Books – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Art, Truth, Feminism, JD Salinger, Lena Dunham and Sex

when: From Lena Dunham’s Website

Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days. If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.

Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling. It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.

Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty? It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:

Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.” (Seymour, an Introduction)

GONE GIRL – I Wish She’d Kept Going

OK so I was all set to do some real work this morning. I was. Then I saw this in my friend Katherine Stone’s Facebook feed:

Katherine is a remarkable person whose fierce advocacy for women with post partum mood and anxiety disorders is legendary. I listen to her.

The problem is, I really really hate Gone Girl. Really.

First of all I figured out the ending near the beginning. Secondly, the ending was kind of lifted from SPOILER ALERT: Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Third, I’m betting the movie, soon to be released, is really good, which will just get more people saying nice things about the book. David Fincher. Ben Affleck. Neil Patrick Harris. What could go wrong? I read they changed the ending, too. In principal, that usually bothers me but in this case I’m really curious to see if the change makes the story more palatable.

I am far from the only person with negative feelings toward this novel. The sample in Katherine’s feed includes comments like these:

Rachel Kaffenberger Great writing but the characters just pissed me off. I hated that book. Awful, horrible people are in that book.

Jen Neeld Bradshaw Ha! I read it two weeks ago and I still have some rage.

Asha Dornfest That book freaked me out.

Deb Rox I threw the book. You can guess which scene.

Kit Kelly I hated it.

And my own two personal favorites:

Susan Petcher I feel like “Books that Make You Hate Humanity” needs to be a new FB meme.

Doug French I wanted the last sentence of the book to be, “And then they all piled into a Greyhound Bus and drove into a volcano.”

I’m with Doug. There were also some positive comments but these are the ones I agree with and there are already enough good comments out there in the ether and it’s my blog so….

Even so, it is true that the book evoked a ton of comments and a lot of emotion. I guess there’s some skill required for that to happen but if that’s true, she’s squandered it. Allegedly her other work is better but that’s no excuse – especially for a public which seems to be gaga for this one.

Right now I am reading California, a dystopian, almost too real story of a dark American future. It’s probably only on the radar screen because Stephen Colbert used it as an example of books by young first-time authors who are most hurt by the Amazon-Hachette battle. Since then it too has gotten a lot of attention so one makes me think of the other.

California doesn’t have as many stars on goodreads. For me though, it’s so very much more exciting and provocative. Her characters are more than horrible stereotypes, and it’s Edan Lepucki’s first published novel which is exciting.

This is not a contest between California and Gone Girl or between Stephen Colbert and Ben Affleck. At least not to me. I just didn’t want to be this mean about a book without including one that has my attention, is unpredictable, and includes some decent, interesting people.

Don’t we love that books can get us all riled up like this? Far more fun that terrorists and the NFL!

And for a treat, here’s the Colbert Report after LePucki’s book made the New York Times Best Seller List:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

OH and #boycottNFLsponsors.

WHO EVER THOUGHT RAISING SONS WOULD BE SO GREAT!

NOTE: This is another 2008 virtual baby shower post – to Julie Westerbeck Marsh when her first son appeared.

OK so I grew up with sisters. And I went to a women’s college. And most of my life I’ve worked in offices with more women than men (amazing, no?) So, when I was pregnant I was terrified at the idea of having boys. They were so strange — so noisy — I just had no idea what was coming. Except that what was coming was Josh. And then Dan. And it turned out that — hang on sisters — boys are a blast, great company, luuuhhhv their moms and — boys are easier! I know this because I’ve watched my friends raising daughters and the tensions are fierce. Girls and their mothers — boys and their dads. Not easy.

But let’s get back to basics. Little boys run around a lot and make noise. They jump off things. They ride the dog around and fall off and hit their heads and need stitches. They, later, seem to be trying to kill each other much of the time. And before I go any further – let me tell you that there’s an old shrink saying that therapists never believe that babies are born with personalities until they have their second child. This is also true with many women regarding gender differences – it hits you once they show up. My kids are feminists and very good to the women in their lives as far as I can tell – but they are men and they were boys and that is not like being a girl. Nope.

I have great memories from when they were little – stomping around singing Free to Be and Da Doo Ron Ron Ron and The Garden Song and Abiyoyo, skiing down black diamond slopes and going to Yankee Stadium to see Billy Joel and Carnegie Hall to see Pete Seeger and Madison Square Garden to see Sesame Street on Ice and being dragged to an infinite number of Police Academy and other disgusting movies.

And I lived in alien space much of the time. Some of our hit toys (ie things I would NEVER have had in my house if there were not these strange male creatures inhabiting the premises — and pre-video game age of course):
One of those Radio Shack electronics build-your-own thingy kits that make bells ring and bulbs light up if you hook them up correctly.
Legos
Anything aviationary
Anything Star Wars
Anything GI Joe
Voltron
Weird wrestling stuff (boy did I fight that one!)
Folk music (that’s my fault though)
Baseball cards (and proudly, I did NOT throw them out)
Stuffed animals
Ernie

No Mary Poppins books (I tried) but I did get to read all The Great Brain and Ralph S Mouse and Timothy Goes to School and a gazillion baseball player bios.

There’s serious stuff to having sons, of course. We have to be sure, no matter how much we love hanging around with them, that they get enough alone time with their dads or some other male figure. And wave bravely as they off together on a Sunday (also your day off after all) without you. We have to accept and celebrate the guy stuff.

Just like girls, but differently, we have to let them know we think they can take care of themselves – enable independence at each landmark, if we think they can handle it, even when we really want to help. It’s so easy, with a boy, to want to remain more connected than is useful for them as they grow. At certain points they may pull back for a while, when they need to untangle. We have to let them and respect the struggle

With regard to respect for women – I am deeply impressed with my sons’ perspectives. I hope that being honest and respecting their developing attitudes, helped. I never threw a Playboy out of our house but I made it very clear how I felt about them in the (brief) period they were around. Anything like that, of which I (or my husband) disapproved, had to come out of their allowance. They had to put their money on the line – and I think that helped more than locking it all out of the house and pretending they weren’t interested. It also helped us understand where their heads were. Although that is easier for boys because they are, honestly, more straightforward.

Of course none of what I write here applies to all boys. Much of it may apply to plenty of girls. But it was my experience and in a kind of stream of consciousness baby shower kind of way it’s what rose to the top. The bottom line though, is that even though it’s scary if you’ve lived in a world of women, as I had, they are just wonderful. Most of all, because I know Julie, from reading your blog for so long, you would be a great mother to any child with whom you were blessed, this kid is in for a great life. And where advice is concerned, I say take it only as far as your gifted mother gut takes you. Where the two collide, trust yourself. Girl, boy or android, that way your little one will always be in the right hands.

How Did I Miss “The Giver?”

The movie is coming. I saw the trailer. But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s The Giver was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s The Keeper!. Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post. And The Giver? I hadn’t even read it.

Yesterday I did. I so wish I had been 14 when I found it, but it was published in 1993 and won the Newbery Medal in 1994 so that’s past not only my 14th birthday but that of one of my son’s! It’s very gripping and beautifully written, but there’s been so much YA dystopian fiction since then that it’s hard to imagine the punch in the gut it must have been when it appeared.

As a veteran of the Divergent trilogy and The Hunger Games (and, ok, the Twilight Series but they don’t count) as well as countless post-nuclear–holocaust novels and a ton of cyberfiction, I’m an old hand in this neck of the woods. Even so, the intent of The Giver is a little different. There’s no hunger, no war, not even any pain. It’s a twisted version of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The “sameness” that rules this world has murdered color and music and laughter and love. Oh – and babies, too. One person, “the Giver” is the sole custodian of all memories of the bitter, the painful and the sad. We know this will not stand. And that’s the point.

We had a sign up in my college dorm – a banner across the front porch: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner, The Wild Palms Those are the words and feelings of young people and artists. And it is the battle against nothing the Lowry offers her young readers. As she told the New York Times: “Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.”

When the Giver helps our young hero Jonas decide that beauty and emotion are worth the terrible prices we pay to be fully human, we are all empowered to imagine that we can — no must, join him. Take a stand. Change a mind. Solve a problem. Correct an injustice. Fall in love. Break our hearts or someone else’s. Be alive.

And that’s the power of The Giver, as the rest of you have probably known for years.

So Many Stories

dinner window 4-29 — Evening, out the window.

There are some amazing people here. Wander around looking for a poolside table for lunch and two people look up and say, “Join us.” They turn out to be a pair of characters with whom we share enormous common ground – in broadcasting, in travel, in life.

Go to Trivia at noon and be outclassed at every turn (an unfamiliar experience, I might add.) Meet two couples who’ve sailed around the world and several who’ve hit most of it. All full of stories and curiosity and an unfettered sense of adventure.

Spend a couple of hours on the private patio; wander upstairs to check out the gym and the spa then downstairs to the “book swap” to find an old favorite I would have rated “highly unlikely” to be along on a trip like this.

Then I met a Game of Thrones couple who had never heard of Hyperion and were thrilled when I went back to the give away and brought it to them. A perfect cruise reminder: never assume anything about anyone. Don’t.

I guess that’s true in general but out here on the sea it’s particularly so. Physical therapist or CEO, accountant or fashionista, nobody is predictable and almost everybody is as eager to meet you as you are to meet them. An openness to discovery – of new places, people, food, books and ideas dominates.

A lecture on tomorrow’s destination filled the large auditorium. It’s a kind of floating grad school dorm for grownups. In other words, as we move toward our first stop in Tangier in about eight hours, we’re a bunch of excited, curious, energetic travelers who also just happen to be living on a ship where this appeared at the foot of our bed tonight.

Yes, he’s a towel wearing Rick’s sunglasses and holding the info on our next stop in his paws. Goodnight for now, from Rick, me and the bunny.

A Quick Trip with Leonard Cohen

I can see the room. It’s a little scruffy and smells like pot and incense. (Yes that’s a cliche but there you are.) There’s a mattress on the floor, crazy Berkeley posters on the wall, a turntable and speakers, one window over the bed, another on the long wall. Lots of bookcases, record albums, a coffee grinder for stems and seeds, a big old stuffed chair, and us.

It was a long time ago. Hasn’t crossed my mind in years. Then, right there, on the Spotify singer-songwriter channel, comes a young Leonard Cohen singing this:

Music is dangerous. Suddenly I was back in Massachusetts almost half a century ago, when Suzanne, and Sisters of Mercy too, were part of my lexicon, along with everything from Milord

to Ruby Tuesday

to Blowin’ in the Wind.

Years ago Garry Trudeau published a Doonesbury thta included the line “You’ve stolen the sound track of my life!” I don’t remember the context but it’s disconcertinly accurate, as he usually is. Every song is a movie of the past, running — sometimes joyously, sometimes with enormous sadness, in my head.

It was such a different time, full of righteous anger and, at the same time, joy at being alive, sometimes in love, always part of the changes taking place all around us, many at our instigation.

Now, as we face the rage and disappointment of many of our children and their peers, it’s kind of heartbreaking to look back with such nostalgia at a time that they clearly see as debauched and destructive and, even worse, egocentric and selfish.

It’s paricularly hard when these songs rise up, so transporting. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has fond recollections of the younger times in their lives. But for me, as the music carries me there, it was so much more. Hope, freedom, equality, beauty, love and peace — every song an anthem moving us forward. And lovers in a scruffy dorm room, a little bit stoned, listening, and sometimes, singing along.

The Wolf of Wall Street: Greed, Sex, Cruelty and Martin Scorsese

I understand about Martin Scorsese. I really do. From Mean Streets to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull to Goodfellas to Boardwalk Empire, much of his work has been dark and violent. Decent people don’t show up very often and when they do, they seldom prevail, so when we went to see The Wolf of Wall Street this weekend, I wasn’t expecting a pleasant experience. I was not expecting what I got, either.

By the end of the film I was so angry I was shaking. After three hours of unrelenting greed, emotional violence, ruthlessness, the cynical exploitation of the weak, casually abusive and emotionless sex, indescribable disregard for and destructive treatment of women, it was tough to walk out of the theater without throwing something.

It was excess beyond anything that words could describe; images, sadly, are more successful. There’s nowhere to hide and there are so many moments where we wish we could.

I was a broadcast producer in the and 80’s and covered the excesses of that time. I knew that, in Bonfire of Vanities, Tom Wolfe was demonstrating his skills as a reporter as well as a novelist.

Even so, the rank, brittle ugliness of this film, of these people and of the fact that much of the story really happened turned what we know into what we wish we didn’t. The criticism by the daughter of one of its main characters, that it glamorizes the Belfort universe and makes them some sorts of rakish sweetie pies wasn’t what I saw. The are all reprehensible from first to last.

Of course the film wouldn’t have had the impact it did if it hadn’t been so well-made. Its impact is indisputable. Even so – maybe his next undertaking, after all this darkness, will bring us the Scorsese behind The Last Waltz and Concert for New York City. After all, they say music tames the savage beast, and in this film, he certainly unleashed a hell of a creature.

So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks

All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass. To be part of the Glass family, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door. They were sad and weird and wonderful.

And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved for Holden Caulfield, the eternally adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye. Holden is worthy of every affectionate word written about him, and his palpable pain is familiar to those who’ve journeyed through the teen years, but the Glasses — well — they were a different kind of lovely.

They are all the children of one man, and he died today. I wish I could tell you what it felt like to read Catcher in the Rye at 13. I can remember where I was sitting as I read it – how I felt – and the deep sadness that accompanied Holden’s story. It must have been traumatic though, because later, when my son and I read it together, I was shocked to learn that Holden’s brother had died. I had jammed that fact someplace hard to reach, which means it was even more disturbing than I remember. Reading it with my own child was a beautiful experience to share with a young man of deep compassion and great sensibility – a memory I cherish. So Salinger gave me that, too.

(I’m not mentioning Joyce Maynard here. She had a right – but sheesh!) And I really don’t have much to say about the quiet recluse in the hills of New Hampshire. Farewell to him, yes, but also to yet another connection to the days when I was young – and more like Holden than like women of a Certain Age. The passions, the pain, the poetic anger at people for not being what we expect them to be and the desperate longing to rescue the imperiled and the lost.

Anyway,
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of
rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big,
I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy
cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go
over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re
going I have to come out from somewhere and <span>catch</span> them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the
catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing
I’d really like to be.”

I guess those who don’t dream of being the catcher long
to be the one who is caught. And those longings don’t go away whether you’re 13 or
63 (right – I first read it FIFTY years ago!) Imagine. No, it
doesn’t go away, but your perspective changes. The loveliness of that
kind of protecting — or being protected – it isn’t around much in the real
world. All the more reason to be grateful for the rare observer who can remind us of its sweetness, and of what we are capable of aspiring to.

And grateful I am. For Franny and Zooey and Seymour and all their craziness and for Holden, what he gave me then, and what I remember, even today.

Ellen Goodman Doesn’t Write there Anymore

As long as I've worked in media, which is a long time, Ellen Goodman's been there too. Her Pulitzer-prize-winning column, originating in the Boston Globe, has been a beacon and a landmark and a treasure.

And now it's ending. No, nobody fired her, she still has a large audience and many adoring readers but she's decided to stop. Here's part of what she said in her valedictory meditation on covering women in America – and I recommend you go read the entire thing:

My generation — WOMEN — thought the movement would advance on two
legs. With one, we'd kick down the doors closed to us. With the other,
we'd walk through, changing society for men and women.

It turned
out that it was easier to kick down the doors than to change society.
It was easier to fit into traditional male life patterns than to change
those patterns. We've had more luck winning the equal right to 70-hour
weeks than we've had selling the equal value of care-giving. We have
yet to solve the problem raised at the outset: Who will take care of
the family?

As a young mother and reporter, it did not occur to
me that my daughter would face the same conflicts of work and family.
Or, on the other hand, that my son-in-law would fully share those
conflicts. I did not expect that over two-thirds of mothers would be in
the work force before we had enough child care or sick pay.

Yes – those things are true. My own sons expect (and one has) wives who keep their names and expect to remain in the workforce. And yes, they still face issues of child care and equal pay and glass ceilings. The sad thing is, they won't have the provocative, inspiring, funny and very gifted voice of Ellen Goodman to cheer them on. Maybe she'll write another book though; if she does, I'll send a copy to each of them.

Art Imitates Life and Dr. Horrible’s Nemesis Is an Author!

I'm not sure who's on first, which chicken chased which egg or even how to tell you about this. See this book cover? It's a real book – and Entertainment Weekly says it isn't even bad. But the author – well, the author isn't real!!! He's a character on an ABC TV program called – guess what — Castle!

Played by Dr. Horrible's own Biggest Enemy Captain Hammer — aka Nathan Fillion – he's a debonair, wealthy mystery writer with an actress mother and a typically New-York-wise daughter with whom he has a refreshingly healthy relationship (Mom too, actually.)

So there's nothing wrong with the show; it's slight, sweet and kind of funny although it could certainly be better written. In fact, from the reviews I've read, it might be better if Richard Castle (who remember, doesn't exist – really) wrote the scripts as well as his books.

Yes books because apparently this is the first of many. And you can get it on Kindle and Castle even has a brief (equally fictitious) bio on Amazon "Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets,
published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume
Society's prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle
currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom
infuse his life with humor and inspiration."

Got that? Fillion/Captain Hammer (this guy) also plays a fictitious writer on a lightweight TV show and somebody – whose name isn't anyplace and as far as I can determine hasn't played anyone (other than a ghostwriter) has written a novel in his name.

This isn't a scandal or a crime – it's just so damned funny. Fillion seems like a fine fellow and Castle is certainly likable enough. But it's hard to get books published these days – especially fiction.

So all you struggling writers out there — now you know how to sell your novel. Make it into a TV show and your literary career is assured.

As my mom used to say, "Only in America!"