, and this is why

2010-07-02T06:54:00.000-07:00

A series of hilarious posts at Tiger Beatdown over the past couple of months, triggered in large part by professional anti-feminist/rebellious daughter Katie "I'd know if my friends were being raped!" Roiphe and her lament over the flaccid sexuality of today's male literary stars and how they lack the virility of dudes like Norman Mailer and John Updike, has me thinking a lot about those two authors in particular. (The latest is a review of Martin Amis' "The Pregnant Widow," entitled "Fond Memories of Vagina." Ha.)

This is the thing - I have never read a word by either author, and I am not really sure I care to. I mean, sure, I am willing to grant that both guys are very good writers, or that they have at least produced some very good writing in their lives, and that for me to have a full understanding of what we are dealing with when we talk about the first generation of American Phallic Literary Stars, I should probably read at least one of their books.

But I can't bring myself to do so. Not when I have yet to read everything by Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Connor, not when "Pale Fire" remains unread, not when I'm still trying to catch up on the acclaimed novels that came out last year that are just now making it to paperback (because, sorry publishing houses, but I refuse to buy hardcover).

Maybe if the subject matter was at all of interest to me, I'd reconsider, but I have to be honest with you, if I never read or hear another word about Man and his journey to Ultimate Manhood via the Vaginal Canals of Young, Nubile Women, I can't say I would consider that much of a loss. It's a narrative I'm already pretty familiar with, and I'd daresay I've already read the apex of that kind of literature in the form of W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" (which, by the way, is a fucking fantastic novel, one of my favorites, and so I am kind of loathe to lump it in with all of these books, simply because I love it so much), and besides, it's not like the world isn't saturated with that kind of conquistador-as-lover mentality anyway.

I'm ready for new narratives, narratives that are relevant to me and the world I grew up in. I wish I could find this rebuttal to Roiphe's essay, where the author talks about how the new breed of literary superstar grew up watching families dissolve as a direct result of the sexual liberation that Mailer, et. al., have embraced as the most important facet of existence. It's very true. The sexual revolution certainly freed up our society from many of the old constraints, but in the process it ushered in a new generation of latchkey kids and kids who grew up watching their parents take each other to court and kids who never really felt like they belonged in one place. So if we don't see wanton fucking as the pinnacle of the human experience, it's because we've seen the side effects. Hell, we've lived the side effects. We are the side effects.

So you'll have to forgive me if I never bother to pick up a copy "Run Rabbit." Besides, why would I do such a thing when "Infinite Jest" remains unread?

On rape and abuse in "women's novels"

2010-06-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

The other day I was browsing through the RSS feed for The Smart Set when I came across a review of Scarlett Thomas' latest book by the brilliant Jessa Crispin. In it she writes:

Every year when the Orange Prize announces its longlist, or its shortlist, or its jury members, or an anniversary, or is mentioned in the press, people start to write long opinion pieces about the sad state of women's fiction. This year's award will be announced next week, and we've been enduring months of such complaints. Women's fiction is too domestic, too small scale, too dreary, too often about rape or abuse. It's not ambitious enough, not universal, not epic.

It got me to thinking about many of the serious "women's novels" I've read recently. (And by the way, I have serious issues with the way novels written by women and about women are categorized as "women's novels." There's no such thing as "men's novels," now is there?) I read "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" by Vendela Vida, and "Breath, Eyes, Memory" by Edwidge Danticat, and "The Robber Bride" by Margaret Atwood, among several others, and the only one I could think of that didn't involve rape or abuse as a plot point was "Kinflicks" by Lisa Alther, which was written a quarter-century ago.

I am pretty sure I know what the standard reason given for this would be, at least according to some literary critics and aficionados. They would point to feminism, and they would say that it's vision of Woman as Perpetual Victim has so infiltrated the minds of modern women that it is impossible for us to create art that doesn't touch on these themes in some way. The idea seems to be that, until the feminist orthodoxy came along, women never felt like they had been pushed aside as a class, that they had been forced to deal with violence of the most intimate kind, and that they had been expected to just shut up and deal with it.

Furthermore, the categorization of such themes in literature as "dreary" and "small" seems to come from the perspective that writing about rape and violence and abuse is little more than an attempt at therapeutic navel-gazing, better left to tearstained bedside journals and women's writing groups that contain the word "heal" in their mission statements.

Obviously, I think this is bullshit. Not only have I written extensively about my own experiences with rape and abuse and molestation, but I think I have done so in a way that universalizes my particular experience and turns it into something that, while not exactly approaching art, certainly has the ability to communicate a facsimile of the experiences to the person who reads my words. (I've long considered myself more a communicator and less an artist, but I think that might just be my own insecurities at work.) Reading my writing on these matters is not pleasant, which is not the point, but I think it certainly makes the reader feel something, which is exactly the point.

Why do I write about these things? Because experiences like these have transformed me on a molecular level. They changed the hue of the world as I see it. I mean, it's difficult to see the world as a happy-go-lucky place of possibility when you know, at the age when most people are still learning to ride a tricycle, that people are capable of hurting each other in unspeakably awful ways. Obviously these subjects are not the only thing I touch on in my writing, but they do make appearances, simply because I recognize how important they were in my life, and as a result, how important they would be in the life of others.

For generations, men have written about their transformative experiences, and not all of them have been enjoyable adventures involving sex and travel and conversations with fascinating people. A lot of those experiences took place against the context of war, and war is vivid and brutal and painful, just like rape and abuse. Yet no one ever points to a novel about war and calls it out for being small and dreary, and for obvious reasons. War is epic, it changes the lives of thousands, if not millions, it remakes the geopolitical landscape.

But rape and abuse are no less insidious, and no less influential on the lives of those who have to deal with it (not just the victims, but those who love and live with them). It has changed the lives of thousands, if not millions. It has remade the emotional landscape of entire cultures.

My thoughts on the matter were perfectly summed up by Joyce Carol Oates, which makes sense, as she is Joyce Carol Oates and I am, well, me:

“If the lot of womankind has not yet widely diverged from that romantically envisioned by our Moral Majority and by the late Adolf Hitler (‘Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen’), the lot of the woman writer has been just as severely circumscribed. War, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes evidently fall within the exclusive province of the male writer, just as, generally, they fall within the exclusive province of male action.”

(I came across this quote in a NYT review of Jessica Stern's "Denial: A Memoir of Terror," which also incidentally holds rape at its center. As you can imagine, I can't wait to read it.)

It makes sense that, as more and more women take to the literary arts to express themselves, they will write about their transformative experiences. Few of us ladies have ever been to war, but a whole hell of a lot of us have been raped or have been punched in the face by a lover, and as a result, those will be the things we write about, because those are the things we know. One of the cardinal rules of writing is that you stick to what you know. Well, this is what we know.

Am I a writer or a marketer?

2010-06-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've taken a break from blogging recently for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that I am part of a huge project at work that has sucked the life out of me, much like a hyena sucks the marrow out of carrion. For several weeks, when I came home from work at night, I had enough energy to mash some buttons on my Wii and maybe bake a potato and wave limply at my sweetie before passing out.

But the other reason I've taken a bit of a break from blogging is because I realized that I started blogging because I was reading all of these writing blogs, and they were all like, If you want to get published you have to have a platform! You have to blog! Tweet! Blog! Tweet! Platform! Tweet! Blog!

And after a while I was just like, fuck that. By following all of this advice - which, by the way, I am sure is very good advice that has definitely helped other aspiring authors find agents and publishers and such - I found that soon, I was so invested in building my platform that I wasn't actually focusing on the thing that this platform was supposed to be all about: my WRITING.

I have often envied those prolific creators who can blog and write books and do podcasts and take part in readings and all that, but I have also come to the conclusion that I am just not like that. I have a finite amount of energy, and I have to dedicate a big chunk of it to my job, because it pays my bills and keeps me in food and health insurance, and I want to also dedicate a substantial part of it to my husband, my friends and my running, because all of that keeps me sane. That means that whatever is left over is dedicated to my creative pursuits, which for me, is writing.

So when I am faced with a decision about spending two hours of free writing time, I am going to either choose my manuscript, essays I hope will some day be published somewhere, or my zine - all things that feel very important to me, not least of all because they are tangible evidence of accomplishment. And then the blog falls to the wayside. I am fine with that, but I suspect I am committing a cardinal sin in the eyes of modern writers (and those who aspire to be like them).

This is the thing - somewhere along the line, it has no longer been enough to just be a writer, or to just be a journalist, or to just be an artist. If we wanted to try to make any kind of money doing these things, we had to learn how to turn ourselves into a brand, and how to sell ourselves like we are some kind of trendy new nightclub or well-built automobile. And I am okay with that...to a certain extent. I am okay with it as long as I think people remember that this whole business of "brand building" is supposed to be a means to an end, but instead, I wonder if people haven't gotten so caught up in the idea of marketing ourselves as writers that we actually forget to be writers.

I know things are different these days. It's really hard to make a living as a writer, and so many people are trying to be writers that often it seems like the question isn't so much about whether a person has talent or not, but how hard they are willing to hustle.

But I'm tired of the hustle. I just want to write, and I want people to read what I have to say. If I take to my blog, it's for that reason alone. Not so I can accumulate commenters in hopes of having something to show off to any potential agents who come calling. When I put out my zine, it won't be with the intent of catching the eye of booksellers and other writers. When I submit my essays to journals and lit magazines, it's not so I can pad out my resume. It's because I've got something to say, and I want you to hear it, and I even want to know what you think in return (so long as it isn't "Piss off, you talent-free hack".)

And with that, I'm reclaiming my life as a writer.

Dear college date-rape op-ed writers: STFU

2010-04-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

Many, many years ago, when I was just a wee Caitlin, I once had an op-ed column for the student daily at the University of Oklahoma. I landed the spot on the strength of my Maureen Dowd-ish column about Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton. (And with that, I officially feel old.)

Things fell apart pretty quickly, which in retrospect is not surprising, as my career as a collegiate op-ed writer was fueled by two parts intellectual sloth and one part bong resin, poured over a tumbler full of youthful bravado.

I came across those old op-eds a few years ago during spring cleaning, and, like a complete fool, started reading them. I only managed to finish one of them before I found myself engulfed with such a powerful sense of shame that nothing short of complete and immediate annihilation by a nuclear warhead could have rescued me.

(I would share, but the experience proved so traumatic that I can only recall one vague idea, something about the grossness of old people having sex. And with that, I have died from shame once again.)

Fortunately for me (and my future career as a writer/journalist/person worthy of respect and love), this was in the days of Windows 3.1, when the only people who had the internet were uber-nerds on Usenet who engaged in months-long flamewars over Unix flavors and William Gibson, and so I am spared the indignity of having my boorish idiocy appear every time anyone types my name into Google, and my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren will also be spared the indignity of knowing what an asshole Gamma Cait was when she was a kid. Oh yes, I am very lucky.

The point of all this is that I have a certain amount of sympathy for the idiotic college op-ed writer. It's a dangerous thing, to be young and to have been told you are smart your entire life (which I assure you, most of these op-ed writers have been, just like I was) and to actually believe it. And it is doubly dangerous when you are all of these things and someone gives you a platform from which to speak, because it leads you to believe your ideas and your thoughts are important, no matter how inane they may actually be. All of this is compounded by the fact that we live in a world where people can make entire careers out of being audacious pricks in the media.

By my sympathy ends when I run into this new breed of college op-ed writer who, in an attempt to seem edgy and subversive, harshes on women who have been date raped. (Because, you know, nothing says "edgy and subversive" like adopting the same mentality that has been around since the days of Deutoronomy!)

You know who I am referring to - the 20-year-olds who think they are engaging in lion-like feats of bravery by saying they think that a woman who has too much to drink should not be surprised when someone rapes her. They are standing up to that all-powerful cabal of feminists who...control the women's studies department? the cultural studies department? the literature department? still haven't figured this part out yet...and want to use that all-encompassing power to deny men the right to have sex with half-conscious women who are covered in their own puke.

But the fact that college students have written op-eds like this isn't the most shocking thing to me. My recent re-entry and graduation from college as a "non-traditional" student was a stark reminder that, just because someone is enrolled in an institute of higher learning, it doesn't necessarily make them thoughtful or capable of thinking critically. All enrollment in college means these days is that they can afford to pay a few thousand dollars every couple of months.

No, what was most shocking to me is that these op-eds actually got past the editors of the paper. The gatekeepers of the paper, the ones who enforce a degree of quality assurance, the ones who are responsible for making sure their paper is better than than the rambling, error-ridden, photocopied missive handed out by the guy who stands on a street corner and holds a sign warning that God is going to kill whoremongers, feminists and Mormons, and yet they let this swill receive their seals of approval? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I worked as the assistant editor for my student paper, and maybe it was because I was older and a bit wiser and a bit less audacious, but my career as an editor was a photo negative of my time as a columnist. And I assure you, had an op-ed like that come into my inbox, I would have sent it back so fast, the internet would have burst into flames. Lest you think this is just because I am a humorless feminist, I am pretty confident that all of the other editors I worked with would have done the same. We were all about questioning public safety reports or promoting conscious consumerism or debating the War in Iraq. But we NEVER would have stood for undermining victims of crimes.

I would encourage those op-ed writers, and perhaps more importantly, THEIR EDITORS, to listen a bit harder in their journalism classes, and perhaps they might catch this old chestnut when it is invariably brought out by their professors, that journalism is supposed to be about "afflicting the comfortable, and comforting the afflicted," not "slut-shaming rape victims, and defending rapists."

Tina Fey, Liz Lemon and feminist backlash

2010-04-18T13:46:00.001-07:00

I am about five days behind this whole argument - which, in modern timeframes, means it might as well have happened in the Middle Ages - but evidently a bunch of feminists got all bent out of shape over Tina Fey's appearance on SNL.

I have a hard time having an opinion about this, as I have not watched SNL in years and only occasionally watch "30 Rock," so I am not nearly as versed in the various performances and public statements of Ms. Fey as, say, Salon's Rebecca Traiser (who I love, by the way).

But I came across this passage from Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle, while farting around in my RSS reader, and I just had to share:

I have, for some time, been referring to a particularly irritating brand of privileged semi-feminism as “Liz Lemonism.” I associate this brand of feminism with a certain variety of white, coastal-city dwelling, fairly well-to-do heterosexual cisgendered woman, a woman with a comfortable white-collar job that is so very comfortable and so very white-collar that she is free to spend her spare time yearning for, and semi-believing that she could attain, something with more “meaning.” This woman doesn’t do Blogspot, but she does do Tumblr; she doesn’t do posts about sex workers’ rights, but she does do complaining about “raunch culture”; she doesn’t do anti-racism, disability activism, or trans ally work to any huge extent, but she does do “body image” (and oh, does she ever do body image, without taking much note of the fact that as a white, abled, cis person she conforms to the “beauty standard,” and benefits from conforming to it, in more ways than she will ever let on); she can’t have a conversation with you about Michelle Tea, Sugar High Glitter City, Kathy Acker, or Carolee Schneeman, but she can tell you that as a feminist she has a right to be Concerned About Porn; she’s Brooklyn not Queens, brunch not breakfast, flirty not slutty, fond of cupcakes and feminist theory but unsure how to make either one herself, and thoroughly incensed about Vajazzling.

DAMN.

Open letter to white feminists, or please stop embarrassing me

2010-04-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

Dear fellow white feminists:

Imagine we are having a discussion about sexism. We are telling stories about being sexually harassed on the streets, about hearing others blame a woman for being raped, about feeling completely disrespected by our boyfriends who expect us to act like Sasha Grey every time we have sex and tell us we are frigid when we refuse to go along with it.

We are really into our conversation, and we are getting mad, and we are talking about the patriarchy and how it pisses us off, and we are talking about men and how they piss us off, and it feels good, because finally we are around others who understand these feelings of rage and frustration we carry around with us.

And then let's imagine a man finds his way into the conversation, and not just any man, but a particularly argumentative man who is totally invested in his own awesomeness. (This has happened to all of us, so it shouldn't be too hard to envision this.) He starts taking offense to the things we are saying, and he lets us know it:

"Not all men are like this! You are being reverse-sexists. You are misandrists! Sexism isn't that big of a deal; after all, you could live in the Congo or Saudi Arabia. I don't understand what you are complaining about. You are just overly sensitive. Maybe if you weren't so emotional, people would listen to what you have to say."

The guy has come into a conversation about women and sexism, and he has made it all about him. He has posited himself as the arbiter of what is sexist and what is not sexist, even though he has never been on the shit end of the patriarchy in his life. Sometimes he will claim to be our ally, and that he is all in favor of equality between the sexes, but he doesn't think we are going about it the right way.

Totally annoying, right?

Yet for some reason, white feminists can't seem to understand how often we do the same thing to women of color when they talk about race and feminism. We are just baffled that WOC could be angry at white feminists, and we don't understand why they can't take the time to help us understand, and why they can't do so without so much hostility. "Why do they have to be so mean about it?" we sob as we nurse our hurt fee-fees.

But the second a man barges into a conversation about sexism and tries to derail it, you can be assured those very same women would be all over that man for flexing his privilege and acting like he is some kind of expert when really, he doesn't know shit.

Funny how that happens. (Not really.)

Last night, I had the dubious honor of watching what seems like the seventeen thousandth mess like this over at Jezebel. Over the course of 500+ comments, the "why can't you help me understand?" and the "I don't see why you are so angry" and "how can you say I'm privileged, I came from a poor family!" and "I feel like I am a White Person Punching Bag!" (*dies*)

I see discussions like this, and I hear the justifications made about the whiteness of the women involved in the Newsweek piece about feminism, and I read the accounts of suffragettes who were angry that black men could vote before white women, and I read about the racism among riot grrrls and zinesters, and I read about #racefail, and so on and so forth, and it all has the cumulative effect of making me feel like I really can't blame women like Renee Martin, who choose to identify as "womanist" rather than "feminist." I can't blame them at all.

We talk a good game about wanting to be more inclusive, but the truth is, we pretty much suck at it. We think that because we read bell hooks and Alice Walker, and because we care about female genital mutilation and rape in the Congo, that this somehow makes us too enlightened to be burdened by white privilege, that it makes us too aware to be tainted by racism.

Bullshit. We live in a society that privileges white skin above all else, and if you have white skin, you experience that privilege whether you want to or not. You might have been raised by a single mother on food stamps. You might be gay. You might have a learning disability. You might be a woman. You might have mental illness. You might have a million other things that would put you at a disadvantage, but if you are white, then there is one kind of privilege you do experience, and all of the whining and guilt in the world isn't going to change that.

A lot of us don't seem to get this. We are very used to thinking of ourselves as being on the shit end of things, and so when we have to reorient ourselves and our world view so it reflects the true complexity, the true intersectionality of things, it freaks us out. And I'll totally admit that part of me gets it, because I too was once a defensive white girl. I couldn't understand why people of color would rant about white people like we were awful. I felt offended and hurt when I saw the anger of women of color, and I took it personally. When I read, for instance, zines by Mimi Nguyen for the first time, I felt like I had been slapped in the face.

But I can't empathize too much, because at some point, I stopped viewing their anger and their frustration as being All About Me, and started recognizing it as a perfectly rational response against a world that thought nothing of treating them like bundle of offensive and destructive stereotypes. (Because, as a feminist, anger at oppression and injustice is something I am totally unfamiliar with. *snort*) And I realized that if I was going to really fight racism, if I was going to back up my lofty ideals about "equality" and "justice" and "freedom," it meant I was going to have to shut the fuck up and listen.

Listening was hard, and it hurt, especially when I realized that I had said and done some pretty offensive things in my life. I still burn with shame when I think of some of those things, but I also know that my shame and my pain is nothing compared to what it must be like to be on the receiving end of those words and actions, not once or twice, but over and over again, every day of every week of every year of your life.

Listening is also simple. It is just the matter of being willing to hear what the other person has to say, and honoring it as truth that is worthy of respect. Yet as simple and as powerful as this act can be, I notice that a lot of us white feminists have serious difficulties with it. Our defenses go way up, and we become incapable of recognizing that we have turned into that obnoxious guy that barges into our discussions to tell us all about how we are wrong about sexism.

I am aware that I am hardly an expert on all matters related to race, which is kind of the point. I recognize that I don't know everything. I know I have tons to learn, and that I will always need to work on my ideas about race (and sexuality, and colonialism, and ablism, and gender identity, and...), because I, as a cisgendered, middle-class, college-educated, physically able, white American woman in a heterosexual relationship, will never be able to use first-person experience to understand what it is like to live in a body and a life that is different from mine.

But I can learn. I can listen. I can capture a glimmer of understanding, and I can use it to build a more nuanced, compassionate worldview. And so can you. So next time you come across a discussion about race, before you open your mouth or put fingers to keyboard, sit back and just listen. You might be surprised by what you learn.

90s nostalgia aka where the fuck have all the girls gone?

2010-03-09T17:14:00.001-08:00

The fantastic blog Jezebel, which inhales huge chunks of my free time like a black hole sucks away light and matter, posted an interview with Marissa Meltzer, who just wrote "Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music," about the 90s riot grrrl revolution in music.

(BTW, Meltzer and her colleague Kara Jesella also wrote "How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time," which I contributed to! Jesella also helps maintain the awesome blog 90swoman.com. Clearly they are my 90s-girl soulmates.)

Obviously I was all over that shit. I am sorry to say that, during the 90s, I was NOT a riot grrrl, as I lived in Utah and I was a Mormon and even though I identified as a feminist, I was too obsessed with fitting in to ever embrace something as in-your-face as riot grrrl. Good Mormon girls did not scrawl "SLUT" on their bellies or dye their hair blue or play horrendously awesome punk music on out-of-tune guitars. Please. As if.

Even so, I relish the culture of the 90s, and I miss it. I know that's pretty standard for adults, to wax nostalgic about the years of their adolescence, about how things were so great back then, way better than the manufactured crap that passes for music that the kids listen to these days, about how the 60s/70s/80s/90s were the last time music was real/political/honest/raw.

It makes sense. You are flooded with hormones and ideas and feelings that make you feel like every part of your body and mind has just burst into the world after laying dormant for over a decade. You feel like Columbus exploring the New World, like Neil Armstrong planting his big puffy boot on the dusty moonscape for the first time. And even though we all eventually grow up and learn there's nothing new under the sun, there's nothing out there that hasn't been done a million times and in a million crazier ways than anything we could ever come up with, even if we were jacked out of our minds on heroic doses of psilocybin mushrooms and oxytocin, those first impressions are still imprinted deep in some reptile part of our brains. Which is why most of us will always love best the culture in which we came of age.

But aside from all of that, I think I have some very valid, non-psychobiochemical reasons for feeling the way I do about the 1990s. Check out my response to the interview:

I've been going through a fit of mid-90s nostalgia as of late, particularly as I've been working on my book, which is focuses heavily around growing up in the 90s. The music, the identity politics, the flannel shirts, the movies...I look back and realize that I was so lucky to have been a teenage girl when I was.

There was such a crazy amount of positive, amazing teenage girl culture available for anyone who was so inclined. I mean, even aside from the riot grrrls and zine culture, which I only got into when I was in my early 20s, you had Fiona Apple and Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair, and you had "All Over Me" and "Foxfire" and "Clueless" and Banana Yoshimoto and Kim Gordon and so much fucking amazing, incredible girl-centric stuff. Even the stuff that got scoffed at back then, like the Spice Girls and Lilith Fair, was amazing.

And now I look around, and I see Dane Cook and Tucker Max and hear nothing but fourth-generation Nickleback imitators (Nickleback! Not even Creed! Or Pearl Jam! Nickleback!) on the radio and see loads of blatantly sexist crap on TV and everything is all Judd Apatow this and dudebro that, and I am like, where the fuck did all the girls go? I mean, I love Lady Gaga as much as anyone but one pantless woman does not an entire culture make.

So no fucking wonder I'm nostalgic for the 90s. It's the last time I felt like popular culture held a place for someone like me.

I'm not totally pessimistic about things, though. I am a believer in the cyclical nature of things, that history moves in fits and starts, that culture charges forward and then doubles back and then heads forward again. I am sure that a decade of Dudebro Nation will give way to something a bit more lady-friendly, hopefully sometime before I hit menopause.

At least it better.

Link Roundup - March 5

2010-03-05T10:07:00.000-08:00

I noticed that a lot of my favorite bloggers do this regularly, which is where I get a lot of the best reading material. So, bandwagon-jumper that I am, I've decided to do this as well.

Bookslut's Jessa Crispin reviews translator Edith Grossman's book, "Why Translation Matters" - I'm particularly interested in translations in light of a review I read about the latest translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," which criticized the decision to hire translators who have more experience with cookbooks than with feminist theory, and that the poor translations have kept the book from occupying its rightful position in the canon of western feminist thought.
I haven't watched this year, but here is a video of Anne Sexton as she reads some of her poetry. When I was about 23, 24, I went through a time in my life when I used to spend hours in my bathtub, crying and drinking wine and reading poetry and Buddhist philosophy. (Overdramatic, I know, but true! Also, did you miss the part about me being 23, 24?) During that time, I read a lot of Anne Sexton. Like, A LOT.
The Best of Journalism in 2009 from True/Slant - I've read about five of these pieces, and so if the rest are anything like those five, I can assure you my mind will be blown to smithereens once I read the rest of them.
I loved this comment in a blog entry focused on stories about triumphing over adversity:
Another important question to ask regarding memoir:

Do you really want people to know?

I'm not talking about overcoming adversity - I'm talking about all the gritty little details about how you failed - how people close to you failed. Do you want to relive damage in public? Even if you take a humorous approach, those details will show up in a good memoir.

If they don't, you haven't written a memoir, but a pep talk.

Every memoir I've ever read, from Girl, Interrupted to She Got Up Off the Couch, Oil Notes or even Danse Macabre - whether humorous like In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, or harrowing like Needles or Thin Places - every last good memoir lays the author out for any reader to dissect, analyze and even mock if they feel like it.

The one thing anyone writing a memoir must face is the likelihood that their main character, if written honestly, will be more flawed than most "normal" people would ever choose to admit in public.

God bless the memoirist.
So in case you are still laboring under the delusion that it is possible to be a good writer without reading (and yes, I actually know people who think this), the Guardian is here to disabuse you of that notion.

Happy Friday!

Fear is the enemy of good writing

2010-03-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

I've been dissatisfied with the way my attempts at blogging pan out for a while now, which probably explains why they all fade away after a couple of months. It's not that I am not capable of dedication to a writing project. But I couldn't put my finger on what it was until very recently.

I am afraid.

The writing you get on this blog is a lot like the version of me that shows up for dinner at my Mormon grandmother's house. I still have things to say, but I've sanded off all my edges, dropped all the cuss words, tip-toed gently around any opinions I hold that might possibly upset someone. I've presented you with a G-rated version of myself.

The truth is, I am opinionated. I am profane. I am a fan of filthy jokes and "unladylike" conversations. Yet you don't see any of that here because I blog under my real name, and as a result, I always have lurking at the back of my mind this worry that some day, a future (or present) employer or agent or whatever is going to Google my name, then see some opinion or language that offends them, and then I'll lose out on whatever opportunity because I didn't exercise sufficient caution in expressing myself on the internet and then my life will be over because - omigod - I said the f-word on the internet and I didn't have the decency to be ashamed of myself.

You know what I'm talking about. I know you do. Don't pretend like you don't.

Fear, and its cousin, self-consciousness, are the enemy of all great art, because it causes you to hold back and reconsider for the sake of propriety and social convention, when the truth is that all good art is good because it is honest. Art that tells the truth about our lives is powerful simply because so few people are willing to do it.

Take the field in which I do most of my writing, which is memoir. Memoirs are insanely popular these days, despite snobbery that dismisses them as the literary equivalent of "The Jerry Springer Show," because good ones will shine a light on that which we refuse to acknowledge in so-called "polite society."

I don't mean tragedy porn, because those truly are little more than trashy talk shows in book form, but memoirs that speak honestly about doubts, fears, anxieties, pain. These are all things that make up a big chunk of the emotional rainbow but get little play in our culture that expects people to be nothing but deliriously happy and upbeat at all times (and if you can't manage to actually be happy, then you damn well better fake it lest you bring the rest of us down.)

It never fails to strike me as sad and perverse, how we insist that people keep their true selves under wraps for the sake of public sensibilities even as we devour art made by those who tell the truth. We are like starving men who, when given the opportunity to sit down to a feast, turn our backs out of pride instead.

Anyway, the impetus for this rant is the rebirth of Roger Ebert, who was once one-half of the most famous movie critical dyad in the U.S. but is now poised to take residence in the pantheon of American literary icons. And rightfully so - have you read the man's blog recently? It is consistently one of the most wonderful, beautifully written corners of the internet, and I am not just saying that because everyone else is saying it too. (Although it makes me happy that everyone else is saying it.)

I am sure that part of the reason why his writing has moved to another level is because of the physical limitations his battles with cancer have imposed upon him, but I suspect that the motivation behind his brilliance can be summed up in one sentence, quoted from a recent Jezebel post about the man: "Roger Ebert doesn't give a shit."

Now, I'm sure there is a lot that Mr. Ebert does give a shit about, like his wife, movies, politics and Chicago, but what he does not give a shit about is what others think of him. He does not give a shit if his words piss people off. He does not give a shit if someone reads a blog post and thinks less of him. He just does not give a shit. He writes without fear, and it shows.

I aspire to be like that, and I hope that I am able to attain such freedom of expression without having to be rich and famous or deal with life-threatening medical conditions to get there. Because I know that when I tie a gag in the mouth of my internal censor (who has been well-primed by a decade of life as a Mormon and another as an abused wife), the words that come forth from my mind and out through my mouth or my keyboard are much closer to who I truly am than any false Caitlin I could concoct in my attempts to be acceptable to those around me. I feel faster, lighter, freer, as natural as a seagull coasting on an ocean breeze.

This is what I am supposed to do, and anything less is not only preventing me from forming a real connection with those who read my writing, but it is also stunting myself as a person and as a writer.

So I am pledging to myself that I will write - and live - without fear. I will cast off those self-imposed restraints and I'll let you see who I am, even if it is embarrassing or distasteful to some. One day, I hope I can be like Roger Ebert, and truly not give a shit.

What a movie taught me about writing

2010-03-01T08:07:00.001-08:00

Over the course of my life, I've written zines, essays, op-eds, features, news reports, several research papers, a few short stories and a thesis. These days I churn out a dozen stories about everything from double murders to dogs that work in convenience stores. When I go home I labor away at my book and the occasional essay and blog entry.

On an average day, I spend about five or six hours putting words to paper (or screen), almost all of it intended for the eyes of others.

In addition, I have read at least 10 books on writing (Strunk & White, Stephen King, Annie Dilliard, Roy Peter Clark, William Zinsser...you name it, I've read it - twice). I constantly scan writing blogs for tips. I read, read, read as much as I can, every chance I get. And when I am not writing or reading or reading about writing, I am thinking about writing, thinking about how I would describe something or someone if I had to write about it.

My point is, I take writing seriously. I dedicate large chunks of my life to becoming the best writer I can possibly be. I enjoy it, but I also approach it as work, as do most writers, I think.

While this hardly makes me great - even at my current rate, I am still at least a year away from reaching that mythical 10,000 hours mark at which one supposedly becomes a master, a milestone I regard with skepticism anyway - it does mean that I have a pretty good sense of how to construct a sentence and choose words so I can best convey my meanings.

But even with all of this work, I am woefully unprepared when it comes to the world of memoir and fiction writing. Here, the scene is king, and dialogue his queen. And I am but a trembling peon, trying to figure out how to approach them in a way that shows nothing but the utmost respect.

Fortunately we have the work of masters to guide us. I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of one of the best last week when I was flipping through the channels and I came across "The Age of Innocence" with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. I'd been told by many that this was a wonderful movie, so I watched it. I was captivated, not just by the acting and the visuals, but also by the nuance of the story and the way it was told through a series of interactions overlaid with wonderful narration by Joanne Woodward.

And so I decided to read the book, because I figured that if I loved the movie as much as I did, I would surely love the book even more. That is exactly what happened. I immediately ran out and bought a copy of House of Mirth, and I plan to read that once I finish the books I'm reading at the moment ("Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict" by Irene Vilar and "Girl Meets God" by Lauren Winner, two much-praised memoirs I hope will teach me something about the art form while edifying and enlightening me).

But even more importantly, the juxtaposition of film and words gave me the unique opportunity to compare the way Wharton wrote a scene with the way Scorsese and his cast brought it to life. What I learned is that a scene does not have to be long and it does not have to be momentous. It can be subtle and only a few words can be spoken. What makes a scene important is that it has some action, some forward movement for the plot or some character development (preferably both). Facial expressions, gestures, tiny movements, nervous tics, phrases...all are essential ingredients when building a scene.

Scenes don't have to necessarily be staged and blocked as if they were intended for a movie or a play. That is the last thing I want for my book, for it to seem as though it was written with a movie adaptation in mind. But there are certainly aspects of film that can help jumpstart the imagination when it comes to the scenes for my own writing.

I am facing a particular challenge, as much of my book takes place within my mind as I examine the doubts and fears that plagued me over the course of my adolescence. I am not sure there is any way to make a compelling scene out of questioning a passage of the Doctrine and Covenants, for instance. But there is much that does take place outside of my mind, and I am relishing the opportunity to bring it to life as much as possible with these new tools I've been given.

So tell me, what are your ideas and thoughts about writing scenes, particularly when it comes to memoir? What makes an effective scene? What do you keep in mind when you construct a scene for your own writing?

Zines, social media and the human touch

2010-02-22T16:18:00.000-08:00

In my closet, I have a mail carrier's box full of zines. Some of them are quarter-size, others are half-size. Some are handwritten and hand-drawn, while others are laid out entirely using computer. Some have vellum covers, block-printed designs, ribbon bindings. There are as many different styles of zines as there are zinesters.

They all have one thing in common, though: you can actually hold them in your hands.

Such a quality seems quaint in a time when we are constantly bombarded with announcements about new gadgets and wireless networks that will free us from the tyranny of materiality. No longer will we be held hostage by books and magazines! No longer will we be confined by the limits of paper! An entire world of information will be at our fingertips, no matter if we are riding a bus to work or in waiting in a rest stop off Alligator Alley.

And I'll admit, it is pretty cool. The internet has given me access to all kinds of information I would have never otherwise known about and exposed me to writing I would have never had the chance to read.

But it doesn't keep me from feeling wistful for the things of the past, no more than the pretty design of my iPod Nano can erase the memories I have of sitting in my bedroom and listening intently to a CD for the first time while paging through the booklet, reading the lyrics and examining the artwork.

I had the opportunity to consider what it means to hold a piece of media in your hands while reading a chapter in Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Piepmeier. She quotes Marissa Falco, whose adorable and perfectly laid out zines were among my favorites, who writes (to summarize) that a zine gives her the ability to connect with others on a visceral level. She can smell the scent of another person's house, see the pressure of the pen on the letters included with the zines. I know exactly what she means. When you hold a zine in your hands, odds are good that the person who created it held it in her hands as well.

It's a different kind of connection than what I might establish with someone I know only through the internet. I may converse with someone through Twitter or blogs or email, but that conversation first goes through a keyboard, then into a computer, through a network of servers and hubs before coming out on another computer and finally reaching my intended partner's eyes. The disconnect is so considerable that it's no wonder people treat others so shabbily over the internet. Without those humanizing touches Falco wrote about, it's easy to see people as pixels and bytes rather than, you know, people.

I sometimes think social media has the potential to overcome these limitations and establish the kind of human connection that makes the world of zines so powerful. I've used it for work as well as for my personal purposes, and each use has fostered that sense of shared humanity in its own way.

When I took part in the NASA Tweet-up in November 2009, I live-tweeted the entire two day event, and soon I realized nearly 100 people were following everything I said, responding to my tweets and asking me to check out something for them. It was a remarkable feeling, knowing that I was experiencing the launch, not only for myself but also for dozens of people via my phone.

Social media has also put me in touch with talented, strong people. It has helped me connect with others who shared experiences not unlike what I've gone through in my life. It has given me the ability to help others in their times of need. It helped me maintain friendships when I was in a place where I was unable to sustain those relationships in real life.

I refuse to look at the debate as a matter of either/or. I would like to think we live in a culture where it is possible to enjoy the convenience and accessibility of new media while appreciating the value of old media. I do worry that, with the rush to embrace all that is bleeding-edge, the way we interact with media will change so dramatically that we are no longer able to do that. I see it with the way people find it hard to sit down and read a book after zipping through six-paragraph news stories and blog entries, or how music fandom is now more single-oriented rather than album-oriented.

But at the same time, I do believe there will always be many people like myself, who enjoy curling up with good reading material in bed, who take sensuous pleasure in the feeling of a book on their hands, and who will find a way to enjoy the best of that both digital and analog media have to offer.

Writing, running and what I've learned

2009-11-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

Last December, I wrote a short list of goals I hoped to accomplish over the course of 2009. Now, as the year winds down, I am edging closer to making two of them happen: writing a book and running a marathon.

The two goals have one obvious thing in common, which is that huge numbers of people are forever swearing that they will do these things one day, but rarely get around to actually doing them. The thing is, a person doesn't have to be a gifted athlete to run a marathon, nor does she have to be a brilliant creative to write a book. She just has to be dedicated, focused and a bit of a blockhead to make it happen.

Over the past several months, as I've spent hours pounding out miles and words, it occurred to me that my achievement of these two goals demanded I make adjustments to my way of dealing with the world. The idea was confirmed when I read "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a well-known novelist who also competes in marathons and triathlons, and much of what he wrote resonated with me. (Although I do disagree that walking during a marathon represents some kind of defeat - sorry, Haruki.)

Here's a short list of the things I've learned so far.

1. Baby steps and consistency are key.

This is one of my husband's oft-repeated mantras, the gist of which is that any goal can be achieved through persistent and incremental effort. A person does not just wake up one day and run a marathon, just as a person does not sit down at a keyboard and churn out a book over the course of a day. Well, a person COULD do these things, but they would be assured the most agonizing four or five hours of their life in the case of the former, and several thousand words of crap in the case of the latter. The end result is sure to be so terrible as to prompt the question, why even bother if the experience is going to be such a waste?

Others might start out with a plan to accomplish something big, but upon realizing just how monumental the task is, freak out and quit. They think of running 26.2 miles when they can't even run a block, or they imagine writing 60K beautiful words in a coherent narrative when the most detailed thing they've written was a packing list, and they say to hell with it, I'm going to watch TV and eat Doritos instead. (Mmmm...Doritos...)

One of the most irritating things I've learned as an adult is that the most rewarding tasks are often the most difficult. This is true of everything from earning a college degree to mastering an instrument to raising a child. None of these things can be done overnight. Doing them well requires discipline and sustained effort, two qualities that used to vex me as a teenager, as I had elevated slacking to a high art. With limited effort I could get by, and that was good enough for me! That was all well and good until I hit my mid-20s, and I realized that a life of slackerdom meant I was destined for an unsatisfying life, one where my highest achievements would be found in the realm of the Xbox and the three-chamber bong.

So working at big goals mandated that I find a way to break them down into bite-sized goals, and then stacking them on top of each other until I reached the big one. So I set a goal of writing 500 words a day or running three miles at least three times a week, and before I knew it, I was running my first half-marathon and polishing off a 80,000-word rough draft. Just knowing that I had it in me to do these things has given me the confidence to push ahead in both endeavours.

2. Some days will suck - and it's not a bad thing.

Some days I head out for a run, and something goes wrong. Perhaps I ate yogurt and it gave me acid reflux, or I misjudged the weather and realized it was nearly 80 degrees outside by the time I was two miles from home, or I felt so sore or so exhausted that I had no choice but to walk for a half-mile. A run like that, and I'm tempted to throw my shoes into the salt marsh near my home.

I have days like that when I write. Sometimes I sit down to my laptop, and I stare at the blinking cursor for five minutes. Then I get a drink of water, file my nails, toss my kitten around a bit, go to the bathroom, and come back and stare at my cursor some more. Or sometimes I can only force the most tortured metaphors or tired cliches, or my language is too mannered or too stilted or too...whatever. After thirty minutes of doing battle with myself, I give up and berate myself for being such a pathetic hack for the rest of the night.

At first, I thought bad days like this were signs that I had no business trying to be a marathoner and/or an author. I mean, if I had any talent for these things, it would always come...well, not easily, but it wouldn't be such a monumental struggle, right? It wouldn't feel so much like banging my head against a brick wall, would it?

Well, I realized I learn just as much - if not more - from my failures than from my successes. Knowing what doesn't work is just as critical as knowing what does work. Why do professional distance runners have trainers and programs that get them running twice a day? Why did Mark Twain revise "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" more than 100 times? Because NO ONE gets it right 100 percent of the time. Those who do get it right are the ones who keep at it, no matter how frustrating and pointless it all seems, because eventually they stumble upon something that works.

3. Hard work can be undone by self-consciousness.

When I run, I don't flush prettily, I turn violet. My hair turns into a frizzy halo of flyaways, I spit and shoot snot rockets, and sweat drops leave rivulets of encrusted salt on my face. I am the first to admit that I am disgusting when I run, and I'm sure that those who see me are horrified by the sight. (I am horrified just by my description of myself - good thing I don't see myself run.) But that's how running is. It's raw, animal, hardcore. There is little that is civilized or *vomit* ladylike about it.

Writing leaves me vulnerable to embarrassment in different ways. My life is peppered with memories of sharing my writing with friends and family members, only to see them make fun of the things I've written. In particular, I remember writing a short story from the perspective of a drunken Elvis impersonator for a class three years ago. In one paragraph, the Elvis impersonator leers at the bartender, whose dress is short and tight and whose boots lace up around her calves, and he imagines what it would be like to have sex with her. My classmates teased me about that scene, saying it was gross and I was gross for writing it. I almost felt bad for including the paragraph until I realized that I was a writer, and my job is to reflect the world as I see it, warts and all.

The exact moment everything starts to fall apart for me is the moment I start thinking too hard about how the perceptions of others. I don't mean thinking of my audience, but of the way those who know me will see me after they read what I've written. When a person writes or creates art, what she is really doing is inviting an audience to step inside her brain and have a look around. And not everyone is going to like what they see. They might call your values, your morality and even your sanity into question. You have to believe intensely in yourself and what you are doing in order to survive such scrutiny and criticism.

I won't go so far as to categorize writing and running as forms of meditation, but they are as close as my scattered little brain gets. I do my best work when I've locked into a zone, and I'm focused on the mile I'm running or the sentence I'm writing. There's a looseness, a freedom that comes along with that lack of self-consciousness, and it makes me more willing to take risks and to put myself out there. Sometimes I take those risks and I fall flat on my face, but just as often, I realize I've uncovered strange and beautiful territory within myself, things I didn't even know I was capable of doing. And that makes all the frustration, the embarrassment and the self-doubt worth it in the end.

Journalism and emotional trauma

2009-09-20T04:45:00.001-07:00

My average workday involves writing several news stories, and as anyone who watches the news can attest, most of them will not be happy stories. There are the occasional feel-good spots about people who make the most of tough circumstances or break world records, but for the most part, I spend my time writing about the worst days in people's lives.

If you end up in the news, it's more likely you are there because of some unimaginable horror than because of something amazing you did.

It's difficult not to be affected by the work we do as journalists, although most of us have developed ways to cope. We make inappropriate jokes, we keep a bit of distance, we harden our shells, we don't linger too long on the details. Some of us drink a lot or smoke.

If we allowed the full impact of the stories we cover to penetrate our hearts, we'd never get anything done. So we find ways to protect ourselves.

But some stories still manage to penetrate the carefully constructed defenses. Obviously, reporters and photographers who are actually out there are most vulnerable. Poynter Institute recently ran a column about a New York Daily News reporter who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after one of the WTC towers collapsed practically right on top of him.

Also, war photographer Jim Nachtwey has candidly spoken about the way his experiences have isolated him from other Americans. It's understandable - I cannot imagine taking photographs of a legless Indonesian man whose family lives on a piece of cardboard between two train tracks, then returning to the comfort and privilege of the average American existence.

In the face of the trauma faced by those front-line journalists - not to mention the people who actually have to live with such things in their daily lives - it seems a bit petty to talk about the way this work affects those of us who are stuck in the newsroom. We are so insulated. If we see blood and suffering, it's second-hand, through raw video footage and photographs. We don't hear the screams. We don't see the tears. We don't smell the fire.

Even so, there are times when I find myself haunted by the stories I work with. There are times they keep me up at night. There are times I hide in the bathroom stalls, sobbing uncontrollably, because I just cannot believe the amount of suffering that exists in the world.

I might be particularly susceptible to this simply because I've been a victim - and am now a survivor - of violent crime. The things I've experienced are all too common in this world, which means media alerts, press releases and arrest affidavits that essentially force me to relieve some of the most traumatic events of my life pass through my hands on a near-daily basis.

For the most part, I am good at shutting down and doing my work, which involves running the copspeak through a human translator, then rearranging the events so they come together as a readable, coherent story. It also helps that I am far along in my own healing process. I no longer have nightmares or grind my teeth in my sleep. Occasionally things will trigger a tightness in my chest - perhaps a name, or a pair of glasses - but for the most part, I'm okay.

But sometimes a story slaps me so hard in the face that I am unable to breathe. The details are too similar, the circumstances too familiar, and I have to step away from what I'm doing. The fear and pain come flooding back as I sit at my computer, and I find myself having a tiny emotional crisis in the middle of the newsroom.

Anyone who works in a newsroom knows, it's about the last place you want something like that to happen. It's embarrassing, and I can't help but feel unprofessional when it happens. And then I feel even worse, because sometimes I think I'm the only one who goes through this. (Which I know statistically cannot be true.)

So I was relieved to read an essay from Doug Fisher at the University of South Carolina's j-school about the oft-ignored trauma faced by those who work at copy and photo desks.

In the essay, he shares the stories of a few newsroom-bound journalists who have been traumatized by Hurricanes Katrina and Hugo and the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, and how they coped.

Simpson said managers must watch for indications of stress among those they supervise: exhaustion, anxiety, tearfulness, abnormal anger and upset stomach among them. They also need to know more about what those people have been through.

"I think a lot of managers fail in this respect because they don't know the personal backgrounds of the people they work with," he said.

Cox, the Journal-Constitution's presentation editor, said everyone has a story to tell, so let them tell it. Simpson, too, encouraged conversation, but warned against forcing people to say how they feel. But to start those conversations may take a culture shift in many newsrooms, he said.

Our jobs as journalists demand distance in order for us to do them professionally and ethically, but I think we also need to realize that sometimes it is just not possible to meet such a standard. After all, we are people, too.

Much has been written about our political biases and how those come into play with our jobs, but less is said about our personal backgrounds and how those might affect us as journalists as well. And when you break down the statistics of rape, child molestation, domestic violence, assault, murder - you realize that odds are likely that at least one person in the newsroom has been touched by these things.

I'm not saying the job needs to change, or that anyone needs to feel sorry for the survivors, or anything like that, but I do think that more understanding and awareness of what it means to be a survivor working in this industry is in order. The newsroom tends to be a gruff place filled with hardened people, and it is that way because the job demands it, but sometimes, gruff and hardened are the exact opposite of what journalists need. Sometimes a bit of sensitivity, a bit of humanity is required to help us get through our jobs.

(It reminds me a lot of one of the problems with the cult of masculinity, how it demands that men act like they don't have feelings and how it never gives them room for grief or sorrow. The end result is that those emotions often find expression in unhealthy, damaging ways, like anger, violence or substance abuse. It's far better to honor the emotion than to pretend it doesn't exist.)

It's a job with a high burnout rate without taking the survivor factor into consideration. More support for those who need it can only be a good thing, not just for the individual, but for the industry as a whole. The field needs people who are sensitive to the issues faced by victims, who will treat them with dignity and respect, who will not see them as fodder to fill the news hole or the wheel. The more support available for people like that in this field, the better off we all will be.

In Defense of Dirty Dancing

2009-09-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

The sad passing of Patrick Swayze gave me occasion to consider one of the most important movies of my childhood: Dirty Dancing.

As a girl I loved the movie for the dancing, for the music, for the lake scene, for Swayze in a tight black tank top. But when I revisited Dirty Dancing as an adult, I discovered that the movie was so much more than the mindless girl-fluff so many had maligned it as being.

Consider this: the movie focuses on a teenage girl who cares more about the world around her than her clothes, who loves books more than she loves boys. What a breath of fresh air in a world that seems convinced that all teenage girls are nothing more than narcissistic strippers in training, that sees teenage girls as little more than a collection of Facebook photos, low-riding jeans and glitter.

Consider this: the movie illustrates class conflict, not just between the privileged visitors and the working-class staff, but also among the staff itself. There is Robbie, the college-bound sweater-wearing boy who wields Ayn Rand like as a weapon of privilege and disdain, who knocks up Penny the dance instructor and treats her like trash, then turns around and courts Baby's sister, the daughter of a doctor. Then there is Johnny Castle, a kid with a talent for dancing who sees the lodge - and the women who patronize his services - as his escape from his hard background.

Consider this: the movie shows pre-Roe abortion for what it was - a dangerous yet necessary thing demanded by the social mores of the day. Penny could have carried the baby to term, but it would have meant the end of her career as a dancer, her job, and a condemnation to a life of poverty. So she did what she had to do, and in the process, put her life in the hands of a ruthless man who took her money then left her to die.

Consider this: the movie treats the sexual awakening of a teenage girl as a matter of serious importance. Anyone who was once a teenage girl can attest: it absolutely is. Baby Houseman is not merely a vessel for the desires of others. She has desires of her own. And over the course of the movie, she learns to express those desires, even if it means the loss of affection from her beloved Daddy. That is something that nearly every teenager can relate to.

Consider whether such a movie would ever be made today.

Youth and the world of writing

2009-09-13T05:26:00.000-07:00

Those of us who were deemed "gifted" as children know what a mixed blessing such a designation can be. On one hand, it's nice to be told you are special. I don't think anyone will dispute that. Most of us - and truth be told, I'd say ALL of us - want to hear that we are talented and beautiful, that we are unique little snowflakes, that the world would be diminished without our presence, etc. etc.

But the flip side of that is that you end up saddled with the distinct feeling that, if you have not developed a theory of mathematics, written a Pulitzer-nominated novel, earned a Ph.D. or started a Fortune 500 business by the time you are 27, then you are a failure and a disappointment to all of the teachers and guidance counselors who lavished so much time and energy and praise on you when you were a youngster.

I recently had one of those moments when I learned that the new managing editor of the New Yorker was only 26, and what was worse was that this was her second editorial job. Her first was with the Paris Review. And then when I learned that the new books editor for the Daily Beast was only 24, I felt that same old self-doubt nibbling at the back of my mind. How did I get old so quickly? What have I done with my life? Why am I such a loser? Where is my drink? Where is my bed?

The feeling is only compounded by our culture's unabashed worship of youth. We love young people who Do Things, and the younger they are, the better! The novelist who gets published at the age of 18, the thirteen-year-old who collaborates on a screenplay, the eleven-year-old who lands an interview with President Obama...soon we will be raving about movies directed by six-year-olds and paintings by toddlers. (Oh, wait, we've already seen how that turns out.)

But whenever I start feeling badly about myself for my status as a relatively late-bloomer (at the ripe old age of 29 - ha), I just remember two words, and I don't feel so bad.

Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Wurtzel is, like, the definition of the literary wunderkind. She went to Harvard. She won the Rolling Stone College Journalism award when she was 19. When she was 26, she published her first book, Prozac Nation, which became a bestseller. By the time she was 34, she'd written four books.

I've only read one of her books, but the one I read - Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women - I adored. I loved the premise of the book, and her writing style read like a meth- and feminism-fueled odyssey through the last three decades of popular culture. (I was not surprised to learn she had become addicted to crushing and snorting Ritalin while writing this book. One could practically see the white powder poofing up from the pages as they turned.)

I understand the criticisms, that she is an inveterate navel-gazer, that she is unfocused, that if she didn't TMI, she certainly took it to a whole new level. I agree with all of these criticism, but it doesn't diminish the fact that Bitch was a book that really resonated with me when I was a younger woman. Wurtzel stood up for women who were almost universally maligned, even my beloved Hillary Clinton, who was at the time seen as little more than the sad embodiment of a Loretta Lynn song. (Of course, certain passages in which Wurtzel laments Clinton's waste of potential seem a tad bit ironic now that she is Secretary of State, but I digress.)

Wurtzel is enormously talented, but she squanders her abilities on obtuse solipsism that tell us little about her subject and even less about herself, beyond that she is intensely self-absorbed. (Perhaps a function of her clinical depression? I can't say.) Her post-Sept. 11 essay described the destruction of the World Trade Center from a point of view she thought of as aesthetic, but to me it merely seemed anesthetic. She memorialized the death of David Foster Wallace with an essay that scarcely made mention of him but managed to include the intimation that they had possibly had sex. She mourns the loss of her youthful beauty in an article for Elle, and writes that she thinks she'd rather be dead than old.

Writing like this makes it difficult to defend her.

I'm sure Wurtzel would have ended up a wreck even had she opted for a more prosaic life as an office manager with a husband and two kids. I can't say if her early success had much - if anything - to do with the way her life played out. But I can say that her story makes me feel better about where I stand in my life - to paraphrase the Despair, Inc. poster, "It could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning for others" - because it reminds me that early literary success does not necessarily blossom into a successful career as a writer. It reminds me that sometimes the best thing a writer can have is some maturity to go along with their life experience, some perspective to go along with their audacity.

But then of course, I remember that Lorrie Moore was 26 when she published her first book, and the whole cycle begins again.

The ethics of memoir

2009-09-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

The world of memoir writing is one that is fraught with ethical landmines, perhaps more than any other form of writing, I imagine. To write about one's life is to write about others lives - there is no way around it. (Unless, of course, you are one of those monks that lives on a rock in the Faroe Islands, but even then your memoir would probably contain some reference to the overbearing parent or romantic partner who tormented you so much you felt you had no choice but to live the rest of your days on a windblown pebble in the North Irish Sea. But I digress.)

The problem is, what is fair game? When is a memoirist allowed to expose the deepest secrets of a loved one in their pursuit of artistic and emotional truth? More importantly, what is off-limits to the memoirist? What can a memoirist never write about?

When I was in journalism school, I took an ethics class in which we studied case after case of tricky ethical decisions, and we were always asked to balance competing values against each other when coming to our decision about how to proceed. After the fifteenth or so class discussion balancing the public's right to know* versus the subject's right to privacy, it occurred to me that there is no reason why a journalist cannot be good at their job while still being a good person. The two are not incompatible.

The same goes for memoirists. Writers may say one thing about their craft - that they are "monsters," that they cannot have friends because of what they do - but I wonder how much if that is an affect, a pretense toward the notion of the artist who sacrifices self for art, and how much of it is just selfishness disguised as creative pursuit.

These questions, which have simmered on a low boil in my mind ever since I decided to take up the mantle of "writer," came to the forefront when I read about Julie Myerson's THE LOST CHILD in The New York Times:

A high-profile novelist and occasional television commentator, Ms. Myerson was pilloried in her home country this spring as cruel, selfish and manipulative for writing about her teenage son’s descent into drug addiction in the memoir “The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story.” Her son Jake, the eldest of three children, denounced his mother as insane and obscene for exploiting and exaggerating the drug troubles that eventually led his parents to throw him out when he was 17.

The NYT published a "Room for Debate" on the controversy, in which (surprise, surprise) the memoirists came down on the side of Myerson, while a psychologist questioned her decision to write about her child. In the Memoir Writers discussion group at SheWrites.com, the participants expressed a similar empathy for Myerson.

And then there is me - an aspiring memoirist who thinks Myerson overstepped her boundaries.

My initial objection to the book is that it seemed like Myerson practically sprinted to write the book and get it published before the dust on the rubble of her life had a chance to settle. Her son was 17 when he was kicked out of the house. The book was published when he was 20 and still dealing with his substance abuse issues. Surely the issue of parents dealing with their children's drug addictions is not such a timely issue that she couldn't have waited a few years? Surely she isn't the only person to write about such things? Surely there isn't such a huge gap in the literary market that it needs to be filled as quickly as possible?

But the more I learned about the controversy, the more problems I realized I had with her decision.

First of all, it sounds as those she was dishonest. Now, any memoirist will tell you that truth is a fungible thing, that it changes depending on who it's coming from. However, a memoirist, by virtue of their elevated platform, has a heightened responsibility to make sure their truth is as honest and real as possible. Myerson omitted discussion of her divorce from the story, which is unfair to her son. Many children do not handle their parents' divorces well, and it sounds like her son was no exception. If she was going to do his story any justice, she should have included information like that, even if it made her look badly.

Second, she's made a career out of writing about her son's life. Her son's classmates used her writings, about such private things as pubic hair, to torment him. When I examine the situation from his point of view - having a mother who sees fit to write about my emergence into puberty in embarrassing detail, and to do so on a national platform - I have to say that a life as a pothead would seem pretty damn appealing. Myerson evidently failed to take into consideration the fact that her decision to make her son's life fodder for her literary career could have very well played a role in his current status as a drug abuser.

It's one thing to out a family member who sexually or physically abused you, or to write about a powerful institution, or to write about your own struggles with addiction/mental illness/crime. It's another thing to write about your own children, and to do so repeatedly without their consent. The responsibility we as human beings have to one another is amplified when it comes to our children, because we hold all of the power in that relationship. As a result, we owe it to them to be that much more ethical when it comes to using their lives as material for our own careers.

Broadsheet's Amy Benfer sums it up perfectly:

I'm not saying there should be a law. I'm not saying we can't keep debating the ethical line of what is and what is not fair game in writing about one's children. But I do think that parents' ethical obligation to protect the privacy of minor children in their care -- who have little choice in how they got there -- is higher than one's obligations to friends, family, even to one's own parents (who, after all, were the adults in the room during one's childhood). And no amount of piety and appeals to a higher cause to "save" other people's children changes this simple fact: If your kid calls it a betrayal, it most certainly is.

Even Elizabeth Gilbert, who has taken her share of flak for her memoir EAT, PRAY, LOVE, opted out of writing about her ex-husband and the marital troubles they faced shortly before their divorce. Yet she still managed to write a successful book that resonated with millions. If there is anyone many would argue is open for a literary filleting, it's an ex-spouse, but Gilbert resisted the urge, and her book was no worse off because of it.

I'm not saying parents are never allowed to write about their children. In fact, the NYT article makes the point that two recent memoirs have recently been published by parents detailing their children's struggles with mental illness and drug addiction. The difference, though, is that those parents had the permission of their children to write about these things. And in one case, the child himself even wrote a memoir. I see nothing ethically sketchy about that. But when a parent insists that their obligation to the world at large supersedes their responsibility to their child, I don't see that as the burden of an artist. I see that as the mark of a narcissist.

Resources

Julie Myerson's 'Lost Child' - Mother's Memoir, Son's Anguish [New York Times]
The Memoir and Children's Privacy [New York Times]
Is it ever OK to tar your kids in print? [Broadsheet]

Endnotes

* We usually discussed some graphic photograph of a dead child or something, which I generally found distasteful. Personally, I find the public's right to know about matters related to crime is more often than not based on nothing more than prurient interest. The public's right to know is more defensible on matters of public policy than personal tragedy. IMHO.

Don Draper is not a hero

2009-09-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

We recently started watching Mad Men Season 2 so we could get caught up and watch Season 3, like all the other cool kids in town. I find the show fascinating in a time-capsule sort of way. Not only is all of the costume and set design spot-on, but it really gives post-Boomers like myself a sense of what kind of resentments and frustrations fomented the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s. It's quite difficult for me to conceive of a world in which everyone but a select group of privilege straight white dudes were utterly powerless. Mad Men shows me just how much things HAVE changed.

Of course, then I see how some react to the show, and I have to wonder if those who say things haven't really changed all that much are right.

Earlier this week, we watched the third episode of the season, where Don Draper and Bobbie Barnett have a disagreement over her client/husband's behavior toward a sponsor's wife. The disagreement is "resolved" when Draper walks up to Barnett in the lady's restroom of a swank hotel, grabs her behind the neck, then reaches up beneath her dress and sticks his fingers in her.

I turned to my husband and went, "Oh my God, Don Draper just sexually assaulted that woman!"

It was obvious to me that Draper was acting out of a need to dominate her, to show her who is boss, to put her in her place. I saw nothing sexual about it, aside from the fact that he was breathing on her neck and had his hand in her vagina. To me, it was a sexual assault, pure and simple.

So imagine my shock when I realized that, last year, when the episode aired, several Jezebelles said they thought the scene was hot and sexy. The discussion that followed devolved pretty quickly into the standard one that pops up whenever feminists seem to discuss sex. One camp insists a thing is degrading or misogynist, and another camp defends its right to be turned on by that thing. (See also: SarahMC's post about teenagers and facials at Bitch.)

Some made the point that the scene was proof of the show's genius, in that so many people were able to look at a scene and come away with opposing views of it. Others said they were able to find the scene sexy because they saw it as fantasy, while others said they thought turnabout was fair play since Bobbie had forced herself on him. Still others said it was proof of Draper's complexity of character.

I have to say, I disagree with all of these defenses of the scene, with the exception of the one that sees it as fantasy. (However, that brings up another long-running concern of mine, which is how sex and violence are so tangled up in the minds of many, myself included.)

- The idea that two people could look at an event and believe two different things happened is very Rashomon, but it is also the reason why a lot of rape and sexual assault convictions do not happen.
- I didn't realize that sexual assault was appropriate retribution for being a dick.
- I didn't realize it wasn't possible to sexually assault someone you'd already had sex with.
- Just because someone is complex doesn't mean they are admirable. News flash: most people are complex, and that includes people who do heinous things, like murder, rape and abuse others. That's just how we are!

So why does Draper get a pass on so much of his shit? Is it because he looks smashing in a suit? Because he is suave and debonair? Because he can sometimes be a good dad? I think it's worth asking why he is positioned as the hero of the show - a show which many feminists, like myself, really love - when in any other context he would be seen as one of the villians.

On heroines and kicking ass

2009-08-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

I've spent much of the past few years reading literary fiction, which I enjoy for the ideas it contains as well as the artistic use of language, but I didn't realize the literary world was suffering from a such paucity of ass-kicking feminist heroines until I made the leap to genre fiction. Sure, literary fiction is home to dozens of wonderfully-drawn female characters, but they are likely to end up dead, broke or mentally ill. Most of them do not kick ass. If they do kick ass, it is only momentarily, and sometimes by accident.

There are exceptions to this, of course, but the only ones I can really think of are Lizzie Bennett from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and Janie from THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. For the most part, though, women in literary fiction who are lucky enough to be something more than a vehicle through which another (usually male) character fulfills his destiny will still usually end up dead, broke or mentally ill.

(Perhaps that is merely a function of literary fiction, which is more interested in telling us something about the Human Condition than in telling a rollicking good yarn. In that case, depressing and pathetic female characters make sense because the Human Condition is often depressing and pathetic. Although, it doesn't explain why there are plenty of heroic male characters in literature. I blame the patriarchy.)

This is why I was so happy to read the Sookie Stackhouse books. I got into them after realizing I was obsessed with True Blood. Like scarily so, to the point where I read recaps and check out online communities and Twitter feeds about the show. I am but an extra hour in the day and a tad less dignity away from writing slash fanfic with myself as a character. I am THAT OBSESSED. (Someone help me. Please.)

Anyway, I picked up the first two books and I was sucked in almost immediately. Unlike Sookie in the TV show ("Soo-kah!") Book Sookie is brave, smart and tough. She likes men and she likes sex but she's intelligent about it, not just hooking up with any guy who will have her. She's not afraid to deliver an ass-whupping when it's warranted, which it often is. She gets beat up more than I'd like, but hey, it's a book series about vampires and werewolves. People are gonna get beat up.

I took a break from the vampiric world of Bon Temps so I could pick up Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, which I had been eyeing ever since I heard about it. (What can I say, as a tattooed girl I am always fascinated by other tattooed girls.)

The book is a compulsively-readable murder mystery, but it is begging for some feminist literary analysis. I would do it myself, but honestly, my ability to analyze fiction is limited to "I liked it" and "I didn't like it." (Okay, it's not that bad, but it's not that good, either. I'm better at analyzing news media.)

The main female character is a 25-year-old punk hacker named Lisabeth Salander. Lisabeth has a whole mess of problems: a mom in a nursing home, an educational system that has deemed her incompetent, a lecherous guardian, an inability to relate to people on an emotional level.

I felt sorry for her at times, just because she was unable to see what an incredibly gifted person she was, but whatever pity I had for her quickly evaporated when it became apparent that she could handle pretty much anything sent her way. There is one particular scene in the book in which she takes the most delicious revenge possible on a sex offender. I don't want to ruin the scene, so I'll just say two words: Tattoo. Gun. I squealed and bounced up and down on my bed with delight as I read the passage. Feminazi bonerkiller wish fulfillment FOR THE WIN.

I have so thoroughly enjoyed these books that I found myself questioning why I had been such a snob about fiction in the past. For some reason I internalized the idea that a book had to have Deep Meaning in order to be worthwhile. A book that was Merely Entertaining was little more than a handy way to murder trees. Intellectually serious people did not read solely to be entertained. They read to have access to Great Ideas while being entertained, dammit!

How juvenile of me. But the thing is, I know I'm not the only one who looks at books this way. There is definitely a group of readers who perceive books as falling somewhere along a hierarchy of worthiness, and these judgments are often applied wholesale, without regard to things like the quality of the writing or the intricacy of the plot.

But thanks to Sookie Stackhouse and Lisabeth Salander, I've come to see the error of my ways. What's more, I've realized that middle-grade and genre fiction can absolutely be a vehicle for some pretty great feminist art and culture. (Yes, I said it - genre fiction can be art.) Not everything has to be Alice Walker or Maxine Hong Kingston to be amazing and powerful. Sometimes all you have to be is a Louisiana barmaid with the ability to fight vampires in order to kick ass.

Sexist Media Watch - Hillary Edition

2009-08-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

How tragic is it that we have this intelligent, capable woman who is out there kicking some diplomacy ass, and yet all our news media can do back in the States is find a way to cram everything she does into predetermined patriarchy-approved narratives?

Secretary Hillary Clinton has been traveling throughout Africa as part of her effort to engage various governments to search for solutions to problems like mass rape as a tool of war in the Congo, widespread corruption in Nigeria, near-anarchy in Somalia. You know, minor, inconsequential things like that. (Nothing compared to the latest update in the Saga of Jon-and-Kate, I know.)

But back here in the States, you'd think that all she was doing was yelling at hapless Congolese men and having a meltdown over her husband's diplomatic mission to North Korea. Oh, and if former New Yorker* editor Tina Brown is correct, she's flapping her batwings and rumbling her thunder thighs all over the continent while she does so. (Jezebel has the video.)

My first inkling that something was up came on Monday, when this story popped on the AP wire at work:

Clinton snaps at Congolese student who inquires about husband's views

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is happy to answer questions about her own views on world affairs, just don't ask her what her husband thinks.

Clinton's temper flared at a town hall forum in Congo's capital Kinshasa today when a male university student asked what "Mr. Clinton" thought of World Bank concerns about a multi-billion-dollar Chinese loan offer to the Congo.

Her reply was incredulous: "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?"

Before the moderator quickly moved on to other questions, Clinton told the young man: "If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband."

Talk about some loaded language. I understand that the reporter was simply trying to put a bit of flair into the story, but "temper flared?" "Incredulous?" My beginning reporting professor would have docked me a bazillion points for subjective language, then humiliated me in front of my class, and rightfully so.

Besides, wasn't she right to get upset? Let's look at this in a wider context. She has traveled to a country whose women and children (and some men, too) have been subjected to horrific rape by militias, armies and even UN peacekeepers.

Then as if that isn't bad enough, those women are then shunned from their communities and their villages for the egregious sin of having been raped. Obviously we are not dealing with the most woman-friendly culture here.**

So Clinton, who is one of the most powerful women in the world, comes to this country to speak about the problem this country has with rape, and one of the audience members asks what her husband thinks.

It would be as though someone calls my job with a question, but then asks if they can speak to my husband instead. My expertise on the subject does not matter, because I cannot possibly know what I am talking about, because I own a vagina, and everyone knows that my vagina is really just a black hole where my brain should have been.

But that wasn't even the best part of the story:

The question comes a week after former President Bill Clinton stole the limelight from the start of his wife's first trip to Africa when he traveled to North Korea to secure the release of two detained American journalists.

He stole the limelight? Says who? And how do we know Secretary Clinton wasn't involved in this? Does the writer of this story really think that she had absolutely no involvement with sending President Clinton over? Or does the writer just think that he jaunted over on a private jet on a whim?***

The Hillary vs. Bill narrative, the one that constantly pits them against each other, is so old, so tiresome, so 1995. It's evidence of a cultural mindset that cannot look at a married couple and see equals. No, surely there must be a power struggle going on! Someone must be in charge! Someone has to dominate! Either Bill has to be resentful of Hillary's success, or she has to be resentful of him. And who cares if we have no evidence to back that up? We'll just grab stills from video and use it to illustrate our carefully constructed storyline!

So now we have Secretary Clinton pegged as as a volatile harpy shrew who wants to castrate her husband. But thanks to Tina Brown, we can also remember that she's FAT, too. Because, you know, it's not enough that she's working tirelessly to empower women around the globe. No, she needs to get her FAT ASS back in the gym and do some leg lifts, because everyone knows that only thin women are smart, or smart women are thin. (Or maybe it was that women can only be thin or smart, or beautiful or smart, but never both. Oh, I give up.)

At this point, I've spent my entire adult life watching the nation project its anxieties and frustrations over gender roles, sexuality and power onto the Clintons. And as they continue to maintain a high profile, it only seems to get worse. As the always-awesome Judith Warner puts it, the important work Clinton is doing is on the verge of drowning in a "tide of trivialization."

Media people of the world, I beg of you, give it a rest. We've got more important things to do than speculate over whether or not Bill stole Hillary's thunder and criticizing her for spending more time researching global issues than hitting the cardio machines.

Resources

Congo's Rape Epidemic Worsens During U.S.-Backed Military Operation [Washington Post]
Congo: Confronting rape as a weapon of war [Christian Science Monitor]
Hillary Clinton's Africa trip signals new U.S. commitment to Somalia [L.A. Times]
Clinton heads to Liberia to show women power [AFP]
Tina Brown Style 'Tide of Trivialization' Threatens to Swamp Clinton Trip [Jezebel]
Domestic Disturbances: Hillary Fights A Tide of Trivialization [NYTimes]

Endnotes

* I've been reading The New Yorker for about eight months now, and I need someone to explain to me how Tina Brown was ever the editor of that magazine. She seems to me like the Bonnie Fuller of the New York media set - she's savvy, sure, but she focuses all of that brain power on appealing to the lowest common denominator. What gives?

** I don't think the Congo is unique in this regard. Not even close. I'm just referring to it specifically because that is what the story is about.

*** Clearly I am not the only one who thought this story was a stinking pile of whale excretia. I tried to search for it but came up blank. Thank god for that. Honestly, Associated Press, you have some wonderful people doing some really fabulous reporting, but you muck it up with stories like that.

Yes, it's yet another blog

2009-08-04T11:52:00.001-07:00

I've had a LiveJournal - you remember those, right? - for about eight years now, so I figure it's time to make the switch from pseudo-anonymous navel-gazing to actual blogging. After all, isn't this what all writers do? Find a way to squeeze in a blog entry a few times a week in between writing sessions, querying editors and agents, and, for most of us, our eight-hours-a-day at a full-time job?

Clearly we are all insane.

Allow myself to introduce...myself.

I'm Caitlin, an aspiring author, web journalist, running junkie, proud feminist, avid reader, transplanted Floridian, wife to Brian, cat-mom to a bipolar kitty from hell, and a damned good cook, too.

I spend most of my days working for a Corporate Media Outlet as a web content editor, running for miles, reading one of the hundreds of books taking up residence in my condo, engaging in endless battles with my feline demon spawn and writing.

Most of the time I am working on a super-sekrit writing project, but I also have times when I just want to share one of my copious opinions on this great, glorious world around us. That's what this here little digital cranny is for. I hope you enjoy it. And if you don't, well, please keep it to yourself. Thanks!