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May 22, 2008

Who Killed Literature AND Criticism? Cultural Studies! (A British Guy Said So)

About two weeks ago, I posted something on What Literary Critics Actually Do, saying I'd follow up on the topic because I had more to say. I actually have said more; I wrote a couple more blog entries; I just haven't gotten around to posting them.

But turns out there's no real need to explain what it is I as a literary critic do, because I have followed the author (which I also sort of am, in a non-Foucauldian sense), and died.

That's right, the literary critic is dead. And who killed her? Cultural studies, that evil creation of second-rate thinkers and writers tired of being considered second-rate! This according to some British academic named Ronan McDonald. Though, according to a discussion on Salon, bloggers have to be blamed as well, because their democratic impulse, their arrogant assumption that their preferences in literature should matter enough to them to express them from time to time, have helped keep her dead. Oh yeah, I've also been told a time or two that Oprah helped as well, with her book club, getting publishers to paste a sticker on some books and not others, so that the sticker-bearing books are seen as special when they might not really be. Naughty cultural studies! Naughty bloggers! Naughty, naughty Oprah!

I admit, I haven't read the book announcing all this, The Death of the Critic by Ronan McDonald. All I've read is the blurb on Amazon, which reads

McDonald argues that crowing blog-based citizen opinionistas, triumphant over shrinking print media coverage of books are simply kicking a dead horse; the lit critic, it seems, was killed already by the an out-of-control sense of cultural relativism, which has over the 20th century wormed its way into literature programs, engendering artistic and aesthetic relativism. McDonald contends that the idea of artistic expression's equanimity, and the subsequent equanimity of opinion regarding that expression, has marginalized the important and difficult work of honestly evaluating artistic worth. Emphasizing literature, his specialty, McDonald illustrates how trendy efforts to make art more scientific, more academic or more cultural ultimately undermine its role as art, making it more difficult (if not impossible) to consider with the language of art. McDonald illustrates how specific movements-including romanticism, fin-de-siecle and radical aesthetic individualism-have obscured and in some cases removed entirely those traditional standards of value. A daring, but fitting, comparison between aesthetics and ethics shows how standards may be relative but are never irrelevant; McDonald's cogent, largely convincing attempt to pin the critic's murder on relativism is sure to raise eyebrows among academics, though it doesn't do much to instill hope of the critic's resurrection.

here's what I want to say:

the language of art is dead because of fundamentalist religions like Mormonism, because of the uniform way the west in general and western religion in particular treats texts, including evocative and symbolic texts. As Karen Armstrong writes in The Spiral Staircase,

Sacred texts cannot be perused like a holy encyclopedia, for clear information about the divine. This is not the language of everyday speech or of logical, discursive prose.

Rather,

theology is--or should be--a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music.... You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth, or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque.

(I sorta don't believe this bit about fundamentalist religions killing the language of art, by the way; and I sorta do. It's possible, I think, but I can't really say definitively that that's what's to blame, more so than anything else. I threw it in part just to show that you can blame anything for a particular situation.)

I mentioned in my last post on this topic that I read every single word of The Canterbury Tales in middle English as an undergrad. What I didn't mention is that the class in which I did so was one of the most boring of my life. It was all explication; it was all, "Here's what this phrase means; here's what Chaucer was trying to show in this passage; here's why this is so brilliant." Oh, god, it was painful, and so fucking encyclopedic! I swore then and there that I would never adopt that mode of teaching. When I compared it to the method of teaching in most of my other courses, well, I could see a huge difference in how exciting and meaningful the conversations were.

I have always trusted that my students will "get" why the great works I'm teaching them are really great works, at least some of the time. They don't always, and I admit that sometimes that upsets me, but I have told them it doesn't matter whether or not they like a text, that they're free to hate things and to express that hatred in class discussion (though not in their papers--more on that later) and I try to stand by that. I also try to give them that empty space Armstrong mentions, in which the text can declare itself to them, whereas so often in these classes where the whole point is to convince you that something incredibly boring and irrelevant like The Faerie Queen was great art 400 years ago and should still be recognized as great art now, are just fucking coercive. In a class I taught a few years ago, there was a moment, after we all finished Lolita, when we talked together about why it was such a magnificent work of art. I was happy that my students came to that opinion, and came to it on their own. Getting them to understand that was NOT my primary objective.

Anyway. There are other reasons why I'm pissed about this. I didn't come across McDonald's book on my own; I found it via a review on Salon, in the form of a conversation between two book critics. (Book critics are people who help others decide whether or not to buy a book, and they do this by writing about it in popular magazines or newspapers. This as opposed to literary critics, people who study literature in some systemic way, with an area of specialized expertise. I won't deny there are people who are both, but it's not always the case.)

The tagline for the review reads, "In the age of blogging, great critics appear to be on life support. Salon's book reviewers [Louis Bayard and Laura Miller] discuss snobbery, how to make criticism fun and the need for cultural gatekeepers."

It's in the form of a Socractic dialogue (somewhat reminiscent of the great critical essays of Oscar Wilde--The Decay of Lying, The Critic as Artist--but not nearly as insightful, witty or wise), and starts out with this from LB:

Book reviews are closing shop or drastically scaling back inventory. Film critics at newspapers all over America are getting tossed on their ears. TV reviewers are heard no more in the land. All the indicators suggest that America's critics are becoming an increasingly endangered species.

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that's just come across our desks: "The Death of the Critic." Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain's University of Reading, and he's particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the "public critic," someone with "the authority to shape public taste." It's only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic's disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than ... cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function -- the right to say this is good, this isn't, and here's why.

it goes on to this:

Laura Miller: I suppose it's only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism -- such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines -- lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what's good and what's not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don't have celebrated "public critics" now because critics don't care about the public, not because the public doesn't care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

Bayard: I think critics are just the canary in this particular coal mine. It's no accident that McDonald locates the "Golden Age" of criticism at the midpoint of the 20th century, which was also the apogee of the modern novel, particularly the American novel. Novels -- and novelists -- mattered then in a way they simply don't today. (William Styron's posthumous essay collection is a potent reminder. The man got invited to the Kennedy White House on the strength of one novel!) Even if you think critics are parasites, you have to acknowledge they can only survive when their host organisms thrive. In this regard, I think McDonald is right: If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist.

And frankly, there's precious little that gets me more hot and bothered than talk like that, the idea that the only literary art form that REALLY matters is the novel. Yes, there are plenty of great novels that I REALLY love, but they are not the be-all and end-all of literature. After all, they've only been around for 400 years (Don Quixote is usually considered the first, and it was published in 1605), and oh, the effort it took to validate them as "respectable" literature and "high" art! For a long time they were this third-rate literary form because (gasp!) they were really popular among women! In fact, even women could write them! They didn't take that much actual knowledge, you see; you could produce them out of your imagination!

Then the discussion descends into this circle jerk (albeit a small one) in which LM and LB talk about the critics whose prose they love, though they never read the books these people mention: critics, who "can misinterpret and misevaluate to their heart's delight as long as they make the words dance," and then they both agree that it's good to read Northrop Frye.

And then they mention this bit from McDonald, and add their own interpretation:

McDonald mentions that one of academia's last havens for evaluative criticism has been the creative-writing class, and he suggests that universities should offer more in the way of "creative criticism" classes, teaching the craft of interpreting other people's works. All the same, I'm skeptical this would reverse the current state of affairs. People will only value literary criticism to the extent they value literature. Unless we can arrest the decline of reading -- and even Harry Potter hasn't managed that wizard's trick -- then criticism will be swept away in the same mud slide.

What the fuck?

First of all, haven' t they read the stuff about how reading is actually at an all time high? Book clubs flourish. Book stores make huge profits.

Secondly, I teach creative writing courses. I teach criticism courses. I have taught--and produced, and published--creative cross-genre criticism. So I think they're full of shit and don't know what they're talking about. And to substantiate that, I should probably post some of the other things I've written for this series, and I'll do that soon.

Posted by Holly at 9:28 AM | Comments (0)

May 9, 2008

What Literary Critics Actually Do

Over on Letters from a Broad, there’s a discussion about individual tastes in literature, and how to think about things when personal tastes violate the received wisdom and authority of experts in literature--people with PhDs. The discussion really upset me, not because anyone said anything particularly insulting or offensive--on the contrary, many comments were quite astute--but because it made me confront, more forcefully than anything has for a long time, that most people don’t understand in the slightest what I do. They don’t understand academia in the humanities; they don’t understand the way literary scholars approach the study of literature; they don’t understand the way literature is taught or the rationale for it.

It’s not like this is necessarily anybody's fault; relatively few people get PhDs in English, so why should the rest of the world understand what it’s like to do that? The grueling hours involved in being a grad student and teaching freshman comp (which is the primary way graduate studies in English are funded), the sheer drudgery of grading paper after paper (many of which are heartbreakingly bad), aren’t the least bit glamorous, so you can’t blame people for not wanting to hear more about the whole business. And in order to get a PhD, you have to study something in such depth that sometimes you can’t even explain easily your specialty to grad students focusing on other periods or genres of literature.

And it’s also not like I ever really forget this; I am reminded every time I’ve mentioned to someone over the past few years that I’m not really happy in my current situation and would like to find another. “Have you considered applying to this really cool college in this really cool area?” they sometimes ask me. “You should send in your resume.”

But an academic doesn't have a resume; she has a curriculum vitae. And you don’t simply send it to any institution you’d like to work at, because it won’t do you any good: colleges and universities don’t just hire English professors; they hire specialists, to do specialized jobs, and they do it at specific times, when they have a specific need.

Furthermore, the job of an academic is not merely to pass on but to generate knowledge. It's not the job of English professors to tell students what the masterpieces are and how to recognize them, as was Chanson's assumption on Letters from a Broad. That hasn’t been the goal of literary studies for a long time; it wasn’t what happened when I started college in the early 80s. Instead, literary scholars broaden the scope of questions that can be asked about texts, both general and specific. In order to do that, you have to be trained in the types of questions that have been asked. Certainly that includes attention to criteria for excellence, but its also includes interrogating those criteria, not merely reiterating them.

Neither my undergraduate degree nor grad school involved going into classrooms and talking about “great books” and why they're great, which is an entire curriculum (not just a single course) that is increasingly rare in colleges and universities, although people like Allan Bloom are always arguing that we wrong to abandon this approach to literary studies. Certainly there was attention to the canon, to the foundational texts of English literature, and I personally am glad that I read every last word of The Canterbury Tales--in middle English, no less. But the fact of the matter is, I read that as an undergrad, and that’s where I think students should read things like that. I think it is irresponsible of undergraduate English departments to produce graduates who do not have a solid foundation of knowledge of English literature through its history, and one of my dissatisfactions with my current institution is that we do just that.

But students don’t merely read texts; they discuss them. It’s not enough to read Chaucer and Beowulf and a few representative texts tracing development in the novel in the 18th century. Partly because professors have to have a way of assessing how well students have read the texts and how sharp their analytical, verbal and creative (and here I am not talking about creative writing, but creating ideas) skills are, students must write papers. And to do that, undergrads must learn the art of critical analysis and literary scholarship, which is also what you do in grad school, only in more specialized terms.

If I hadn’t already known how to write papers and analyze texts when I got into grad school, I wouldn’t have A) gotten in or B) succeeded once I got there. I admit I didn’t like my PhD program in a lot of ways, but I am figuring out that that might have had a lot to do with the particular time I went to grad school: the 90s, the heyday of theory. I hate Barthes and Judith Butler and dear god, I can’t believe I had to read Althusser’s dreadful piece on ideological state apparatuses THREE FUCKING TIMES! I don’t remember a single goddamn thing from it, which to me is a sure sign that it lacked substance and import, because I generally have an excellent memory, especially for things I've read.

As an aside: what I really remember about Althusser is this anecdote from his autobiography (which I also read--it was written to explain why he murdered his wife--short answer: she wanted him to) about how he stuffed bread in his ears when he was institutionalized as a young man, because the mental hospital he was in was so noisy. Then the bread got moldy, and caused him great pain, but he’d stuffed it in too deeply to fish it out. And because he was sort of crazy, the doctors didn’t believe him when he said, “I’ve got moldy bread in my ears and I can’t get it out, but it really, really hurts.”

But I digress.

The larger point is this: to get a PhD in English you must (ideally)
1. Be a reasonably competent (but not a great) writer. True eloquence is not necessary; the ability to produce comprehensible prose should be.
2. Understand the criteria by which literature has historically been judged, and understand as well the ways those criteria have been challenged and changed.
3. Have a sophisticated understanding of the questions that have already been asked about specific texts and the larger endeavor of literary studies, so that you can then ask sophisticated questions yourself. This means reading not only literature, but criticism, and producing criticism yourself.
4. Have an area of expertise, something you study in depth. Thus, in addition to knowing enough about the canon of English literature that you can chat about it at cocktail parties, you must know a decent amount about the canon or foundational texts of your own genre. Not everyone who studies literature needs to read the Confessions of St. Augustine, but I do, because my area of specialty is nonfiction, and The Confessions constitute one of the earliest and most important texts in the history of autobiography. The same goes for Rousseau (who also called his autobiography his Confessions) or Montaigne (who invented the essay, when he began to make “attempts” or “essays” in writing to understand his life, his mind and his times back in 16th century France).

This is long enough for today; I’ll continue it later.

Posted by Holly at 8:29 AM | Comments (7)

January 20, 2008

A Typical Kid Picking Her Nose

Via Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex, I have learned about a way of depicting young girls as sexualized known as “lolicon,” a bastardization of “lolita complex,” which (I am not making this up) “has a nicer ring to it than pedophile."

I have three things to say.

1. GROSS.

2. Ditto to everything Figleaf says in his response to the topic.

3. Have any of those people proclaiming their interest in lolicon ever read Nabokov’s damn book? Because it doesn’t make sex with a budding pubescent (a.k.a. nymphet) particularly appealing.

Ten years ago or so, I got an email from one of my friends, who’d snagged an easy gig writing up a piece on “the ten sexiest novels of all time” for some women’s mag. She wanted suggestions. I don’t remember what I told her she should include, but I do remember telling her two books I thought SHOULD NOT be on the list.

The first was The Story of O. I said something like, “I know everyone thinks this is all sexy, because it has fetishwear and fucking and bondage and total submission to sexual servitude, and that turns a lot of people on. I just don’t buy it. I don’t see why O goes along with the whole thing--why she doesn’t say, ‘Look, I really need to get back to my apartment and feed my cat, and oh yeah, I promised to call my mother this weekend.’ What happens to all her stuff back in Paris? Who pays her rent? Don’t any of the people she knew who didn’t want to turn her into a sex slave ever wonder what happened to her? I realize I’m not staging much of an argument for why it’s not sexy, except to say that I’m more persuaded by fantasies I can believe, so for me, The Story of O is just too impractical to be genuinely erotic.”

Of course my friend included it in her list anyway.

The other book I said shouldn’t be on the list was, of course, Lolita. I defy anyone to find a passage from that book that is really truly sexy. Consider this example in all its euphemistic obscurity and see if its depiction of a young girl's reaction to sex is hot--or not:

I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.

Yeah. A naked adult man in a leather armchair, straddled by a girl he has had to bribe into allowing him to touch her, and even still, the only way she’ll tolerate sex with him is if she can read the comics while it’s happening and completely ignore what she's sitting on. I don’t think that’s hot, and I don’t think for a second that Nabokov wants us to find it hot.

There’s a way in which Humbert Humbert doesn’t even LIKE Lolita. He complains that “Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl.... She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” And she doesn’t much care for him--in fact, he realizes very early on that to her he was “not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn” and she hates sex with him. OK, he claims that the first time they have sex, she seduced him. But aside from that one time, he has to bribe or blackmail her in order to get her to consent to anything at all.

How sexy is this?

Her weekly allowance, paid under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start....and went up to one dollar five before [the] end.... She was, however, not easy to deal with. Only listlessly did she earn her three pennies--or three nickels--per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed--during one schoolyear!--to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks... she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot.... then I would burgle her room.... what I feared most was not that she might ruin me but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away.

He knows just how much she wants to run away, because he would hear “her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.”

He knows this. And he keeps her prisoner anyway, until she is lucky enough to escape him. And Nabokov wants us to know that HH knows this; wants us to know that HH understands what his question and her refusal mean when, after he finds her, married and pregnant, he asks her to leave her husband and go with him:

“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. "You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”

“No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”

She had never called me honey before.

“No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean--”

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally. (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”)

This isn’t a book about the tragedy of being a monster in love with a nymphet. It’s a book about how tragic it is to be the nymphet a monster makes captive. HH is intelligent and articulate, a very compelling narrator, far more articulate and sophisticated than Dolly Haze could have been. But at crucial moments, Nabokov undercuts HH’s lust and ecstasy with the very real and poignant grief of a little girl who has realized “during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.” And Nabokov has HH state this:

Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction--that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze has been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Which is why I always think people who worry about whether or not HH loved Lolita sort of miss the point. I personally think he did love her, as much as he could love anyone, but SHE HATED HIM.

I love the novel Lolita. I think it’s amazing, and compelling, and brave, and wise. It’s one of the few books narrated by a monster--Grendel by John Gardner is another--that I really admire. But how someone can read it in any but the most superficial way and think it’s sexy, I don’t understand. I told my friend all that. But of course she found something to quote from it, and included it in her list of the ten sexiest novels, and earned about $4,000 for 1,000 words, most of them written by someone else. (Yeah, I admit, I was jealous of that.)

Anyway. All of this has to do with this larger meditation on lust I’m working on. Humbert Humbert’s lust is overwhelming, all-consuming; Lolita’s lust is either non-existent or irrelevant--the one person she wants, Quilty, wants only to watch her screwing someone else.

I’ll continue with this later.

Posted by Holly at 10:07 PM | Comments (12)

December 17, 2007

Latter Gay Gaze

My friend Troy hates the movie Latter Days--just hates it. A year or two ago at Sunstone when he and I were hanging out, I mentioned that I liked it; he countered that he despised it. “What do you think is so bad?” I asked.

“You mean, besides the script, the plot, the acting and the direction?” he replied.

I didn’t respond, except to shrug. Yes, the movie has problems. There are elements of the script that really bug me. There are elements to the plot I find predictable and cliched. There are performances I find really weak.

But I still like it. I liked it enough to buy a copy for myself and to give a copy as a gift to someone else. I liked it well enough to listen to the commentary.

One major reason I like it is that as far as I’m concerned, it’s about the only movie I’ve ever seen to get a mission right--I would argue it gives a more accurate depiction of a mission even than God’s Army, which I found thoroughly annoying and lame. (Don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that they make the new guy lug his suitcase around while they go tracting, which I’m fairly certain would never happen; that the main character goes back to BYU, dates and MARRIES his English TA while she's still his teacher (a BYU alum can correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather suspect the administration wouldn't be cool with that) and that the movie ends with her bringing him a cup of tea and sitting down at his feet to adore him; and that Richard Dutcher, who was about 40, plays a missionary of about 30 who dies quietly in his sleep from an inoperable brain tumor with no suffering or puking his guts out or whatever, so much so that no one even knows he's sick. I hate on principle all movies where people die quietly in their sleep from inoperable brain tumors. Anyway, aside from all that, I found the movie so vacuous and forgettable that I can’t remember what happened, and so can’t really tell you why I hated it in detail, though I think the reasons I’ve already listed constitute solid ground.)

But back to Latter Days. I like it for moments. There’s a moment where one elder grabs another and says, “I’m going to hit you, elder, and it’s going to hurt.” Pretty much. I liked it for Steve Sandvoss, the guy who plays the gay missionary--he has a sweetness and a decency I found both sympathetic and genuine, and it reminded me of the elders I liked best on my mission--some were really good young men.

But the thing I like best about it is the sex scene.

It’s not just that both actors are young, hot and well-muscled, so that the viewer is treated to some really nice views of beautiful male asses. It’s that the actors go for it. There’s a moment (one of those moments I like it for) when, after a hurried disrobing, they embrace and then positively fling themselves together onto the bed. It’s passionate, hot, and tender.

And after the sex, the guys sit naked on the bed and stroke each other and talk. The experienced guy in the equation says to the recently deflowered, soon-to-be-excommunicated elder, “I thought you’d be more reticent.” (Which is another reason I like it--reticent is a good word that people are reticent about using.) Rebecca, whom I try not to resent for deleting her entire blog, once wrote an entry about how watching these two guys make sweet love somehow brought tears to her eyes. I feel the same way.

I don’t always like sex scenes. A lot of them feel contrived, staged and manipulative (which isn’t surprising, since they are) and if I’m not emotionally invested in the relationship between the characters, I don’t really care about seeing them get it on. That’s one main reason I don’t care much for porn: aside from a sort of anthropological or informational interest--oh, so that’s how this industry works; that’s what the audience for this stuff expects; huh, I hadn’t known that particular activity was really part of the repertoire--I often find it fairly boring, which isn’t surprising since for the most part it’s designed to be emotionally vacuous.

But I love this sex scene. I could watch it over and over and not feel bored or dirty or cheap--or, for that matter, particularly aroused, since it’s a sex scene that has no room for me or any woman. I can’t imagine what I’d do in that scene; it sparks no fantasy; and so it doesn’t turn me on. (And I know all that because I did just watch it over and over, with the commentary on and off, so that I'd be accurate when I discussed it now.)

I remember reading a Dan Savage (whose most recent book is reviewed here) column in which someone asked him why straight men were turned on by lesbian porn, but straight women weren’t turned on by gay male porn, since in both cases what was depicted were scenes in which same-sex participants found ways to pleasure one another. He reasoned that in lesbian porn, men could always assume that they’d be welcome, and certainly there would be plenty of orifices into which a penis could be inserted, which, after all, is still what most people in our heteronormative world consider “sex.” Whereas in gay male sex, there are already accommodating orifices for any penis present, so any additional orifice is superfluous, and women therefore have a harder time creating a fantasy in which they’d be welcomed into the scene.

Savage’s argument about the possible welcomeness of a penis in a lesbian relationship is supported in part by this passage from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King, about the early stages of her first lesbian love affair:

Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in the submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on the search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

Candles melt/ Carrots are tough/ Bottles can hurt you/ Might as well muff.

But countering the male fantasy of the “Hey, all these chicks would want me!” scenario, King also offers this insight, gleaned after her lesbian love affair ends and she goes back to heterosexual sex for a while:

After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boiler-maker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernable waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.

Now, I really am going somewhere with this; I didn’t just set myself the academic exercise of analyzing a couple depictions of gay sex. But I have written enough for today, so you’ll have to come back later to read the rest of what I’m getting at.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (6)

June 24, 2007

Reading Like a Sixth Grader

All in all, my current attitude towards reading reminds me, as I said in my last entry, of the summers before and after sixth grade, which I think is when I read more--voraciously, compulsively--than at any other time in my life. Actually I've reverted to sixth grade in several ways: just as I did during summers when I was nine or ten or eleven, I like to sleep late, put on comfy clothes, then settle down to munch cookies I've made and plow through one book after another.

The very first thing I read, when the end of the semester was in sight and I could read whatever I wanted, was Her Little Majesty, a really mediocre biography of Victoria by Carolly Erickson. But even that was kind of like scholarly reading, because I was teaching a class on colonial lit and after all, Victoria ruled over the largest colonial empire in the history of the world.

But the next thing I read all 480 pages of a Life of Elizabeth I by Allison Weir, and I did it in a weekend. I've read more biographies of Elizabeth Tudor than anyone else but she continues to fascinate me, and Weir's biography was excellent. I would have to stretch to make it relevant to my studies, because I don't do anything at all with the renaissance. Fact of the matter is, as a historical period, I much prefer the middle ages to the renaissance.

Then I reread several works by Karen Armstrong--all her memoirs: Through the Narrow Gate, Beginning the World and The Spiral Staircase, because they count as research for a paper I'm presenting in November and because I just plain wanted to. I even annotated them, but I find her work so compelling that it still felt like fun.

And I then I looked at my bookshelf and decided I wanted to read some things I'd be willing to sell to a used book store, because I really need to thin out my book collection. So I dragged off the shelf A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, the first two books of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, which were given to me last summer by a colleague who was leaving town.

And that's another way I've reverted to sixth grade, because they're considered juvenile fiction, though they're not really the least bit simple or simplistic. Nonetheless I read The Tombs of Atuan when I was in fifth or sixth grade, because it was a Newbery honor book and I wanted to read all the Newbery honorees. And boy oh boy did it freak my shit out. I had always remembered how profoundly that book unsettled me, which is one reason I accepted the books when my colleague offered them: I recalled aspects of that book very clearly, and I wanted to revisit them as an adult and understand better what that book was about.

So I sat down one afternoon and started A Wizard of Earthsea. I finished it after a couple of hours, at which point I refused to let myself pick up the sequel until I washed my dishes because they needed it and went for a walk (my mother and I used to have terrible fights about how I never got any exercise because I was too busy reading, and she wouldn't let me go to the library unless I went swimming at least twice a week) because I'd been so sedentary all day. And when I got home from the walk, around sunset, I curled up on my couch inside and finished The Tombs of Atuan in one sitting. I would have started The Farthest Shore, the third book in the series, that night at 11, but I didn't have a copy and had to be content with ordering it from the library.

The Tombs of Atuan is a creepy book in a lot of ways, about some dreadful cult that worships darkness, and the high priestess of that cult, who begins her initiation into her position at age five, and how she eventually leaves it. And though it freaked my shit out, I think it must have influenced me profoundly on some fundamental level, because it's also about the loss of faith and the cost of leaving a belief system. I reread this passage about fifteen times:

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy.... She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Did that ever resonate.... I had to wonder: Was I primed to leave the church in 1989 when I was 25 because of a book I read in 1974, when I was 10? I don't know. I do know I didn't feel the slightest desire to do anything but read. So before I went to bed, I read The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt, one of my favorite books from my childhood. So I read three books in one day. Which was my favorite thing to do when I was ten.

p.s. In finding the links for this entry, I discovered that the Earthsea Trilogy is actually a quartet... make that a quintet, with a couple of short stories thrown in to boot. So I get to look forward to more reading!

Posted by Holly at 2:00 PM | Comments (3)

June 20, 2007

Summer Reading

The summer is racing by, and what have I done? Not nearly what I should have. I was supposed to be halfway through with two book proposals by now. I've barely made any progress on either. Nor have I gone once to the yoga studio I was so desperate to find. Instead, I've merely done a whole lot of yard work, a lot of cooking, a lot of sewing (two skirts, three dresses--two of which I gave as gifts--and a blouse that still needs the finishing touches), a little blogging, and a hell of a lot of reading.

For a variety of reasons, I've virtually no interest in movies and tv right now. An entire week will pass without my watching more than half an hour of TV. Why would I want to be inside watching some movie on the dvd player when I could be sitting on the ugly couch I dragged out to my porch, reading just about anything I can get my hands on?

By the end of my third semester in a PhD program, I had developed what I called "reader's block": I had read so much that semester, so many books and so many papers, that I couldn't bear to look at a page of print. This was not an acceptable state of affairs; I had to cure the condition over the winter break and be ready to start again spring semester. I figured I needed a book I had already read and found agreeable enough, something I knew could keep my interest but wouldn't make too many intellectual demands because I already had the basics of the story down. So I read Jane Eyre for the second time (which was the only time I really liked it--the first time I thought it was OK and the third time I thought Jane was a dreadful snob very deficient in self-knowledge, and I rather disliked her) and it did indeed ease me back into the pleasure of reading.

This past semester was also pretty reading-intensive, so I don't know why it should be that a few weeks before the semester ended, rather than getting reader's block, I developed an insatiable hunger of books, the likes of which I haven't felt since about sixth grade.

Maybe it's because I knew I had some time, and really could do some pleasure reading, provided I was willing to disregard for a while my ever-present sense of duty. As I discuss in this entry from last summer, I have so much reading to do for my job, both the teaching and the research/writing part, that I rarely read something that is unrelated to some aspect of my career. And I like that reading, I really do: I admire, respect and learn from most of the books I read for teaching or research (if I don't, there's a problem). A often, even if I've read a book simply for pleasure, if I REALLY like it, I'll start trying to figure out how to work it into a syllabus, so I can read it again.

But when I read books as part of my academic career, I feel obligated to do two things: 1) read every single word--I don't skip bits in a book I'm going to teach or quote from, and 2) annotate them in some way--most often by underlining very neatly. I mark passages I find important using colored pencils, plain the first time I read a book and red the second, then blue or something on subsequent readings, so I can tell what reading inspired me to make the lines; and a ruler, so the lines are straight. Because I have an excellent memory and can easily locate and remember the gist of many, many passages in a book, I only write comments in the margins of books I really love or really hate, and even then, they're very neat, because I HATE sloppy markings in a book. I just HATE them. I especially hate other people's sloppy markings. Books containing neon highlighting, underlining or notes written in ink, or even lots of margin comments, always strike me as defiled.

And while all that aids in understanding and remembering a work, it can inhibit the pleasure part. Especially if part of the pleasure is derived from sitting on the porch and feeling a breeze, looking up every so often to admire a pretty spot in the garden or watch the cat stare in rapt attention at a bunny eating clover in the neighbor's lawn.

Posted by Holly at 11:35 AM | Comments (5)

November 3, 2006

Buffy, Fiction and God

Here's an entry from Stephen Frug that speaks to several of my primary interests: good writing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, moral and artistic complexity, and religion. I recommend it with this disclaimer: it's LONG, as long or longer than some of the stuff I post. But it's really thoughtful and interesting, and worth your time.

Posted by Holly at 7:51 AM | Comments (3)

August 21, 2006

As They Say about Acid

Yeah, I'm back.

I got home Wednesday night. The journey home was, as they say about acid from time to time, a bad trip. Flight patterns were screwed up at the Salt Lake airport for some reason no one ever bothered explaining to me so although we boarded on time and shut the door on time and pulled away from the gate on time, we then sat on the tarmac for 55 minutes (the captain specified that it was 55 minutes) waiting for our turn to take off, waiting and waiting and then waiting some more as if waiting were a perfectly normal thing to do in an airplane. Fortunately I have a gift, a very fortunate gift indeed, and even a strange one, in light of the fact that in a bed I am prone to insomnia, and my gift is this: I always fall asleep on planes. I am so disposed to falling asleep on planes that I get sleepy just waiting to board one. So I slept while we waited for our plane to take off, even though I had slept a lot the night before and it was only ten a.m., too early really to be sleepy.

My plane and I should have landed before 3 p.m. eastern daylight saving time but we did not land until after 4 p.m. I had not flown in or out of my local airport because it was too expensive; instead I flew out of a bigger spiffier airport two hours away because it was cheap AND a direct flight to SLC, but that meant I had to pay seven bucks a day to park my car at some godforsaken parking lot. And after I picked up my luggage and took a shuttle back to my car in that godforsaken lot I discovered that my battery was dead; it was dead because I had left my lights on for an entire week, a terrible mistake and one I have not made since automakers started including that little bell that goes off when you leave your lights on. I don't know how I missed it but I did somehow last week when the shuttle driver was waiting impatiently for me to get my stuff together and get out of my car and get on the shuttle and go to the airport.

At least the shuttle/parking people had jumper cables and they were able to start my car. But everything had been timed just right to ensure that I hit rush hour traffic and there was a lot of it. And there was also a lot of construction on the highway between the airport two hours away and my house. And when I got home from this bad trip I was so cranky that for the next four days I could scarcely do ANYTHING except think about how much I hated flying, notice that my house really needed cleaning (eventually I talked myself into cleaning it), read Pride and Prejudice for the 18th time (because it is the best book in the whole world), and knit.

Yeah, knit. I have been knitting a lot. I am in love with knitting. I am currently making a green cardigan/jacket thingy and a pair of red fingerless gloves. I will write more about this soon. I sort of even plan to post pictures.

Sunday morning at about 4:30 I finished Pride and Prejudice for the 18th time because I was in my bed and not on a plane and that meant I couldn't sleep even though I had two shots of a vodka and a Benadryl and then that meant that when I went to bed Sunday night I had to read something else, so I picked up The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein because that is what I had chosen as the book to read on the airplane when I wasn't sleeping.

tAoABT was the last of the big important books I had to read to prepare for teaching this semester and I saved it for last because I suspected strongly that I wouldn't like it but lo and behold I was wrong, very wrong. Once after a movie we really liked (though I don't remember what it was) Saviour Onassis and I observed that we could tell when a movie was really good because when we walked out of it, we couldn't help talking like the characters in it. As opposed to a movie that was really bad: then we would choose to talk like the characters but we would do it as mocking, as a deliberate invocation of the accidental artifice we had never ceased to be annoyed by, as in the case of Shakespeare in Love which we saw together and HATED, how we HATED that movie, the script was lame and obvious and contradictory and the characterization lame and obvious and unconvincing and Gwyneth Paltrow just plain sucks.

Using that same reasoning and logic I am attempting to convey how much I to my surprise loved tAoABT because I find myself totally captivated and affected by Gertrude Stein's sentences, they are very moving and effective sentences, and I want to copy them. Trudy (as I prefer to call her, not Gertie; Gertie rhymes with "dirty" but Trudy rhymes with "beauty") has completely captured my thinking heart and despite my fervent loyalty to conventional punctuation I feel a shitload of run-on sentences and comma splices piling up inside me and needing to spill forth. I not only want to write like her, I want to read everything else she has ever written, or at least look all the titles up in the library catalogue and order the books so they can sit on the shelf in my office and make me feel hopeful.

We'll see where this heads.

So you've just read an entry that's not about Mormons or Mormonism or how fucked up and fucked-upping Utah is. Enjoy it while it lasts! I might try to postpone the diatribe against the weirdness that my annual pilgrimage to "Zion" always unleashes in my life, since I wrote about precisely that before I left, but it will occur sooner or later, I can guarantee it.

In the meantime, before posting again, I am going to try to get caught up on YOUR blogs, which I have shamefully neglected. Pardon me. I really was too cranky to leave comments much worth reading, and I knew I wouldn't respond properly to much that I read.

But really, Trudy has cheered me up and I will try to read everything with the same delighted surprise and gossipy happiness (the woman knew everyone! Everyone wanted to know her!) her sentences aroused in me.

Posted by Holly at 12:44 AM | Comments (9)

August 7, 2006

From the Library

Something I do for fun and self-affirmation is check books out of my university library system, then leave them to languish in my office book case. If I don't start the book within a week of checking it out, I almost never get around to reading it. But as a faculty member, I can keep a book out for, like, the duration of my employment here, as long as no one else wants it, and it comforts me to look at all those books from the library, know that I haven't spent a cent to have access to them, and imagine that I might read them, some day.

I just got an email telling me that I needed to renew my stash of books--I had 34 out. Here are some of the titles:

Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation, by Laqueur, Thomas Walter.

The celluloid closet : homosexuality in the movies, by Russo, Vito.

A history of the breast, by Yalom, Marilyn.

Bachelor girl : the secret history of single women in the twentieth century, by Israel, Betsy

"Shall she famish then?" : female food refusal in early modern England, by Gutierrez, Nancy A.

I leap over the wall : contrasts and impressions after twenty-eight years in a convent, by Baldwin, Monica.

Over her dead body : death, femininity, and the aesthetic, by Bronfen, Elisabeth.

Integral psychology : consciousness, spirit, psychology, therapy by Wilber, Ken.

Beyond sexuality, by Dean, Tim

Language and social identity by Gumperz, John Joseph

The female malady : women, madness, and English culture, 1830-1980 by Showalter, Elaine.

Becoming an ex : the process of role exit, by Ebaugh, Helen Rose Fuchs

The palm-wine drinkard ; and, My life in the bush of ghosts, by Tutuola, Amos

Changes of mind : a holonomic theory of the evolution of consciousness, by Wade, Jenny

Femininities, masculinities, sexualities : Freud and beyond, by Chodorow, Nancy

Outercourse : the be-dazzling voyage : containing recollections from my Logbook of a radical feminist philosopher (be-ing an account of my time/space travels and ideas--then, again, now, and how), by Daly, Mary.

Unbearable weight : feminism, Western culture, and the body, by Bordo, Susan

Swimming to Antarctica : tales of a long-distance swimmer, by Cox, Lynne

Spinning straw into gold : what fairy tales reveal about the transformations in a woman's life, by Gould, Joan

Truth : a guide, by Blackburn, Simon.

Posted by Holly at 10:29 AM | Comments (3)

May 1, 2006

Reader's Block

Despite the fact that I spend much of the school year fantasizing about the reading I'll do when I'm not forced to focus on the books I'm teaching that term, I sometimes get to the end of a semester and realize that there might not be a book in the world I can bear to read. I'll haul some tempting volume off my shelf, skim the blurbs on the back cover, open the book to page one...and that's as far as I get before the nauseated revulsion sets in.

Yep, once again, I've got it: reader's block. I simply can't bear to look at a page of print. It happens to me sometimes, particularly after a semester when I've assigned too many books, nearly fallen behind in my reading, had to struggle to make it through the many, many pages I've assigned my students.

The good news is that it will wear off before too long. And when it does, I've got plenty to keep me busy. In fact, here is my summer reading list, broken down by why I have to/want to read the works on it.

These are the books I must read for the first time this summer because I'm going to teach them this fall:

Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud
Judith Kitchen, ed. Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

These are the books I must reread this summer because I'm going to teach them this fall:

Anne Carson, Plainwater (Carson is my favorite Canadian writer)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
Richard Wright, Black Boy

These are the books I must read because they're research for papers I'm writing:

Tony Kushner, Angels in America Part I and II (I know, I could watch the movie with Meryl Streep, but reading the plays won't take as long, and won't be as annoying)
Colleen McDanell, Religion and Popular Culture in America
R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion and the Marketplace of Culture
Carol Lynn Pearson, Good-bye, I Love You

These are the books I should read this summer so I can decide if I want to teach them next spring:

Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land
Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter
Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires
Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

These are the books I want to read this summer because someone I like gave them to me:

Da Chen, Colors of the Mountain
Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics
Scott Russell Sanders, Secrets of the Universe

These are books I bought recently and want to read while they're still exciting and new to me, instead of familiar volumes that have long sat, reproachful and resentful, on my shelves:

Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth
Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia
Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

I was going to list some of the familiar volumes I hope to read so they'll stop reproaching me, but that was WAY too depressing--there are just too many of them, and they don't come first.

Anyway, I think I can keep myself busy this summer.

Posted by Holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (19)

April 13, 2006

Gender, Fiction and Reading Preferences

Yesterday I came across this article (published a week or so ago) in the Guardian UK about gender, fiction and reading preferences. Frankengirl and Mysticgypsy, you'll be pleased to learn that Jane Eyre was the novel most often cited by women as having the greatest influence on them. The novel most men cited as influential was The Stranger by Camus.

The report is fascinating and draws some interesting conclusions: Women's favorite novels were "surprisingly varied" and women found it easy to discuss the influence fiction had on them, "producing a number of key moments in their life at which they unselfconsciously acknowledged that fiction had offered them guidance or solace," while men's preferences were limited to a much smaller cluster of works, and "men were more reluctant than the women to discuss the influence reading might have had on them." As for why that might be,

Jon Elek, lecturer in English at University College London, told us: "I guess that if you admit to having a watershed novel, then you're admitting to having a watershed moment, which is something that a lot of men don't necessarily want to admit to. And to admit to having five [as respondents were asked to do] - oh, come on!"

The researchers summarize some of their findings thus:

Our final top 20 of men's reading clearly shows a majority of books with strong active narrative themes - books that might traditionally be described at quintessential boys' books. No surprise there, perhaps. Except that both our recorded interviews and questionnaire responses show these choices being made on the basis of a conscious commitment to novels that take the reader in a direction of personal development. Men's reading choices tend to identify themselves with novels that include intellectual struggle. Personal vulnerability is represented as a more or less angst-ridden struggle against convention, a sense of isolation from social normality. Catastrophe and the struggle to rise above circumstance characterise the plots.

Part of the reason for this, we decided, was that, to a far larger degree than women, men's formative reading was done between the ages of 12 and 20 - indeed, specifically around the ages of 15 and 16. For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence. Many men admitted that they had read little fiction since, though mature men returned to fiction reading in later life, and expressed increasing enjoyment in reading for "self-reflection".

Between 20 and 40, many men we talked to openly showed an almost complete lack of interest in reading which drew them into personal introspection, or asked them to engage with the family and the domestic sphere. On the other hand, those who had remained avid readers could see distinct patterns emerging in their choices which differed from those selected by women.

A final conclusion is that

men use fiction almost physically as a guide to negotiate a difficult journey (but would rarely admit to this downright being the case). They use fiction almost topographically, as a map. Many of our women respondents last year explained that they used novels metaphorically - the build-up to an emotional crisis and subsequent denouement in a novel such as Jane Eyre might have helped negotiate an emotional progress through a difficult divorce, or provided support during a difficult period at work, or provided solace when things seemed generally dull.

Even if you get bored by the reseachers' commentary on their study, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page and read the summary of both Jane Eyre and The Stranger--very witty!

Posted by Holly at 9:25 AM | Comments (6)

April 10, 2006

The Really Dead Women Writers Meme

This meme was started by Bardiac. I found it thanks to Heo Cwaeth. I tried to do this cheater thing where I had Heo Cwaeth email me the html she used to post her entry, but it didn't translate well for whatever reason. Her version is better than mine because it has links to ALL the various texts, not just the ones she added. I'm sorry, but I'm too lazy to do that for you; if you want to learn about these other texts, you'll have to click on the link to HER post.

(Note as of Tuesday, April 11, Bardiac has compiled a list of all the contributions)

Starter Five from Bardiac:
Behn, Aphra - Oroonoko
Christine de Pisan (aka Pizan) - The Book of the City of Ladies
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Locke, Anne (aka Ane Lok, etc) - A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
Marie de France - The Lais of Marie de France

Dr. Virago then adds:
The Paston Women - The Paston Letters
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
Anonymous - The Floure and the Leafe(Her reasoning for this is on her blog)
Lady Mary Wroth - Poems

La Lecturess then adds:
Anne Askew - The Examinations of Anne Askew
Mary Sidney - Psalms
Anne Finch - Poems
Katherine Phillips - Poems
Teresa of Avila - Life

Amanda at Household Opera then adds:
Bradstreet, Anne: collected poems
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Fama y obras póstumas
Lanyer, Aemilia: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Wroth, Lady Mary: Urania

Medieval Woman then adds:
Trotula - The Diseases of Women
Female Troubador Poets:- La Comtessa de Dia - "A chantar m'er" & other Trobairitz poetry excerpted.
Hrostvitha of Gandersheim (c.930-c.1002) - Plays Gallicanus & Dulcitius

Heo Cwaeth then adds:
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) Scivias and Liber Divinorum Operum
Rachel Speght (1597 - Some time after 1621) Mouzell for Melastomus and Mortalities Memorandum
Anna Comnena (1093-1153) The Alexiad
Frau Ava (1060-1127) First named German poetess. "Johannes," "Leben Jesu," "Antichrist," "Das Jüngste Gericht" (That's in MHG)
Dhuoda (9th century, inexact dates) Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman's Counsel for Her Son (at Sunshine for Women) and a dual-language version from Cambridge UP

Continuations of this meme have occurred all over; check the comments on the various blogs listed above to find other early women writers. Dr. Crazy was the one who brought up the most obvious entry of all: Sappho. (I admit I hadn't thought of Sappho myself, and I admit I was ashamed. Doh!)

One of my favorite continuations is courtesy of Natalie at Philobiblion; she adds:
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (A lady in waiting to the Japanese empress c. 965AD)
Eliza Haywood The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless (1751) (and much else)
Chen Tong, Tan Ze and Qian Yi, authors of The Peony Pavilion: Commentary Edition by Wu Wushan's Three Wives (1694) They were his successive wives, by the way...
Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter, lately written in meeter by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573)
Elizabeth Elstob, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715).

Given that several of the early women writers I'd add have already been mentioned, I thought I'd discuss the early women writers I personally would recommend. Bardiac suggests the list focus on women who have been dead for 300 years, but she also mentions the scarcity of attention in college courses to women who wrote before 1800, and people seem to have interpreted that as the cutoff date as well. I'm going to follow suit in a couple of cases, because it makes the list easier and more fun for me to compile.

1. Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603): My first great historical crush. The woman wrote some great letters and gave some truly eloquent speeches, AND she wrote poetry.

2. Margery Kempe (c. 1373-1440), The Book of Margery Kempe: MK is my favorite illiterate author. She dictated the story of her life to a scribe--perhaps her confessor. She cried a lot (she was rather proud of that fact) and was probably really annoying to be around, but the story of her spiritual development is fascinating.

3. Aphra Behn (1640-1689): I read several of her plays 20 years ago but don't remember them. What I do remember is reading some scandalously funny poem in an undergraduate lit survey about how some sexy encounter in a pastoral setting was ruined when the hot young shepherd pursuing the hot young shepherdess couldn't get it up.

I also remember wandering around Westminster Abbey 20 some-odd years ago, looking down, and realizing I was standing on Aphra Behn's grave--except that it wasn't in poets' corner; it was out in some vestibule. I wonder if this is a legitimate memory, or one I made up? I will have to ask Natalie at My London Your London if she can verify where in the abbey AB's tomb is.

(Note: Natalie got back to me with this passage from Maureen Duffy's biography of Behn:

Thrysis [Thomas Sprat, Birmingham's old chaplain, who was Dean of Westminster], I believe, was responsible for her burial in Westminster Abbey on April 20th, no doubt backed by Burnet and by those of sufficient wit and position not to mind the odium or satire that accure to them from such an act. She lies in the cloister and not among the 'trading poets' in poets' corner, but with the Bettertons and Anne Bracegirdle. (p. 294)

So, Natalie concludes, "it sounds like she was classed as 'theatre' rather than 'literature.'"

Natalie also posted the question on Philobiblion; check there to see if any discussion has been generated on the topic, and also to find a link to a picture of the tomb. The engraving on the tomb reads, "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality.")

4. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672): the first North American poet, and my personal favorite Puritan poet. (And I admit I have a soft spot for Puritans, having been one for many years without really realizing it--not in the sense of being a prude but in the sense of being "an iconoclastic, language-fetishizing, constantly self-scrutinizing, fiercely individualistic, hard-working lover of The Word who is pretty sure God isn't very nice and doesn't much like me and that it's MY FAULT, and who has therefore been subject to bouts of despair, bleak and desolate despair, which I don't much talk about because when I do, most of the world tends to assume my descriptions are inflated, exaggerated, melodramatic and not especially sincere," as I once stated elsewhere.)

5. Mary Rowlandson (1637-1710): A History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, also known as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. (You can download the whole thing here.) Rowlandson was a 17th century New England housewife who was captured by Narragansett Indians during King Philip's War, then wrote an account of the ten weeks she spent traipsing through New England in the winter as a captive before she was finally ransomed. She was very much a product of her time: racist, provincial, convinced that the events of her life were orchestrated by a god who cared about nothing so much as teaching her a lesson. Nonetheless, I find her text remarkable for its uncensored honesty, even down the gratitude she feels that makes her grasp the hand of an Indian and weep with happiness, because he has brought her good news--which she instantly regrets, for proper Puritan housewives do not grasp the hands of Indian men while weeping tears of joy. I am also always moved by her account of the death in her arms of her six-year-old daughter, who has been exclaiming for days, "I will die, let me die." I am fascinated by her discussion of her tobacco addiction and her discovery that profound hunger and fear of starvation changes forever your relationship to food--you are always afraid of hunger after that, she says. There is also some cool prose: people are "knocked on the head" (a mildly nicer term for having one's skull cracked open) and when they misbehave, told to straighten up or someone "will break my face." Students find the text thoroughly problematic, which of course is just one more reason to teach it.

In order to be acceptable to Puritan audiences, Rowlandson's text required an introduction by an upstanding Puritan male assuring readers she was writing this only to show the sovereignty and goodness of God (hence the name) and not to sensationalize her own sensational experience. Nonetheless it was hugely popular and spawned all kinds of imitators. In fact, Rowlandson created the first uniquely American literary genre: the captivity narrative, a story in which a person (generally a woman) is captured by Indians, tormented in various ways, then released or ransomed or able to escape by her wits.

6. Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784): one of America's most remarkable poets. Born in Africa in 1753, she was kidnapped into slavery at age seven. English was not even her first language, she didn't possess (as Alice Walker points out, borrowing from Virginia Woolf) ownership of her own body, much less a room of her own, and she still managed to write "hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions-including a poignant plea to the Earl of Dartmouth urging freedom for America and comparing the country's condition to her own."

7. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823): Radcliffe is acknowledged as one of the great innovators and popularizers of the Gothic novel; one website I looked at claims that The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) "was the world's first 'best-seller.'" I admit I've read more about her than by her, but one of these days I'll do it.

8. Fanny Burney (1752-1840), Evelina. I read this 22 years ago in a survey course on the 18th century novel (a class I liked so well I almost focused on that period for my graduate work) and REALLY liked it. I keep saying I'm going to read it again.... Maybe I should just read some of her other novels instead.

9. Jane Austen (1775-1817): OK, OK, I know this is kind of cheating, because none of Austen's works were PUBLISHED before 1800. But several of them--Lady Susan (special for its deliciously wicked main character), Northanger Abbey and First Impressions (which was the first draft of Pride and Prejudice), were almost certainly written BEFORE 1800. I just think it's important to remember that not only did she write really great novels, she helped shape our expectations of what a good novel should be, back when it was still rather a new form.

note (several hours later): I got an email from Spike, asking, "Where's Mary Wollstonecraft?"

Doh! So now I'm adding

10. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): One of the most important feminists in Western history, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. A new biography of her was published last year, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon. I haven't read it but a friend has and says it's fabulous.

OK, that's what I've got now. If I think of someone else I should add, I will.

Posted by Holly at 9:28 AM | Comments (2)

February 23, 2006

Reader, I'm Not Sure What Happened

Reese, Frankengirl, Mystic Gypsy, and all types like me, check out this plea from the BBC:

Are you an avid reader of romantic fiction? Has Mr Darcy made you leave your fiancé? Has Mr Rochester, Heathcliff or any other fictional hero changed your love life in a significant way? Does your partner want you to be more like these fictional male heroes?

Silverriver Productions are producing a series of three 60' programmes for the BBC about the history of the romantic novel. Presented by Daisy Goodwin, Reader, I Married Him! will examine the work of Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Margaret Mitchell, Helen Fielding and Catherine Cookson amongst others, looking at how romantic novels have changed the female perception of the ideal man.

In the programmes we want to talk to real men and women whose love lives have been transformed by romantic fiction for better or for worse. We want to speak to the women who have never found their Mr Darcy, as well as the men who feel that they fall short of romantic literary ideals.

If you have an interesting story, please get in touch with Louisa MacInnes on 020 7580 2746 or louisa.macinnes@silverriver.tv with details of your experience and and some method of contacting you.

Posted by Holly at 12:54 PM | Comments (13)

October 6, 2005

It's Out

Yesterday I met a friend for coffee at Barnes & Noble. (Yeah, I know: how terribly corporate of me. But my little home in the Rust Belt doesn't offer much else. I have tried and rejected as thoroughly inadequate the various non-corporate alternatives for book acquisition, with the exception of my university library--that rocks. And even non-corporate coffee is hard to come by. The one entry in the corporate coffee delocator for this area was provided by me, and that place is a million miles away, with mediocre mochas.)

My friend was late, so I browsed the books. On the "New Arrivals" table, I saw several copies of Best American Short Stories 2005, but couldn't find the other titles in the series. Finally I located a sales clerk. "Where's the Best American Essays?" I asked.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"The same thing as this," I said, holding up the collection of short stories, "except with essays."

He led me to a display, and there it was. I picked it up and scanned the table of contents: twenty-five essays, by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Edward Hoagland, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace--and me.

That's right: me. The last essay in the collection is something I wrote about my love of textiles and some of the homemaking skills I acquired as part of the training for wife-hood all Mormon girls get in early adolescence.

It's jarring to see my name at the end of that list--not bad, definitely not bad. But though I fully intend to get used to it at some point in the next 52 weeks (just in time for the issue without my name at the end of the table of contents to appear), right now the fact that it's really cool is still competing with the fact that it's jarring and unfamiliar, much as it was to run my tongue across smooth teeth unemcumbered by metal wires one magic afternoon after three traumatic years of intense orthodontia.

It's very strange. I'm 41, I've been writing since I was 15, I've produced two books though neither is in print, but I garnered this very cool honor. Part of me hopes this is an omen of good things to come, and part of me fears this is about as good as it's going to get.

The essay was rejected by any number of prestigious journals, and printed in a small, yearly journal of women's writing called PMS, for Poem Memoir Story. I turned to the list of Notable Essays and saw that my little offering was considered superior to (among other things) something by E.L. Doctorow printed in The Kenyon Review.

Yesterday afternoon at B&N, my friend insisted on buying a copy so I could autograph it, and since we were on our way out the door, she gave it to me to take home, so I could write a note instead of just signing my name. This meant I got to peruse the book at my leisure. (I'm supposed to get a clothbound copy, but so far it hasn't shown up--I'm guessing they sent it to my agent, and perhaps she hasn't gotten around to sending it on.)

I went to campus after that and ran into Tom. "It's out," I said, and handed him the book.

"Wow," he said. "Were you surprised to see it?"

"Nah, I knew it came out today," I replied. "I've been checking the release date on Amazon every so often."

"You're the anchor," he said, looking at the table of contents. "The very last one."

"I'm the end of the alphabet," I corrected.

"Yours has the best title," he said. I admit I agree: the title is great, borrowed though it might be from a shirt Tori Amos wore on one of the four different covers of her album Strange Little Girls, which I briefly owned.

"This is huge," he said.

"I hope so," I said. "I hope it does some work for me. But I can't help imagining these reviews where someone says, ‘All the essays are really good, except for that last one, about fabric! What's up with that?'"

"That won't happen," he said. "I can tell by the first few paragraphs that it's really good." He read for a moment, then said, "Wow! You've got a semi-colon right after the close of a parentheses! That's so adventurous!"

"Yeah, my flamboyant facility with punctuation gets all the editors hot and bothered," I said. "It's what everyone likes best about my work."

The collection, I should mention, was edited by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief--that's right, someone interesting enough to be played in a movie by Meryl Streep likes my work. I am intensely flattered and gratified and thrilled that she does--there is NOTHING about that fact that sucks. But I confess I read the essay and think, "OK, I like this and I'm proud of it, but I don't even think it's the best thing I've written. So why is this getting attention when my book, which I think is great, isn't even in print?" I can only figure that either I'm a lousy judge of my own work, or angst-filled stories about religious despair just don't strike the publishing world as big-time money makers.

I wish I could say that I have other exciting publications in the pipes, but I don't. The issue of Sunstone currently at the printer's has an essay by me on "Why I Go to Sunstone" and I have a few poems forthcoming in various respectable journals. But I haven't been very good about submitting my work lately, and there's also the fact that aside from a few pieces I have purposely tried to make really short, most of my prose is long enough that it exceeds the word limit imposed by many journals. You can get an idea of that from this blog, where pieces are often so long they have to be split up into two or three posts.

I don't know. I guess I just have to write more, then put it all in envelopes and mail it to editors.

Anyway, I would ask you all to rush out and buy the anthology, but I don't get royalties, just a small honorarium, so it doesn't make any difference to me if you buy it or just read the essay in the coffee shop. (It's a mere eight pages, one of those things I tried to keep short.) But if you do read it and like it, I would be grateful for praise and congratulations--it's the most prestigious publication I've ever had.

Posted by Holly at 7:51 AM | Comments (3)

October 3, 2005

The Artist Sleepover

I would love to invite Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, Wallace Stevens and Oscar Wilde to my house for a sleepover. I rather suspect that Jane and Wallace might be disposed to decline the invitation, but I would wheedle and flatter, tell Jane how much I admire the navy and promise Wallace I'd buy all my insurance from him, until their resistence would deliquesce like a snowman and its mind of winter thrust suddenly into the orderly heat of Key West. Before my guests arrived, I would bake a batch of my special chocolate chocolate chip cookies, because those cookies always garner me praise, admiration and gratitude. I'd stock up on different flavors of Ben & Jerry's, because after all, the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. I'd buy a case of Bass Pale Ale, as well of plenty of tequila, triple sec, limes, salt and ice, because who wouldn't like to see Emily Dickinson completely shitfaced? We'd lay our sleeping bags out on the living room floor and play Truth or Dare.

Actually we'd play Truth or Truth. Like I'm going to dare Frank O'Hara to make out with Oscar Wilde? I mean, yeah, I'd love to watch that, but I'd bet my entire poetry collection it would happen on its own. I'm far more interested in what they can tell me.

I'd ask Jane about sentences. She's considered one of the greatest prose writers in the English language, but in her work, metaphors are as scarce as racy lingerie in the underwear draw of a middle-aged Mormon matron. Was it a choice? Did she want clean, elegant prose, free of baroque ornamentation that might distract from her withering characterizations of fools and the wisdom achieved by her heroines and their paramours? So much of her work focuses on the ways people communicate and miscommunicate; was she working to communicate as directly as possible as with her readers? Does she think that's one reason her work has aged so well?

I'd give Frank O'Hara the complete works of David Sedaris and beg him to read some of it aloud. I'd ask him what he thinks of Oscar's statement in The Critic as Artist that "That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul." I'd ask him what he really thinks of Andy Warhol's work. I'd invite him to lunch, hoping he'd write a poem about it later. I'd play some Madonna and convince him to dance.

As for Wallace--first of all, I'd want to know how he came up with the name Holly for his daughter, way back around 1910. (Of course I think it's a fabulous name, but there aren't many people my age or older with that name. The character who popularized the name was of course Miss Holly Golightly, but in her case, Holly was short for Holiday, and her real name was Lula May.) I'd give him Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, then ask him to discuss "The Man on the Dump" in terms of Kristeva's notion of the abject. I'd ask him how we recognize and reckon with the mess. If you're Eve in the garden and you can't tell the garden has become a junk heap, then what's going on?

I'd ask Emily about friendship and death. I'd ask about mastering homemaking skills, since when she was 25, she "won second prize in the bread division at the local cattle show." I'd ask about dwelling in possibility. I'd ask if she ever had her astrological charts done. (Emily, Jane and I are all Sagittariuses--Jane and I share the same birthday.) I'd ask about her refusal to be baptized into the religion of her family and if she was ever afraid of God. I'd ask her about this poem, one of my favorites in the whole word:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are--

None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--

When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--

I'd ask about internal difference. Her answer would probably make me as earnest and overblown as a Tony Kushner character, so to lighten the mood I'd show her my meticulously ordered closets: one for shirts and blouses, one for skirts and dresses, another for trousers and miscellaneous items, and of course my coat closet (I just bought the coolest lightweight sky blue quilted walking coat), and ask if she wanted to try on any of my clothes.

And Oscar? First of all I'd ask him if his last words were really, "Either this wallpaper goes or I do." I'd ask if he still loves Bosie. I'd ask if he has truly forgiven Bosie. I'd ask him about Constance, where his wife fits into the memory of his life. I'd tell him that in the first year of my PhD program, I wrote a paper about him that was returned with the comment that it was "wonderfully well written and enormously entertaining. It feels like it could be published in Vogue, say, beginning as it does with ‘boredom' and ending with a rowdy affirmation" and a grade of A-. (Anyone else who's done work toward a PhD ever have a professor tell you your critical work could appear in Vogue?) I would read him this paragraph from another paper I wrote about him:

For Eliot, who got away with his dictum that "good poets steal; bad poets borrow" partly because Wilde had already announced, "Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man," his proximity to Wilde (and perhaps his homophobia) was too great: he is Wilde's hypocrite lecteur but the familial slot Eliot occupies is not frere but fils. Eliot as Oedipus is aware of Wilde as Laios, and is very uncomfortable with his brilliant, tragic, homosexual, disgraced and already dead father. He could not allow himself to acknowledge or appreciate Wilde, not only when borrowing from and expanding on, but also when reacting against and attempting to refute, Wilde's work. He is anxious to see completed the erasure of Wilde begun after Wilde's fall from grace.

I'd get him to agree with me that Eliot is thoroughly overrated and The Waste Land really kind of sucks. I'd ask him about this passage from de Profundis:

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought--the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul and send them back soiled at the end of each week--so they always try to get their emotions on credit, or refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. We must pass out of that conception of life; as soon as we have to pay for an emotion we shall know its quality and be the better for such knowledge.

Then I'd cry and cry and tell him that I have always loved him.

I'd haul out my copies of their work--especially the ones I read and cherished like love letters as an undergrad, the filemot pages now brittle and loose in their cheap bindings--and beg them for autographs. I'd give every last one of them the address for this blog and ask them please to comment. I'd stare out the window at the darkness beyond my neighbors' houses and think about nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Then I'd shout, "Who wants more margaritas?"

p.s. Saviour, you are absolutely invited this time.

Posted by Holly at 6:17 AM | Comments (2)

September 18, 2005

A Necessary Ingredient for Enjoying Art

I love Grendel by John Gardner so much I wish I'd written it.

It is, of course, a retelling of the Beowulf saga from the point of view of the monster who wrecks Hrothgar's meadhall and feasts on his men.

I love it because it's a fiercely intellectual book, concerned with truth and ultimate meaning. I love it because it has so many fabulous lines. I love it because the dragon Grendel visits is one of the best characters ever created in all of literature.

I love it because plot is never the point: if you've read Beowulf, you know how Grendel ends: Beowulf rips Grendel's arm off, and Grendel goes off to bleed to death in the woods. So you don't read it for what happens, you read it for how it happens, and why what happens matters.

I get annoyed when people refuse to know anything beyond the initial set-up of a book they want to read or a movie they want to watch. "Don't tell me! Don't ruin the end for me!" they shout, covering their ears, as if ignorance is a necessary ingredient for enjoying art. If I feel I'm getting too caught up in wondering what will happen next to appreciate things in a text like musicality of language and construction of scene, I'll read the end so I can just dispense with the suspense and concentrate on enjoying the pages before the end, rather than racing through to the end.

The best books remain compelling and worthwhile even when you know exactly how they end: you enter the world of the book and that world takes over. I've read Pride and Prejudice at least fifteen times, and every time I read it, I am as engrossed, as anxious to read the next scene, as if I didn't know the story at all--because Austen's prose is just so good, her insight into human beings so clear-eyed and astute, her narrative so breathtakingly complex and rewarding. I reread it this summer and had to stay up until 3:30 in the morning to finish it--I just couldn't put it down until I was done.

Grendel is the same way, and I love it for that; I love that its world is so compelling. I also love Grendel for the stark, empty epiphany he has as he confronts his death. He insists even in the final moments of his life that everything is a matter of chance, that nothing is fated, but at the same time, one choice is as good as another. He refuses to believe that Beowulf managed to hurt him through anything but accident, fortunate for Beowulf, unfortunate for Grendel.

I will cling to what is true. "Blind, mindless, mechanical Mere logic of chance." I am weak from loss of blood. No one follows me now. I stumble again and with my one weak arm I cling to the huge twisted roots of an oak. I look down part stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowing to my voluntary tumble into death.

In On Becoming a Novelist, Gardner discusses that scene and comments that while writing it, he was thinking "child thoughts of death with undertones of guilt and the ultimate moral ugliness of God." I have always loved both that phrase and that idea. I do think the idea of God, at least in his Christian form, is one of the most morally repugnant ideas humanity has ever invented, in part because God is so capricious--fate is a matter of his choices, in which one choice is as good as another: he can choose to destroy the world by flood, and then choose not to, and it's all pretty much the same as far as morality and ethics go, because he's God and gets to say so. When I still believed in such a creature, I also often felt like I was falling off the world into some endless hideous darkness.

Which maybe is another reason I don't mind knowing how things turn out.

But don't let the fact that I've provided one of the last paragraphs of the book and the idea behind it prevent you from reading Grendel yourself if you haven't already. It's so good! And since you know now (if you didn't already) how it's going to end, take your time and notice how inventive and insightful the book is, and don't worry about the plot.

Posted by Holly at 9:29 PM | Comments (1)

September 7, 2005

Art That Fits in Envelopes

This post is dedicated to my new friend Tammy, whom I met through Friendster (yes, you really can meet interesting people that way) thanks to the suggestion of a mutual friend (SBJ, to be specific), who thought we'd get along. We've been corresponding for less than three months, and she has already written me several of the best letters I have ever received in my entire life.

***

I think one reason I like blogging so much is that it's the closest I can come to writing letters all the time. The letter is one of my favorite art forms and one I think I'm particularly good at. I have always placed a high premium on good mail, and while I've learned to appreciate the virtues of email--its immediacy, for one thing--still, in many ways it's a sorry substitute for a real, honest-to-goodness letter. Most people send such short, inconsequential notes over email, and I still miss opening my mailbox, finding an envelope bearing the return address of some cool person, and knowing that inside are a couple of pages that will entertain and delight me.

Email has also hurt another of my favorite art forms, the postcard. What a great thing to find in your mailbox: a few really witty statements on the back of an interesting photo! I love getting and sending postcards, and used to devote a lot of time and energy to building up an impressive postcard collection. But these days I have only one friend who sends me postcards: John C, who not only sends postcards, but sends them with postmarks from Thailand and South Africa and Austria and so forth. (I am chagrined to admit I send him, at best, one postcard for every four or five he sends me, and mine have BORING postmarks.)

In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, the heroine, Catherine Morland, is teased by the hero, Henry Tilney, when she suggests that she doesn't keep a journal. "Not keep a journal!" he exclaims, adding that

it is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but still I am sure it must essentially be assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

The "usual style of letter-writing among ladies is faultless, except in three particulars," he assures Catherine, those three particulars being "a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar." Whether or not journalizing contributes to the art of writing agreeable letters, I do know that my journal and my correspondence often overlap. I'm serious about journal-keeping. I use three-ring binders, and thanks to my industrial-strength three-hole paper punch, pretty much anything can be included in my journal. I used to put the best letters I receive in my journal, and given that I wrote drafts of letters (I typed them out on a typewriter, because my handwriting is so hard to read--even I have trouble with it)--I would keep copies of the more important letters I wrote as well. These days it's even easier: I write my journal on my computer now, and I just cut and paste important letters I've written or received from my email program to my word processing program. (Though I did get a notebook to dedicate entirely to Tammy's letters, because they deserve that kind of special attention.)

Here, for instance, are the opening and closing paragraphs of a letter dated August 22, 1990, sent to my friend Hakim in Seattle:

With such pleasure did I receive your postcard! I always wanted a depiction of the burning fires of hell. But even more than that, I was glad to know that you are alive, working for an entity that values you enough to give you raises, promotions, etc, even if you hate your job....

Anyway that's my life. Thanks again for the postcard, and drop me another line some time i