Book vs. Movie: The Godfather

I started writing a lengthy essay about how The Godfather Part I has to be in the top 3 movie adaptations of all time. My only complaint is that I would have liked a bit more of the female characters’ perspectives. In the book Mama Corleone comes alive as a really sassy woman who doesn’t take her husband too seriously. Kay is fleshed out a lot more too. And who doesn’t love speculating on whether Johnny Fontane was really based on Frank Sinatra?

Instead, I’ll leave you with a few favorite clips that illustrate the brilliance of Coppola’s film.

Here we see Michael’s first step into the “family business.” Outside the hospital, he’s calm and cool and ready to become the next Don.

This scene possibly makes the movie better than the book, because the greatest line wasn’t in the book. “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

The final scene where the door closes on Kay is such a perfect haunting image. In the book there is one more chapter, but for the movie this leaves such an impact.

Here’s a fun article from Vanity Fair with more geeky details: The Godfather Wars

And if you haven’t read the book, go get it! It’s a fun page-turner with a lot of subplots involving the minor characters that aren’t in the movie.

The Swerve

Every once in a while a book delights me so much that I want to clap my hands and say “Yay!” the way my one-year-old does whenever the Blackhawks score a goal. I want everyone on the planet to read this book just so they can share my excitement. Of course, tastes are so subjective that surely 90% of the population would think it’s totally boring.

Regardless, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt inspired this “Yay!” feeling in me. Somehow it incorporates everything that my husband and have been debating about since we were teenagers. To sum it up very simply, an Italian collector of ancient texts named Poggio found a copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in a German monastery in 1417. The ancient Roman poem had been MIA for about a century, and once Poggio had some friends copy it, the text ended up influencing some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance and far beyond. Included in this exalted group: Shakespeare, da Vinci, Galileo, Botticelli, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson.

The poem was controversial in its own time and in the Renaissance because it states that everything is made of atoms. The scientific aspects of it were considered heretical because it discredited the idea that God created everything. Also, Lucretius stated that there is no afterlife, and therefore there is no reason to fear death. No afterlife means no Hell, but also no need to worry about what’s left unfinished in life. You won’t be aware of these things, so you won’t care! He believed that religion was cruel because it caused fear and kept people from pursuing life’s highest goal, pleasure. He wasn’t exactly an atheist, because he believed that gods existed, but he thought that the gods didn’t give a crap one way or the other about what humans did. Oh, and humans aren’t the most important creatures in the universe. In fact, we’re not any more important than any other species. There’s no reason to believe that we’re special and that other life forms won’t exist before and after us and in other parts of the universe.

So you can see why the Pope and the Catholics during the Renaissance would have some problems with these ideas. But for me, who kept nodding my head while I was reading, it confirmed that other smart folks since ancient times have concluded a lot of the same things I have. There is something very comforting in that. I love the idea that we’re all part of this huge universe and we are just tiny particles within it. And that is not a sad thing. It’s a wondrous thing. And without religious superstitions hanging over our heads, we can be free to just enjoy the pleasures of life. Yay!

But I find myself writing this just after we’ve had a death in the family and I am faced with attending a Catholic wake and funeral. My family beliefs are very different from mine, and I will not be discussing On the Nature of Things with them this weekend! So even in 2013, most people don’t want to hear what Lucretius was preaching! And far be it from me to argue with loved ones about the beliefs that comfort them during times of grief. Everyone deals in their own ways.

But personally, I found this quote from Lucretius fan Montaigne very comforting today:

“Go out of this world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.

Our lives borrow from each other. And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life.”

Big Brother: Not Just a Reality Show!

Whelp, folks, I just finished the most depressing book I’ve ever read. It’s called 1984. I kind of want to trap myself in a cage of rats. Thanks, George Orwell.

Most normal people read this thing in high school, but my AP class read Animal Farm instead. I’m sure plenty of teachers are currently slamming their foreheads on blackboards and desks, trying to get their students to understand that Big Brother isn’t just a reality show where people vote each other out of a house.

I wonder what Orwell would think of his lasting effect on pop culture? Political analysts, including my husband, love to bring up Big Brother and DoubleSpeak when debating current events. Usually my eyes glaze over during these conversations. And my ears glazed over as I listened to certain chapters of the audiobook of 1984. When the action stops and Winston starts reading a book about the history of the world and Oceania and political parties and so on, I got really bored. But the rest of the story is completely frightening and dark and bleak. I found myself hoping that Winston and Julia would fight the forces of evil like some dystopian version of Batman and Robin. But, alas, nope. There is no shred of hope at the end of this book.

Considering I spend a lot of time whining in this blog that the so-called classics don’t live up to their reputation, it’s always refreshing to read one that does. This book is masterfully written. It scared the bejesus out of me, imagining a world where people wouldn’t be allowed any creativity or sexuality or freedom of thought. So Orwell succeeded in putting the fear of Big Brother in me.

And now that the weekend is upon us and I need something a bit lighter to read, I can’t wait to read Coreyography: A Memoir. When I spotted this book at the library earlier this week, it reminded me that when I was in the hospital in 2002, the only thing that cheered me up was watching the E! True Hollywood Story of The Coreys. Pop Culture Saves!

The Painted Veil

Photo from moviefloss.com

I love it when a book surprises me, and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil almost shocked me. Reading it was a complete 180 from my traumatic high school Maugham experience. In Brit Lit, I was assigned to write a term paper about Of Human Bondage and Existentialism. The book is 600 pages long and depressing as hell. From what I recall, a pathetic artist falls in love with a waitress who cheats on him a lot. I never finished the book, I am ashamed to say, and I used the word “existentialism” as much as possible in the paper to rack up the required number of pages.

But Maugham wrote dozens of other books and plays, many of them set in the Far East. As I read about him online, he lived quite the life. He served in the British military, spied on Russians, had homosexual affairs and illegitimate children. He was one of the highest paid and most popular authors in the 1930s, and he often landed in hot water for basing his characters on real people. Now that is some US Weekly-worthy stuff that can keep a gal like me interested, Mr. Maugham! 

The Painted Veil, which was made into a movie most recently in 2006, is way shorter and more palatable than OHB. The reason it surprised me, other than being enjoyable to read, is that it’s about a woman who has an affair but doesn’t meet a tragic end the way Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina do. I’ve read too many classic novels where any woman who has sex outside of marriage is totally doomed. It gets old after awhile, right, Tess of the D’ubervilles? 

At first Kitty, the main character in The Painted Veil, seems all too similar to Bovary and Karenina. She’s a spoiled, shallow socialite who is only concerned with landing a rich husband. When her little sister gets engaged before she does, she freaks out and grabs the first marriage proposal that floats her way. That’s how she ends up hitched to Walter, an introverted doctor who ships her off to Hong Kong where he’s going to aid victims of the cholera epidemic. There she meets Townsend, a handsome, charming politician. They have an affair and Townsend swears he’ll stand by Kitty if Walter finds out about the affair.

Does a married guy ever leave his wife for his mistress? You can probably guess the outcome. Kitty ends up staying married to Walter, who takes her to a Chinese province where everyone is dying of cholera. Kitty is terrified of catching it, but instead she ends up seeing what a swell guy Walter is when he cares for sick kids in an orphanage. She realizes that Townsend is a total a-hole who never cared about her. Walter’s good deeds inspire her to help some French nuns take care of the orphans. I won’t tell you the end of the story, but I was impressed that Kitty actually grows a soul and redeems herself instead of dramatically throwing herself in front of a rickshaw. Instead of whining that her life has been ruined by heartbreak, she makes a bad-ass speech at the end about how she doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did:

“I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life a free man and make a better job of it than I have.”

This isn’t the typical Victorian morality tale at all. Could Maugham actually be a feminist?! Hurrah!

And while the aforementioned French nuns talk a lot about sacrifice and God, I don’t think Maugham was preaching a religious message with this book. My favorite character, Waddington, is a drunk British officer with a wicked sense of humor who befriends Kitty while everyone else is busy dying of cholera. I think he is Maugham’s mouthpiece when he goes on a rant about the meaning of life:

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.”

And then he goes on about Taoism and almost sounds like Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars:

“It is the Way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring….Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.”

Kitty: “Does it mean anything?”

Wadddington: “Sometimes, when I’ve had half a dozen whiskies and look at the stars, I think perhaps it does.”

Sounds about right to me, buddy. Also, the book’s title comes from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Photo from PoetryFoundation.org

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

 

Shelley is one of my favorite poets, and I think of him as an optimistic Romantic. This poem seems to say that if  you lift the veil on Life you’ll find some pretty ugly shit. That’s harsh, Percy Shelley! And it’s true that Kitty discovers some bitter truths along the way, but she rises above them to find a moral center and inner peace. That makes this a very progressive novel for a book written in 1925.

What Fresh Hell is This?

Once again, I feel like a slacker. I can assure you that I’ve been reading steadily all spring and summer, but not many of my selections seem to apply to this poor forsaken blog. Oh, and I have a teething baby. You can blame a teething baby for just about anything: sleep deprivation, foul moods, scatterbrained behavior. So thank you, Baby Fitz, for providing the perfect alibi for where I’ve been for the last few months. The whole five folks who ever read this blog will appreciate it, I’m sure. Anyway, I’ve decided that being a new mommy is sort of like being in love for the first time. It’s all-consuming and it’s all you can think or talk about. Soon you find yourself gushing to your friends about how your kid ate sweet potatoes for the first time or stood up by himself for the first time. And then you see your childless friends’ eyes glaze over. Silence. Crickets. And then you remember that anyone who’s not a parent does not give a crap about any of these things. Just like my high school friends got bored to tears hearing about my first love (What was his name again? Oh yeah, it was that Nick guy!), my friends are so over hearing about baby stuff. And I’m sure my readers aren’t interested in baby milestones, either.

On that note, I will get back to using my brian and talking about books for a few precious minutes. By now it’s probably obvious that I gravitate towards anything to do with the 1920’s. Since the Gatsby movie came out, a bunch of historical fiction about Scott and Zelda has followed. The only one I’ve read so far is Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. So much has been written about the Fitzgeralds, and I’ve read a great deal of it, that it’s almost hard to imagine an author having a new perspective. But this novel held my attention from start to finish. It’s been long enough since I’ve read biographies that I’m not sure how close to the truth it stays. In her acknowledgements, Fowler says she “often felt I’d been dropped into a raging argument between what I came to call Team Zelda and Team Scott” as she read through their biographies. The Team Zelda people believe Scott ruined Zelda’s life and use her as an example of how women suffered before feminism. It’s true that she never got to pursue writing, ballet or painting in earnest because Scott didn’t really want her to, but she also had mental issues. Scott’s drinking messed up their lives considerably. It’s hard to tell what Zelda would have been able to do if she’d been more stable and able to get a divorce and establish her own career. There’s no doubt that Scott “borrowed” from her letters and journals in her own writing. Some stories published under his name were written by Zelda. But would we ever have heard of Zelda if she hadn’t been married to Scott? I don’t think she was exceptional enough as a writer or a dancer that she would’ve been famous if not attached to her husband. She would have married a rich guy in Montgomery, Alabama, and would’ve been an eccentric Southern socialite if she had not married Scott.

Z is very sympathetic to Zelda and portrays her as an ever-suffering wife of an alcoholic who spends money extravagantly. Scott cheats on her and tells her not to write novels because he doesn’t want her stuff to compete with his similar material. His friendship with Hemingway causes all sorts of problems in their marriage. I don’t have a difficult time believing Hem was a d-bag who has his own agenda to topple Scott off the top of the literary ladder in the late 20’s. The author thinks he outright made up stories about the Fitzgeralds in A Moveable Feast that persist today as facts about Scott and Zelda. I’ve never thought about that, but she’s probably right. So many famous stories about them are accepted as myths, but no one really knows if they ever danced in the fountain in front of the Plaza. These things make fun stories, but the day-to-day marriage of these two people was a hot mess. And reading their tale always starts off as fun and games, when Scott was making an astonishing amount of money from short stories and they made friends with every famous writer of the day in New York and Paris. But then it all descends into alcoholism and madness and it’s so sad. When I finished this novel I felt angry on Zelda’s behalf. Scott was broke and bitter and very ill at the end of his life and his wife died in a fire in a crappy mental hospital. Where were all of her fancy friends when she really needed them? No one cared about Scott and Zelda at the end of their lives, and it took a couple decades before Scott’s writing gained some respect as his novels were reprinted.

I find it hard to accept the author’s portrayal of Zelda as the suffering wife, though. I know it’s too simple to dismiss her as crazy the way some people did, but she was far from innocent. It takes two to tango, as they say, and she and Scott always knew how to push each other’s buttons. They both cheated on each other. They both spent too much money. They both drank too much. They could have accomplished so much more if they could have gotten themselves together. It’s a shame. But overall Z is a fun piece of historical fiction. Maybe just skip the last few chapters of depressing material?

No less depressing is the life of my beloved Dorothy Parker, but any fan of hers knows that she could always find the humor in her dilemmas. Ellen Meister decided to write a work of fiction with DP as a character. In her acknowledgements of Farewell, Dorothy Parker, she said she realized that a ton of fiction has been written about Jane Austen and other famous authors, but not one novel existed about DP. So she wrote one. Good for her. I share her taste in authors, and by her liberal references to DP’s poems, stories, and reviews, you can tell she knows her stuff. The premise of the novel is a little cheesy, and DP herself might even write a snarky review about it. A movie critic with serious social anxiety finds the ghost of DP in the guest book of the Algonquin Hotel. DP’s ghost helps the protagonist find the courage to fix all the problems in her life. She finally stands up for herself with the ghost of DP standing by drinking gin and offering witty remarks. It’s a heartwarming story in the end, and a quick read.

Light, quick reads seem to be all I can manage these days. Every attempt I make to read a Serious Classic lately has been a total fail. I started listening to the audiobook of War & Peace and got completely frustrated with the endless chapters of play-by-play on the battlefield. The chapters where characters actually have some emotional drama in their lives kept my attention for the first section. Yes, it’s just one of those books on my bucket list, but that one might actually kill me. I’ll make another attempt when I have more brain power. Ditto for the poems of Rilke, which are fascinating and bizarre. I kept reading the same page over and over and barely comprehending a word. But they are pretty. I will keep looking for a classic that my mommy brain can understand right now.

The Sound of Mommy’s Fury

Hi folks. Yes, I’m still alive. But when does mommy have time to blog when she’s working full-time and taking care of a four-month old at home? Try never. But I’m alive, feeling positive and trying to read and write a bit every day to keep my brain functioning.

So a week or two ago I finished Faulker’s The Sound and the Fury, the first classic I picked up since returning to work after maternity leave. My mom loves Southern Gothic Dysfunctional Family Novels and so I’ve always meant to check out good ole Faulkner. And she warned me that this one is the toughest, what with the four different narrators and the stream of consciousness and the whatnot. But I guess I am just a glutton for punishment sometimes.

According to Mom the Literature Teacher, you need to read The Sound and the Fury more than once to really get it. And I believe it. I mostly listened to the book on audio and that made it a bit tougher to comprehend. At least on the page, the author used italics to indicate flashbacks, but not always. Basically, the Compton family is f-ed up, and they have been since the Civil War ended. Benji, one of the brothers, is mentally handicapped. Quentin, another brother, drowns himself because he’s so depressed that his sister became a floozy. Jason, the third brother, is bitter that the bank job he was promised by his sister’s fiance was taken away from him when the sister’s baby turned out to be someone else’s kid. Caddy, the sister, leaves town after she has the baby girl, who is named after Quentin. Mom is totally self-absorbed and checked out emotionally. Dad dies of alcoholism. So, yeah, it’s a feel-good book. Sort of like Marley and Me, except in the South. Uh-huh.

Well, here’s what I’ll say in this bummer of a book’s defense. Reading it feels like a brain exercise, a puzzle to be solved. It fascinated me even though it made me feel sort of dumb. I don’t know how the guy wrote this thing and pasted it all together. I had to read background info in both SparkNotes and Novels for Students to even figure out the plot. And even then, there is a lot left up to interpretation. Reading the characters’ confusing thoughts and memories reminded me that everyone has a different take on family events. If you ask any member of your family what happened on any given day, you will get completely different answers. Whose narration should we trust, if any of them? It’s sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure with a family that really needs a therapist.

These days the family probably would turn to a therapist, talk show host or self-help book. Currently I’m reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, which explains how to use mediation techniques to stay calm with your children. I am having mixed results with its suggestions, but that is another story! It reminded me of S&TF’s stream of consciousness narration when I read, “our thinking is complex, chaotic, unpredictable, and frequently inaccurate, inconsistent, and contradictory.” So, Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn would suggest that the Comptons take a mediation class together to let go of their negative thoughts and their inaccurate memories of family events. That would be a much happier outcome then all of the death, bitterness, yelling, and running away that goes on in Faulkner’s book. Faulkner himself would probably say, “Screw that hippie nonsense” and just go hunting.

In any case, these people had PROBLEMS. I don’t even have the brain power to unravel them right now. All I can tell you is that I found the women in the book, Caddy, her daughter Quentin, and the housekeeper, Dilcey, far more interesting than the men. I would have much rather read their perspectives on their messed up family, but I guess it’s symbolic of women’s lack of power in 1920’s society that we only hear from the men and the omnicient narrator. Okay, fine, I get it, but it still would have been way more fun to read Miss Quentin’s version of how she stole her a-hole Uncle Jason’s money (which was supposed to be hers anyway) and ran away with some guy from the circus. At the end of the book, Miss Q’s antics are supposed to mark the complete downfall of the family. She’s become a floozy just like her mother and feels no remorse about it. But I felt happy for her. She got out of town and hopefully created a new life for herself. At least she showed some backbone. Dilcey is supposed to be the redeeming member of the whole family, the one who keeps everything together with her quiet wisdom and religious faith and cooking skills. Well, screw that, I say. She should have told the whole family they were nuts and left the lunatics to run their own asylum. Being the martyr is overrated.

But finding a classic book where female characters have any sort of optimistic ending is a tough task. I guess my goal for next classic will be to read something that doesn’t make me want to follow in Quentin’s footsteps and drown myself. Maybe I should pick up something for children in honor of my munchkin at home?

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.

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.