The Mirage begins in a world related to ours but very different. The United Arab States (UAS) is the dominate superpower in the world, and North America is divided into several nations, including The Evangelical Republic of Texas, the Rocky Mountain Independent Territories, and the Christian States of America (CSA). Israel is in Central Europe. The Gulf War was fought in the Gulf of Mexico. And on November 9, 2001, Christian fundamentalists hijacked four commercial airliners and flew two of the them into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, Iraq, touching off a War on Terror which saw UAS troops invade North America, capturing the city of Denver (where the World Christian Alliance, the group claiming responsibility for 11/9, was believed to have a base) and eventually establishing a provisional government in Washington, D.C.
The novel follows Mustafa, Amal, and Samir, agents for UAS Homeland Security, as they combat terrorism in Baghdad. They keep running across references to and seeming artifacts from a "mirage world" where a North American country called The United States of America is the dominate superpower who was attacked by Muslim terrorists on 9/11/2001. At first they dismiss that world and its artifacts as Christian legend and hoax, but as time and their investigations progress, they begin to think the mirage world may be the real world.
The Mirage is set up as a thoughtful thriller, and the first half of the book, where Ruff does most of his world-building in his alternate world and all of his set-up for the mystery part of the story, is clever and compelling. But the novel falls off in the back half, when the cause of the mirage is revealed (it is in keeping with the logic of the world Ruff has built, but is somehow anti-climactic) and Mustafa, Amal, and Samir attempt to stop organized crime lord Saddam Hussein from reversing the mirage (he believes that he will be a powerful king in the "real world").
I was hoping that The Mirage would offer insight into 9/11 by making it and its context just strange enough to see clearly. And it does do a fairly effective job of making an American, Christian reader "other" to herself by aligning the narrative's sympathies with those who some Americans consciously or unconsciously make "other" themselves. But as the novel goes on, the alternate reality Ruff has built begins to feel a little cardboard, a little too clever--and in ways which are not serving the story. One begins to question the pat "flip" of our world to this alternate world, one begins to long for an in-depth exploration of how the world got to have this "mirage" configuration. Clever parallels become annoying, begin to beg for further insight. Why, for instance, should there be a Law and Order: Halal in this world? Would the progression of popular culture, the reaction to and anticipation of popular taste, interest, and opinion in a UAS really so closely mirror that of the USA we know so as to develop the same television program? In other words, why should a superpower centered in the Arab world look anything at all like a superpower centered in North America?
The answer has to do with getting this story on the page, not with any careful consideration of another culture. (If the worlds did not parallel one another, Ruff's two realities would not be close enough to one another for Mustafa and others to begin to believe in the other, "real" world. And to be fair, the explanation for the creation of the mirage does address (though indirectly) why a UAS would parallel a USA in any way.) But if one can accept the parameters under which The Mirage operates, the novel does offer a striking glimpse of the USA from outside. Perhaps the best way to approach The Mirage is to think of it as akin to an animal fable, where, instead of human foibles being made clear to human readers by giving those foibles to animals, American foibles are made clear to American readers by presenting them from a different point of view. Perhaps The Mirage works best if one thinks of it as a book which asks not "What's up with the Middle East?" but rather "What's up with America?"
A fascinating book, if an unsatisfying one. It's biggest success may be in existing, in daring (and I do mean "daring") to suggest to the American public, even if only in fiction, that the Arab world may be the injured party in our world and that what we had best look at is ourselves. And I thank Matt Ruff for writing it, even if, as a story, it doesn't really work.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
Book Review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey
(For the most part, if you know the plot of Jane Eyre, you know the plot of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, but I get a bit spoilery in my fourth paragraph for events specific to Gemma Hardy. The whole review will completely spoil Jane Eyre for you if you do not know it.)
I'm afraid that this retelling of Jane Eyre just doesn't quite work. Livesey's sentence-level writing is clean and impressive, and she has a knack for writing the kind of crisp prose that can effortlessly pull a reader along. And taken alone, Gemma's story serves as a decent character study. The problem is that Gemma's story cannot be taken alone. This is Jane Eyre, moved to Scotland in the 50s and 60s, and given some minor make-overs to make the plot plausible in the mid-twentieth century (Gemma's employer with whom she falls in love has a secret, but it does not involve a mad women stashed away in an attic--who would believe such a thing of a businessman in the late sixties? Or if one did believe it, the whole thing could not help but be a great deal more inescapably, irrevocably dark and sinister.) But transplanted to a world that is familiar to the modern reader, much of the plot of Jane Eyre becomes incredible. It is hard to imagine an aunt suddenly treating her niece as less than a servant among automobiles, telephones, jumpers, and boyhood dreams of playing soccer for England. It is difficult to see how a school could treat its pupils so poorly in days so close to our own. It is entirely possible that such things might have happened in this setting (the nineteenth century did not have a monopoly on cruelty, after all), but fiction does not hinge on what might be possible in the real world, but on what has been made to seem possible on the page. And Livesey fails to overcome her source material in making these Gothic-infused plot elements seem possible in the pages of her fictional world.
Jane's transition to Gemma encounters other obstacles as well. Mr Sinclair, the employer with whom Gemma falls in love, contains none of the mysteriousness of Mr Rochester, none of the sense of danger and intrigue wrapped up in enigmatic moods and veiled personal history. Blackbird Hall and the Orkney islands do not ooze with atmosphere and gloom as Thornfield Hall and the moors do. Mr Sinclair's secret is not terribly damning, and while it is believable that its revelation would make Gemma think twice about marrying him, her flight from him comes over as foolish and over-dramatic; Jane's flight from Mr Rochester and his attempt to commit bigamy through deceit (and the subsequent effect Jane may well have thought this would have on her soul) seems almost rational in comparison. This difficulty with suspension of disbelief is not helped by the fact that Gemma and Sinclair's love for one another reads like a result of the novel's paralleling Jane Eyre rather than a natural development springing from these characters themselves.
In fact, much of The Flight of Gemma Hardy appears to exist because it must do so in order to stay true to the source to which it is indebted. Reading the novel was a bit like going down a Jane Eyre plot point checklist. Confrontation with bratty older cousin? Check. Locked in a frightening room? Check. Sent off to a miserable boarding school? Check. Make friends with a doomed pupil? Check. Get job teaching the ward of a rich, absentee landowner? Check. Unwittingly help employer on the road when he returns unexpectedly? Check. And so on. While Livesey does infuse her telling with new elements, while she does, in many ways, make the story her own, her changes and updates to the tale often feel uninspired; they rarely made me think about Jane Eyre in new ways or provided much insight into how the story of a girl growing up with this particular set of disadvantages changed in one hundred years. I thought for a while that perhaps that sense of things not having changed much was the point of the novel, but if so the illustration of that fact falls flat. Having dismissed that notion, I considered the possibility that the novel was meant to illustrate how Jane Eyre, when looked at from a distance, becomes rather silly, how it might have seemed so to its contemporary readers, just as some of its plot elements seem unbelievable when placed in a (roughly) contemporary setting today. But, no, the book does not suggest to me, in its unfolding, in it careful retracing of the plot of Jane Eyre, any sort of critique of the original novel.
Except, perhaps, in the end. Finally, finally, in the last fifty-or-so pages, The Flight of Gemma Hardy departs from its strict adherence to the plot of Jane Eyre. Upon discovering that she may have family on her father's side still living, and in the aftermath of refusing a perhaps practical but certainly passionless proposal of marriage, Gemma (unlike Jane) goes in search of that family. And here are some of my favorite parts of the book. Gemma finds living relatives in Iceland and learns (as Jane does not), a fair amount about her childhood before coming to live with her aunt and uncle, about her family, about, as a result, herself. And Mr Sinclair comes to find her, rather than her going back to him. And they do not get married (though there's a strong intimation that they will, once Gemma comes to understand herself a little better). This is the sort of thing I was hoping the whole book would do--put a spin on the familiar story, show how Jane Eyre would be if she'd been born in the aftermath of World War II. And in some ways I suppose it does do that, but I never really felt that the novel was fully reimagining the original story.
I did so want to love The Flight of Gemma Hardy. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite novels, and I thought a retelling of it had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, Livesey doesn't quite tap into that potential--I spent much of the novel wishing she (or someone) had reimagined Jane Eyre in its original setting, taking up the story from some crucial point in the original narrative and exploring what might have happened if Jane had made different choices. Alas. But I do give mad props to Livesey for trying, and on the strength of her prose, I will be looking out for some of her previous novels.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
I'm afraid that this retelling of Jane Eyre just doesn't quite work. Livesey's sentence-level writing is clean and impressive, and she has a knack for writing the kind of crisp prose that can effortlessly pull a reader along. And taken alone, Gemma's story serves as a decent character study. The problem is that Gemma's story cannot be taken alone. This is Jane Eyre, moved to Scotland in the 50s and 60s, and given some minor make-overs to make the plot plausible in the mid-twentieth century (Gemma's employer with whom she falls in love has a secret, but it does not involve a mad women stashed away in an attic--who would believe such a thing of a businessman in the late sixties? Or if one did believe it, the whole thing could not help but be a great deal more inescapably, irrevocably dark and sinister.) But transplanted to a world that is familiar to the modern reader, much of the plot of Jane Eyre becomes incredible. It is hard to imagine an aunt suddenly treating her niece as less than a servant among automobiles, telephones, jumpers, and boyhood dreams of playing soccer for England. It is difficult to see how a school could treat its pupils so poorly in days so close to our own. It is entirely possible that such things might have happened in this setting (the nineteenth century did not have a monopoly on cruelty, after all), but fiction does not hinge on what might be possible in the real world, but on what has been made to seem possible on the page. And Livesey fails to overcome her source material in making these Gothic-infused plot elements seem possible in the pages of her fictional world.
Jane's transition to Gemma encounters other obstacles as well. Mr Sinclair, the employer with whom Gemma falls in love, contains none of the mysteriousness of Mr Rochester, none of the sense of danger and intrigue wrapped up in enigmatic moods and veiled personal history. Blackbird Hall and the Orkney islands do not ooze with atmosphere and gloom as Thornfield Hall and the moors do. Mr Sinclair's secret is not terribly damning, and while it is believable that its revelation would make Gemma think twice about marrying him, her flight from him comes over as foolish and over-dramatic; Jane's flight from Mr Rochester and his attempt to commit bigamy through deceit (and the subsequent effect Jane may well have thought this would have on her soul) seems almost rational in comparison. This difficulty with suspension of disbelief is not helped by the fact that Gemma and Sinclair's love for one another reads like a result of the novel's paralleling Jane Eyre rather than a natural development springing from these characters themselves.
In fact, much of The Flight of Gemma Hardy appears to exist because it must do so in order to stay true to the source to which it is indebted. Reading the novel was a bit like going down a Jane Eyre plot point checklist. Confrontation with bratty older cousin? Check. Locked in a frightening room? Check. Sent off to a miserable boarding school? Check. Make friends with a doomed pupil? Check. Get job teaching the ward of a rich, absentee landowner? Check. Unwittingly help employer on the road when he returns unexpectedly? Check. And so on. While Livesey does infuse her telling with new elements, while she does, in many ways, make the story her own, her changes and updates to the tale often feel uninspired; they rarely made me think about Jane Eyre in new ways or provided much insight into how the story of a girl growing up with this particular set of disadvantages changed in one hundred years. I thought for a while that perhaps that sense of things not having changed much was the point of the novel, but if so the illustration of that fact falls flat. Having dismissed that notion, I considered the possibility that the novel was meant to illustrate how Jane Eyre, when looked at from a distance, becomes rather silly, how it might have seemed so to its contemporary readers, just as some of its plot elements seem unbelievable when placed in a (roughly) contemporary setting today. But, no, the book does not suggest to me, in its unfolding, in it careful retracing of the plot of Jane Eyre, any sort of critique of the original novel.
Except, perhaps, in the end. Finally, finally, in the last fifty-or-so pages, The Flight of Gemma Hardy departs from its strict adherence to the plot of Jane Eyre. Upon discovering that she may have family on her father's side still living, and in the aftermath of refusing a perhaps practical but certainly passionless proposal of marriage, Gemma (unlike Jane) goes in search of that family. And here are some of my favorite parts of the book. Gemma finds living relatives in Iceland and learns (as Jane does not), a fair amount about her childhood before coming to live with her aunt and uncle, about her family, about, as a result, herself. And Mr Sinclair comes to find her, rather than her going back to him. And they do not get married (though there's a strong intimation that they will, once Gemma comes to understand herself a little better). This is the sort of thing I was hoping the whole book would do--put a spin on the familiar story, show how Jane Eyre would be if she'd been born in the aftermath of World War II. And in some ways I suppose it does do that, but I never really felt that the novel was fully reimagining the original story.
I did so want to love The Flight of Gemma Hardy. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite novels, and I thought a retelling of it had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, Livesey doesn't quite tap into that potential--I spent much of the novel wishing she (or someone) had reimagined Jane Eyre in its original setting, taking up the story from some crucial point in the original narrative and exploring what might have happened if Jane had made different choices. Alas. But I do give mad props to Livesey for trying, and on the strength of her prose, I will be looking out for some of her previous novels.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Packing for a Reading Retreat
I've never been on a Reading Retreat, but I've heard of them. Comfy accommodation in some secluded, scenic spot; meals provided; evening gatherings of other retreat attendees to discuss bookish things. No television, no phone, no obligations--nothing to do for a week but read, read, read. I've no immediate plans to go on such a retreat either, as paying handsomely to do something I can just about get away with at home with some forward planning always seems just a little too extravagant. But gosh, I'd like to. And sometimes I imagine what it would be like, and what books I'd take. Thus, about once every four months (I'll shoot for around 1 April, 1 July, 1 October, and 1 January), I'll share what I would pack for a reading retreat if I were lucky enough to be heading out to one soon.
I've done my share of packing for regular vacations, of course. And I always take too many books. It's just so hard to choose, and I'd hate to get there and realize that the book that I really want to read, the book that would be just perfect, is the book I left behind. The knowledge that I will almost surely be someplace where I can get another book, or borrow a book from a friend, has no effect on my overpacking. The books I pack tend to fall into one of three categories: something I've never read, or books that are new to me; books I've read before and would like to visit again, or old favorites; and one or two books that catch my eye after I thought I'd finished packing, or those that are just in case. So in each "Packing for a Reading Retreat" post, I'll pick three books that are new to me, three old favorites, and one just in case--and I'll say a little about each one. That's may still be too many books for a week, but who could choose?
New to Me
The Mirage, by Matt Ruff
From the front flap: "11/9/2001: Christian fundamentalists hijack four jetliners. They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers." Chilling. And tantalizing. I have steered clear of, or been disappointed by, books I've read that center around 9/11, but this one intrigues me. Perhaps it is a suspicion that reading about those events turned on their head will be easier to stand, while still providing some insight. Perhaps it is just that I am fascinated by speculative fiction, with things that posit "but what if it were just this way?" Either way, I've heard good things, and this is the first 9/11 novel I've really wanted to read, rather than just thought I probably ought to. Here's hoping.
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey
Gemma Hardy loses her parents and then a kind guardian and is left in the care of a mean aunt. She subsequently goes away to school, hoping for a better life, only to find the conditions living there little better than staying with her aunt. Eventually she takes a job as an au pair, and finds herself intrigued by her employer. Yar, it's Jane Eyre, and consciously so. If there's anything that fascinates me more than speculative fiction, it's a retelling. And Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books, not only because I loved reading it, but because it was one of the few classics I read as a teenager entirely because I wanted to. It wasn't for school, it wasn't suggested by my mother, it wasn't to help me pass any kind of test. I'm a little wary of Gemma Hardy for that reason, but I've heard really good things about this one, too.
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, translated by John. E. Woods
I had to read Death in Venice for one of my comps a few years ago, and I expected it to be a slog. Au contraire! I loved it. Since then I've been picking up John E. Woods's translations of Mann's major works, but I've yet to sit down and read one of them. The Magic Mountain always seems like a too-intellectual introduction to Mann in long form, and I shy away from Doctor Faustus fearing it may wreck me somehow. Buddenbrooks strikes me as the least intimidating. And such a long novel would be the perfect thing for a weekend of uninterrupted reading.
Old Favorites
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Yes, yes, I hear many of you crying foul, claiming this is too obvious, demanding I pick something else. But this is no knee-jerk, I-always-want-to-read-Rings-again kind of a choice. M just reread The Hobbit the other week, and we've been dipping into the films of an evening here lately. And I've realized that it's been quite a while since I've read Rings in its entirety. There are always new things to discover in Tolkien, no matter how many times you've read him, and I always think that Rings suffers greatly from being read in snatches. One should really sit down with it for hours at a time and let oneself settle comfortably into Tolkien's style, let oneself get caught up in Middle Earth.
The Sound of Summer Voices, by Helen Tucker
My mother read the first chapter of The Sound of Summer Voices to me when I was home sick from middle school. (It was probably a nasty headache, otherwise I likely would have read it myself.) The story has a mystery to it, though it is not a mystery story, and I remember calling out what I thought were deeply important clues as she read. The story involves a pre-adolescent boy who decides that one of his aunts must actually be his mother, and follows him as he tries to find out the truth. Tucker has a knack for capturing small town life and the characters who live in them. And the plot is fun. I've been meaning to read this one again for a long time.
Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier
You gotta take along one slightly creepy book in case of thunderstorms. Rebecca is probably my favorite "slightly creepy" read. The atmosphere DuMaurier creates is tangible, and the mysterious goings on at Manderley hold up brilliantly even when you already know what all the fuss is about.
Just in Case
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
I can practically recite Pride and Prejudice without looking at the pages. And that's largely why it's here. It's an old, comfortable favorite, and will serve splendidly in cases of homesickness, duds, or freak-outs caused by The Mirage. Austen's language is so smooth that her sentences have a kind of soothing, inevitable rightness to them. And the characters are just delicious, the plot just twisty enough, and the humor just delightfully pointed.
I've done my share of packing for regular vacations, of course. And I always take too many books. It's just so hard to choose, and I'd hate to get there and realize that the book that I really want to read, the book that would be just perfect, is the book I left behind. The knowledge that I will almost surely be someplace where I can get another book, or borrow a book from a friend, has no effect on my overpacking. The books I pack tend to fall into one of three categories: something I've never read, or books that are new to me; books I've read before and would like to visit again, or old favorites; and one or two books that catch my eye after I thought I'd finished packing, or those that are just in case. So in each "Packing for a Reading Retreat" post, I'll pick three books that are new to me, three old favorites, and one just in case--and I'll say a little about each one. That's may still be too many books for a week, but who could choose?
New to Me
The Mirage, by Matt Ruff
From the front flap: "11/9/2001: Christian fundamentalists hijack four jetliners. They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers." Chilling. And tantalizing. I have steered clear of, or been disappointed by, books I've read that center around 9/11, but this one intrigues me. Perhaps it is a suspicion that reading about those events turned on their head will be easier to stand, while still providing some insight. Perhaps it is just that I am fascinated by speculative fiction, with things that posit "but what if it were just this way?" Either way, I've heard good things, and this is the first 9/11 novel I've really wanted to read, rather than just thought I probably ought to. Here's hoping.
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey
Gemma Hardy loses her parents and then a kind guardian and is left in the care of a mean aunt. She subsequently goes away to school, hoping for a better life, only to find the conditions living there little better than staying with her aunt. Eventually she takes a job as an au pair, and finds herself intrigued by her employer. Yar, it's Jane Eyre, and consciously so. If there's anything that fascinates me more than speculative fiction, it's a retelling. And Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books, not only because I loved reading it, but because it was one of the few classics I read as a teenager entirely because I wanted to. It wasn't for school, it wasn't suggested by my mother, it wasn't to help me pass any kind of test. I'm a little wary of Gemma Hardy for that reason, but I've heard really good things about this one, too.
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, translated by John. E. Woods
I had to read Death in Venice for one of my comps a few years ago, and I expected it to be a slog. Au contraire! I loved it. Since then I've been picking up John E. Woods's translations of Mann's major works, but I've yet to sit down and read one of them. The Magic Mountain always seems like a too-intellectual introduction to Mann in long form, and I shy away from Doctor Faustus fearing it may wreck me somehow. Buddenbrooks strikes me as the least intimidating. And such a long novel would be the perfect thing for a weekend of uninterrupted reading.
Old Favorites
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Yes, yes, I hear many of you crying foul, claiming this is too obvious, demanding I pick something else. But this is no knee-jerk, I-always-want-to-read-Rings-again kind of a choice. M just reread The Hobbit the other week, and we've been dipping into the films of an evening here lately. And I've realized that it's been quite a while since I've read Rings in its entirety. There are always new things to discover in Tolkien, no matter how many times you've read him, and I always think that Rings suffers greatly from being read in snatches. One should really sit down with it for hours at a time and let oneself settle comfortably into Tolkien's style, let oneself get caught up in Middle Earth.
The Sound of Summer Voices, by Helen Tucker
My mother read the first chapter of The Sound of Summer Voices to me when I was home sick from middle school. (It was probably a nasty headache, otherwise I likely would have read it myself.) The story has a mystery to it, though it is not a mystery story, and I remember calling out what I thought were deeply important clues as she read. The story involves a pre-adolescent boy who decides that one of his aunts must actually be his mother, and follows him as he tries to find out the truth. Tucker has a knack for capturing small town life and the characters who live in them. And the plot is fun. I've been meaning to read this one again for a long time.
Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier
You gotta take along one slightly creepy book in case of thunderstorms. Rebecca is probably my favorite "slightly creepy" read. The atmosphere DuMaurier creates is tangible, and the mysterious goings on at Manderley hold up brilliantly even when you already know what all the fuss is about.
Just in Case
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
I can practically recite Pride and Prejudice without looking at the pages. And that's largely why it's here. It's an old, comfortable favorite, and will serve splendidly in cases of homesickness, duds, or freak-outs caused by The Mirage. Austen's language is so smooth that her sentences have a kind of soothing, inevitable rightness to them. And the characters are just delicious, the plot just twisty enough, and the humor just delightfully pointed.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Are you from the PAST?
I was born in the early eighties into a family with a mother who worked in an office, one grandmother who was the vice-president of a local bank, and another grandmother who was responsible for the bookkeeping and all money matters for her church. Our houses were filled with books, and you were generally more likely to walk into a room of people reading than of people watching television. Abortions and hormonal birth control have been legal all of my life. That a woman should have professional responsibilities outside of the home, that she should have control over the reproductive functions of her body, that she should read whatever struck her fancy, were all such normal, self-evident ideas that it didn't occur to me even to think about them until I was somewhere in my teens. And I can honestly say that I have never thought that my femaleness--its very fact alone--has ever been a cause for others to dislike me or behave condescendingly toward me or form any opinions about me at all. Until now.
I am not naive enough to think that this experience was universal for women my age, or even for those born a little later, a little more solidly into the post-Roe-v.-Wade era. And I know that the fight for women's equality--in popular culture, in politics, in the job sphere--have been going on all my life. And once I started to emerge a bit from the shelter of family life, I certainly saw it. But suddenly I feel it. Suddenly I feel like there are people out there who will think a certain way about me because I am a woman, and not because they have met me, or read what I've had to say, and come to a thinking conclusion. And some of those people appear to be the same people who think they ought to be the President of the United States. The president. The face of the nation. The singular embodiment of our country and the democratic ideals for which it stands. When Rush Limbaugh called an accomplished, intelligent young woman a slut before a national audience because he didn't like her politics, Mitt Romney, one of the forerunners for the Republican nomination for president, responded to the incident by saying that Limbaugh's words "were not the language [he] would have used." That Limbaugh would say something so distasteful, nasty, controversial, and off-point does not surprise me in the least. That so many people are trying to defend his statement, that a potential presidential candidate would so obviously fail to condemn it, saddens me, frightens me, and, frankly, makes me feel like shit.
And this is what I thought we had moved past as a society, this putting down of women, this shaming of women through their sexuality, this infantilizing of women, consciously or unconsciously, solely because they are women. That there is work still to be done in our culture if we want men and women truly to stand on equal ground, I have always known. But certain entrenched attitudes which reveal themselves in language, in jokes, in "glass ceilings," cannot help but take time to work themselves out, and while I don't like these things, I rarely see any maleficence, any nastiness, in them. They are unfortunate, and have great potential to harm, and should be worked against. But unintentional, culturally ingrained misogyny, while destructive and potentially insidious, is a far cry from hateful, shaming speech; from denial of access to health care; from removal of autonomy over one's body.
At first I thought that the nastiness of Limbaugh's invective was just an isolated incident--something that was exacerbated by the Republican Primaries and was blown out of proportion by the real (potentially not-nasty) concerns that some have over the question of whether birth control should be required to be covered by health insurance plans. But since the Limbaugh storm, it seems that every day I read about some similar (if not quite so shockingly blatant) attack on the strides women's equality has made. A new proposed bill in Arizona would allow employers to request to see women's prescriptions for contraceptives so they can determine whether women are using the pills for birth control or other medical reasons. Because of Arizona's employment laws, employers would be within their rights to fire women using the pill for contraception. Eat your heart out, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
But, the bill almost certainly won't pass, right? And there will always be some people whose beliefs are out of sync with prevailing national attitudes, right? Well, how about this New York Times article about the re-release of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which is touted as erotic? The article made me increasingly cranky the more I read. It suggests that the book is something to "pass around" in womenly spaces like exercise classes and school groups, that the book is teaching mothers how to be sexual again, that there is something slightly shameful in reading about sex, that more women may be reading erotica now because they can "hide" their reading on e-readers, that it has taken a book of this sort to get women reading. All these suggestions paint a picture of a culture that feels like something out of Marilyn French's The Women's Room. I don't know about you, but my world is not defined by a series of circles of women, I never stopped reading, and I don't need to pass around a dirty book in secret with my girlfriends to feel fulfilled at home with my husband. What is this, 1955?
All I can say is, "Push back." Don't let people get away with conflating their political views with misogyny. Don't let them treat you like children or some kind of second class citizen. If you start to feel shameful or dirty or bad because of what some people are saying, stamp those feelings out. There is no denying that being a woman will have some bearing on how your life unfolds and how others interact with you, but what you think, how you behave, are so much more important than what's between your legs. As for what you do with that, it's between you and, well, you. No government officials or media pundits need apply. And if you have a father or a grandfather or a brother or an uncle or a boyfriend or a husband or a son who has always treated you as a thinking, feeling, competent human being because it never occurred to them to treat you any other way, take a moment to give thanks for the positive influence they had on the person you have become.
The title for this blog post comes from The IT Crowd.
I am not naive enough to think that this experience was universal for women my age, or even for those born a little later, a little more solidly into the post-Roe-v.-Wade era. And I know that the fight for women's equality--in popular culture, in politics, in the job sphere--have been going on all my life. And once I started to emerge a bit from the shelter of family life, I certainly saw it. But suddenly I feel it. Suddenly I feel like there are people out there who will think a certain way about me because I am a woman, and not because they have met me, or read what I've had to say, and come to a thinking conclusion. And some of those people appear to be the same people who think they ought to be the President of the United States. The president. The face of the nation. The singular embodiment of our country and the democratic ideals for which it stands. When Rush Limbaugh called an accomplished, intelligent young woman a slut before a national audience because he didn't like her politics, Mitt Romney, one of the forerunners for the Republican nomination for president, responded to the incident by saying that Limbaugh's words "were not the language [he] would have used." That Limbaugh would say something so distasteful, nasty, controversial, and off-point does not surprise me in the least. That so many people are trying to defend his statement, that a potential presidential candidate would so obviously fail to condemn it, saddens me, frightens me, and, frankly, makes me feel like shit.
And this is what I thought we had moved past as a society, this putting down of women, this shaming of women through their sexuality, this infantilizing of women, consciously or unconsciously, solely because they are women. That there is work still to be done in our culture if we want men and women truly to stand on equal ground, I have always known. But certain entrenched attitudes which reveal themselves in language, in jokes, in "glass ceilings," cannot help but take time to work themselves out, and while I don't like these things, I rarely see any maleficence, any nastiness, in them. They are unfortunate, and have great potential to harm, and should be worked against. But unintentional, culturally ingrained misogyny, while destructive and potentially insidious, is a far cry from hateful, shaming speech; from denial of access to health care; from removal of autonomy over one's body.
At first I thought that the nastiness of Limbaugh's invective was just an isolated incident--something that was exacerbated by the Republican Primaries and was blown out of proportion by the real (potentially not-nasty) concerns that some have over the question of whether birth control should be required to be covered by health insurance plans. But since the Limbaugh storm, it seems that every day I read about some similar (if not quite so shockingly blatant) attack on the strides women's equality has made. A new proposed bill in Arizona would allow employers to request to see women's prescriptions for contraceptives so they can determine whether women are using the pills for birth control or other medical reasons. Because of Arizona's employment laws, employers would be within their rights to fire women using the pill for contraception. Eat your heart out, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
But, the bill almost certainly won't pass, right? And there will always be some people whose beliefs are out of sync with prevailing national attitudes, right? Well, how about this New York Times article about the re-release of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which is touted as erotic? The article made me increasingly cranky the more I read. It suggests that the book is something to "pass around" in womenly spaces like exercise classes and school groups, that the book is teaching mothers how to be sexual again, that there is something slightly shameful in reading about sex, that more women may be reading erotica now because they can "hide" their reading on e-readers, that it has taken a book of this sort to get women reading. All these suggestions paint a picture of a culture that feels like something out of Marilyn French's The Women's Room. I don't know about you, but my world is not defined by a series of circles of women, I never stopped reading, and I don't need to pass around a dirty book in secret with my girlfriends to feel fulfilled at home with my husband. What is this, 1955?
All I can say is, "Push back." Don't let people get away with conflating their political views with misogyny. Don't let them treat you like children or some kind of second class citizen. If you start to feel shameful or dirty or bad because of what some people are saying, stamp those feelings out. There is no denying that being a woman will have some bearing on how your life unfolds and how others interact with you, but what you think, how you behave, are so much more important than what's between your legs. As for what you do with that, it's between you and, well, you. No government officials or media pundits need apply. And if you have a father or a grandfather or a brother or an uncle or a boyfriend or a husband or a son who has always treated you as a thinking, feeling, competent human being because it never occurred to them to treat you any other way, take a moment to give thanks for the positive influence they had on the person you have become.
The title for this blog post comes from The IT Crowd.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Why I Can't Watch Horror Movies
Recently M and I tried to watch The League of Gentlemen. I say we "tried" to watch it not because it isn't good but rather because it does what it does so well that M and I are so discomfited by its blend of comedy, tragedy, and horror that we can hardly stand to watch. At the end of episode two, M picked up the remote and said, "Well? Carry on? Or no?"
"Uuuhh," I said, the very picture of eloquence. "It's like I want to know, but I don't want to see."
That is how I often feel about horror, or at least about horror that professes to have something to it other than being just a fright-fest or a bloodbath. Things like Psycho and The Shining hold a certain fascination for me, though I will not watch them, while the Saw films, for instance, do not interest me in the slightest. About Psycho, I think maybe I would like to know, provided I do not have to see. I do not even want to know when it comes to Saw.
Because, you see, I am missing whatever gene or synaptic pathway or cultural proclivity it is that makes so many people like horror movies. I have heard the theories: that they release tensions. That they allow us to experience fears safely. Sounds good, I guess. I can buy that this is true for some people. I can even understand a certain amount of gleeful delight in the gruesome. But here's the thing: I don't like to be scared. I don't like anticipating being scared. I don't like the moment the scare happens. And I really don't like trying to fall asleep the night after the scare when I can't get the scary image out of my head. Horror movies don't release any tension for me; they create new tensions, tensions that pop into my mind unlooked for in the night, days, weeks, sometimes years, later. A friend and I mainlined the first season of Supernatural on DVD a few years ago. I was wary of the effect all those ghosts and monsters and demons would have on me, but there was so much good stuff going on there aside from the horror and I wanted to know. I should have known better. I still have nightmares.
Part of the problem is that I respond to the wrong bits. Or that I respond to the right bits wrongly. An early scene in The League of Gentlemen sees a young hiker wander into a shop in the village of Royston Vasey and there be accosted by the shop owners' xenophobia and general creepy wackiness. And the scene is hilarious. (Two catch phrases stemming from this scene--"Are you local?" and "Don't touch the precious things!"--have become part of our household lexicon, despite our giving up on the show.) But the scene ends ominously, and we discover later that the shop owners have killed the hiker and burned his body. (My brain insists that they've also eaten him, but I don't think there's actually anything in the episode to suggest this). Aside from being fairly well creeped out by this revelation (I think that was probably intended), I'm also let down that a character who was introduced early and seemed important has been dispensed with so summarily. I was settling in with him, dammit! I was preparing to get to know him, and now he's just gone. This sort of reaction I am not at all sure was intended. And it is this desire to see the show do things I do not think the show has any interest in doing that disinclines me toward watching it, more than the creepiness. I am uneasy that I will become invested in characters who will never see resolution, that I will see things that require a catharsis that the show will never offer. This is almost certainly an unfair judgement of a show of which I have seen only two episodes, but the fear of these outcomes is enough to make me wary of watching any more.
"Uuuhh," I said, the very picture of eloquence. "It's like I want to know, but I don't want to see."
That is how I often feel about horror, or at least about horror that professes to have something to it other than being just a fright-fest or a bloodbath. Things like Psycho and The Shining hold a certain fascination for me, though I will not watch them, while the Saw films, for instance, do not interest me in the slightest. About Psycho, I think maybe I would like to know, provided I do not have to see. I do not even want to know when it comes to Saw.
Because, you see, I am missing whatever gene or synaptic pathway or cultural proclivity it is that makes so many people like horror movies. I have heard the theories: that they release tensions. That they allow us to experience fears safely. Sounds good, I guess. I can buy that this is true for some people. I can even understand a certain amount of gleeful delight in the gruesome. But here's the thing: I don't like to be scared. I don't like anticipating being scared. I don't like the moment the scare happens. And I really don't like trying to fall asleep the night after the scare when I can't get the scary image out of my head. Horror movies don't release any tension for me; they create new tensions, tensions that pop into my mind unlooked for in the night, days, weeks, sometimes years, later. A friend and I mainlined the first season of Supernatural on DVD a few years ago. I was wary of the effect all those ghosts and monsters and demons would have on me, but there was so much good stuff going on there aside from the horror and I wanted to know. I should have known better. I still have nightmares.
Part of the problem is that I respond to the wrong bits. Or that I respond to the right bits wrongly. An early scene in The League of Gentlemen sees a young hiker wander into a shop in the village of Royston Vasey and there be accosted by the shop owners' xenophobia and general creepy wackiness. And the scene is hilarious. (Two catch phrases stemming from this scene--"Are you local?" and "Don't touch the precious things!"--have become part of our household lexicon, despite our giving up on the show.) But the scene ends ominously, and we discover later that the shop owners have killed the hiker and burned his body. (My brain insists that they've also eaten him, but I don't think there's actually anything in the episode to suggest this). Aside from being fairly well creeped out by this revelation (I think that was probably intended), I'm also let down that a character who was introduced early and seemed important has been dispensed with so summarily. I was settling in with him, dammit! I was preparing to get to know him, and now he's just gone. This sort of reaction I am not at all sure was intended. And it is this desire to see the show do things I do not think the show has any interest in doing that disinclines me toward watching it, more than the creepiness. I am uneasy that I will become invested in characters who will never see resolution, that I will see things that require a catharsis that the show will never offer. This is almost certainly an unfair judgement of a show of which I have seen only two episodes, but the fear of these outcomes is enough to make me wary of watching any more.
Something we have been successfully watching is Northern Exposure, which the Netflix sleeve for The League of Gentlemen (un)helpfully compares to LoG. (Who writes those Netflix sleeves anyway? They seem always to be comically wrong or hopelessly inane.) If I squint, I can see a vague kinship between the two (both involve an isolated town with zany local residents who have unusual attitudes toward the macabre, and both are comedic), but their tones are so resoundingly different. While watching The League of Gentlemen, I began to feel like I could lose my grip on reality at any moment, and that if I did, I would find myself in a dark chaos, perhaps in the company of an evil clown. Northern Exposure often provides the same sense of reality coming unglued, but with NE I feel that if I were to let it, what I would find would be enlightenment, or perhaps the face of God.
I suppose the bottom line is that if I'm going to be led into darkness, I want to be able to trust that I'm going to be led out again. And because so much of the method of horror involves violating trust (a horror film is always trying to "get ya," by making you jump, by making you scream, by grossing you out), I just can't find a way to enjoy movies which employ it. But I can't help feeling, sometimes, that I'm missing out on some really cool things because of it.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Book Review: The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin
Ulin's long essay in book form (I'll estimate it's about 40,000 words) makes some good points about reading in the age of Twitter and texting and the pull of near-constant connectedness, and I certainly agree with his claim that what one might call "traditional" reading (that done with a paper book, not a device that can "do things," like look up words, log on to Facebook, or check e-mail) is important for the ways it cultivates and develops deep thinking and long attention spans. I was heartened that he does not cast the internet and e-readers and all things digital as the Devil, as some of conservative mind on this subject do, because I think doing so is unconscionably shortsighted and unhelpful. In one of the most interesting parts of the essay, Ulin references studies that show how internet usage actually changes our brains and discusses the likelihood that the initial rise of reading did so as well. There's no question that we're living at a cusp; we're changing ourselves, and we know we're doing it.
But for all of the good points and the interesting bits, The Lost Art of Reading is somehow unsatisfying in the end. I often felt as if Ulin were wandering away from his thesis, and while wandering can often be quite fruitful in an essay, sometimes he just didn't quite get anywhere useful. And while there were many moments in the text where I nodded and made little checks of agreement in the margin, there were also many places he didn't go that I thought the essay begged to get to. For example, he talks about how distracting hyperlinks can be to a reader of a digital text and discusses how this fragments one's reading but treats this as if it were a new experience in the digital age without making any reference to the long-familiar and (to my mind anyway) quite similar experience of reading a paper book that is densely footnoted. I also would have liked to have seen a fuller discussion of how "traditional" reading does that which other activities cannot do. Ulin calls literature a "voice of pure expression" (25), and makes a case for the act of reading as training for the kind of critical thinking necessary for anyone who hopes to engage in or understand political discourse. He seems to imply that that these things require "traditional" reading, but does not really explore why. Perhaps I am asking too much of this essay, perhaps I am asking it to do things it did not set out to do. But Ulin has jumped into turbulent waters here, and, while I agree with his conclusions, I'm not sure he's done enough to keep them afloat.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
But for all of the good points and the interesting bits, The Lost Art of Reading is somehow unsatisfying in the end. I often felt as if Ulin were wandering away from his thesis, and while wandering can often be quite fruitful in an essay, sometimes he just didn't quite get anywhere useful. And while there were many moments in the text where I nodded and made little checks of agreement in the margin, there were also many places he didn't go that I thought the essay begged to get to. For example, he talks about how distracting hyperlinks can be to a reader of a digital text and discusses how this fragments one's reading but treats this as if it were a new experience in the digital age without making any reference to the long-familiar and (to my mind anyway) quite similar experience of reading a paper book that is densely footnoted. I also would have liked to have seen a fuller discussion of how "traditional" reading does that which other activities cannot do. Ulin calls literature a "voice of pure expression" (25), and makes a case for the act of reading as training for the kind of critical thinking necessary for anyone who hopes to engage in or understand political discourse. He seems to imply that that these things require "traditional" reading, but does not really explore why. Perhaps I am asking too much of this essay, perhaps I am asking it to do things it did not set out to do. But Ulin has jumped into turbulent waters here, and, while I agree with his conclusions, I'm not sure he's done enough to keep them afloat.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Book Review: The Vesuvius Club, Mark Gatiss
If Ian Fleming and Arthur Conan Doyle somehow had a baby, and then sent it off to be raised by Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, it might have grown up to be Lucifer Box, the hero of Mark Gatiss's The Vesuvius Club. Box is an Edwardian-era secret agent, who, when he's not off saving the Realm, is a painter and a much- sought-after guest at all the best parties. Box narrates his own story, and the result is irreverent, witty, knowing, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Many reviews of the novel toss around the word "pastiche," and that's fair--it's impossible not to think of James Bond, of Sherlock Holmes, even of Bertie Wooster and maybe Edward Gorey while reading--but Gatiss is doing something of his own, too. Box is unapologetically bisexual and from there stems some of what is most interesting about the book; in their review of The Vesuvius Club, The Times Literary Supplement says that Box is "revealed to be bisexual" at the midpoint of the story. I'd say rather that, if you've been paying attention, he is gleefully affirmed to be bisexual at the midpoint of the story. Only a few of the other characters in the book know this about Box (it is early twentieth century England, after all), but between Box-as-narrator and the reader, his bisexuality is treated as a perhaps slightly-shocking-fact at first, but never as something shameful, dirty, or prurient (or at least not any more prurient than anything else--the whole book is delightfully nudge-nudge-wink-wink). It is then taken as given, and Box's sexual interest in valet Charlie is treated as no more remarkable than his sexual interest in drawing-student Bella. And that, itself, I think, is remarkable, even (especially?) today. The novel is not about Box's bisexuality, and in not being about that, somehow it becomes about just that. And I love it for it.
I suppose I should say something about the plot--the novel is a mystery story, and the plot does trip along. Lots of fairly ridiculous incidents, competently written action, and it all hangs together well enough in the end. But really it's about the humor, the wit, and the pastiche. And a certain amount of (somewhat surprising) heart. It's clear that Gatiss had a brilliant time writing this, and if you are in any way inclined toward liking The Vesuvius Club that delight will pass over into your reading experience. That being said, this book is probably not for everyone. There's an element of the send-up here, of going over-the-top, of taking something to such heights of badness that it becomes irresistibly good, and if that's not your thing, this may read flat. But. If you like that sort of thing, this is exactly the sort of thing you will like.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
I suppose I should say something about the plot--the novel is a mystery story, and the plot does trip along. Lots of fairly ridiculous incidents, competently written action, and it all hangs together well enough in the end. But really it's about the humor, the wit, and the pastiche. And a certain amount of (somewhat surprising) heart. It's clear that Gatiss had a brilliant time writing this, and if you are in any way inclined toward liking The Vesuvius Club that delight will pass over into your reading experience. That being said, this book is probably not for everyone. There's an element of the send-up here, of going over-the-top, of taking something to such heights of badness that it becomes irresistibly good, and if that's not your thing, this may read flat. But. If you like that sort of thing, this is exactly the sort of thing you will like.
This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.
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