I’ve wanted to improve my reading French for a while and the back-and-forth of two books is the easiest way for me to do that. I’ve waited until I could find a book that I wouldn’t mind obsessing over for a goodly time and after the first three paragraphs as an introduction to Renée the concierge I knew I had found my book.

Just the first three paragraphs – the young scion who found Marx – Oh! – that was enough. Such a deeply satisfying wit has Mme Barbery and since I am also unmarried, ugly and “plump” (which is a bit of an understatement), I feel I have found my natural place in the universe.

As soon as this last bit of writing is done for this term, I am going somewhere quiet, hole up and read.

BTW hair string (the name of the painting) refers to the culutral practice of using human hair to construct several different kinds of imporant objects which take a part in both every day life and ceremonial practice.

Imagine viewing washing my dishes in such a way! It would definately change the texture of how I view my life.

Hair String

Essentially what Sady (the author) says is that while “Twilight isn’t a literary masterpiece” the somewhat unrestrained criticism of the books (and the characters, and the authors, and the fans) have little to do with any lack of literary quality and more to do with the fact that it’s a girly girl story.

Here’s a question: how many readers of romance novels are fairly careful to hide what they are reading in public?  How many people do the same when they read Zane Grey?

I’ve seen women who wrap their books in brown paper covers; I’ve seen women at lunch who carefully move their books so that the covers are never visible. We’ve inherited a bias against certain kinds of feelings and thoughts- those ones  normally associated with being a girly girl (and of course there are plenty of men who have those feelings and thoughts and so girly-girl does not just apply to females.)

So what is the assumption that underlies this behaviour and its attendant implied cultural criticism? That there is something about having girly-girl feelings and thoughts that is both a bit dangerous (exposing us to public censure should our brown paper covers slip?) and somehow proving something undesirable about our characters.  The public exposure threat seems obvious – we don’t want to be seen as gullible, silly or some other thing that the nasty pointing finger of critics (and other public judges) point out about the ways in which we FAIL.

This is related to the idea that there is something undesirable about our characters. Those of us with girly-girl attributes (which would be all those who claim status as Homo sapiens), have various strategies to suppress them in the face of the cultural determination of their undesirability. Some of us just man-up and smack buts, punch shoulders and other such touchy-feely displacements. Some of us try not to touch at all for fear of weakness showing, and then fail epically and go waaaaaaay overboard (you know like a visit to a prostitute or some other nurturance displacement like drinking or eating too much.)

Those young girls (and a few boys) who let it all show – the ones who moon over actors and characters in books, they seem to me to more truthful about the state of our nature. We all want to cling with ardent intent to something or other. Think about Ayn Rand fans. Or the young intellectuals who go haring off after some Sartrean life-style.  Why is the lovely little brunette expressing her deisre for an actor of any less value than the sandal-wearing Sartrean emulator that inhabits college philsophy class after philosophy class? I would argue only because we as a culture have a long inherited tradition – received wisdom if you like – that what  women like, and particularly what women really like is just not good – either that or what we liiiiiike is downright dangerous to the general moral rectitude.

I mean you can’t have women mooning around all over the place! And especially not mooning over those objects and fantasies not authorized as morally conducive to the status quo.

This is why, on the whole, I ignore movie critics. I simply don’t share their inherited assumptions. Personally I think it might be healthy if we all just fessed-up to our not-to-be-denied obsessions. Imagine: Palinites just fessing up that they will not approach politics (or anything else for that matter) from the point of view of actually knowledge about the subject but will live and die by the sword of I-want-to-make-the-world-look-and-act-like-me. It would save the rest of us so much time trying to figure out what the fuck they are trying to say.

So in essence, the critics who are lambasting New Moon and like stories, they are mad because these girls are just telling the truth and not even attempting to hide how they think and feel. That’s the real sin here: they aren’t hiding behind some black garb of displaced feeling or the blue shield of intellectualization.

Now, the thing is, I will almost certainly not see New Moon and I haven’t read the books.  I do read youth fiction but not this one. The question I ask myself is why.  The reason I ask is that I want to expose my own assumptions just as much as I want to expose those who seek to tell me what to do and what to value.

I did see the first movie and within a few minutes it became clear that this was a novel written to a teenaged girl facing the culturally and personally dangerous ground of cross-gender interpersonal relationships in a world where she is far less powerful than the ones she is driven to seek. OK. There is great value in that since there are a few people in our world that meet that description. Just three or four maybe. This little thing – this numerical presence in our population – seems to me to indicate some value to attending to its presence, needs and impact. So I think the movies and books are valuable because at least they address the issue. It’s just that I am not a teenager and I don’t face the cross-gender issues faced by the novel’s target audience and despite my female gender, I don’t face habitual powerlessness. So while I enjoyed the first movie (sparkly skin!) I have nothing to learn from the second that I didn’t learn from the first. So I won’t go.

But I also wouldn’t go to a Zane Grey-based movie. I don’t do horror. I find adolescent male humor movies similarly unenlightening.  Fantasies need to be personally relevant to have impact, yet the fact that the fantasy that is New Moon might not be relevant to my life says nothing about its cultural value. As Sady points out in the article, clearly it is deeply relevant to a large number in our population.

Now to the issue raised by what the movies present as valuable – i.e. powerful men. We still live in that world. No amount of critique is going to change the hormonal nature of adolescence and despite our advances (I can vote and get a bank loan – in my own name and without my father/brother/husband’s approval!), we still live in a world that despises the girly girl set of feelings and behaviours. The moral quality of the critic’s projected sense of despicability is the real problem, not the girly girl mooning after a fantasy.  I mean for one thing, most fans realize that what they want is a fantasy; most critics don’t get that wanting humans to be de-girly-girled is just as much a fantasy and probably less realizable than whatever the pretty brunette dreams about when she gazes at his adored picture.

Clearly our world is such that young girls need something to fantasize about. Which isn’t saying much since old men need the same thing (they just call it “political will for a better future” or some such thing.)  More sensible than blasting young girls for mooning over powerful and beautiful adult men would be blasting ourselves for blundering around tripping over mole-hills. Let them get to it, and then provide them with other, more productive and realistic, magnets for their desire as they age. But attend: those other, more productive magnets – they have to ones the girls want and not the ones someone else thinks they should have. It’s they that will inherit after all, not the critic, not the one that thinks he or she knows what we should be.  (Evolution, whether biological or cultural, works from the base of what actually is and not from some imagined golden moral age that never was.) Then maybe once the girls (and occasional boy) get over  sparkly, beautiful, powerful, dead vampiric cultural icons less of them will become attracted to people like that sparkly, beautiful, powerful and intellectually dead Sarah Palin. In other words, provide a calm, non-judgmental opportunity to learn from what is the normal experience of youthful hero worship instead of trying to make it all go away through the power of a hearty critical diss – because it won’t go away, as the Palinites prove. Then maybe you’ll get more calm, non-judgmental learned women (and occasional man) who turns her desire to creation instead of adoration.

The power of adulation can be directed of course, but it’s like the Mississippi – don’t make the mistake of thinking you can make it run north. It will pop its banks if pushed too far. In other words, get over it. Girly girl is here to stay and fantasy is what we do.

It’s been raining for several days, and was bucketing during the night and early this morning (could hear it through my open bedroom window as I was lying, listening, in the dark), but by the time I left the house the rain had stopped, the wind had picked up and the clouds were starting to be blown apart. As I got in my car there was a blue patch to the north.

The drive is pleasant in the middle of the morning. The traffic is as light as it gets for this region and the wind had cleared the roads of standing water so I could zip right along. I don’t always listen to music as I drive. Most of the time I prefer the relative silence that the car’s space offers. Today, however, I punched the button, and out poured Stravinsky. Normally Stravinsky is not really accessible to me. I like Rite of Spring but mostly I just don’t have enough in common with the music to be able to see through it to the world Stravinsky was creating with the sounds and rhythms. This piece that was playing is from Petrushka and I have to say I was about 20 seconds away from either changing the channel or turning off the radio when I came out of the curve and onto the bridge approach.

The bridge is a graceful, curved neck of concrete that spans a small industrial island and the split Fraser River as it nears the sea. As I came up the bridge the day was such that the light coming in from the blue break in the grey sky suffused the industrial district with a diamantine brilliance it almost never enjoys. The smells of logging, salmon and other local industries were there, but light enough to be enjoyable. Just as Stravinsky hit a bit of a joyful frenetic crescendo, I hit the rise of the bridge and just for a moment, the combination of the light, industry, wind and the music made me understand Stravinsky in a way I have never been able to do before.

Mushrooms grow in a thin layer underground long before the fruit is visible on top of the ground. It’s like a fine web of life normally invisible. I understood industry, in fact this tool maker’s mind part of what it means to be human as normally invisible to me (perhaps because of little interest on my part?), yet as something compelling to Stravinsky. The music fit so well with the harmony of boats, lights, patterns of logs on the river, the smells moving over the island, the blood and bones of the human tool user in action, that it formed a kind of composite rhythmic melody that flashed across the surface of the land much like the perfectly formed white lace network of mycelium flashes underneath it. I gained a new appreciation for his music in the few moments it took me to cross the bridge and leave the industry behind.

The most interesting thing about the experience for me is what it taught me about my own habitual point of view.  Using more spatial metaphor, I tend to think about the earth from a much more localized and in a much more deeply rooted way than Stravinsky’s music and the thin sparkly of human industry suggests to me. I’m more the reach down into the earth up to the shoulder and then stretch the fingers to reach a bit more kind of person. When I move into an area I spend quite a bit of time learning about what kind of rock rests under me, how it got to be here, where it came from, and where, in the far future, it is likely to end up. I also get to know the names of the local plants, find out what critters nest near by and that sort of thing.  I move around a lot but wherever I end up for more than a few days, I want to know the “name” of the place I live, and for me the name of the earth on which I walk is its history and current occupants.

So normally when I cross that bridge, my knowledge of where the river has come from, where the soil that is under the industry on Annacis Island has eroded from, the life cycle of salmon, the origin and destination of the trees that are now logs, those things are the conceptual bedrock that underly whatever music I listen to, whatever thoughts I am thinking. This is a point of view not at all like that which informs Stravinsky.

How much is gender? I really don’t know but it’s there I think. Of course part of it is almost certainly cultural, but there are a set of assumptions about what is important in the world that seem to me to make the recent human layer on the earth disproportionately important – and even more parochial, the part of that layer which I have called the tool makers mind in action. It’s as if human industry is assumed to define what it is to be human and that tendency is, I think, most definitely a gender thing. But here I am beginning to stray into what must be another post so I will stop.

The Art of Vera (via Wooster Collective)

The Women Unbound reading challenge (which Litlove mentions here) is something I have been thinking about since I first came across it. For years, from the time I was quite a small girl, until I was through my second degree, I did a bunch of heavy lifting when it came to feminist reading.  I don’t want to revisit all those books, although I have incorporated what they offered me in my day-to-day thinking about what I can do and what I am.

I don’t choose books based on gender issues any longer. I have narrowed my focus to a rather small subset of what it means to be human that, seems to me anyway, to be prior to what it means for me to be a woman in the world. Not that my gender doesn’t effect how things are for me. It does. Invisibility, condescending assumptions and other such typical things are just a part of what it is to be in this time and place. Having said that I no longer read books based on gender, I most definitely count myself as a feminist. I think any woman who has her own bank account, drives and votes has to recognize herself as a feminist on pain of terrible hypocrisy.

I have noticed that if I am going to read something light, it almost always involves a female protagonist – Olive Kitteridge, for example. Notable exceptions are books by Indian (Native American) authors, Cormac McCarthy and Terry Pratchett (whose novels Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment still make me roll around with laughter. Though, come to think about it Monstrous Regiment is about women pretending to be men so they can fight in the on-going war, with predictably hilarious results – this is Pratchett after all).

So I don’t think I can really say I am going to start reading books to meet the challenge, but what I think I can do is look at what it means to be human and female through art.  That’s why Vera. But you never know, if I run across an interesting fictional woman in a novel or even one in a non-fiction setting, I’ll pop it up here.