Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters by Jessica Valenti

In a world where "rape culture" is prevalent, women are still not making as much money as men on the dollar, and abstinence only education is still what's being pushed in the classrooms, I would have to wholeheartedly agree with Valenti that fighting for women's rights is an important issue and that feminism still has a function in our society. It's feminists like Valenti, however, that frighten me. Yes, there is good cause for women to be angry, but if the well educated women are screaming and slinging a distracting amount of obscenity around while they are trying to get their point across, they aren't going to use their platform for change effectively.

Full Frontal Feminism quickly glosses over all of the major issues in a way that would not be very enlightening to anyone with previous knowledge on women's issues/rights. I suppose this is appropriate though, given that it is after all suppose to be a young woman's guide and targeted directly at women who do not already consider themselves feminists (though why one of those would read this without it being shoved at them I do not know.) Valenti's writing tries too hard to be hip and push the envelope with an excessive amount of f-bomb dropping and conservative-bashing. For example, in her chapter about women reclaiming a more healthy sense of sexuality, she included not having sex with Republicans in her sex tips. Is that really necessary?

The main issue I have with Valenti is that the majority of her book rides on opinion and not fact. Given that she studied at Rutgers and worked for a variety of women's organizations (such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood) it seems like she would be a woman ready to back up her witty quips with stats. While there are places where she does give reference where reference is due it's not nearly consistent enough.

I use to volunteer at the Women's Center on campus and if I ran out of things to do on my desk shift I could usually be found reading the books on their Women's Lit shelf. Let's just say that if I went back now to volunteer I wouldn't be putting my copy of Full Frontal Feminism on their shelves. I'll stick to Eve Ensler and co.

If you are interested in what Valenti has to say, she's responsible for the feministing website.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

"What are the characteristics of living things? At school, i biology I was told the following: Excretion, growth, irritability, locomotion, nutrition, reproduction, and respiration. This does not seem like a very lively list to me. If that's all there is to being a living thing I may as well be dead. What of that other characteristic prevalent in human living things, the longing to be loved? No, it doesn't come under the heading Reproduction. I have no desire to reproduce but I still seek out love. Reproduction. Over-polished Queen Anne style dining-room suite reduced to clear. Genuine wood. Is that what I want? The model family, two plus two in an easy home assembly kit. I don't want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don't want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new. Fighting words but the fight's gone out of me."

Written on the Body is unlike anything that I've ever read. The narrator is not given an age, a gender, a name... What we know of the narrator is simply how their life has been defined, shaped, and changed by their romantic relationships over time. These relationships have been with both men and women, but the relationship that the book focuses on is the narrator's relationship with Louise, a fiery art historian married to an oppressive doctor named Elgin who controls Louise while going off on his own adventures to cavort with prostitutes.

The narrator acknowledges what s/he is doing to Louise's marriage and has no patience for adultery, however, points out that it's not s/he that's doing the cheating and is therefore somehow free of the ethical burden that goes along with this. The narrator for selfish reasons elevates their relationship over the marital relationship of Louise and Elgin, saying:
"When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of formalities, instead of the formalities If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I will have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for one another above all else." The narrator wants Louise, and the reader, to believe that regardless of how their relationship came to be it will not end with transgression.

The narrator vows to be true to Louise and goes to great measures to prove their love in the most irrational ways, wrecking friendships, handcuffing his/her arm to a chair at the library, being fired from work... Louise becomes the be all and end all of our narrator's life, the one consuming interest in passion in a way that is pathetic and pitiful. Why is it that people seem to not love enough or love so much that it's not love at all anymore, but obsession?

The twist in their love affair is that Louise has cancer and only Elgin, who has done advanced research on her particular brand of Leukemia, can save her. Our three main characters squabble over how to handle their precarious situation and in the end, it seems to me that all of them lose. I'll spare you the ending in case you care to read it.

While the plot is not wound together very tightly and I had some issues with the structure of the second half of the book, I have to say that overall I enjoyed reading Written on the Body. Christopher pointed out in his review of Sexing the Cherry that Winterson writes about ideas more than anything else and beats them to death. I found this to be true but could overlook it because I found her writing style to be lyrical and poignant. While I did not agree with everything that the narrator had to say, I found him/her to be painfully self-aware and insightful.

I don't know what to say about the narrator being genderless. Given that Winterson is usually pigeonholed as a LGBT writer (primarily due to her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit), it was easy for me to fall into thinking that the novel was about a lesbian couple. Throughout the book, though, more passages than not made the voice seem to belong to a man. Do men and women love differently? Would I have reacted to the novel in another way if I had a physical description of the narrator?

This is as much a text about the human body as it is a text about two people trying to find their place. What happens to the body when it becomes a desired object, what happens when the T cells become problematic, what happens when something full of life gradually transitions into a state of decay?

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book."

On Audiobooks

Nate DiMeo, a contributor to Slate.com and American Public Radio, discusses audiobooks and the problems that often plague them.

www.slate.com/id/2200177/

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

A Wrinkle in Time was a beloved classic in my childhood, and re-reading it now I wonder why I never sought out the rest of the books in the series. It could be that Wrinkle is such a wonderfully self-contained volume that I never felt the need, but now I find myself wondering about the outcome of Meg Murry and her family in their crusade against the Black Thing that threatens Earth.

I say that it is self-contained, and it is--for a serial book, the characters experience quite a bit of well-written growth, traceable, significant, and believable. At the heart of the tale is Meg, who is not as brilliant as her precocious brother Charles Wallace (who reminds me of so many Salinger creations) nor as communicative as her friend Calvin O'Keefe, but comes to learn that her own modest gifts are quite important. I think that this depiction carries an incredibly subtle message, championing the significance of "ordinary people." I mean this completely seriously; it is not only children but many adults in this world who seem to have internalized the idea that exceptional people are the only ones who matter. Many YA authors seem to want to stress how familiar their heroes and heroines are, how like you, the reader, but these are sympathy games. Meg Murry's ordinariness is not a ploy to get you to identify with her; instead, it is a crucial plot point that shows that those gifts available to all people--such as a learned and well-practiced capacity for love--often trump the undeserved brilliance or skill of others.

I am rambling. This book is self-contained but it is not, like Tuck Everlasting, tight. The prose is well-mannered, but the plot is all over the place, racing from Earth to Orion's Belt to the Stepford-like planet of Camazotz to the gray world of Aunt Beast. It is a book that really embraces imagination, and I am certain now that this is why it appealed to me so much as a child. It is full of great images: Camazotz, where every child bounces a ball at the same time, in the same rhythm. Aunt Beast, who is faceless and blind and crowned with tentacles and fur. It owes much to mid-century science fiction, I think, which was bizarre, vivid, and frequently absurd, replete with "space operas" not unlike this one--in contrast to today's science fiction, which endeavors to be sleek, or bleak. But where an adult science fiction novelist would have felt the urge to explain all away in some pseudoscientific babble, L'Engle manages to spin an entire universe from one relatively simple concept: tesseracts, which she describes as way to move through space and time using the fifth dimension. (Note: in reality, a tesseract can be simply defined as a fourth-dimensional cube. Here's an animation. Don't think too long about it.)

So, no, it is not tightly written, but it does manage to balance all its messiness and strangeness on the head of a pin, so to speak. Tuck Everlasting, by contrast, is unfortunately lacking in color and wonder.

Another thing I did not recall about the book is how very Christian in its outlook it is--there are several explicit references to Bible verses, and when young Charles Wallace speaks to the children's guides--three extradimensional beings known as Mrs Who, Mrs Whatsit, and Mrs Which--about the Black Thing which is enveloping Earth, he asks why no one has thought to fight it. But, the guides tell him, there have been many warriors against the Black Thing, and Charles Wallace, suddenly realizing, rattles off a list of famous artists, thinkers, and religious figures. But first and foremost on his list is Jesus. Buddha is on there too, of course, but there is no mistaking; in L'Engle's universe, primacy is reserved for Jesus. That's all right, I think; there is little patronizing or indoctrinating about A Wrinkle in Time. Rather, I think it is a much fairer and nuanced depiction of Biblical wisdom than I hear in church every week. It is a Christian book, but to L'Engle's credit, her sparing use of religious imagery gives the few instances great power.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

One of the good things about my new job (high-volume babysitter) is that it gives me an excuse to revisit some of the classics of Young Adult literature, under the pretense that I am trying to decide what to have my class read. You and I know the truth: I love sub-200 page books with simple vocabulary and happy endings.

Anyhow, I begin today with Tuck Everlasting, a book I read on the train in about one day, though the fact that Alexis Bledel was on the cover got me some strange looks. I don't care. I love Alexis Bledel.

What struck me about Tuck Everlasting was how tight it was--it makes sense of course, that YA authors must be a lot more sparing with their words than adult novelists, but the market is so flooded with sprawling, unfocused tomes (and here a namecheck to the recently deceased David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest seems appropriate), that I am especially appreciative of the talent that is required to mold a compelling story into something that is brief and uncomplicated enough to keep the interest of a middle schooler.

But the problem I have with Tuck Everlasting is that it seems to take a relatively simplistic view toward its main theme: death. The story is--if you were the odd child to have never read it--about a family named Tuck, composed of a mother, father, and two (seemingly) older sons who, some eighty years prior to the setting of the novel, discovered a spring in a forest which bestowed upon them eternal life. They have long acted as keepers of this secret spring, ensuring that no one else drinks from it--because, as they describe, this seeming benefit is really a curse that makes it impossible to create lasting human relationships with anyone but their immediate relatives--that is, until a young girl named Winnie Foster complicates their existence by stumbling upon the spring. It's quite a good yarn, though it seems like only a tiny fraction of what an adult novelist might do with the same situation.

But you can see how, thematically, this might be used as a platform from which to introduce middle-school-aged children to the concept of death. I cannot help but respect this goal; it takes quite a bit of bravery to attempt to distill one of literature's most persistent and complex themes into a presentation that is so very accessible. But what Tuck Everlasting wishes to say about death--that it is as necessary a part of the human experience as life, and that the Tuck family suffers in their lack of it--is something that any sufficiently contemplative adult has already considered.

I am not saying that Tuck Everlasting doesn't do a commendable job of presenting death to its audience, but I am saying that it is not a book--like the one I am to post on next--that I feel can be appreciated on an adult level as well. It is a book written for a time when a child's fear of death, still a faraway and unapproachable thing, can be allayed by pithy philosophizing. In truth, as these children will learn, into adulthood death remains present, frightening, and ill-understood no matter how much we understand the salience of the Tucks' pro-death sermonizing. How many minds of how many generations have set themselves to understanding death through art, literature, religion and philosophy, and have we truly ever come closer than Shakespeare, who called it an "undiscovered country?"

And then I think of these students of mine, who live in a neighborhood of New York City that, while not as impoverished or plagued by crime as Harlem, the southern Bronx, or Bedford-Stuyvesant, certainly has a higher incidence of violence than the areas in which any of us live. Tuck Everlasting may have made my young self feel more at ease about death, but would it seem patronizing to a student who has witnessed the untimely death of a friend or a relative? Much better, I think, would be Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia, a much more mimetic book about a young student dealing with death.

Looking For Alaska by John Green

"I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails."

The only way I know to start this review is to tell you that if I were an author, this is the kind of book that I would want to write. It had me laughing in the library with people looking at me like I was on drugs and it was impossible to put down in a way that made me forget it was assigned school reading. (What is it about being told to read a book that usually saps a good portion of the fun out of it?)

Looking for Alaska is a book that functions on two levels. On the first level, we are dealing with a fun loving group of pranksters living together at a boarding school in the middle of nowhere, wreaking havoc on their classmates and teachers. Green captures so many important little adolescent moments in just the right way-- the adrenaline you feel when you know you're probably going to be caught doing something you'll regret later, the cigarette you're offered that makes your lungs explode, and the first kiss where you have no clue what you're suppose to be doing with your mouth, ect. That last one is particularly funny in this book.
"I thought: This is good.
I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.
I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe."
...and then the girl pulls away and asks why he's slobbering everywhere.

On the second level, the book is addressing all of the Big Scary Questions that start to matter during those years where we feel invincible but also full of confusion about what the hell is really going on. Our main character Miles is obsessed with famous people's last words and they're scattered throughout the book as he reacts to situations and tries to work out what they mean as a kind of device to make the book a bit more meaningful and literary. He ties in the things that he's learning in his world religion class so that the things he's working through become more universal and less reliant on his personal circumstances. The entire reason he leaves his boring life back home for boarding school is that he is going to find his "Great Perhaps," stolen from the last words of Rabelais. The most important last words used in the novel, though, are those of Bolivar, being "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" The characters want to know first what the labyrinth is, if it's life or death or suffering. Then they want to know what the way out is.

Alaska, the character the book is named for, is elusive, moody, sexy, and completely histrionic. She's the girl that makes things happen. Of course, she's also the girl her circle of male friends are lusting after throughout the book, whose plot relies mainly on the interaction between Alaska and Miles. I don't want to say too much or give anything away, so moving on... The other characters are fun and different, as well. (Takumi, the free-styling Asian who refers to himself the motherfucking fox. The Colonel is from a trailer park and at the school on a scholarship and is always the one getting them into elaborately crafted schemes even though he has the most to lose. Lara's the shy girl from Romania who made me die in the library laughing at her attempts to seduce Miles.)

Lastly, I liked the way that Green set up the novel. On his website he talks about how he was working on the book during September 11th, and that made him think about how there are central moments in people's lives, how there was a Before September 11th and an After September 11th. While this book has nothing to do with what happened on 9/11, it's set up the same way, with one section titled Before and the other After. The climax of this novel is the central moment of Miles' life, and so the beginning is set up so that the chapters count down the days to the big event that shapes him, and the end counts down the days afterwards.

If you like YA fiction, I'd recommend it. The reviews all say it's reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, but I don't know that I would go that far.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman

I'll admit that initially I was a bit thrown by the phrase "familiar essays" on the front of this book. I thought that maybe this was a collection of commonly told fables or something akin to that. I didn't realize that the familiar essay is a type of essay. In my defense, they are not as common as they used to be. However, I would imagine that I have read some and didn't even know it.

Historically, these essays often had titles like "On Boating" or "On Politics Being a Masculine Arena." They were meant to be informative, while at the same time highlighting pertinent personal experiences of the author. Fadiman explains some of this in the preface, and by the time I was through the first two or three essays, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on things. It helped that Fadiman's second essay was about Charles Lamb, a favorite of hers, and a prolific writer of familiar essays in the 18th century.

A key aspect to all of these essays is that they draw heavily from Fadiman's life. The first essay of this collection, "Collecting Nature," is largely about her and her brother's near obsession with lepidoptery when they were kids. But she uses this as a springboard to discuss Darwin, the history and methods of collecting nature, natural selection, and even Vladimir Nabokov.

On occasion Fadiman totally immerses herself in a topic. While writing her essay on ice cream, she ate copious amounts of the frozen treat. (Incidentally, this was one of my favorite essays. It concluded with a recipe for making ice cream with liquid nitrogen.) The topic of "Night Owl" was insomnia, and she only worked on this essay during the night. Numerous cups of joe were consumed while writing "Coffee." You get the idea.

I did not find a single one of these essays lacking. However, there were some that I particularly liked, no doubt owing to their topics. The essay about mail was great. I enjoyed learning what mail was like in Great Britain before the creation of the stamp. Fadiman brings the essay up to roughly the present, admitting her reluctance to use email -- something which she eventually overcame. "A Piece of Cotton" was a thoughtful meditation on the U.S. flag, its history, its many interpretations, and its use in popular culture. "Under Water" was the last essay in this collection. It was also the shortest. Here Fadiman recounts the death of a fellow rafter during a trip down the Green River in western Wyoming.

Fadiman has an amazing way with words. The time I spent reading this book was delightful.

The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan

I liked the first book of this series a lot, and The Sea of Monsters was a nice follow-up. But The Titan's Curse was not nearly as good as the first two. Much like Order of the Phoenix, in the HP series, we find out some interesting bits to the overarching story in this book, but the pacing and much of the plot just felt off to me.

Riordan relies way to much of "future reveals" as in, "Annabeth looked directly at me. 'Percy, I should probably tell you something.' But our conversation was cut off by Grover who stumbled into the room out of breath." Exchanges like this happen all throughout the book. The info is withheld from the reader, sometimes not revealed at all, sometimes used later for a climactic end to a chapter. I began to find it really annoying.

Another thing that is starting to bug me is that no one ever dies. Percy and his friends are constantly fighting all sorts of monsters and (new as of this book) Titans, but no one is ever killed. Even when is seems like someone has died, you find out twenty pages later that they are not dead. And in most cases, Riordan does not explain how they managed not to die. That was one of the aspects of the HP series that I really liked. When people faced down real danger, they didn't always make it through.

There were still many positives to The Titan's Curse. The plot of the series really begins to unfold in this book. Riordan continues to deftly weave together Greek mythology and the modern world, in ways that are unique and often funny. In the case of Riordan v. Rowling, I side with Rowling on nearly every issue. However, when it comes to humor, Riordan has a slight advantage.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)

RIP David Foster Wallace

.....learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Is there some significance to the fact that David Foster Wallace did not commit suicide by firearm, but instead hanged himself?

The Plague/The Stranger by Albert Camus

Much like last year's Cormac McCarthy duo, I've decided to review The Plague and The Stranger, both by Albert Camus, together. Partly because I'm so far behind on reviews, but also because both books cover almost the exact same idealogical ground in different contexts.

In The Stranger, Mersault, a young Frenchman, attends his mother's funeral, spends some time with a girl, and accidentally kills an Arab on the beach. The second part of the book is more philosophical, delving into Mersualt's thought processes while he's in prison, awaiting death. The Plague chronicles the escalation of the bubonic Plague in a small French town, following the efforts of several townfolk as they do their best to save those afflicted.

While the plots of the two books aren't very similar, the points they make are similar. At first glance, both appear to be nihilistic, and there is a hint of nihilism in Camus' philosophy. Mersualt, in The Stranger, doesn't care if he lives or dies. He is not angry at the injustice of being executed for a murder he didn't intend to commit; he does not mourn at his mother's funeral; he is uninterested in confessing his sins before he dies. He is interested in life only to the extent that it interests him--when he begins getting bored, he goes along with whatever comes up.

The protagonists in The Plague are mostly Mersault's opposites. Dr. Rieux, the narrator, spends a year caring for people dying of a plague he can't even slow down, much less stop. Even as those around him die, or give up, he continues on selflesslessly, even though he, like Mersault, doesn't believe in a God or an eternal reward. He presses on because it is the best thing to do, because it is the only thing he can live with.

In both these novels, the protagonists ultimately find a tenuous fulfillment, when they decide that nothing is significant, and, if nothing they do matters, all that matters is what they do (Thanks, Angel). In some ways, it makes existentialism as I understand it is either the most pessimistic or the most optimistic of systems. There is no ultimate reward, no ultimate justice, but there is what we do right here, right now.

In The Stranger, Mersault claims a person who lived only one day would have enough memories to last a lifetime. That's what stuck with me the most. That's the end of this review.