How to Write a Negative Review

I love reading negative reviews but I have a hard time writing them. And I wonder about their usefulness, too. A book’s author is often the most attentive reader and I always think of her--of Virginia Woolf’s eloquent and pained responses to reviews, of the reviews I hope and fear to read of my own work one day. (One does exist, by the way, in the new issue of Woolf Studies Annual, but I haven’t seen it yet.) It seems churlish, knowing how hard it is to write a book, to be mean about someone else’s.

But not all books are good, and every book, even a great one, has limitations.

It seems to me that Emily Nussbaum’s review of Deborah Garrison’s new collection of poems in Sunday’s NYTBR offers a great model of a kind of negative review. This is a second collection, a follow-up to a popular and successful first. Nussbaum establishes that with generosity and this pads us against feeling too bad for Garrison (after all, the implication is, she is going to be just fine--as the picture of her, smart, good-looking, and, apparently thriving in a backyard in New Jersey, seems to attest). Nussbaum is careful, too, to note that Garrison’s “Sex in the City”-type poems appealed to her; she found them light but pleasant; she likes “Sex in the City.”

Then, in the last three paragraphs of the review, she zooms out to take a look at the bigger picture.

Garrison is writing about motherhood now. Of poets on that topic, how does her work stack up?

Well, not as well as one might hope. Nussbaum puts Garrison in a large constellation dominated by the stars of late-twentieth century women’s poetry: Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and, finally, Sylvia Plath:

But is it wrong to want more? Since …midcentury, … there has been a flood of smart, morbid, searching, sometimes outrageous writing on maternity. The best such poems burn off the pink sentimentality of motherhood in favor of something wilder and more surprising. …

This, “is it wrong to want more?” is, I think, a key question of reviewing. I’ve just finished a book that didn’t do it for me and that wanting more was the whole problem: the author built a world for me and then didn’t really do much with his creations. All the lovely sentences built towards predictability, beauty without momentum, cruelty. I wanted more.

Nussbaum continues, comparing Garrison to Sylvia Plath. It’s an unfair fight--and Nussbaum acknowledges that--but the point here is to remind ourselves as readers what it feels like not to want more, to read poems about something common--being a mother--and be left feeling stunned, amazed, transported.

To my mind, the great unsung poet of motherhood is Sylvia Plath. She may have a reputation as the ultimate misery chick, but in fact, her writing overflows with talk of birth, of breastfeeding and motherhood, much of it, despite sad undercurrents, loving and celebratory. In the gorgeous “Nick and the Candlestick,” for instance, Plath writes “O love, how did you get here? / O embryo / Remembering, even in sleep, / Your crossed position. / The blood blooms clean / In you, ruby.” The poem ends with one of her most moving images: “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious. / You are the baby in the barn.” In poems like this, and in her finest descriptions (as when a newborn’s “clear vowels rise like balloons”), Plath makes strange what should be familiar — which is, after all, a central task of poetry.

It’s unfair, of course, to expect Garrison to be like Plath. She has her own gifts and an audience sure to appreciate them. In real life, I’d rather have a likable next-door neighbor than a bipolar goddess as a confidante. But in writing? Give me the strange mother over the sweet one any day.

Where Have I Been?

My desk at home, where I work only at night when my husband is home and upstairs, is in our bedroom. When we set up this desk, we imagined the always overflowing shelf above my workspace as a convenient spot for a few books currently essential to my work. We wanted to keep the bedroom a sanctuary, in spite of the space restrictions of apartment living.

Well, here we are, ten months later, and the stack here includes, among many other things, all the books I’ve read but not yet told you about. Plus a few leftovers from the LitBlog Co-op last quarter--things that I haven’t yet filed elsewhere or about which I’m still thinking. Every time, for example, I see Demon Theory, I’m paralyzed about what to do with it. I didn’t like it, but my dislike turned to fascination as I thought more about the book. I don’t really want to give it away, nor do I want it on display. So there it sits.

And the other week was, well, stressful. Things at work were a little intense--good, but intense. And then I went to the CCCC’s conference at the end of the week (two weeks ago now): that’s the big conference on teaching writing (composition, not creative writing) at the college level. I had all sorts of split motives all the time. I considered attending a joint presentation by Joy Harjo and Lee Marmon (a photographer and the father of Leslie Marmon Silko) but decided that I would do better to go to a smaller, wonkier presentation.

At the wonk-fest, I was bored (as I’d expected to be) but imagine my double disappointment upon arriving at the book exhibit to find Joy Harjo kitted out entirely in red satin, signing books.

I meant, then, to make up for that by going to hear Dorothy Allison, but I ran into a bunch of old friends and our conversation was so fun and good that I missed her, too: I had to run off to a department meeting. And so it goes.

A more familiar problem of time

I'm still here--barely. Swamped by bureaucracy and hoping to re-emerge refreshed from the weekend.

The baby fell off the bed yesterday. She is fine, but will be sporting quite a shiner for her baptism on Sunday.

Back to the memos and meetings for now.

Back to books on Monday, d.v.

New DeLillo--Falling Man and the Problem of Time

When Bud and I had lunch, we talked about blogging and the future of book blogging and the reasons why it can be hard to get a conversation going on a book blog.

The problem, it seems to me, is the problem of time.

While we all follow the news on the same day, we aren’t--thank God--reading the same books at the same time. That’s why, for lively discussion and a change of pace, I love the success of some of the great reading group blogs like 400 Windmills (Quixote), A Curious Singularity (short fiction), and the LitBlog Co-op (contemporary literature).

More fiercely than that, though, I love the ability to choose to read whatever in the world I want to read next, regardless of what is being talked about.

And the forthcoming DeLillo is a great example of that.

My upstairs neighbor is in the book business. She came by the new DeLillo and passed it on to me. I read it and gave it to a student who’s a huge fan. (JRG: If you read this, maybe you could put the first paragraph into the comments to satisfy the commenters?) So now, a couple months before it’ll start showing up everywhere else, I’ve read it.

And, oddly enough, it’s the only DeLillo I’ve read. So, what can I tell you about it?

It’s a 9/11 novel. It’s wonderful. My guess--confirmed by my student--is that it’s excellent but not the very, very best of his work.

It opens on the morning of September 11, 2001, after the collapse of the first tower, with a dust-covered and bleeding man walking uptown, briefcase in hand. In shock, he steers himself to his ex-wife’s apartment.

From there, we follow him, his wife and son, his wife’s mother & her boyfriend, and the owner of the briefcase, in those dark, confusing weeks after September 11. There are also several interpolated chapters--stunning and moving and deeply upsetting--following the life (and death) of one of the suicide bombers. DeLillo captures the uncertain mood of those days perfectly but this is not a novel about that strange grief-stricken elation, that “we are all Americans now” mood that the war so effectively killed. Instead, it’s a novel about mounting anger, anxiety, and nervousness. Maybe it’s a novel about the mood that led to the war. The children--the son and his friends--are incredibly wonderful, creepily watching the skies with binoculars.

Best, for me, was the brittle anger of the ex-wife, lying next to her husband in bed, wondering if they would ever make love again, washing his clothes separately, and, most chillingly, letting herself think racist thoughts--doesn’t that music sound Arabic? Is that blouse Morroccan? Why is she wearing that blouse in these difficult times? Why is she listening to that music in these sensitive times?

Oh, those poisonous thoughts. Oh, the marvel of watching DeLillo reveal the poisonous thoughts of an ordinary unhappy woman to us.

There is neither hand-wringing nor kumbaya here. Just carefully observed, horrible, limited, and ordinary upper-middle class white Americans burrowing back into the Upper East Side.

So, months from now, when the book comes out, when people start talking about it, perhaps you’ll remember reading this little meditation-cum-review and think to pick up the book. But, by then, where will the comments thread on this post be? You’ll post your reaction on your own blog and our imperfect, ill-timed conversation will carry on imperfectly, at its own lugubrious and erratic pace.

Spring Break

I'm off to Florida with my family for a week.

I'm sure you'll find plenty to read in my absence...

Those Dry & Witty Stracheys

One of the great, great pleasures of editing--gleaning great quotations from the reviews one edits. My favorite in a long time is this, from my friend Jay's review of a biography of the Strachey family (Lytton was the most famous brother, a great friend of Woolf and author of the terrific Eminent Victorians). Lytton's sister Pernel describes to her elder sister Pippa of a typical Newnham College nightly ritual:

I have got to go to a hideous entertainment called a cocoa; you are given one spoonful of powdery cocoa and one spoonful of ‘cow’ that is condensed milk. These you mix together in a cup of milk till they look like mud; boiling water is then poured on, the next process being to try and drink it. Weird cakes are also passed around. At 10 o’clock at night this depresses me somewhat.

Delta Zeta at DePauw: Sisterhood is Global?

I’m still chewing over the horrific, tragicomic events at DePauw’s chapter of Delta Zeta sorority. You may have read the article in the Times last weekend: representatives from the national headquarters of the sorority had been unhappy with the house for some time. It was not full and had a reputation for attracting members who were a little too smart and not quite pretty enough… I could stop right there and be justified in my outrage.

Anyway, representatives from national swooped in and summarily evicted 23 members--including all (or, according to some reports, all but one) minorities and everyone who was a little overweight. Of the twelve remaining “sisters,” six resigned in protest over the action.

The heartless women from national evicted these women on December 2, just before finals, as has been widely reported. In an eloquent letter of protest to Delta Zeta’s headquarters from DePauw’s president, Robert Bottoms, he notes that the timing of the notices created “an unacceptable disruption in the academic lives of our students.” I can only imagine the distress of these young women, most of whom care about their grades and their education, upon learning this news just as they were gearing up to study for exams.

This action--and the DZ officials’ lame, double-talking justifications of it on CNN and elsewhere--has only reconfirmed my very worst suspicions of what is wrong with sororities and the Greek system in general. I am outraged at the evictions themselves--so antithetical to sisterhood--and the timing of them--so hostile to education. Susie Bright, so clever and so much brasher than I, writes about how the “Greek system is founded on discriminations of race, class, and family— sugar-coated over the years as a ‘way to make friends.’” Then she gets to the heart of what is so sickening about this action--and so heartening about the admirable, brave behavior of the young DePauw women since. She reminds us how sororities “prey on every freshman's fear of being lonely and miserable.” Furthermore, she says, let us not forget what it means that DZ national so prizes pretty women who are good at “recruiting”:

It's the heightened heterosexual regime of trophy wife assembly. These young women must learn to project the promise of Virgin WASP Money while getting sloshed and performing merit-based blow jobs on a calculated ladder of potential husbands, i.e., frat-brats. Plenty of the De Pauw ‘undesirables’ had boyfriends and sex lives— they just weren't ‘partying’ hard enough. Yep, their booze and tease stats were too low to qualify.

Disgustingly put--and deservedly so. Bright’s vulgarity lays bare the vulgarity of how the Greek system continues an old-fashioned middle-class marriage market in which women attend college to secure their class position not through career but through marriage.

I taught at DePauw for four years and I remember Delta Zeta as an all right sorority. On a campus where the vast majority of students belong to a sorority, it was difficult to maintain my natural suspicion of the Greek system. And, as you might imagine, when three quarters of the students are “Greek,” some of the sororities and fraternities turn out to be all right--not as horrific and exclusionary as the usual run of such organizations. Newsweek quotes DePauw’s Dean of Students as praising the old DZ for filling "a great, eclectic niche." That’s not, as Newsweek notes, typical of sororities. Still, the model of houses (maybe) being like special interest dormitories was the one that prevailed when I was at DePauw. And, judging by the school’s memo of its recommitment to Greek Life, it continues to be the hope of the DePauw administration.

I do not see how anyone can continue to countenance that hope in the face of these events. It’s time for the sororities and fraternities to go. It’s time to find a better way to help college students find friends and overcome the social terror of moving from home into the world.

There was a lot of talk all over the web about this last week. MommyPhD does some eloquent hand-wringing over this--she is a DZ alum; BitchPhD praised the sisterhood of the resigning six--everyone’s heroes, for sure; some well-meaning but naïve mothers and boyfriends are quoted over at mothertalkers; Jennifer Weiner is mad, too. And you can find more at the university website and the very good student newspaper.

The Man Who Would Be King

After all these years, I finally made it to Three Lives Books--thanks to Bud, who took me there. What’s been the matter with me? Well, let’s see--tight purse strings, little babies, and a poor sense of direction in the West Village which had me confusing Biography Books (which is fine but not great) with Three Lives which is both great and incredibly clost to the PATH train. Hooray!!

On my first trip, I bought, among other things, a very, very pretty little Melville House edition of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King which I gobbled one night in the tub, dreaming of Sean Connery, of George Clooney in a remake.

The novella, set in Afghanistan, is not only a terrific adventure story but also a great fable for our times. Two English loafers tire of the strictures and civilization of colonial India and head off to a remote part of Afghanistan, hoping to be greeted as liberators--oops! wrong century--to be made kings. The story is framed by a newspaper man who first lends the two adventurers his atlas and then, three years later, listens to the whole tale from the surviving one.

I can think of no quicker or more delightful way to read about the beginnings of “The Great Game” (as the Anglo-Russian land-grab over Central Asia was then called) than this.

The Melville House edition--from Hoboken!--is lovely. Still, it’s too bad to misspell Noble (!) Prize and the name of one of the two protagonists (Carnahan for Carnehan) on the dustjacket…).

Special Collections

Every time I go to the New York Public Library, I think--or wonder--if it’s a good job, a well-paying job. The workers there seem unusually friendly, helpful, and competent for people whose job it is to match a call slip with a book, to stamp a call slip with a time, to check a bag for contraband. ''

The friendliness of the regular librarians is matched by the diversity of the public. It is also matched by my terror of special collections.

And the public is truly the general public. On Ash Wednesday, a black man with two huge, flat dreadlocks, one on each side of his head, hanging like the rectangular locks of some barristers’ wigs, approach a beautiful librarian, a black Carribbean woman, asking for the phone book. As I sharpened my pencil, the dreadlocked man returned and, pointing at the ash on her forehead, said, “I noticed that you have the mark of the beast on your forehead. The Catholic Church is the devil…”

As we went on, she smiled, and sweetly said, “Well, you’re entitled to your opinion. The phone books are over there.” When he left, she turned to her co-worker, sotto voce, “Get a haircut.”

This good, warm, and human behavior (polite to the crazies but still enough of a person to let off steam), held, too, when I went to apply for a reader’s card at the special collection within the library, where Woolf’s manuscripts are housed. The librarian was generous, welcoming, and assuaged my nerves. He asked if I intended to consult the manuscripts that day. No, I said, I had too many books with me. Best to return when I didn’t need to leave so much at the coat check.

“Yes. It’s best if you can just bring in a pencil. They’re quite particular there.”

My fear of special collections mounts.

The reference librarian was helpful, too, when I went to see if it could be right that the first American edition of Mrs. Dalloway was available in the general collection and that I need not go to special collections to consult it.

“Yes, that looks right. And if you can avoid looking at their copy, do. They’ll much prefer it.”

My heart is now pounding in my chest.

Still, I rang the bell to enter the special room and was ushered in by a kindly man. This was not, perhaps, going to be so bad. He asked me to sign in, “we live and die by numbers here,” and helped me discover what was becoming clear: for all the great manuscript material they have, they don’t have the books I need.

Well, I told him, once I get the books consulted, I will need to come back to look at the manuscript material. Thank you so much, I said, and I’ll be back in a few weeks.

“Have you spoken to --- ?”

No, do I need to?

“Oh yes. He’s not in today. Let me give you one of his cards. He is the one who authorizes anyone looking at actual manuscripts, not just the cd rom or microfilm. And, when it comes to publication, you’ll need a letter from the Society of Authors. He follows the letter of the law on that. Let me stress that. The Letter. Of. The. Law.”

I am officially terrified to return.

In telling this story to a friend, she informed me that there is, in fact, a whole chapter of a recent novel, Round-Heeled Woman is the book, I think, about how hard it is to get into special collections...I'm relieved and amused to know I'm not alone...

Editing--Collating Editions

I wrote with some embarrassment over my unwillingness to donate one of multiple copies of a book. This week, I find myself wishing that libraries worldwide had shared my caution.

I’m at work on a textual edition of Mrs. Dalloway. The first phase of that work, as I’m learning (this process being new to me), involves collating all the changes amongst the editions of the novel published in Woolf’s lifetime. (This means checking all the spelling and punctuation variants across editions.) (I will also be checking the first English edition against the two surviving proofs as well as consulting extant drafts of the novel).

As I embark on this collation, then, imagine my surprise in finding that the New York Public Library, home to most of Woolf’s papers, does not own the Hogarth “Universal Edition” of Woolf’s novels. This universal edition, with blue jackets, was a repackaging of her books for completists, readers who wanted the pleasure and prestige of a lovely block of identical blue-jacketed novels in their library. (I have never seen these books in person.)

In fact, according to WorldCat, there are only 23 copies of this edition in libraries worldwide, none in New York City. It’s a good thing, I suppose that my brief does not extend to the second universal edition which came out in 1942. Only four libraries have that book--and one, Princeton, shows up as owning it on WorldCat but it’s not listed in Princeton’s own database. That database, rather alarmingly, lists their copy of the first edition (1925) as missing.

Why does all this matter? Well, in the short term it matters to me immensely because I’ve contracted to do this work and I intend to do it properly, thoroughly, and even, although it is unnatural to me, meticulously.

But, beyond that, why does it matter to know that the first edition has “silver-flashing plumes” while the first American edition has “silver flashing--plumes”?

I don’t think it’s too heretical of me to say that I accepted this project in part to come to my own answer to that question. I’m not seeking a piety about sacred texts, but a real, earned knowledge.

Stay tuned.

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf

I really thought that I was making a bit of a break from Woolf to imagine a new project (after the Mrs. Dalloway one, that is), that would have Bowen and and Graham Greene at its center.

Now I find, as I read Victoria Glendenning’s biography of Bowen, that I’m working on yet another woman writer with a family history of manic depression. Both Woolf and Bowen lost their mothers as young adolescents.

The Camel Bookmobile

I don’t quite now how it happened, but I actually did send a box of books off to Kenya yesterday. The appeal hit me at just the right moment. It’s such a romantic and moving notion: books arriving by camel. And then, I’d just read Wizard of the Crow. Most of all, however, I was in the foulest mood possible: really, just barely civil. I wanted to break things, destroy things, spend money, overeat, wreak havoc. Somehow, my better angels led me to this entry onMaud’s blog. I found a way to spend $42 and put the brakes on my careening frustrations.

So, I went through my office. I love books and am a hoarder. What did I have that I could spare that was not utter junk? I have five copies of To the Lighthouse in my office (and more at home), but I couldn’t find one to part with. The same was true of all my Woolf books--this one is unmarked and valuable for being pristine; that one has my grandmother’s markings in it; the other was the first one I read and has naïve markings; and the final one has more recent notes and is essential for finding key passages fast. O.k., so I could let myself off the hook there: I’m a Woolf scholar and it’s o.k. to be a little batty with regards to that.

But why couldn’t I part with one of my two unread copies of The Thirty-Nine Steps? Or The Quiet American? Well, one copy of the Buchan is a reprint of the original and has a cool thirties roadster on the cover; the other has some sources and editorial material. The same kind of thing was true of Greene. And then, there are the dozens of rare African novels, literary journals, literary histories and political histories that I inherited from a retiring colleague. Could I, should I, part with them and send them to Kenya? I could not part with that treasure, either. In short, I began to fear that I would never find a book at all.

I ended up with thirteen to send--and it’s not such a bad list either: a couple English writing textbooks; two anthologies (including one of postcolonial literature); Much Ado About Nothing, The Oresteia and Beowulf; four great Dover Thrift editions (Mansfield, Joyce, Eliot, and Conan Doyle); and, to round out the baker’s dozen, The Color Purple and The Double Helix. Given all that I couldn’t part with, I was glad to send a box that, I hope, won’t look like the runt of the litter when it gets to its destination, some six or eight weeks from now. (I think it’s going by camel…)

Poetry for Children

Whenever I go to a children’s bookstore of the children’s book section of a chain store, I’m dismayed and disappointed by the choices of children’s poetry on hand. True, Chris Raschka has illustrated some gems and John Hollander, a personal hero, has made some amazing selections. Overall, however, the choices are slim.

Glad I am, then, to have the books of my girlhood. Today, my daughter chose the Golden Treasury of Poetry (c. 1957; 1974, ed. by Louis Untermeyer) as her reading tonight. The pictures are by Joan Walsh Anglund: charming but a little insipid. We flip through the book: a big, 300-page treasury, and she chooses based on whether the pictures are in color (every page is illustrated, but only 10 percent or so are in color) and if that color picture appeals. I don’t generally read either the title or the poet but just dive right in.

Tonight, she loved two by Robert Louis Stevenson, Ogden Nash, Louis Untermeyer, and an Untermeyer modernization of part of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” (“That’s a very good knight!”). She could tell that Lewis Carrol’s “Father William” was funny without understanding it, but, when I read a bit of Wordsworth to her, she closed her eyes and began to pretend to snore.

That’s always been my feeling about The Prelude, too…

*(I admire and respect Wordsworth and I genuinely love the Intimations Ode, Tintern Abbey and many other shorter lyrics. I just can't do The Prelude.)

The dreaded 100 books meme

In full list mode, having done my top ten, I found Cam and Imani playing around with this meme. I copied it out and drove myself insane with it. It's a crazy list: no Woolf at all, only two Austens, no George Eliot and light on Brontes, no 18th century novels at all (Fielding, Defoe, Burney, Richardson, etc.) very little African American literature, tons of Steinbeck but no Hemingway, almost nothing literary that is also not commonly taught at school or acknowledged as canonical except for, strangely, Margaret Laurence. I find it very hard to strike through things. I mostly love reading; my tastes are pretty catholic. I thought The Da Vinci Code was entertaining. It just doesn't bug me all that much that it's not well written. I don't think Dan Brown was aiming for that. It was a good, amusing little story. So what?

Similarly, there are books that I know I'd probably enjoy--as cotton candy, like Sophie Kinsella, or more richly, like John Irving. But will I ever get to them? Unlikely. And it doesn't make sense to italicize them just because I imagine I'd enjoy them well enough. Still, if stuck in a cabin over the weekend with The Bible and Confessions of a Shopaholic, I'm confident that the Kinsella would be read by the end of the weekend.

***

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. + Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. +Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. +The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. +Bible (like Cam, I have read parts; not all)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. +Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. + She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. *Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. +The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. +Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. +The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. +Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) (It means so much to so many students of mine that I feel I should learn, first hand what the story is.)
63. +War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. +One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. +Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. +Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. +The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. +Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. +The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. +Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. +Ulysses (James Joyce)

My Top Ten

This was hard. Bud posted his top ten and I immediately got nervous in a shameful way. So many books that might and should be on my top ten aren’t there because I haven’t read them (or haven’t finished them). Poor Madame Bovary, for example. I was twenty-four and in love. I was in Paris. I bought the novel in French. My French is good, but I was undone by all those ribbons and petticoats. Then, my beloved’s indifference to me became excruciating. I left him and the book.

Watching Eric Rohmer’s Summer last night--a movie I hadn’t seen in a decade and one that lives up to its unofficial status as my favorite film--I was again shamed to be reminded of Dostoevsky. The heroine (French, lonely, self-defeating) has read him; I have not.

And this is a dangerous game, isn’t it? If you’ve read David Lodge, you’ll remember the English professors playing a suicidal game of admitting which classics they haven’t read. Drunk, the young antihero plays his trump card: Hamlet. He wins the game.

He doesn’t get tenure.

So these are the thoughts that have been racing through my mind.

Still, top ten lists are amusing, so I offer mine. I took this to be about fiction, so Yeats, Shakespeare, and Virgil are not here. They probably would be otherwise. As would Keats’ odes.

I drew this up quickly: the top five or so are without doubt the most important novels in my life. After that, I’ll admit to some tinkering. I let the unquestioned masterpieces pass without comment. They are, to me, sacred texts. As Henry James (who came in thirteenth or so) said, one does not defend one’s god; one’s god is, in himself, a defense. (I doubt he foresaw that being applied to Leslie Stephen’s bluestocking daughter Virginia….)

1. Pride and Prejudice
2. Mrs. Dalloway
3. Another Country by James Baldwin. I came to this on my own somehow in high school and it changed my life. It’s not close to being in the top twenty-five best books, but it does something incredible: it really tries to imagine a world of inter-racial love and friendship, of alliances between gay and straight people, even (least successfully) of finding smart women interesting and sexy. This was the world that my Seattle friends and I thought we were building in the early eighties in high school and to find Baldwin having tried it already made me believe in our fantasy all the more.
4. Invisible Man
5. Great ExpectationsLittle makes me happier and more connected to my girlhood and my father than Dickens. It’s hard not to choose Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, but this novel of a thwarted fairy tale did some important illusion-breaking for me. I have re-read it several times since with increasing pleasure and admiration.
6. Anna Karenina
7. Anne of Green GablesD. H. Lawrence wrote a gorgeous essay on the hymns of his youth as the lifeblood of his poetry. Nothing, he wrote, could touch him more deeply than “Oh Galilee, sweet Galilee / Where Jesus loved so much to be.” L. M. Montgomery was that to me. I still remember breathlessly running down to the kitchen, “Mama, what’s a kindred spirit?” “Oh. Well, Anne is my kindred spirit.” My parents were kind and did not giggle in front of me. I knew I was swept away, but what a pleasure it was.
8. Women in LoveI came to Lawrence late. What a thunderclap. And, when I turned briefly away from Woolf to work on Lawrence--just for a little testosterone break--I met my husband.
9. Ulysses
10. Wizard of the Crow I love what Bud said--that if he’s lucky, the book he’s reading now is his favorite. I’m still living in the spell of this one: a great, great epic of African literature with a marvelous romance, lots of humor, and biting satire.

Not a lot of overlap with other lists, I see, but that’s the fun of the game, isn’t it?

Ha Jin, Waiting

I got excited about the Opera of The First Emperor because, well, China is cool and I knew the names Tan Dun, Ha Jin, & Zhang Yimou. I bought tickets & went. I went to hear Ha Jin speak at Fordham in an interview connected with the opera. And, weeks ago, I read Waiting for the first time. Finally, I have a minute to type in my thoughts which have been languishing in longhand for a while now…

I loved this book, but it took a while for me to find the first passage that struck me as great. I read along passively: it’s so well-written but the prose doesn’t overwhelm you with its power or skill at first. Then, suddenly, the crackle of this amazing description of the springtime hit me:

Then spring descended all of a sudden. Aspen catkins flew in the air, so thick that when walking on the streets you could breathe them in and you would flick your hand to keep them away from your face. The scent of lilac blooms was pungent and intoxicating. Yet old people still wrapped themselves in fur or cotton-padded clothes. The dark earth, vast and loamy, marked by tufts of yellow grass here and there, began emitting a warm vapor that flickered like purple smoke in the sunshine. All at once apricot and peach trees broke into blossoms, which grew puffy as bees kept touching them. Within two weeks summer started. (27)

What moved me? I like the phrase “Aspen catkins” with its internal rhyme; I like the excess of it--the catkins scent is not only so thick you breathe it, they are so abundant that you flick them away; I love the immediate image of Chinese old people in conjured by “cotton-padded clothes”; best of all, the second moment of excess, when apricot and peach trees break into blossom and those blossoms themselves then grow puffy from the bees.

From this moment on, the experience of reading the novel changed. That passage made me know for myself what I had heard (and believed) from others: that Ha Jin is a great writer.

Then, I was surprised at how affecting the plot is. I can’t quite explaine it--it’s partly that it made me remember the years and years of my life that I spent working and lonely, longing for a partner. Those years were far from monkish years, not solitary at all, but I did spend a lot of time waiting.

But there is something more. The hospital setting, full of doctors and nurses, most of them far from their home villages, educated beyond their parents and in a different field from them, is familiar and modern. But rather than focusing on alienation or bacchanal, Ha Jin emphasizes the sense of lives in suspense. (The austerity of the Chinese Communist setting only aids this.) When the protagonist goes back to his home village annual (to request a divorce from his wife), he is simultaneously relieved to be among familiar, easygoing faces and appalled at the parochialism of the villagers--symbolized most potently by the bound feet of his wife.


When you have lives in two places, in two worlds, and before you have definitively broken with one in favor of the other, it’s easy to live--as the main character does--in a fantasy in which the life that is “real” oscillates between places according to mood--in harmony, one can feel that the real life is here, wth only a dull awareness of another life ongoing there; out of sync, the real life seems to be there, this life here, only a figment.

The book is wonderful and I wouldn’t want it to be a sentence shorter. The ending really took me by surprise--watching his decisions grow dumber and thicker and then watching the lovely and disastrous consequences of his passive, suspended life, was a really gorgeous and moving reading experience.

But now, weeks later, I can see the book as a fable, too. I can imagine boiling it down to five hundred words and a moral and finding that equally worthy of meditation.

That duality--its beautiful length and its powerful précis--may be a sign of a certain kind of greatness.

Times New Roman vs. Garamond

I know this is silly, but sometimes I find myself thinking about fonts. I know, too, that I’m not the only one. For, really, why are there so many? And why do so many books have “a note about the font” at the back?

I used to write everything in Palomino. I thought it was a beautiful font. Then, at some point a few years ago, its very beauty became offensive and shameful to me: a sign of my dilettantism, yet another indication that I would never get my book done. I switched to Times and, occasionally Times New Roman. I cannot tell the difference. Both are fine, functional typefaces and I like them for the way they pass, on the printed page, almost unnoted. But the reign of austerity could not continue forever. When I taught my first graduate class on modernism in 1999 or so, I wanted the posters advertising my class to be as pretty as those of my colleagues, both Victorianists. But I needed, too, for my work to look modern, to look new. I found Skia, a lovely, squat sans-serif font that has a look of the twenties about it. I continue to use Skia in my teaching from time to time.

But I stuck with Times for my writing life. There, I needed to be ramrod-straight, serious, intellectual, and uncompromising until the book came out.

Well, the book is out. Where does that leave me?

Rudderless, of course, and amazed to find that I am free to do what I have always been free to do: abandon Times. I am working on a new project, an edition of Mrs. Dalloway, and, to do it, I need an electronic copy of the novel. Someone in duplicating services scanned it into Word for me, after much grumbling, and now I am laboriously correcting the scan. I need an exact copy of the book--what was on page 23 will be in my word document on page 23, with all the same dashes, hyphens, etc. This means that I will have--and need to have--lots and lots of white space surrounding the text. It turns out that Garamond lets me do this really well. And what a lovely font! Elegant and old-fashioned without looking Victorian, it pleases me.

Looking at it, day after day, I realized that I could easily turn my back on Times forever, should I so choose. I’m writing this in Georgia now. It’s lovely for writing: round and bold, easy to read (Garamond can be hard on the eyes when reading a screen), but with a little more personality than bland old Times.

Still, when I have to write something official, I will return to Times, I think.

Read this: new Ngugi

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s new novel The Wizard of the Crow is this quarter’s READ THIS selection from the LBC. I was a little sorry that my nominee, the wonderful Seven Loves by Valerie Trueblood didn’t win. Still, there’s no shame in losing to a masterpiece written by a master.

Ngugi is the author of many novels and plays--Petals of Blood and A Grain of Wheat are the best known; he spent years in prison in his native Kenya for the ideas expressed in his books; he has taught all over the U.S. (And why, oh why, when he & I overlapped, did I not take his class?) After writing his first couple novels in English, he did what many, many postcolonial writers cannot do or dare not do: he switched to writing in Gikuyu. He then translates his books into English. Ngugi is a powerful advocate against colonialism and the continued colonialist financial exploitation of Africa and the developing world more generally. His “Decolonizing the Mind” is a widely anthologized polemic, an essay about the power of walking away from English, the colonial language.

All of this is pretty serious stuff and I admit that, although I am glad to have read A Grain of Wheat, I don’t look back on the experience of reading it with joy. So, why should you read The Wizard of the Crow?

Well, as interesting as it is to know all this stuff about Ngugi, put it aside and pop over to the LBC and read some of the other enthusiastic accounts about this new novel there. The Wizard of the Crow is a great, serious, hilarious satire. At its heart is a love story and, to my delight, the woman and man are evenly matched and she is lovely, strong, complex and interesting. At the heart of their story--the tension in their friendship and wary courting--is the conflict between what George Orwell called the desire to live inside the whale with the need to step out of his belly and prophesy. That is, in the face of overwhelming violence and corruption, don’t you just want to retreat to the forests and live the life of a mystic? But how can you leave behind the sufferings of your neighbors, your people? There are layers and layers of storytelling, which make the book, for all its heft, just sing along. And, though every character is weak and flawed--some much more than others--Ngugi shows such affection for and understanding of them all that you finish feeling the joy and variety of life as much as the corruption of society. Someone said Catch-22 and, if I’d been able to finish that book, I think I’d agree with the comparison to be apt. Maybe John Irving at his best. Or Rushdie at his. And yes, absolutely Garcia Marquez. But really, what I think of is Dickens: that broad, teeming canvas, full of eccentricities and joy.

So, do yourself a favor and READ THIS!!! Man, it’s good!

What to Read Next: Don DeLillo

I've been wanting to write about how to decide what to read next, how, when. During my many years of teaching, of working on my book, I was always behind; I always knew precisely what I needed to read next--and after that--for class, for planning my next class, for my book. The book is done. I’m still on maternity leave, not teaching this year. I can read whatever I want. How to decide?

There are so many exciting brand new novels. And then there is the category of books from the past decade or so that I’ve purchased with some enthusiasm but haven’t yet read. And then there are books, second and third books, by writers whom I admire but haven’t read all of. And all the classics that I never did make time for. Or maybe I should dip back into the Indian novels I used to love. Or continue reading African novels. Or read some of the works of forgotten women modernists whose books I know I’d like. Or read some Japanese literature. Or...

But while a more thoughtful version of this meditation awaits, there was the problem this week of what to read next.

A problem immediately solved by the appearance, in my mailbox, of a advance copy of the new DeLillo. I am really interested in novels about September 11. I’ve never read DeLillo (until today). This book is both. Thanks to a slow commute and a fast, moving narrative, I’m sixty pages in. It’s great. Falling Man is clearly what to read next…

Women Writers, Censorship and War

In my head, I have been writing for days a small piece on women writers, censorship and war. I have been thinking about what it means that many of us--myself included--can live through war untouched by war. I think about Molly Ivins’ death and her call to us to raise hell against this war. I think about Tillie Olsen’s death, too, and her peace work. And Valerie Trueblood’s peace work. And what I means to be able to say that one worked for peace.

In the mean time, I want to draw your attention to two things worthy of commemoration and celebration. First, the incisive and powerful Laila Lalami (of MoorishGirl and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits) had an Op-Ed on censorship in the Times on Saturday.

Progress comes in such babysteps, doesn’t it? There was a time when it would have been nearly impossible to imagine a Morrocan-American woman being a respected writer, sufficiently authoritative to speak out against censorship. And yet, here we are, still speaking against censorship.

And worse. Journalists killed all the time all over the world.

But we must celebrate the lives of those who work for justice. If you’re in the San Francisco area, you might want to join others in celebrating Tillie Olsen. Another of her grand-daughters asked me to spread the word about a memorial service:

Tillie Lerner Olsen
Author, Feminist, Activist
January 14, 1912 - January 1, 2007

Join family, friends, and readers for a Memorial Celebration of Tillie Olsen's Life

Saturday, February 17, 2007

First Congregational Church of Oakland

2501 Harrison Street (corner of 25th and Harrison)
Oakland, CA

1:00 celebration followed by reception.

Parking on site. The church is 8 blocks from the 19th Street BART Station.

Exhaust-great

I explained to my older daughter (4), that “exhausted” means “very very very very very very tired.” Now, she has taken to adding “exhaust-“ as a prefix to any word to make it a hyper-superlative (so favored among the preschool set). Thus, we get “Wow, Mom! Applesauce, fish sticks, ketchup, and cottage cheese. There’s nothing here that children don’t like! This dinner is exhaust-great!”

As childhood mispronunciations (compity for company, regliar for regular) fall by the wayside, it’s exhaustgreat to have a new linguistic oddity (beyond the amazing Jersey accent!) to amuse and delight us…

Woolfiana

A while back, I thought I would make a casual effort to collect Woolf-ish things in the blogosphere. The project has taken a while to get off the ground and I’ve been wondering why.

I think that it partly made this blog feel a bit too official to me--something that always makes me a bit itchy. Fernham seems to be at its best as long as I keep it loose. Every time I get really good at meeting my (pitifully modest) goal of four posts per week and my sitemeter count upticks a bit, I get nervous and busy and turn my head away from the blog just long enough for my readership to fall back off, for the blog to return to its rightful place, on the backburner of my life.

Then, too, I subscribed to weekly Google alerts for “Woolf” and “Virginia Woolf” only to find lots and lots of references to people writing about the movie, or noting that they just read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time and didn’t much care for it, or saying that some day they might want to read Woolf. These aren’t the kind of rich, nuanced readings that I was hoping to link to, to weave together.

Still, I watch, I look and I read. And I have found some wonderful tidbits for you:

• Amardeep Singh posts a lovely meditative appreciation of “Street Haunting,” one of Woolf’s great essays--and an essay getting a lot of scholarly attention of late. The essay is simply about walking in the city in winter, about concocting an errand to justify the “journey” and all the little encounters along the way. Since he posts it over at the Valve, there are some amusingly churlish responses, too.
• Mrs. Bookworld has been gobbling Woolf’s diaries. I was so jealous of her that I began doing the same. Shame to say, I’ve never read the diaries the whole way through. Now, with a new Woolf project, I have all the more reason to begin. And what I delight they are. Now, rather than envy Mrs. Bookworld (who is, after all, convalescing from foot surgery these few weeks--get well soon!!), I envy Woolf herself. Interesting people are constantly interrupting her work. When my doorbell rings, it tends to be UPS with a package for upstairs. When hers rings, it’s her friend Walter Lamb, just in from seeing the Queen--“he always stops by after he’s been to see the Queen,” she says with mild irritation and then, recalling his good gossip (about the King demonstrating how ill-fitting his dentures are), decides that it is kind of fun to have him around.
• Bloglily spent some time with Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in December (she, too, is on a health break--good luck with the radiation therapy, Bloglily--a strange thing to add parenthetically, but a sincere wish nonethless.)
• And probably most famous of all, Susan Hill’s blog resumes its Woolf for Dummies Course. This last is the strangest to me. In my ignorance, I don’t know her work, but her blog is set up almost entirely for readers--especially high school students--who are coming to the web for help in writing papers on her. The “course” is briskly encouraging--kind of a Barbara Woodhouse for readers instead of dog owners (Woolfies! Woolfies!).
• I keep thinking Imani must have had something to say about Woolf, but this is all I have found…so far…

And then, all of a sudden, I have found, too, tons of delightfully random, not totally literary references to Woolf from blogs I never would have found otherwise.

• There’s a great critique of the limitations of SuperGirl that draws upon A Room of One’s Own here,
• and here is a review of a play based on Woolf’s The Waves--surely one of the great “unfilm-able” novles, but one that had had many dramatic interpretations,
• I’m a little jealous that a pretty picture and a very brief quotation from Woolf can garner so many comments here,
• but it’s a sign of how Woolf continues to inspire. As is this lovely entry at Hot Toddy, on Woolf’s diaries as an inspiration for blogging,
• and, strangely enough, Woolf can even be an inspiration for parenting!

Finally, the Woolf listserv, which has many, many more readers than Fernham, has been abuzz of late with the connections between Patti Smith and Woolf. Apparently, as googling them shows, Smith acknowledges Woolf as a major influence and has given several performances and exhibitions on the connection.

Off web, my copy of Susan Gubar’s latest book, Rooms of Our Own arrived in the mail today. I can’t wait!!!

So, those are the passing glances to Woolf around the web this month

Trueblood, Jones

Carolyn (Pinky's Paperhaus) & Ed (Return of the Reluctant) collaborated on the podcast with Valerie Trueblood. It’s preceded by a mini-interview with me: very strange to hear one’s own voice--and laugh.

This week is Demon Theory week at the LBC. It’s another of the nominees this quarter. This book--a literary film treatment of a horror trilogy--is not my kind of book and I didn’t much like it. However, there is a lot interesting in it--enough that I participated in a roundtable discussion of it with four other LBC’ers. I think that roundtables like this one mark one of the strengths of the LBC: lots of bloggers getting together to “talk” about a title. (We emailed back and forth for a week or so, refining and adjusting our responses as the thing grew and grew.) So, hop back over to the LBC and check out the roundtable!

Happy Birthday, Aquarians.

Virginia Woolf, born on this day in 1882.

My mom, born on this day, much more recently, and celebrating in London!

Valerie Trueblood is guest-blogging today over at the LitBlog Co-op. She's already posted a great and thoughtful piece about time and age. Pop by....

The First Emperor

We went to see The First Emperor on Monday night. It’s the new opera by Tan Dun with a libretto that he co-wrote with the novelist Ha Jin. The production was designed by film director Zhang Yimou. If that’s not enough stars for you, the title role was written for and sung by Placido Domingo.

All the buzz surrounding the premiere--including the on-stage interview with Ha Jin--back in December led me to buy tickets. The review in The New Yorker was lukewarm, but in a way that didn’t concern me: the reviewer’s quibbles were beyond my abilities to grasp opera. He did say that an Italian singing in English while pretending to be Chinese strained credibility. I think this is a silly and vaguely racist criticism. Good grief: it’s opera! Credibility?

At intermission, we ran into friendly acquaintances. “I’m not feeling it,” she said. And I kind of agreed.

By the end, I was totally moved.

First of all, I judge an opera a success if I am not fidgety. My standards are not so high. I want good singing, pretty music, and some dazzling things to look at along the way. The First Emperor had all of that and more. I loved it. The more I think about it, the more excited I get. I did not fidget. When I did check the time, I was shocked at how much had passed.

The opera tells the story of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, who oversaw the building of the Great Wall of China and those hundreds of terra cotta soldiers. The opera is about the building of the wall and his commissioning of an anthem worthy of an emperor. He tracks down his boyhood friend (and cell mate from prison), a musician, and forces him to write the anthem. The musician seduces the emperor’s daughter (who is engaged to marry a general).

So, that’s where we are at the end of Act One: firmly in the midst of an opera that promises to end badly. (It does.) Oh, it’s grand. When the musician and the princess first come together, they’re all in white on the stark gray set. Suddenly, a long red silk scarf appears and they dance with it. Walking in, the emperor is at first overjoyed to see the princess, long an invalid, so happy but the red scarf enrages him: like a bull, he turns on his friend. How dare you ruin my daughter and shame me!

From family circle Row K (there is no row L--we were second only to the standing-room folks--but hey, it’s only $15!!) of the Metropolitan Opera House, the visual poetry of it was glorious, a little silly, and very operatic. Three hours seems like a fine length for an opera--or anything--to me. Still, some of the prettiest arias and duets went way too fast: they should have been doubled over, played with, repeated, allowed to build and flow. I wanted more of a chance to learn them, I wanted more of a chance to hear the tunes. But Tan Dun’s music is great--I knew I would love it and I did. He has figured out a way to mix Chinese and Western sounds in a way that is lovely and beautiful and harmonious.

And then, in Act Two, suddenly, there is color.

Other good things: a singer from the Beijing Opera, singing in Chinese (the rest of the opera is in English). An acrobat-dancer. Drums on stage in the opening scene. A giant (8 foot?) Chinese gong, studded and mottled, just on the edge of the stage, which gets played with a giant pole. Watching Placido Domingo, respendent in a gold lame robe, bang the gong. An amazing chorus. Costumes that are different front & back. A very, very pretty pink dress for the princess in Act Two. Tan Dun himself conducting. A completely, totally full house. Walking out, hearing a beautiful woman, 50-ish, say, in gorgeously clear Chinese “…ting chang-chang ge…” (listen sing songs--about all the Chinese I remember from a year in college) and then hearing her teen-age son, already plugged into his iPod, say, “Listen, mom, the story was great, but the music sucked.” With heavy Chinese accent, she answered, “I cannot agree.”

Seven Loves Week at the LBC

This week we’re talking about Valerie Trueblood’s great debut novel Seven Loves over at the LitBlog Co-op. There’s a contest--you could win a free copy of the book if you haven’t read it--and more! I interviewed here and will post that tomorrow: it’s a great, rich, and interesting interview with lots to chew on. Please do go read it tomorrow and then go back to the LBC on Thursday: Valerie will be guestblogging and so, if you have a question for you, you can pose it.

And if you’re still hungry for more, you can find an excerpt to a wonderful essay on reading here.

Finally, just so you know that I’m not alone in my admiration. There is a wonderful review here.

Helping Orphans Worldwide

My friend, the novelist Natasha Radojcic, has partnered with writer and publisher Allison Weaver in a project with two purposes: raising money for orphanages and running a literary magazine. For a $5 donation, you can contribute to the cause and--maybe--get published, too. (Scroll down: accepted manuscripts will be paid a minimum of $200--that’s a pretty decent return on investment.)

Here’s what they say:

H.O.W.; a new journal representing the vision of two writers dedicated to publishing quality fiction and nonfiction while giving a voice to those suffering in silence worldwide.

H.O.W. was started with the purpose of raising money for orphanages across the world. For each submission you send us we ask that you include a donation of five dollars. The entire sum will be donated to the orphanage we are working with at the time. This year we are focusing our attention on a small orphanage run by Haregewoin Tefarra, an Ethiopian woman, who opened her home to hundreds of children orphaned by AIDS. She now operates two houses in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

The orphanage’s mission is: to house and support children, both HIV-positive and HIV-negative; to provide food, clothing, education, and medical care; to reunite children with surviving family members whenever possible; to seek new family situations if necessary through licensed inter-country adoption agencies from North America and Europe; and to promote employment among adults living with AIDS.

Submission Guidelines:
1. Please submit one story, or essay, at a time. Submit clearly typed manuscripts, double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 inch white paper, one side only, to: H.O.W. 22 West 15th street (apt 3B), NYC, 10011. The submission must contain your name, address, e-mail address, and a telephone number where you can be reached. Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope or we cannot guarantee your work will be responded to or returned. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please let us know immediately, if your submission is accepted elsewhere. It takes up to 4 months to respond to submissions. We do not accept submissions via fax or email.

2. The word-length limit is roughly 8,000 words.

3. After edits are done to our satisfaction, writers will receive a payment. Payment varies according to the length and genre of the submission, but we pay $200.00 minimum for fiction and nonfiction. We buy First Serial Rights; nonexclusive, and one-time anthology rights. Authors proof their galleys and receive 2 copies of the issue in which their work appears.

4. All manuscripts are carefully considered. Due to the large number of submissions, we regret that we cannot comment on every manuscript.

5. Do not forget to include a check for $5.00 made out to Helping Orphans Worldwide, or else the submission will NOT be read.

Publishers:
Natasha Radojcic earned her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Pindeldyboz, The Boston Review and Small Spiral Notebook. Her two novels, Homecoming and You Don’t Have to Live Here, both published by Random House, have been translated into seven languages.

Alison Weaver earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The New School University. Her short fiction has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, Opium Magazine, Red China and The Fifth Street Review. Her memoir, Gone to the Crazies, will be published by Harper Collins this July.

Phew! Deadlines and the Days After

I got my work done and in on the 15th. Just barely. But the editor had forgotten about the holiday, too, so she was pleasantly surprised that I pulled it off.

I woke up empty-headed and grouchy. It’s a great but disorienting feeling to make a deadline. All my energy had been focused on that one project and, with it done, I feel both accomplished and flat. Accomplished for obvious reasons. Flat because I look up to notice that my house is in a shambles: I don’t remember the last time the baby had a bath, there is a headless playmobil figurine on the changing table, my measuring tape is on the floor under my desk (why? it takes me a couple minutes to remember that I went on a shopping spree for running clothes during this whole frenzy & had to measure myself), the pantry seems to consist, inexplicably, mainly of Starburst and Zweiback. And my family, reasonably enough, is more focused on these facts than on my individual achievements.

I went for a run: the second of the season, the first without a stroller and with my iPod. That’s when, after a deadline, I really know that I am mad as a hatter. Miriam Makeba came on and I picked up the pace. I went from

• remembering that I wanted to blog about the interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga in Transition to
• remembering that I wanted to purchase her new novel—only available in the UK—to
• thinking about contacting her publisher, who used to work for Heinemann’s African Writer Series, and interviewing her (a good idea, sure, but something that ordinarily makes me really nervous), to
• imagining applying for a Fulbright to South Africa so I could dance with Makeba and, perhaps, as I reach the outer edges of sanity, that nice French scholar from Cape Town I met who invited me to visit some time to
• frantically, parenthetically, trying to remember how long ago I did meet him and how to say “I have been busy” in French to
• somehow envisioning myself at a big dance party in the courtyard of Oprah’s new South African girl’s school with Miriam Makeba, my daughters & husband, Dangarembga and her family (visiting from Harare, don’t you know), the Cape Town Frenchman, and the whole Jolie-Pitt clan—maybe Nicholas Kristof could come, too…

Then, thank goodness, I have the mental equivalent of the sound of a record needle scratching across vinyl.

And I remember all the things that I have pushed to the margins in order to finish.

That’s the thing about deadlines. Everything narrows down to a point and when that one project is done, there’s the illusion of open space. But the world quickly obliges by rushing in to remind me of, oh, let’s see—laundry, the book review that’s two months late, the essay that’s three months late, the articles I need to edit, the edition I need—urgently—to begin, the books I want to read, the loved ones I’ve neglected ….

The mix on my iPod is new. It was on shuffle. A few songs passed. Suddenly, I’m back in Boston--

Every time that I look in the mirror
All these lines in my face getting clearer
The past is gone….

Dream on, indeed.

NYC Event: MEMORY AND LONGING--Christianse & Hartman Conversation

[This just in over the wires. I can't go--we'll be at the Opera!!!--but it sounds great. I got Yvette Christianse's novel for Christmas and am eager to read it.]

THE AFRICANA STUDIES PROGRAM AT BARNARD COLLEGE presents a conversation about HISTORY, FICTION, & BLACK DIASPORA with YVETTE CHRISTIANSE (Unconfessed) & SAIDIYA HARTMAN (Lose Your Mother)

Monday, January 22, 7pm, Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard Hall

Join the Africana Studies program at Barnard College for a provocative conversation about legacy of slavery and the politics of history. The evening begins with a reading from poet Yvette Christiansë’s acclaimed debut novel Unconfessed. Called “a devastating song of freedom” by Kirkus Reviews, the novel, inspired by actual South African court records from the 1800s, tells the story of slave woman Sila van den Kapp, who was sentenced to death on April 30, 1823. The novel follows Sila from a Cape Town jail to her commuted sentence of hard labor on the now notorious Robbins Island where she was one of two women prisoners, and where, more than a century later, Nelson Mandela would spend 28 years of his life. Christiansë will be joined by Saidiya Hartman, visiting professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, whose new book, Lose Your Mother, retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by journeying along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast.

In so boldly and so eloquently confronting the silences of history and absence in the archive, both Christiansë and Hartman lead us to a new understanding of the forces that shape history, the meanings of memory, and the profound power of storytelling. It’s a stimulating discussion of the ways in which African descended people grapple with the longing for lost homes and histories that is the legacy of slavery in the US and Africa.

Book signing to follow. 212.854.9850

READ THIS! Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow

The LBC has spoken: this quarter’s selection is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s sprawling masterpiece, Wizard of the Crow. It’s an amazing romp through an African dictatorship: at once pointedly satirical about political corruption at all levels, hilarious, and moving. It’s also the first African novel I’ve read by a man with really strong, wonderful, brave women characters. We’ll be talking about Wizard over at the LBC in two weeks—with interviews with Ngugi and all the other bells and whistles you’ve come to expect.

I was a little bummed that the novel I nominated didn’t win, but it is a great wonderful book: you should read it, too. I nominated Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves. I’ve already written about the process of finding it. If you pop over to the LBC site today, you can see my testimonial about it.

We’ll be talking about Seven Loves all next week: there’s a podcast, a written interview, and the author will be guest-blogging to boot! Grab a copy of the book, read it over the weekend and stop by….

Small Deadlines & Meta-Reading

Monday (MLK Day) marks a small deadline for me and I'm slaving away to meet it--or pretending to. I am staggered by my own reluctance to read when I'm under pressure. I will sit down to "work" and decide that the most important thing I need to do for the day is to read, say, a certain essay.

Then I will proceed to google the author, free write on my current procrastination, and then do all the other unrelated procrastinatory things (checking blogs, making notes for future blog entries in the "Fernham" file on my computer, reading catalogs, watching cooking shows). All the normal kinds of procrastination seem, well, normal to me.

What astounds me is my ability to sit, with text in hand, and still not read it but instead to read around it, consider it, read everything in the world ancillary to it in my whole apartment and available on the web before I actually read the essay in question.

Sigh.

I did actually get down to some reading today but, oy!, it was no thanks to me that I got myself working.

I hope to be more present, less scattered, once Monday's past....

Besides, the new quarter at the LBC is kicking into gear next week and it's going to be great!

Tillie Olsen Tribute, January 14, 2007

I have been moved by those who have commented on my Tillie Olsen post. I was particularly touched and grateful to receive a comment from her granddaughter, Rebekah Edwards. She pointed me to a lovely, lovely website created by Olsen’s daughters. There, you can find an obituary written by the family.

She also informed me of a wonderful tribute happening this weekend: "the family requests that on her birthday, January 14th, people whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together. We would be comforted to hear from you about your celebrations. Please email us: tillies_family@childpeacebooks.org."

It would be wonderful if people from the feminist blogging and litblogging community could take a few hours out, on this upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend, to honor another great American.

Tillie Olsen, RIP

Tillie Olsen died earlier this week (via RSB). The pioneering leftist feminist writer was just weeks shy of her 95th birthday.

I wanted to commemorate her death by re-reading her great short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” but it’s in the office and all I can find on-line are dozens of disheartening links to term papers for purchase. More interestingly, there’s a teaching wiki up that may be of interest to some.

My mother devoured Tell Me a Riddle when I was a girl and I remember her raving about it. I liked the title, but when she told me that one of the great stories was called “I Stand Here Ironing,” and consisted of a woman ironing and talking and thinking about her daughter, I resisted. The very idea felt claustrophobic to me. My mother ironed. She talked about me. Tillie Olsen, from Nebraska with a Scandinavian name (a married name—she was the daughter of Russian Jews), was too close to home. What could I learn from her?

I went on to teach the story several times. It's terrific and devastating. The writing is deceptive: spare and realistic as a great poem by Frost or William Carlos Williams with uncanny moments of mother-speak that bring you right into the intense world of love and worry that is motherhood.

I’m willing, in retrospect, to forgive my snobbishness as a teenager: after all, my mother was educating me to think beyond ironing. Interesting, though, that being unable to see what could possibly be interesting about a woman ironing almost cost Olsen the Stanford Creative Writing Fellowship. (This is from Constance Coiner’s great biographical essay on Cary Nelson’s excellent website.)

At an initial screening intended to eliminate most of the applicants, one of the reviewers for the competition, after reading a few pages of "I Stand Here Ironing," tossed it in the wastebasket in disgust, muttering, "'Can you imagine? That woman went on for pages just about ironing. Standing there ironing!’" Procedurally, at that point the story would have been eliminated from the competition. However, Dick Krause, the one person on the screening committee with a working-class background, happened to overhear the remark and asked to see the piece; he was so moved by it that he delivered it personally to Wallace Stegner, the director of the program. After reading the manuscript, Stegner declared: "'Well, we have to have her"' (interview).

Stegner was right, of course. He and my mom hail from the same corner of Iowa and they understand what us snobs often fail to: that everyone’s life is interesting and that it’s worth working hard to listen to the lives of working class people.

Tillie Olsen became a writer against the odds. In Silences she offers an account of how the life of a working class mother mitigates against writing. She’s the writer the Virginia Woolf dreamed about, hoped for, and longed to find when she spoke to Working Women in the Cooperative Guild. Unlike Woolf or American leftists (such as Meridel Le Sueur with whom Olsen is often paired), Olsen was working class: she never had to agonize over the ethics of her identification with the cause. The huge gap between her acclaimed first short story in 1934 and “I Stand Here Ironing” in 1955 stands for the years spent working and raising four daughters.

But she was clearly no ordinary mom. She spent time in jail; she was smeared by McCarthy-era anti-communists, she worked throughout her life for working people, for social revolution, for women’s rights. When the Feminist Press was founded, she worked for them as an advisor, recommending many of the titles that only they have brought back into print.

Trying to write, she sent her daughter to live with her parents. Later, “examining Yonnondio's 11 rough drafts and trying to figure out where she was when she wrote them," Olsen "realized that most of her best writing was done" after her reunion with her daughter (Duncan 212-213)” (Coiner again).

Hungry to read, “She copied passages from books she could not afford to buy and tacked them on the wall by the kitchen sink for inspiration.”

Now that is worthy of a place above all our kitchen sinks. Bless Tillie Olsen! May she rest in peace.

Blue Collar Holler offers this information, should you wish to offer a gift in her name: The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Tillie Olsen Memorial Fund for Human Rights, Public Libraries and Working Class Literature, c/o the San Francisco Foundation, 225 Bush St., No. 500, San Francisco, CA 94104. The date and time of a public memorial will be announced.

This is What a Speaker Looks Like

Congratulations to Nancy Pelosi!

The excitement is catching and lots of fun even for me--and I'm pretty neutral on Pelosi.

Why does it matter? Well, her breaking the marble ceiling, as they're calling it, matters because studies have shown that once women occupy something like 30% of elected positions, the agenda does start to change. One woman doesn't--can't--change congressional agendas. But we're still woefully behind in government and so symbolic victories matter because they pave the way to the day when women make up closer to half of elected officials. Then, the thing that the suffragettes hoped for a century ago may begin to happen: more attention to health, education, and affordable housing, and, just maybe, a government less enamored with war...

Underrated, Best of: more lists

While I took a break, the blogosphere kept on turning. If you haven’t already checked it out, be sure to visit Mark Thwaite’s collection of the Best Reads of 2006. He’s gathered suggestions from a group of authors, bloggers, and editors (including me). One really nice aspect of his list is that everyone wrote a few sentences explaining why they loved their nominees. Plus, it’s not limited to new books (I wrote about A Hazard of New Fortunes which came out in 1890), so it gives a better flavor of how we read, I think: not only the new, but also the recent, the old, and the ancient. This kind of list, like Jeff and Trevor’s collection of underrated writers, strikes me as the kind that actually might inspire reading.

Still, that said, I’m feeling a bit dizzy with the weight of choice and recommendations these days. I find myself having retreated back to assigned reading. But then, as I said yesterday, there are some looming deadlines…

Happy New Year!

When I was a little girl, I loved fact-filled compendia. I devoured The Book of Lists and The Guiness Book of World Records. I scoured almanacs, collections of trivia, and a whole series of folklore books for children. I used to dog my mother and my teachers with my recitations of superstitions, incantations (for lovers, against warts), and riddles.

Somewhere amidst all this trivia, I read that, rather than simply making resolutions, it’s a good idea to actually spend a little time doing each of the activities you resolve to do more of in the coming year. Surely a good idea.

And somehow, yesterday, I managed to do almost that: I took a long walk down to the Hudson, I did a yoga DVD (with my older daughter). (May I just say that the Yoga ABCs DVD includes some poses that, while easy for four-year-olds, have me in some pain today? Next time, I’ll be skipping “C for Caterpillar” and “I for Iguana”…) I read a little. We had friends over for dinner and actually cooked together—something I’ve always wanted to do. We tried new meats (rabbit!), new recipes, and it all felt very decadent and festive.

Now, with deadlines looming, I can do little more than list all that lies, undone, before me. Still, it was a festive and promising start. Fingers crossed….

The Metaxu Mixer

Well THAT was fun. Lauren Cerand and Bud Parr organized a mixer at Verlaine last night. After a very long day home with a sick-ish child baking cookies for some distant relatives too ill to cook their own, a little selfish literary bacchanal was just what the doctor ordered.

I had never met another blogger before, which seemed weird for about two seconds. Then, we were talking about which was our favorite Mr. Darcy (I can’t remember any actors’ names, so I’m useless), preferring Rosalind over Viola (or the other way around), nightmares about bad book covers, bad agents, bad copyediting… And the cocktails: potent and delicious. I didn't get to meet all but had great conversations with all whom I met. I confess to having been a little star struck--very, very happy to put faces and audible voices to the voices I know so well on-screen. It was really fun.

I was happy to meet Marcy Dermansky, who had read Twins alongside Bill Gordon at Mo Pitkins’: a reading I had all but gone too and had been sorry to miss. She reminded me that we had had a little blogging communion (fitting word for Catholic novels) over our mutual love of Antonia White’s May Sinclair and, at the end of the night, when I found myself without a business card, she whipped a copy of Twins out of her bag and gave it to me.

She said, with a certain tone in her voice (pique?), “This was supposed to be for Cate Blanchett. But here, you can have it.”

I’m a goofball, I know, but in the context of an evening meeting publicists, publishers, bloggers, and writers, I couldn’t think who Cate Blanchett was. A really important editor? A blogger too fancy to go to the Lower East Side? I was fully five blocks west before I realized whom she’d meant.

Cate Blanchett. Oh. Wow. I have Cate Blanchett’s copy of Twins.

I’m only ten pages in, but it’s really good. Cate will have to buy her own copy.

Underrated Writers, 2006 Edition

Jeff and Trevor have compiled and published their list of underrated writers. I nominated Elizabeth Bown and Tsitsi Dangarembga. I was excited to see Richard Grayson nominated. I met him this fall. He’s a really nice person, and a great teacher, too. Shortly after I wrote my hand-wringing entry about Barbie, a book appeared in my mailbox: it was Richard’s I Survived Caracas Traffic with the hilarious story “Twelve Step Barbie” marked.

End of 2006 Wrap Up

Everyone is cleaning house this month, making their Best of 2006 lists. Some are lamenting their failure to reach their reading goals of 75 books or 52 books or whatever. Mark Sarvas is nicely testy about the problems with “Best of Lists” over at the millions (rightly insisting on the insane arrogance of “best,” preferring “favorite”) but so far my favorite contrarian response to the mood is Mrs. Bookworld’s. Without snark, she lists the dozen books she wishes she had not finished last year.

Overwhelmed as I am by the trifecta of end-of-term, daughter’s upcoming birthday, and Christmas, I thought I would take stock. On the down side: it looks like I only read about 25 books last year (and that includes The Da Vinci Code). The plus side: I wrote one. (Well, published.)

I particularly loved Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Gina Ochsner’s People I Wanted to Be, and Natasha Radojcic’s You Don’t Have to Live Here: all three of these books are gorgeously written, humane, aware of (and realistic about) injustice but striving for something better. They’re great books by strong women. Ha Jin’s Waiting was another favorite from the year. I just finished it a few weeks ago and haven’t even had to time to write up my reaction. But I found it so deeply moving. Roudning out my list of favorites would be Seven Loves, of course, Michael Frayn’s Spies, Michelle Herman’s The Middle of Everything, and William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes.

I’m shocked at how many memoirs I read. Proportionately, they should show up more often on the list above. Still, they brought me great pleasure so I expect to continue to read them.

It’ll be interesting to see how 2007 goes. With no book to write, no pregnancy or newborn, I predict some differences. What will they be?

If you lived here, you'd be cool right now

You heard it here first.

Upcoming at the LBC

Next quarter is my first one up with a nominee at the Litblog Co-op. I nominated Valerie Trueblood’s first novel, Seven Loves. It’s the story of a woman’s life through seven people whom she’s loved: a moving conceit and a novel that more than lives up to it. It’s a terrific book.

It’s going to be a really interesting January over at the LBC. Seven Loves is up against a really weird novel by Stephen Graham Jones, Demon Theory. The book is written as a really fleshed-out screenplay for a horror movie. It’s exactly not the book for me: a little gimmicky, a little sexist, a little silly and, I must say, I’m enjoying it. The third book is the new novel by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (The Wizard of the Crow, the Kenyan novelist whose A Grain of Wheat is a postcolonial classic: a tough, intense book that I’ve taught a couple times.

I was so intimidated in my quest for a book to nominate. I got really focused on finding a book that the other bloggers would like, forgetting that I needed to find one that I liked. I also spent a lot of time thinking about how many, many new books other bloggers must see all the time. I don’t work in a great bookstore; I don’t have an MFA and lots of friends from grad school days; I don’t get all that many free books. How could I possibly find a book that would really deserve touting?

I thought about what I wanted and missed from the past couple quarters since I started participating. I decided that I wanted to find either an African book or a book by a woman. I couldn’t find the African novel I wanted: some great-sounding books were just a little bit too old; lots and lots of first novels by African women sounded formulaic; Chimamanda Adichie’s book came out to so much acclaim that nominating it would harldy fulfill the mission of the LBC; Tsitsi Dangarembga’s second book came out so quietly, I didn’t notice it.

I turned to women writers. I wanted the woman’s book to have an unobtrusively feminist perspective and a female protagonist. Maybe that sounds heretical to the aesthetes among you. I insist on great writing and I felt that I’d read a lot of great writing from nominees. But I wanted to read great writing from a woman that sounded womanly to me. Edie Meidav and Sheila Heti (I almost called her Sheila Ticknor) ventriloquize a male voice and write about men; Gina Frangello’s S&M book was too sexual for me. So, I worried and struggled and, when the babies slept, I went back onto amazon.com and typed in book after book that I liked to see if the recommendations would yield a surprise.

Then, out of the blue, I got a sweet email from someone who, from reading my blog, thought, that, perhaps, I would like her novel. Might she send me a copy?

Well, as you know, I love free books. I said yes.

And the rest is history. I read Seven Loves. I loved it. I nominated it. And, on January 15, the discussion will begin. What a round it should be: the firework-y men’s book I’ve come to expect, the African novel I sought and did not find, and Trueblood’s beautiful, moving, strong story. Stay tuned….

Barbie

Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking about Barbie and Bratz dolls this time of year. Margaret Talbot has a nice essay on the Bratz dolls in the 12/4/06 New Yorker and Newsweek is covering the Barbie v. Bratz court battle. Barbie, a doll that used to be for eight- and nine-year-olds is mostly for three- to six-year olds now. My older daughter will be four in two weeks. Christmas is in three. All she wants is Barbie.

I almost caved.

We were not allowed Barbie when I was little. My mom did a great job of explaining that the dolls just were not for our family. She didn’t burden me with feminist explanations, but they were central to her refusal. We had other dolls—nice, chunky Sasha dolls, built like little girls and easy to sew and embroider for.

My mom is firm for her granddaughters, too. When we talk about it, she keeps sputtering “But you’re a feminist!” She’s good to promise to support me in my decision but I can tell that she finds my confusion puzzling. It’s so clear to her that Barbie is dumb and bad. She’s found a nice, chunky doll and a small fashion doll, too, so my daughter will be duly gifted. There’s also a very big box of very pink Duplos in the basement from her other grandma. But they’re blocks. You build with them. You pretend to have a castle and you dump them into the box with green, yellow, red, and blue ones.

At Thanksgiving, I polled the guests, mostly childless, many of them psychologists and therapists, and in their forties. They shared my confusion. When I announced that I would clearly not buy Bratz for my daughter—just the name itself goes against so much of what I value for her—the one teenager in the room rolled her eyes. I think I sounded hopelessly old and maybe even a little racist to this cool teen. Barbie is a blonde. The Bratz are racially indeterminate but definitely “ethnic.”

But that’s not my issue with any of them. And the hip teen’s disapproval helped pull me back to my senses. I don’t like the Bratz because they are brats: they are dolls “with a passion for fashion” and that’s not what I want my three-year old to be learning and thinking about. True, Barbie is a lawyer now, but that’s as much an afterthought as are the black and brunette Barbies. She is all about fashion, too.

I know the studies that say that little girls playing with Barbie don’t focus on her breasts and often don’t play games about fashion and dating. But why give children a toy hoping they will play with it against its type? In The New Yorker, Talbot seems to come about to my position but more elegantly and with less hand wringing. (I’m sorry I can’t link to it here.)

I try hard to be a mellow mom and a strong but non-proselytizing feminist. Barbie is a test for that double role. Being a mellow mom means that I include a little packet of SpongeBob or Dora “fruit snacks” (gummi bears) in my daughter’s lunch knowing they are fun but of dubious nutritional value. I try to avoid TransFat, but, sometimes, at the end of a hard day, we stop in the bodega for some Little Debby goodness. We aim for organic and healthy, but settle for yummy; we aim for wood, but accept plastic. But we insist kindness and lots of books. Behind my efforts not to show it, I do believe that everything I let into my home—from a person to a Macintosh apple to pack of crayons or a dolly is a reflection of our values. I don’t think Barbie is exactly evil, but I don’t see how she enhances the lessons I want my daughters to learn.

Hoboken

Recently, the girls (7 months and nearly 4) and I took the Light Rail to Hoboken. It was a chilly Sunday morning, Dad had to go to the office, and we needed a change of scene.

When we moved here 2 and a half years ago, I had never heard of Jersey City, but I knew all about Hoboken (or so I thought): a great music scene, a really cool place to live in New Jersey (if “cool” and “New Jersey” can be put together). I wanted to live in Brooklyn. But then we looked at the apartments. Yes, we could afford Brooklyn—but not the Brooklyn of our dreams. The Brooklyn we could afford was across the street from a prison or a twenty-minute uphill walk to the first of three subways to my job in midtown. And daycare was going to cost triple what we had been paying. So, reluctantly, I agreed to look at some apartments my husband had seen on craigslist in Jersey City.

Now, we’re here. But the romance of Hoboken lingers. We don’t really like the city, which seems like a fine place to be single or newly married. But the name! Hoboken. Hoboken! What a great word. To walk along Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken and look across the Hudson River at the Manhattan skyline, well, it’s enough to make you burst into song. Instead of giving the three syllables more or less equal emphasis, my daughter used to really play with it, talking about Ho-BO-ken. We went there once in our first fall here and she got a hat. Her Ho-BO-ken hat. We did not go back until the other weekend.

So, there we are, on the light rail, listening to that soothing voice (the same woman’s voice on those between-terminal airport trams): “Harsimus Cove. This stop is Harsimus Cove. The next stop is Pavonia/Newport.” Oh, how my daughter lit up at the announcement of “Hoboken Terminal.” Such is the magic of a pretty name.

You can imagine, then, that our stop’s name left her a little crestfallen: “Jersey Avenue.” Not a lot of poetry there. The Jersey Avenue stop in Jersey, City, New Jersey. I don’t remember a place I’ve loved to live more, but the name does leave something to be desired.