Lady Lazarus

It’s my second day back at work from maternity leave and now it’s time to raise the blog back from the dead. As you can imagine, I didn’t find a whole lot of time during the baby’s first three months to sit and philosophise about books. The kid is cute as a button, especially now that he’s starting to smile and babble, but he sure wants every bit of my attention when I’m at home. So now, here I am at work, at loose ends if I don’t have something to do every minute. And I’m trying desperately not to feel guilty that I’m not home with the kid. But there are these two pesky things called money and health insurance that have brought me back to the library.

And I am finding the library a welcoming place to come back to. Surrounded by books once again, I feel inspired to read ALL of them and to write a few of my own. The irony of this, as anyone who’s ever worked in a library can tell you, is that you don’t generally have any time to read all the great books around you, let alone write one yourself. Bummer.

But I will soldier on and do my best to both read and write every day. Because if I don’t do these things I don’t feel like a complete human being. Even on my leave, I found time to read while the baby was sleeping. But I’m afraid I don’t have many inspirational words to share about what I read on maternity leave. Pregnancy and parenting books kind of say the same things over and over again, and most of it is common sense stuff that you can figure out on your own. I would warn moms-to-be not to dwell in the depths of What to Expect… or any similar titles for too long. I guess it’s considered a classic of its genre, but really it will just scare the crap out of you. It will convince you that you or your baby will contract a horrible disorder or disease when the reality is that in 99% of cases both of you will be just fine. We live in a lovely American culture of paranoia. Don’t go there. Take a deep breath and try to enjoy the ride.

When not reading about what’s normal behavior for a two-month-old, I did listen to an audiobook of one classic while I was home. I have always wondered what the big deal about Proust was, so I downloaded Swann’s Way from the library and listened to it on my long meandering winter walks with the baby stroller. Dude. DUDE! This is the most BORING book I have ever read, or listened to, or whatever. I can’t even write a whole blog post about it, because I listened to the whole thing and I’m not even sure if anything happened. I know I was sleep-deprived at the time, but there was barely a plot. Some snooty rich French people disliked the one guy’s (that would be Swann’s) mistress because she was kind of a ho bag. And the main character really missed his mom when she wasn’t in the room with him when we was a child. So yeah, he was a total puss. And he really liked Madeline cookies, which brought back a lot of childhood memories for him. Um, that’s about it. I totally am not getting why this is considered a masterpiece of literature. Supposedly Proust was trying to imitate the Impressionist painting style. And well, the book did seem…blurry…but not as pretty as a Monet. And remember, according to the main character in Clueless, being a Monet is not a good thing.

So, I’m hoping my sister can help breathe some life back into this blog. She recently reread The Bell Jar, which I haven’t read since I was an angsty senior in high school. I would love to hear her adult opinion, and she’s agreed to write a guest entry for me. So I will hold her to that. Until then, here’s an article about the ridiculous new cover that’s been chosen for the 50th anniversary of Plath’s novel. Maybe they were trying to make it look like a Mad Men episode? Chick lit it is not, folks! The original cover  accurately reflected the book’s content. Let’s stick with that one. Or read the ebook, I guess?

Historical Fiction Bender

Here’s my attempt to revive this blog before I drift into baby land very soon. I’ve been a bit distracted by baby showers, crib construction, and just wondering when the heck this kid will decide to show up. But in the meantime, I have devouring a lot of books. The best of the lot are historical fiction titles from Ken Follett and Jennie Fields.

The Age of Desire follows Edith Wharton through a doomed love affair in Paris. The poor woman was famous for writing about New York society and its scandals. But her own personal life lacked passion and drama. She married a dude named Teddy, who came from the right sort of family, when she was too young to realize it was a bad match. They had zero chemistry. Dear old Ted had some bipolar mental problems. Whoops.  This means that Edith didn’t discover sex until she was 46 and met a handsome cad named Fullerton in Paris. I half expected that it would end like one of her novels, where everyone is too genteel to do anything more than secretly burn with desire for someone forbidden. But she actually goes through with a messy affair that not only causes her a lot of heartache but tosses her husband off the deep end. Whoops. Meanwhile, her loyal secretary Anna is totally in love with Husband Teddy, but nothing really happens between them. It’s all very tragic and stuff. I kept wondering why Edith and Teddy didn’t just get a divorce and stop making each other miserable. But what do I know. Fields captured the tone of Wharton’s novels and created compelling characters. It was a bit of a downer, but well written.

Fall of Giants kick-starts a trilogy by Ken Follett that follows several interconnected families through the drama of the twentieth century. I’m not usually one for war stuff, but this guy knows how to keep you in suspense at all times. I’m always impressed by a male writer than can create strong, multifaceted female characters. My favorite lady in the series is the Welsh maid who gets knocked up by her rich idiot boss, but then goes on to become a suffragette in London and eventually a member of Parliament. Other plotlines follow a Russian family that sees the revolution against the czar unfold and Communism rise in the aftermath. But of course they discover that Communism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whoops. There is a German family that gets caught up in both world wars, and Americans who work for Wilson during the first world war. All of these characters get tangled up somehow and move the story along as the war progresses. I loved it. My only complaint is that Follett’s sex scenes are a bit excessive and borderline silly. But at least they serve a purpose. Conveniently, anyone who has sex in this book ends up making a baby. Otherwise there wouldn’t be the next generation of kids to fight World War II in the next book, you see.

So Winter of the World is the second book in the series, and it just came out in September. I felt super excited to dive into this sequel, but now I am at least two-thirds of the way through it and it’s not grabbing me the same way Fall of Giants did. The next gen is fighting the Nazis and falling on hard times and wow is it depressing. We all learned in school about the atrocities the Nazis committed against Jews, gays, and the disabled during this war, but reading about it in detail is so sad. Little kids with physical and mental disabilities mysteriously disappeared and died. The local Jewish doctor wasn’t allowed to practice medicine anymore and then… Well, we all know it won’t end well. It was a welcome bit of fun to read the brief section about the Swing Kids in Berlin, as it brought back memories of the 90’s film that was so popular when I was in high school. (1993..wow…I feel old.) Of course now you just have to feel deep admiration to anyone who had the courage to stand up to the Nazis in ways big or small. But unfortunately the youngsters in this book are not as compelling as their parents were in Book One. They just aren’t as well-developed and seem to exist just to introduce scenes about Pearl Harbor or whatever historical event Follett is writing about. The book is still worth reading, but I’m hoping the last installment in the trilogy spark with as much energy as the first.

And on an unrelated note, I plowed through Carole Radziwill’s What Remains in about two days. Now this is a book that first caught my eye when I was a fledgling library associate working in the literature department in Chicago’s main downtown library. A weepy memoir that involved the Kennedys, it was a best seller when it was published in 2005. I always meant to read it, but I kept putting it off in favor of more cheerful choices. But this fall Carole showed up as a new cast member on my favorite guilty pleasure, The Real Housewives of New York City. Now, it still seems odd that Carole, an award-winning journalist that has covered wars and major murder trials, would choose to go on a reality show. My ob/gyn declared that he found it “tacky” that the widow of Polish Prince Anthony Radziwill and BFF of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette would subject herself to Housewifedom. Shouldn’t she be hanging out with the equivalent of today’s Edith Wharton crowd in Manhattan? But whatever…she wrote a moving, sobfest of a memoir about her husband’s struggle with cancer and her famous friends’ death in a plane crash. It’s a heartbreaker, but I highly recommend it. Carole went through emotional hell in the late 90s, so if she wants to date a member of Aerosmith’s touring band and fight with Ramona and Sonja on RHONY in 2012, it’s fine by me. She’s an intelligent, hip lady and a hell of a writer. I want to grow up to be just like her.

She’s kind of a B

I picked up Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women after reading a recent article she wrote in Harper’s Bazaar. It was kind of a silly article about how looking good makes you feel good, and apparently it really pissed off the staff of Bitch Magazine. But it reminded me that I always meant to read this book she had written in 1998. It reads like a strange 90’s pop culture time capsule. If you’re in the mood to read lengthy essays about how Amy Fisher deserved sympathy or how Hillary Clinton failed us by not doing much except being Bill’s wife, then this is your book! It’s fun to speculate about how EW’s opinions have changed about these women since ’98. Does she think the Secretary of State has redeemed herself by finally creating her own political career? Did she watch Amy Fisher on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew? Poor Amy hasn’t fared that well in the intermittent years. I believe Dr. Drew was helping her with sex addiction and substance abuse and various other issues. Her problems go way back before she met that dude in an auto shop.

But how many people still remember who Amy Fisher is? In the introduction alone, EW drops so many 90’s pop culture references that I doubt anyone younger than me would know what the f she was talking about. Laura Palmer? Tonya Harding? That Lorena Bobbitt lady who cut of her husband’s penis? Anyone would have nodded their heads during my high school and college years, but in 2012, this stuff is ancient history. So while reading her essays I could hear the writing instructors of my Columbia College days warning us not to rely on a pop culture reference to make a point. It dates your writing like nothing else will. And even though fashion designers are currently trying to bring back combat boots and all of the grunge nonsense, most of this stuff doesn’t look so great the second time around.

For better or worse, EW loves pop culture, and she also loves throwing in 50 cent vocabulary words to prove how smart she is. And she is smart and understands a lot about the history of feminism. I enjoyed her writing, although she rambles quite a lot. But if the point of this book was indeed to “praise” the “difficult women” of the time, it was a big fail. She writes about Ms. Fisher, who as I mentioned already, is not doing so hot. And she bashes Hillary Clinton for about fifty pages for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. Basically, she wishes Hillary would have been president, but knows that a woman won’t be elected in the U.S. anytime soon. But she really admires how the Clintons have kept their marriage together. Okay. I don’t even know what to say about that.

But Hillary has fared way better in the world than the other subjects of these essays. EW goes on for a long while about how badass Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were, and I agree. But you see, they both killed themselves, via kitchen oven and car fumes, respectively. So, that’s a big bummer. Edie Sedgwick is another one that didn’t get a fairy tale ending, as those of us who saw the film about her starring new mum and British It Girl Sienna Miller can tell you. At least Edie created some lasting fashion trends in the process of her self-destruction, I guess.

And the last essay rehashes the relationship between O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson in all of its grizzly details. No offense to the deceased, but she’s not what one would call a feminist icon or even a “difficult woman.” She got stuck in an abusive relationship from the time she was 17 years old and could never quite escape it. It’s really sad, but I’m not sure their story fit in with the rest of this book. I admire EW’s efforts to explore the reasons why women get trapped in these types of relationships. I can relate to her descriptions of trying to help friends out of such relationships, and the immense feelings of frustration when a friend keeps going back to the abuser. After awhile you realize that they’ll never leave until they’re ready, no matter what you say to them. And sometimes they never leave.

So yeah, even though EW seems to have had a fantasy life where she imitates the behavior of 90’s superstars like Courtney Love and Sharon Stone, it’s clear that acting like a B in real life doesn’t really get you very far. Courtney and Sharon are two more “difficult women” who haven’t fared that well over the years. They’ve both basically gone insane and faded off the radar of pop culture, except when they appear as a punch line to a comedian’s joke every once in a while.

These are not the women I aspire to be, personally. I want my children to speak to me when they’re grown. Ask Frances Bean what it was like growing up with Courtney as a mom. I bet she’d tell you that mental illness, drug addiction, and completely selfish, confrontational behavior really aren’t that cool. Even though everyone in the 90’s seemed to think that acting depressed or angsty or “alternative” to something or other made you interesting, it really just meant that you needed to get your shit together, stop whining and grow up. Some of us learned that in the 00’s, but obviously there were a lot of casualties along the way.

Despite these depressing tales of bad girls gone bad, I do think women are now capable of living fulfilling, independent lives as single women without ending up like any of the above. EW questions whether it’s possible to remain a single girl and live happily ever after. But why the hell not, if that’s what you really want? You can be a strong and live on your own and carve your own path and not be a bitch. Why is that so hard to imagine? I did it for many years, and now I see that you can still be a strong, independent non-bitchy woman as a wife and (almost) mum. Wowee zowee. What a concept.

The Feminine Mystique

Reading this one felt like a really lengthy, sometimes tedious Feminism 101 course. After finishing all 532 pages of this tome, I’m mostly grateful that I was born in 1978. I can’t imagine not having earned my own money from the time I was 16. As meager as my salary was during my teens and early 20’s, I made my own money and it was MINE. Nor can I imagine not going to college or being discouraged from getting an education just because I’m a woman. Huh? But fifty years ago this would not have been unusual.

So, my feelings are mixed. I’m grateful to Betty Friedan and all the other women who fought so hard to get us to this point, where it’s totally  normal for women my age to get a good education, a decent job and a fair paycheck. It’s not to say that things are perfect and sexism doesn’t exist anymore. In her epilogue, BF was so sure that there would be a strong female candidate for president and VP in 1976, and we all know that even in 2008 no female managed to get into office for pres or VP. And the women who ran weren’t exactly treated fairly.

But things have come a long way since 1962. Ladies, imagine a time when magazine editors assumed you had no interest in politics, current affairs, or basically anything other than children and marriage. When women were only 35% of the workforce. When colleges prepped you to be a wife and mother and discouraged you from pursuing any “difficult” subjects like science or math. When you’d have a tough time finding examples of women successfully balancing career and family life. You were either a career woman or a housewife, and no one encouraged mixing the two.

BF said that at this time women were only encouraged to be housewives and mothers. Their resulting boredom and unhappiness is what she referred to “the problem that has no name.” I guess what makes me uneasy about this book is that “the problem that has no name” was really a state only experienced by middle- to upper-class white women in American suburbs. BF describes housewives who are so miserable that they suffered from depression to the point of becoming addicted to tranquilizers, seeing psychiatrists, attempting suicide, and spending time in loony bins. Now, was this really the norm or was she describing a few extreme cases? Hard to say. But I do believe that women were not encouraged to pursue careers that used their talents and intellects. They were so unsatisfied that they got their kicks from buying new household products and stretching out the housework to fill the time available just so they had something to do. They claimed to be exhausted, but were they really just depressed? I’m sure any women home all day with kids will confirm that it IS exhausting. But I’m sure a lot of it was just malaise from being stuck in the house all day too. The point is that I don’t think this was a problem for anyone in the lower classes, because those women always needed to bring in a paycheck to help support their families. I wonder what percent of families ever fit this neat picture of the nuclear family where the dad is the breadwinner and the mom is  a housewife?

Today this isn’t the reality for most of us. I personally don’t know any women who can afford to stay home with their kids these days. I know a few who would like to, but they need two incomes in their household. So in that sense, this problem has been solved by inflation and a shitty economy. But for the women who are stay at home moms today, it’s their choice, not something they’ve been forced to do. As my godmother reminded me recently, the important thing is that we have the choice to work or stay home. But would I even want to stay home with my kid even if the husband and I could afford that? Most women I know are happy to balance work and home life, so that they still get to have adult conversations and use their brains for at least part of the day. What I think most of us would like is jobs that allowed more scheduling flexibility to minimize the time kids have to spend at daycare and whatnot. Some people have better luck with this than others. So that is the next challenge I guess.

Other than focusing on this one segment of somewhat rich white people, my other problems with the book were sort of not BF’s fault. Like anyone else, her opinions were shaped by the information available at the time. Some of her ideas are really outdated and shocking as I read them in 2012. She blamed overbearing mothers who had nothing better to do than smother their children for everything from homosexuality to autism. Huh?! She talked a lot about how educators were concerned with “a new and frightening passivity, softness and boredom in American children” and to her a son being gay was an extension of this passivity. According to her, dominant moms stopped sons from growing up intellectually and sexually. Well, I think by now most sane people agree that folks are born gay or straight or somewhere in between. Let’s not put this one on mom. The autism thing had something to do with parents who set a bad example of not engaging in a productive way with humanity or something. It didn’t really make any sense. Yeah, they didn’t understand much about the disease in 1962, and they still don’t know a lot in 2012. But again, I don’t think we can blame housewives for autism.

But I do understand the concern with kids who were not given enough independence and had too much time on their hands. BF describes college kids who no longer knew how to manage their time or take initiative to organize activities. Any teacher, including my mom, can tell you that today the trend continues. Some parents do everything for their kids, and so kids now get to college not knowing how to write their own terms papers or do their own laundry. NOT GOOD! I get so mad when parents come into the library to do their kids’ homework! I thought the goal of parenting was to teach a kid to be independent? So hovering over your kids every minute of the day might not be such a great thing for the little darlings. I have fond memories of the summers when my sister was in charge of me and my cousin because our moms were working downtown. Not only did we have a lot of fun and act really silly having the house to ourselves, but we learned some independence. My sister started cooking at this time and today it’s become her career. We definitely knew how to do our own damn laundry and we didn’t count on mom and dad to do everything for us.

Another problem with women staying home was that it put a huge burdens on their husbands not only financially, but also emotionally. Being the center of the wife’s universe sounds like a recipe for marriage disaster to me! BF argues that all humans, men and women alike, wouldn’t reach their full potential until they found jobs that were creative and contributed to society in some way. I agree that we should all aspire to use our particular talents and strengths in our jobs. But the reality for most people is that they just have to earn a paycheck to support themselves and their kids. I think her view was sort of elitist, assuming that all men has these awesome spiritually fulfilling jobs that women were unfairly kept from. Uh, as far as I know, most men, especially if they were the sole breadwinners, had to work some pretty shitty jobs to support their families. So her world of academia and white-collar jobs was again not the reality for most people. I think she was kind of living in a bubble. I doubt most men were super happy at this time either.

But of course we should all do our best to get a good education and take the best advantage of it. As she puts it, if women are well-educated and get decent work experience when they’re young, there’s no need to marry for anything but love. Or heck, you don’t have to get married at all! I think most of us have reached that point. But I’ll never forget the mother of my college ex-boyfriend who warned me to make sure I finished college and got a good job to support myself. She had been married for 20+ years when her husband divorced her for another women. She had no college degree or work experience and had to find a way to enter the workforce in her 40’s. Needless to say, she worked her ass off at a crappy job with long hours and low pay. I took that lesson to heart. She’s not the only woman of our mothers’ generation to experience this by a long shot. Even though I have an awesome hard-working husband, I can’t count on him to make all the money. Someday he might not be around for one reason or another, and I still would have to support myself and my kids. I can’t imagine not having my own income to fall back on. That’s putting yourself in an extremely vulnerable position. And these days either of us could lose our jobs out of the blue. So no 1960’s housewife life for me, even if that’s what I wanted!

I guess where BF really started to lose me was when she compared these miserable 1960’s housewives to concentration camp victims. Nope, I’m not making that up. There’s a whole chapter about it. I think today she’d probably use a Walking Dead zombie reference of some sort. She was saying that women who don’t use their brains are basically dead inside. Okay, sure, but comparing American suburban housewives who lived pretty cozy lives by the standards of most of the world to concentration camp victims is absolutely ridiculous and insulting. By saying something this melodramatic, she undermined all of the valid points she made throughout the rest of the book.

It also leads to me ask: were all of these housewives so unhappy? Maybe some women genuinely enjoyed staying home and running their houses and raising their kids. Some women even enjoy that today! I don’t think every woman in this era ended up in the psych ward. But again, the point was having options. What’s frustrating is that the media at this time ran with the idea that all feminists hated men and wanted to destroy the American family. As BF said in her epilogue, “the media began to publicize, in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the manhating, sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW [National Organization for Women] and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children.” In 2012, people still can’t shake this idea that if you’re a feminist, you are a crazy power-hungry man-hater. Why??? All we’ve ever wanted is to be treated like intelligent capable humans, equal to men.

We’ve come a long way, but any young woman who thinks that feminism irrelevant to her life is kidding herself. A new book called How to be a Woman  humorously addresses the fact that we’re all reaping the benefits of all the hard work that BF and her pals did for us. It’s on my to-read list. So, even though The Feminine Mystique was a tough read, it’s still an important book. We can’t afford to forget how we got to this point.

The Power of Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth is full of so many ideas on mythology, religion & modern culture that I had to just pick a few favorite quotes and go from there.

p.26: “There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam-and because the three of them have three
different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together.
They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference.”

JC talks a lot about how all the major religions use the same basic stories, ideas and images. Another one of his major points is that none of these stories were meant to be taken literally. They are metaphors about how to live our lives in a moral way. 

 p.45: “All over the earth people recognize these images. Whether I’m
reading Polynesian or Iroquois or Egyptian myths, the images are the
same, and they are talking about the same problems.”

I remember taking a comparative religions class during my junior year of high school and feeling amazed at how similar the ideas were from all over the world. The same concepts kept appearing in a goddesses of the world class I took in college. There is something comforting in comparing these stories and realizing that we’re all dealing with the same human experiences and problems. But having said that, some religions make more sense than others to me. And I tend to like the ones that don’t force their ideas on others, or you know, kill people for believing something different from what they believe.

p. 65: “The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is
wrong. There is an oft-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the
Chinese Tao-se Ching as well: ‘He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know.
He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.’ For in this context, to
know is not to know. And not to know is to know.”

To me this is the basic wisdom of getting older. When you’re 18, you think you know everything. As life gets more complicated, you realize that you don’t know shit. It’s humbling. But the more you keep your mind open to not knowing, the more you learn.

p. 68: “Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a
literal, physical possibility. But if you read ‘Jesus ascended into
heaven’ in terms of its metaphorical connotation, you see that he has
gone inward-not into outer space but into inward space, to the place
from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source
of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward,
but the reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with
him by going inward.”

p.69: “Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor.”

Again, all of this stuff is metaphorical.  Science took away the possibility of a physical place in the sky where we go after we die. Forgive me if you are a religious soul who believes in a literal heaven. But I don’t. I do like the idea of ascending to a more spiritual form of consciousness within. And reincarnation is the idea of starting a new life to learn from the mistakes in the previous one. But we all have the opportunity to start over every morning when we wake up and make better decisions that we did the day before. And that is why life is beautiful. So, no, I don’t believe you were Cleopatra or Billy the Kid in a “previous life.” It’s all a symbolic idea of renewal!

p. 71: “Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield
yourself, and the book talks to you an builds itself. To a certain
extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from
what has been called the Muses-or, in biblical language, “God.” That
is no fancy, it is a fact.”

Oh, JC, how I want to believe you. Where are my Muses?! Maybe their voices are being drowned out by the sounds of E News and the Bachelor in my apartment! In my idealistic youth I used to believe in divine inspiration. But now I realize you have to sit and force yourself to do the work of creating something. Is there something in our subconscious that leads to great creativity? I think so, but it requires a lot of hard work to get at it.

p. 78: “That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don’t teach
until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s
throats.”

A to the Men, JC! Yeah, Buddhist monks aren’t the ones who show up at your door trying to preach to you. Eastern religions appeal to me more and more as I get older for just this reason. It’s more of an internal journey and you have to come to it on your own when you’re ready. Nothing turns more off more than someone trying to force me to convert to their ideas, or insisting that they’re right and everyone else’s ideas are wrong. And that seems especially silly when, as discussed above, the major religions all preach the same basic ideas of right and wrong. Der. Can’t we all just get along?

p. 82: “The hero is the one who comes to participate in life
courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of
personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge.”

All mythology has stories of the hero’s journey. The basic idea is that we all go on a journey where we have to grow the fuck up, stop acting like kids, and take on whatever challenges life puts in our path. You can either face your problems or you can run away like a lil bitch. But then a three-headed monster will probably eat you. So better to prepare yourself with some weapons and stuff. Ha. But…pssst…the monsters and weapons are symbolic, get it? I had a few ex-boyfriends who were sort of like mythological monsters, but luckily I slayed their asses. Kidding, kidding… Dealing with a chronic illness?  Finding my true career path in life? Taking on the challenge of becoming a parent? Those are battles I will keep fighting every day, folks. And I’m sure you have of plenty your own.

p. 153: “BM: That’s a wonderful image, though-the mother as hero. JC: It
has always seemed to me. That’s something I learned from reading these
myths. BM: It’s a journey-you have to move out of the known,
conventional story of your life to undertake this. JC: You have to be
transformed from a maiden to a mother. That’s a big change, involving
many dangers.”

Thanks, guys! It’s nice to give the ladies some credit on this one! Obviously this is my current path, maiden to mom. It’s a lil scary, but I’m no wuss. I can handle it.

“BM: There are women today who say the spirit of the Goddess has been in
exile for five thousand years, since- JC: You can’t put it that far
back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic
times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the
Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess
celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth
and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called
Notre Dame.”

As I said earlier, I took a whole class on goddesses of the world and wow it was fun. Of course a lot of people get caught up in feminist ideas of “Why is God always called He in the western world? What happened to the Goddess?” But JC does a pretty good job of explaining the history of how different religions evolved. Basically, in ancient times when societies were more agricultural, the Goddess was a symbol of the ferility of the earth. And then some war like dudes from the West took over and with them brought a more aggressive male idea of God. And then there are Eastern religions always had male and female gods who got married and had babies and stuff. In nature, both male and female energy is needed to maintain balance in life. And God, or whatever you call the higher power, is actually above and beyond the concept of gender. The rest is again, just metaphorical stuff. But I always loved the idea of Mary worship in Catholicism. They can try to say that she’s not as powerful as God or Jesus, but c’mon. If I have a problem, I’m going straight to the mama. And many people do. I think Mary is really in charge here. 🙂 The idea of the Goddess is actually alive in many forms around the world as we speak.

p. 22-223: “JC: And so, when you stand before the cathedral of
Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an
image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus sits and
blesses the world as its emperor. That is precisely the image that has
come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early fathers and the
early artists took over these images intentionally. BM: The Christian
fathers took the image of Isis? JC: Definitely. They say so themselves.
Read the text where it is declared that: ‘those forms which were
merely mythological forms in the past are now actual and incarnate in
our Savior.”

Yeah, Isis and the Virgin Mary are like BFFs. The story is very much the same. Christianity took a bunch of pagan ideas and just gave them new names. To me, this proves that all religions just borrow ideas from each other and although it’s fun to read about, I have a hard time taking any of it seriously. But if you are a religious person, I guess it is just proof of the collective human experience? You decide!

“No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have
been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter
solstice, December 25″

Yep, pagan stuff repackaged. I loved reading about this stuff when I was younger. Fascinating.

p. 238: BM: You have said that the point of all these pioneers in love is that they decided to
be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the
realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were
going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from
dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good. And is this
the beginning of the romantic idea of the Western individual taking
matters into his or her own hands?

JC: Absolutely. You can see examples in Oriental stories of this kind
of thing, but it did not become a social system. It has now become the
ideal of love in the Western world.”

Here they were talking about courtly love and the troubadours in France, I think? The idea was that this was the first time in history that romantic love was valued over arranged marriages. Obviously arranged marriages still exist in certain cultures, and they can be successful in their way if the intentions of the families are pure. But I am a Westerner and a romantic fool at heart. One of the greatest triumphs of my life so far was choosing my husband because he was truly the best person for me. No one else’s opinion mattered.

p. 252-253: “That’s very mysterious. It’s almost as though the future
life you’re going to have with that person has already told you, This
is the one whom you will have that life with…It’s almost as though
you were reacting to the future.”

Anyone who has really fallen in love knows about this experience. You can’t explain it, but you KNOW this person and recognize them as THE ONE right away.  Yeah, it is one of life’s great mysteries, but listen to your instincts when it happens. They are never wrong. And if you try to choose a partner for money, security, status, or only based on looks, or because your friends think he’s a nice guy or whatever… you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of misery. Better to be alone and wait for the real thing. Okay, I’m done now.

What I Read on My Mental Vacation

Now that the holiday weekend is over, I should explain the mental vacation I’ve taken the past few weeks. After steadily reading some heavy classics and baby prep books all summer, I needed a break. I picked up Jennifer Weiner’s Next Best Thing. In doing so, I’ve proven that writers can successfully promote themselves on Twitter. I’d always heard that Weiner wrote intelligent but fun stories for women, brainy chick-lit if you will. But she really hooked me by tweeting hilarious comments about the Bachelor and the Bachelorette this year. How many times did I think one of her quips was so funny that I had to read it aloud to my viewing companions Sis and Husband? I lost count. So I finally grabbed her newest novel. The Next Best Thing is charming and heartwarming and honest. She writes about real, imperfect women who have complex emotions and thoughts and aren’t supermodels. In this one, her main character Ruth is a TV writer who pens a sitcom about a girl and her  grandmother. Unfortunately the show gets hacked to death by the studio, turning her beloved characters into size-zero shallow stereotypes. But in the process she learns a lot and falls in love and manages to get her revenge on the Hollywood execs. Insanely likeable is how I would describe
Weiner’s writing.

I also skimmed through Mindful Birthing, which explains how moms-to-be can use meditation techniques to handle childbirth without freaking
the fuck out. I’ve been interested in meditation for the past couple of years. I’m not a religious person, but I like the concept of making time every day to take some deep breaths, calm down, and focus your mind. These techniques can be used in any situation. Theoretically you can use your breathing and meditation exercises to keep calm during labor and go with the flow of childbirth instead of feeling afraid and stressed. Now, there’s no way to avoid pain in this situation, but again, you can control your reaction to it. The only thing that bothered me about this book is the assumption that I will want to reject all forms of medication in favor of natural  childbirth. I like to keep an open mind, but I think this trend of women forgoing pain medication during childbirth is absolutely ridiculous. If there’s any time to take advantage of modern Western medicine, it’s during labor. Hello? Ladies, you don’t have to prove how tough you are. We know that women have been giving birth for millions of years
and that we’re strong enough to do it without an epidural. But….why? Why put yourself through more pain that is necessary? I don’t get it
at all. Many studies have been done to prove that no harm is done to the baby. So why are you torturing yourselves? I’m mostly trying to
mentally prep for all scenarios, like if I get to the hospital without enough time to do an epidural. Anything can happen, and I will go with the flow. But I want the drugs. Sorry. I believe in combining the best of old world wisdom with modern medicine, if that makes any sense. So please don’t write comments about how drugs make babies crazy and the only proper way to give birth is sitting in a hut in the woods in a bathtub with a doola and a life coach holding your hands instead of a nurse or doctor. I’m just not that kind of hippie girl, okay? I know there are pros and cons to all the available options. But give me my nice new hospital in downtown Chicago and all the painkillers it offers, thanks much.

That was a long detour, sorry. Back to books. I’m also listening to Rules of Civility as an audiobook, and I highly recommend it. I’m a sucker for good historical fiction, and this one is set in 1938 in Manhattan. A girl named Kate who works as a law clerk meets a bunch of socialites and her world gets turned upside down by them. It’s a fun era to explore, post-Gatsby, pre-World War II, and the female characters seem inspired by sassy, fast talking screen idols of the era: Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Rosalind Russell.

But to dive back into classics, I’m reading some nonfiction that may or may not be considered classics. One of the problems with working in a library is that every day some shiny new book catches your eye. Soon you end up with five or six books at a   time sitting on your coffee table without the time to read them all. The current pile falls into the “I’ve always meant to read that” category.  One of my meditation books by Jon Kabbat Zinn referenced Joseph Campbell. JC wrote about mythology and how it still influences society today. He did a great PBS series with Bill Moyers that was filmed at Skywalker Ranch in the 80s. The Power of Myth is the book version of their conversations. This is geeky, fascinating stuff. Campbell was a big influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy. So I’ll write more about that in a future post.

And then, since September is back to school time, I’m putting myself through a self-taught course called Feminism After 1960. Watching Mad
Men with my husband inspired me to pick up Betty Friedan’s TheFeminine Mystique. So what’s changed for American women since Joan and Peggy’s heyday? Everything and nothing. I haven’t gotten that far but the introduction contains rants about padded bras for 8-year-old girls and over-nutured children who can’t make decisions for themselves because their moms do everything for them. Sound familiar? Watch an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras or read an article about helicopter parenting and it could be 1962 again, eh?

And then the latest issue of Elle featured articles written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Naomi Wolf, two big names in the 90s feminist movement. I’ve always wanted to read the Beauty Myth, so that’s on its way to me. And today I checked out Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by EW. In Elle, she talked about how the book’s cover enraged people in 1998 when it was published. In the photo, she’s topless and giving the finger. Scandalous! Well, in 2012, my husband picked up his book off the hold shelf at the library and didn’t even notice topless EW next to it. “How desensitized have we become as a society that I didn’t notice a picture of a naked woman?” Good  question. hus. I thought I could always count on you to act like a heterosexual oaf. Geez. Anyway, I remember thinking EW was super annoying in the 90s. Prozac Nation struck me as the whining of a overpriveleged, over-medicated white girl. So I guess I’m wondering what 15 years of perspective will leave me thinking about 90s riot grrrl feminism. Classics? Betty F, yes, for sure. The Beauty Myth? Quite possibly. Bitch? Hmm… probably not, but by now the 90s are considered retro. It will be interesting to compare the social atmosphere of my high school and college years to what’s going on today. I’m starting to feel old but it’s nice to have more years of experience to draw from.

That Lil Dickens!

After reading several books with Greek Tragedy endings, tucking into a Dickens novel the past two weeks felt as comforting as a warm cup of tea. Again, how did I reach the age of 33 with barely a Dickens novel or two under my belt? I finally read A Tale of Two Cities a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it for the historical bits. But Great Expectations seems more typical of his style: a straightforward story of a British boy determined to make a better life for himself. Although he encounters a lot of problems along the way, and makes an ass out of himself a lot of the time, Pip learns his lessons by the end. Even better than that is how all the good guys get their happily ever afters, and the bad guys drown in the Thames. Dickens is big on justice and redemption, and even if he is a bit melodramatic, his stories leave me feeling satisfied.
 
Yes, it’s satisfying to read about a guy like Pip. He starts off poor, comes into an unlikely fortune, and then loses all his cash. In the process he figures out that money can’t buy you love, as the Beatles tell us, and it certainly can’t buy you class, as the Real Housewives of New York tell us. It’s far more meaningful to surround yourself with people who love you and to work for whatever you’ve got.

But it’s a long and winding road Pip takes before finding this out. As a kid, he falls for the cold-hearted but beautiful Estella, who is humbled by the end by her own crappy choices. Instead of appreciating Pip’s devotion to her, she marries a d-bag for money and ends up an abused wife. At least at the end she treats Pip with respect and redeems herself for acting like a total snob for a couple of decades. Like Daisy B. from Gatsby, she’s not a very likable female lead. But at least we as readers understand why she’s so cold. Miss Havisham, her guardian, brought her up to treat men like dirt. But in Dickens Land, even a  misguided soul like Estella straightens out her priorities by the end of the story.

Before now, I didn’t realize that Dickens wrote two endings for GE. I really enjoyed the inclusion of both in the edition I read. He originally wrote the more true to life, and to me more moving, one where Pip runs into Estella years down the road and she admits that she made a mistake by treating him badly and marrying the rich oaf. She remarries and has a daughter that she loves in a way that shows Pip she’s learned to open her heart, despite Miss H’s attempts to make her a cold-hearted snake. Pip realizes that he could never have had a happy life with her and that he was better off moving on to other things. But then some friend of Dickens convinced him to write a crowd pleaser ending where Pip and Estella meet up at the site of Miss H’s house and they realize they’ve belonged together all along. Estella still apologizes to Pip about treating him like dirt, so at least she redeems herself in both versions. But I think the original is far more effective and in better keeping with the whole tone of the book. As much as I’m a romantic fool, there’s no way Pip and Estella were ever going to settle into a happy marriage and decorate their home with cute stuff from Crate and Barrel, ya know? The romantic in me loves seeing Pip and Estella walk off in the moonlight together, but it seems more realistic that they would give each other the nod of respect and that Pip would have finally outgrown his adolescent obsession with this undeserving chick. 
 
All the same, sometimes it’s nice to live in an alternate universe where everyone reforms their characters in the end. Miss Havisham spends her life wallowing in her bitterness that she got jilted on her wedding day and seeks revenge by turning Estella into her man-eater instrument to torture men. But even she begs Pip’s forgiveness at the end of the book and gets torched a little bit by a fire just to drive the message home! And the criminal with the heart of gold, Magwitch (whose name sounds like a sloppy joe sandwich to me: It’s a Magwitch night!) redeems himself by bestowing his fortune upon Pip. To Dickens’ credit, he does acknowledge that some people are just plain evil for no particular reason. But they get theirs, too. The really bad criminal, Compeyson, ends up drowning, but not before Magwitch gets to beat the crud out of him. What a fun book!
 
Even more fun than seeing the bad guys pay for their deeds is reading about the colorful minor characters. This is what Dickens does best. Herbert, Pip’s happy-go-lucky BFF, who’s always there to make Pip laugh or to rescue him from a dangerous situation, is a real gem. We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Herbert. Another stand-up guy is Joe, Pip’s sort-of stepfather who always takes care of him, loves him, and accepts him for who he is even when Pip’s acting like an a-hole. Nothing made me happier in this book then when Joe marries Biddy, the no-nonsense, honest, caring girl from Pip’s childhood. Biddy is the exact opposite of Estella, and by the end Pip finally realizes that if he had any sense in his head he would have told Estella to stuff it and he would have married Biddy. But at least Biddy ended up with a good and deserving dude.
 
These are people who everyone knows in real life. Maybe these folks aren’t the smartest or the richest in the world, but they have good hearts and they live honorably and they don’t expect anyone to give them a trophy for it. Even a guy like Wemmick, the law clerk who seems like a tough bastard on the job, is at heart a big softie who spends his off time joking around and taking care of his Aged Parent. And he even he has a sweetheart that he loves and marries. And isn’t it so true to life that Pip as a young guy foolishly falls for the pretty but stuck up Estella, and hence overlooks the somewhat plain but totally awesome Biddy? He doesn’t realize his mistake until much later in life. A lot of men never catch on to this and their priorities remain out of whack. Girls do this too, to be fair. But anyone who watches The Bachelor can tell you that guys are more prone than gals to fall for a pretty face, even if the person has a lump of coal in their chest instead of a heart. Of course in Dickens Land, the guy acknowledges his mistake and learns to love someone for the right reasons. I like this world!
 
In Dickens’ world, all the loose threads get tied together. All of these characters are connected somehow. Molly the maid turns out to be Estella’s mom, and Magwitch turns out to be her dad. And hence all the rich people, lawyers, poor people and criminals have a part in each other’s life stories somehow. I can’t think of a better plot on any night-time soap opera right now. I wish I was clever enough to write such things. Nothing is a coincidence. Every character has a purpose.
 
Overall, it’s just refreshing to read something where the main character isn’t punished in the end for aspiring to something better than his humble origins. After rereading Gatsby, where he ends up face down in his pool and never gets his girl, and Jude, where his whole life falls apart and his kids get killed, it’s nice to see Pip end up in a good place in his life. Whether or not he gets the girl, he realizes how lucky he is to have good folks in his life. And he had some fun along the way too. Now the only question is, why hasn’t someone opened a theme park called Dickens Land?

Jude the Total Bummer

Sometime during my college years, before I had read any Thomas Hardy, I stumbled upon the film version of Jude the Obscure on cable. I saw Kate Winslet in a period film and decided to tune in. I love Kate, and I love a British period piece! But I unfortunately only saw the horrific ending of the story where Jude and Sue’s babies are found dead. It totally freaked me out. I never went back to watch the rest of the movie. What kind of morbid book was this based on?

Oh, welcome to the Victorian world of Hardy, where everyone who tries to find happiness in the English countryside is totally doomed! A few months back I read Tess of the D’ubervilles, hoping for a raunchy classic. In that one a naive country girl gets raped by some evil rich dude and hence her whole life is ruined. Even though there’s a really nice guy named Angel who loves her, their relationship never works out because everyone acts like she’s a tramp. Lesson learned: being a woman in Victorian England totally sucked.

Jude continues Hardy’s criticism of his times, where folks were so wrapped up in their rigid morals and religious upbringing that anyone who deviated from the norm was outcast. What a bummer. Jude starts out as a smart, idealistic kid who just wants to go to college. The problem is that he’s part of the low-class of Brits who just aren’t welcome in the Oxford-like university he dreams of attending in a neighboring town. Boo. So instead he becomes a stone mason and marries a young strumpet named Arabella. Arabella might be one of my least favorite characters in classic literature. Damn, was this girl annoying. She’s selfish and dumb and keeps tricking different men into marrying her. She tells Jude she’s pregnant even though she’s really not. And after a month or two they discover they really hate being married to each other.

At least they have the sense to bail on the bad marriage, but then Jude falls for his cousin Sue. Now Sue is a progressive super smart chick who loves classical Greek and Roman culture. She defies the norms of the era and gets and education and becomes a schoolteacher. She marries an older teacher for the security of being married, but then discovers that she’s physically repulsed by him. She’d rather sleep in her closet than in his bed. Major bummer. He’s a nice guy and all, but she and Jude really have the hots for each other. So Sue’s husband generously tells her that she can run off with Jude and it’s a-okay with him. Great news!

So then Jude and Sue live happily ever after, right? Ha ha, you fools! No one lives happily ever after in Thomas Hardy novels! First of all, Jude and Sue acknowledge that it’s totally icky that they’re cousins and that they want to get married. And then their auntie warns them that no one in their family ever stays happily married. Could this be foreshadowing? You think?

After that, it feels like half the novel is taken up by arguments between Sue and Jude about whether or not they should get married, even though they’re both legally divorced by now. Sue is afraid to get married again, and who can blame her. It doesn’t seem like such an appealing idea at the time. Why can’t they just be in love and live together? Good question. Well, the neighbors don’t approve. I found myself wishing they would move to a more liberal town in France where they could drink wine and eat cheese and live unconventional lives.

But the Hardy Novel version of events go like this: Arabella throws a wrench into the whole deal by revealing that she had Jude’s son in Australia about ten months after they were married. Oh boy, now this is starting to sound like an episode of Dallas! And the kid is totally creepy. He’s a sociopath, actually. After some depressing scenes where no one will rent rooms to Jude and Sue because they’re unmarried folks with kids, the son of Arabella and Jude ends up killing not only himself but Sue and Jude’s two other kids. And then Sue goes crazy and becomes a religious freak and miscarries her last baby. She thinks she’s being punished for defying the rules of marriage, and she leaves Jude to go back to her boring school teacher husband that she doesn’t want to have sex with. So much for feminism. And then Jude goes back to Arabella for god knows what reason. Are these people gluttons for punishment or what? He gets sick, presumably with consumption, and Arabella is the worst caretaker ever. She goes to a regatta instead of staying by his bedside and he croaks. And then Arabella says that Sue won’t be happy until she’s dead too. The end.

Now wasn’t that an uplifting story? It’s a tough read, but I get where Hardy was going with all of this. If people are trapped in bad marriages it leads to nothing but misery. Is marriage such a great institution? In many cases, no. And why can’t a youngster get an education no matter what part of town he’s from? It’s hard to understand Jude’s problems looking from the perspective of an American 2012. Here are a few things from our modern lives that really would’ve helped Jude and Sue out:

1) scholarships to college…or even if they had ended up with a mountain of student loan debt, they still would’ve gotten a college education!

2) birth control….no unwanted babies to make their lives more complicated!

3) not having to marry the first dude or dude-ette who comes along. Even if J had met a young harlot in his teen years, he wouldn’t have been expected to marry her! If she had been on the Pill, no sociopath baby would have been born!

4) feminism…Sue wouldn’t have to marry anybody. She could have just lived as a modern independent intelligent woman. What a concept.

5) no fault divorce…no one really gives a crap if people get divorced now. Or if folks want to live together and not get married, for that matter. They can even raise kids together and the neighbors don’t freak out!

So yeah, a lot of things we take for granted today were just not part of Hardy’s world. I wonder if he still would have been such a pessimist if he saw the world today. He would probably find other things to complain about. I am all about his criticism of the small-minded morals of his times. What bothered me was his idea that everyone was doomed by fate to have these awful lives, no matter how they tried to improve themselves. I have a serious problem with that. If Hardy were alive today, I would give him some self-help and meditation books. Not everything is a disaster, man! God is not going to strike us down for having some fun! Wow am I glad I was born in 1978.

Nick Shrugged Back!

Here is my darling husband’s response to my post about Atlas Shrugged. Wow, I wish I understood more of what he’s talking about here. He’s a smart dude, and that’s one of the reasons I married him. But oh, when he gets going about economics and politics a lot of it goes over my head. But those of you more well-versed on these topics will appreciate what he has to say. Even when we don’t agree about politics and such, I respect his well-informed opinions. Personally, I was reading the book as a work of fiction and disliked it from that view. I now think that I’d much rather read Rand’s essays on individualism or the value of selfishness or whatever than AS. I still think she had no business writing fiction.

Anyway…He’s what Mr. Nick Duffy, who has read AS many times (!!!) had to say:

“Who is John Galt?” If the legion of objectivists ever did go on strike, I’d assume that is the motto we would choose for our crest, right underneath our symbol – the $ sign of course.
I think a lot of times, the message of Rand’s opus is lost because she, as you rightly pointed out, could not resist beating the reader over the head with her beliefs. I suppose an equivalent experience to your reading of Rand would be my first time attending a “Girl Power” convention. Yes, I believe that woman are equal to men, etc….just as you point out that you agree that one cannot expect to receive anything while sitting around. However, having to sit there and listen to it being beaten into my head would likely be the death of me.
“The things we do for love.” As you read my retort, remember Barry Goldwater’s invocation that “extremism in the defense of livery is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Writing on the heels of the French Revolution, a time when the mob went wild in response to the perceived and real sins of the aristocracy, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to the United States in 1831 to study the American prison system. While here, the seeds of his seminal work “Democracy in America” were planted. Over one hundred years before Ayn Rand wrote “Atlas Shrugged,” I think de Tocqueville offered its most stirring defense, writing “If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority…Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism.”
Rand, the refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution, saw firsthand the dangers and horrors of the collective – seeing her Jewish family stripped of property and sent into exile. Fortunately for Rand, unlike many thousands of lower born victims of the “people’s revolution,” she was able to escape to the country of racism and evil where she was enslaved…wait…sorry…flashback to Socialism 101 (Believe the actual course title was Political Science 101, but nevertheless…)
Atlas Shrugged tells the tale of Rand’s worst nightmare, in the same vain that thousands of other books have used the literary device of the collapse of civilization to make their point. However, Rand was writing something very different from what the intelligentsia of her time (and ours) were willing to hear – that it was the individual who reigned supreme…the the most talented deserved all of their just rewards and more importantly – that anyone not producing was living a life style produced by the largess of the creator, the trader, the artist, and the businessman. Yes, the evil businessman.
The timing of my retort could not be more apt – just last week, the President of the United States, the man elected and sworn to defend a Constitution that has protected individual liberty and property rights as the most sacrosanct of American ideals said “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Someone else made it happen.”
And there you have it-the central ethos of the book- the side that should be feared expressed by the elected leader of the American people. Is man’s achievement his own, or is man nothing but the collective? Did men like Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, the Koch Brothers, etc create and bring to the marketplace for fair trade high quality items at a fair price, or did they steal, enslave, and earn the fortunes on the backs of the hard working indigenous peoples of wherever?
Atlas Shrugged tells the tale of just such men – the creators and traders saying “enough is enough.” A story in which the American aristocrat, the businessmen and inventor, has finally reached the breaking point from overregulation from the supposed “leaders” in the Capital, and the constant demonization from people who have never labored and created deciding to go on strike. To leave the world as its inhabitants have always said they wanted to live. After all, people just need the “opportunity” that is rightly theirs if only regulated and enforced at the barrel of a gun and the quill of a pen. My favorite part of the book is towards the end – as you see the breakdown of civilization once the true motors of the world have shut down until such a time that they are appreciated. The central point, oftentimes missed in my opinion is this – why is the world falling down? Rearden Metal is still in existence, albeit run by an incompetent. Other protected steel companies are subsidized and in existence. Why can metal and steel not be produced as needed? d’Anconia Copper is still in existence, albeit seized by an incompetent government. Why is copper wire in such short supply? Wyatt Oil is still under the mountains of Colorado. Why can the seized wells on fire not be brought under control and brought back online to feed the need for the evil fossil fuel that does nothing but pollute (oops…another college flashback). Why can trains not run safely and on time? The industry has been regulated and laws have been passed to provide service to all DAMN IT! Why is travel and trade breaking down?
I could go on and on, and I’m sure you’re bored by now – but ask yourself this question. Why did Wall Street NEED bailouts from the fleeced taxpayer? Why did the American Auto Industry NEED to be “bought” by the government? Why do people call for trade with other countries to be regulated to PROTECT jobs?
If you can answer those questions, then I think you are one step closer to answering the question “Who is John Galt?”

NJD

Better than the whole damn bunch

It’s daunting to write about my favorite novel. In fact I was afraid to reread it this time. I first read The Great Gatsby in junior year American lit class. I fell in love with the time period, the romantic tone of the book, the legend of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. What’s not to love about the plot: A 1920’s wealthy New York City flapper falls madly in and out of love with a mysterious bootlegger! The bootlegger, flawed but noble, builds his whole life around reuniting with his first love and pursues the American Dream! Of course all of this would appeal to daydreamer bookworm 16-year-old me. I aspired to be a glamorous rich woman living in a huge mansion, relentlessly pursued by the love of my life. That sounded awesome. At that age, I was almost as idealistic and naive as Gatsby. And I considered myself as morally centered and Midwestern (some would say dull) as Nick Carraway.

But as I get older, my life experiences have changed my perspective. Would I, at 33, find Gatsby to be too light of plot or too cynical of human nature or too sentimental about the lost dreams of America’s youth? It was sort of the same fear I felt when reuniting with my first love, as Gatsby does with Daisy. What if, as Nick Carraway says, you can’t recreate the past?

“Of course you can!” Gatsby replies. And in this case, he and Fitzgerald were correct. I admired the writing more than ever. How did Scott write such a compact perfectly structured novel in nine short chapters but still infuse them with lush poetic phrases? Suck it, Hemingway! You got the concise part, but you wouldn’t know poetry or beauty if it punched you in the face! Scott studied his beloved Keats and it paid off big time.

As much as I loved rereading the book, it’s such a quick read that the whole thing flew by. And at first I thought that maybe Daisy wasn’t as much of an awful bitch as I remembered her being. So gorgeous in her long diaphanous white dresses! So charming with her Southern drawl! So in love with Gatsby!

But…wait… She ends up with Tom, her racist white supremacist philandering husband? The guy who punched his mistress and broke her nose just because she said Daisy’s name? Huh? What kind of flaky coward is this woman? I still feel angry about it. There’s not much to admire about Daisy. It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for her. In another author’s world, she would have defied her rich family and the social conventions of the time, ran away from home and lived a swinging single life until she reunited with Gatsby, the love of her life. Who would marry Tom Buchanan? What a loser. He’s the mean jock guy from high school who stuffs geeks into lockers just for fun. Staying with Tom is the worst fate I can think of for Daisy. She tortured herself.

Obviously nobody gets a happy ending in this book. It’s sort of a flapper Greek tragedy soaked in gin rickeys. Yum…gin… I could really use a summer cocktail right now. Pregnancy is rough. But anyway, we all know that Gatsby fails in his attempt to win back his first love Daisy. And poor Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, gets run over accidentally by Daisy and gets her boob chopped off. And that d-bag Tom tells Myrtle’s husband that Myrtle was run over with Gatsby’s car, leading the husband to shoot our hero. Gatsby ends up floating dead in his own pool like a 1960s British rock star. So ahead of his time. But what a waste.

As Carraway tells him before he gets shot, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Gatsby’s tragic flaw was that he didn’t realize he was better than Daisy and Jordan and Tom and the rest of those jerks. Daisy wasn’t worth all of this trouble, was she? She was like a 1920’s Lindsay Lohan, shallow and selfish and always blaming someone else for her car accidents. Fitzgerald revealed how careless and cold the rich can be. They never have to face the consequences of their actions. And the bitchy nature of his female characters doesn’t say much about his view of women. Not to play armchair psychologist, but it’s well known that Zelda wasn’t the most mentally stable woman. Did she taint his view of romance? I can’t think of any Fitzgerald story where a happy couple rides off in the sunset together. Love always ends tragically in his world.

And so Gatsby would’ve been better off sticking close to Carraway, the only other likable human being in the novel. They could have gone on a buddy picture road trip back to the Midwest, the land of virtue. He could have met a nice girl on the north shore of Chicago and settled down in a new mansion. But that wouldn’t have been nearly as poetic an ending. Scott wanted to warn everyone about the dangers of valuing money more than human decency. Good job, old sport.

As a writer, I’m still learning from the old sport. Just a couple of days ago someone posted to Facebook this letter that Fitzgerald wrote to an aspiring author. “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.” Okay, so, I’ll just elegantly sum up the political and social atmosphere of my entire generation in a concise 180 pages or so like you did, Scott. No pressure. No problem.