Grace Reading Series

I am so happy to have writer Jessica DuLong here breaking it down for us as a guest-blogger. Check her out, thank goddess for the functional subway, and have yourself a merry little weekend:

Last week we saw just how dangerous it can be to let Google replace serious research. After all that talk of penises, perhaps it’s best if we let some scientists weigh in on the questions we began exploring three weeks back: Do women and men actually think differently? And what does that mean for writing?

Insights offered in a few books shed some light.

Take Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women. Here, geneticist Anne Moir and writer David Jessel explain that “virtually every professional scientist and researcher into the subject has concluded the brains of men and women are different.”

It’s a matter of organization, they say. And it begins in the womb. Apparently, six weeks into fetal development, the male fetus produces a hormonal flood that organizes the neural networks into a male pattern. Female fetuses, on the other hand, have no such flood.

Okay, so does the idea that your essential femaleness results from some prenatal drought disturb anyone else, or is it just me? Then again, as Elizabeth points out, it’s interesting to think of female as the default setting, or original template. This kind of turns the whole “made from Adam’s rib” idea on it’s head, eh?

Anyway, it seems that initial hormonal flood isn’t the only factor affecting neural pathways. Deborah Blum’s book Sex On The Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women cites research suggesting that when we deliberately change typical sex-role behavior—say men become more nurturing or women more aggressive—our hormones and brains change, too.

This flexibility makes sense. It’s no secret that behavior affects biology. After all, meditation can lower blood pressure. And cool new research using functional MRI technology has revealed that talk therapy creates identifiable changes in the brain.

Now, to bring us a little closer to the matter of writing, let’s consider Simon Baron-Cohen’s line of reasoning. (No, I’m not deferring to Ali G’s theory of gender. Simon is Sacha’s dad.)

In The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain, the Cambridge professor of psychology and psychiatry argues:

"The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems."

Baron-Cohen defends against huffy feminists by explaining he doesn’t mean “all men” or “all women.” He insists his conclusions refer to statistical majorities.

And he defines his terms this way:

Empathizing is “the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion.”

Systematizing is “the drive to analyze, explore and construct a system. The systemizer intuitively figures out how things work, or extracts the underlying rules that govern the behavior of a system.”

If women are empathizers and men systemizers, could that explain why women get so few bylines in the big-time ooo-ahhh publications?

Hmmm. . .

Okay, ignore for a moment all the complicatedness of humanity. Picture these two categories in their purest forms. Wouldn’t a systemizer write a very different story than an empathizer? And wouldn’t a dyed-in-the-cloth systemizer be more apt to Make Points?

We could stop here and say: Hey, maybe Jill Soloway was right. Maybe Making Points is something men invented.

But doesn’t effectively Making A Point require empathy? Don’t systemizers have to understand their readers’ thinking in order to convince them?

After all, the most powerful storytelling drops us head-first into someone else’s world. Allows us to live a small piece of another’s life.

Ernest Hemingway understood it that way: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the place and how the weather was.”

Empathy is a key component in all this. You’d think that would mean women have a leg up.

Perhaps the crucial difference isn’t empathy at all. What if it’s really all about, gulp, sales?

More on this next week. . .

--JESSICA DULONG

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 11:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More from Jessica DuLong tomorrow. At Christmas, Friday is the NEW THURSDAY.

In other news:

Somebody is not phased by the dark ages. Somebody knows exactly what to do:

Contactmusic.com reports that Björk is currently taking a 10-week course to captain a 30 ton boat, and when completed she will embark on an epic journey with her family.

She pretty much never fails me. She pretty much lights the way. Admit it!
xxoo

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 01:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Emberly and I were having our weekly Grace conversation and I found myself admitting some things about how bad things really seem at the bookstore. People are writing books, they just are not getting very published. Maybe the 20th century was sort of this high point. It feels like the dark ages are settling back in very, very fast. My biggest hope is that Oprah will start her own publishing company, and put serious editors and scholars in place to get these books out there. They are backlogging in desks everywhere and there is a Jimmy Buffett novel by the checkout counter. I have to go get a passable xmas present at a big ass bookstore today in the burbs (somehow I think the larger floor space will make this less awful than that apocalyptic midtown borders I was in last week) and I am thinking about how well some kind of sugary latte also available there will help get me through it.

Notice: the coincidence of the rise of formulaic shitty movies and books with HUGE amounts of sugar available at the sales point of same. I sort of think they are making the bad movies precisely so that we will all buy a giant box of Kit Kat nubbins or a ten-dollar soda the size of an arm to chemically assist ourselves through the experience. Sort of like how it's not the printer but the ink cartridges that make you the cash.

Edward Abbey agrees with Kurt Vonnegut that the dark ages never ended. That this interview is dated 1982 is somehow a little bit heartening. I don't know why.

Emb and I were talking about how much worse publishing has become in the 5 or so years since we left graduate school. I am pissed off when I really look at this, and I am really worried about people going into MFA programs. What is going to happen to you, lovelies? My own students who are applying I am not so worried about, because I feel like I will have generated enough--something--to create enough of a nook for their work later on if all mainstream publishing has space for at ALL from women by then is novels about fake tits--putting them in, taking them out, how big is too big? Saline or silicone? (Remember circa 1998 when Allure magazine focusing so much on plastic surgery seemed super disgusting? Now it's like Bryn Mawr or something. It's like Emily Dickinson compared to the rest of the crap hurled at us all day long. Edna fucking O'Brien wrote an article for them last year.) But what about people who are just looking at a model of a writer's life from ten or twenty years ago: go to MFA school, write book, survive, maintain soul and possibly have health insurance through some sort of teaching job. I'm not sure that model is going to work. Maybe there is hope in a legion of stressed out angry writers? Oh jeez. But maybe.

I am thinking more about abbeys, about how the Christians so violently took over the stories and the money of local cultures who had sexier, useful, well-loved, and gender-balanced myths, spirituality, and economics. When the Christians changed the slutty goddesses into saints and removed the right of women to own property, the women sometimes took off for abbeys not because they were so in love with JC but to protect their families' assets--they could protect themselves and not have to turn everything over to the state, oops, I mean church silly me. Small businesses--the new abbeys maybe. But without nuns.

Right now those same fucking good old boys are making a desperate grab for all the stories, wanting to maintain their hold on the stories, the money, the sex lives and intuition of the whole planet.

The true stories sort of disappear as people get addicted to porn and sugar and whatever, crystal meth (can you tell I watched tv last night?). But the need for those stories that sustain us never disappears, and not everyone will go crazy and destroy themselves, and those people need stories passed down, and new stories created, that breathe the life back into life.

Start working on your unicorn tapestries, girls, and merry fucking christmas.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 03:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Our second weekly entry on the questions of difference between men's and women's writing and how that might impact bylines, from the delightful and formidable JESSICA DULONG:

So, last week I set myself up quite nicely, didn’t I? (“Truth is, I'm not convinced blind admissions would actually solve the problem,” I wrote.) That little cliffhanger suggested I would, herewith, begin to reveal the REAL reason so few women’s bylines appear in the big-time, ooo-ahhh magazines (New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic, etc.).

I was meaning to regale you with all measure of penetrating truths on the topic. Really I was.

But I got diverted.

Scene One: Guilt.

I know my hunch about the notion that “a point is something men invented” merits further study. No doubt plenty of feminist psychology texts have delved deeply into the topic. I could learn a lot from them. I wonder what they are.

Scene Two: Crash course.

Go to Google. Type in the phrase ‘women think.’

Scene Three: Holy shit.

The juxtaposition of the words ‘women’ and ‘think’ reveals/provokes more than I ever could have imagined.

The number-one result, I kid you not, is “What Women Think About Male Masturbation.” Turns out male masturbation is “a fact of life,” and most modern women “take it in stride,” according to JackinWorld, the Ultimate Male Masturbation Resource.

Result number two, meanwhile, offers the findings of a survey of 200 women “about their favorite topic . . . penis size.”

Result number three informs us, “Men are like mascara; they usually run at the first sign of emotion.”

Is this all that ‘women think’?

Okay. Maybe it’s wrong to let Google search-engine results signify some kind of zeitgeist. Perhaps I should presume some clever programmer had his/her hand in this and is trying to Make A Point. [For proof of this particular theory, try typing in the word ‘failure’.] But I have to admit, this has me worried.

Finally, with result number four, we’re actually getting somewhere.

It seems “research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white.”
I kind of like this color-coded theory of mental processing.

Human evolution, it appears, has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior.

Researchers say these findings could help explain why men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing like math while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language.

Integrating and assimilating information. Isn’t that how effective writing comes to be? And if women are biologically better at this, wouldn’t that garner them more bylines if the playing field were even? I wonder, does “localized processing” light up some particular part of the brain when a man Makes A Point? Hmmm . . .

Okay, let's skip over the next few search results, including musings on why “so many women think rape is a woman’s fault” and what “women think about men wearing their panties.”

The tenth entry, the last on the page, is the one that has me trembling. This anonymous Craig’s List “Missed Connection” post offers a Dear Diary comparison between Girl and Boy. Girl’s diary recounts a slew of misread signals and hurt feelings that culminates with her weeping, post sex, about how the relationship’s in turmoil. Meanwhile Boy’s entry about the same day reads: “Today the Leafs lost. At least I got laid.”

How quaint. Boys are simple brutes while girls are overcomplicated, oversensitive ones.

Is this the dangerous water I’m treading by even positing that differences in women’s and men’s brains might be at the root of byline disparity? Is Mary Wollstonecraft going to take away my membership card?

"I am compelled to think that there is some thing in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm eulogiums—I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers." —Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, September 1796).

--JESSICA DULONG

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 12:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nine of my advanced students from my writing workshops are reading tonight! Please join us:

We'll gather at 7:30 pm and the readings will start promptly at 8pm

Each writer will read a sample of their work for about 5 minutes each

FREE!

at Lolita Bar, 266 Broome St. at Allen
Take the F/JMZ to Delancey

We'll have snacks I think. And these writers are amazing, not to miss!

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 02:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Girly and I are having a busy week. You should go buy her at amazon now! She's totally available, she's there for you honey.

Yesterday was her big release day--I'm sort of extending that into next week, with a very pretty announcement to go out soon. I sort of crashed mid-afternoon yesterday and hid from the world a bit--I just couldn't quite move or get anything done so I watched the also newbornly- released (same date as Girly!) 40 Year Old Virgin on dvd.

I watched the whole commentary track! It's amazing and filthy and gorgeous.

I know that watching the commentary track on the precise release date is so geeky of me, but I have been in love with Seth Rogen since I had this really nice mellow sweet boyfriend dream about him after I first watched Freaks and Geeks last year. When you get past the Daniel Desario cheekbones on F&G you really can start to see that Seth is actually so cute, but it's really that he's fucking hilarious in a smart & substantive vein that is what you would sort of like to have around the house in a regular basis as you're running around trying to make it a slightly more Sleater Kinney planet in the current lobotomized publishing world. And he's Canadian, which I am starting to think is a good thing in a guy.

Seth Rogen is major, just watch. I know he's too young for me, I know that. But I think my little crush is like Jane Pratt's eighties crush on Keanu Reeves: she knew.

Anyway, time to exit my fantasy world that I am sharing with you here and get back to my very nonfantasy email planet.

Happy Girly Holidays, love Elizabeth

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 02:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Maureen McHugh, one of Miss Grace's November recommendations, has been nominated for The Story Prize. We say Go her!.

I am feeling under the weather today, a bit cranky, not my usual zen California self. You know, I never even set foot in this state until I was 30, but there was so little adjustment needed to live in the Bay Area. I mean, really. We have these bottle brush trees here that look like something out of Walt Disney; they drop saffron threads all over the sidewalk. All the old hippies look like Santa. No rust around the wheels of the cars. I walk out of my place, down the sidewalk, and pick up a sliced ready-to-eat mango. i walk past a french bakery, butcher shop, chocolate shop, and an Asian tapas bar to get there. Why am I so cranky?

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 12:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So I went to Macy's yesterday to try on bridesmaid dresses and I was really aware of the apocalypse. It took me 20 minutes to get from the front door to the bridal salon, the store so crowded with holiday shoppers you could barely move. I was on deadline for a dress so it had to be done, but seriously I do not understand why people cram themselves into retail space like that. You can buy a bridesmaid dress online without trying it on but that is a big old accident waiting to happen, don't you think? But you can buy gloves online or a tie or a dvd player or whatever and have that shit mailed to someone, no problem.

The bridal salon, satanically JUST PAST the famous intense jam-packed Santaland where David Sedaris got his big start (I'm looking at that as a bit of subterfuge style birth control for young financees all giddy with reproductive fantasies) was actually heaven compared to the rest of the store. Totally empty. Quiet. The salesgirl was sweet, got me dresses and left me alone, and looked a little like she was a goth in her spare time.

She pointed out the large and fabulash "mother-of-the-bride" section. There was this one great dress in 2 different animal prints with details that were sort of like hairbeads hanging off of shoelaces all over the place, imagine: what Stevie Nicks made on crafts day at summercamp. Halter, thin nylon, low- and high-cut. That is the stepmother of the bride dress, the third-wife dress to show off the lipo. They think of everything don't they.

My friends are getting married in Seattle and they are so worth going to Macy's for. They have a blog about the weirdness of weddingness that is so funny. Also, one of my favorite guy writers is going to be a groomsman so that is very cool. Brooklyn represents.

Anyway: I do manage to hide in Brooklyn most of the time, this is where everything is for me. Manhattan feels so weird, like the shells of things are still there but the content has been replaced by something Dick Cheney created to make himself feel safer and happier. The books at the Borders I stopped in all LOOKED like books but they were such utter crap that I had a new epiphany about what I'm up against as a reader, nevermind as a writer (THAT part I can take care of, actually).

Further evidence of apocalypse sneaking up on us so quietly: I went out on the Lower East Side with an old friend I haven't seen in 5 years this weekend. She's an amazing visual artist in LA and she was a comp lit major at Yale and she has stopped reading contemporary fiction because it is such utter crap. That wasn't true 5 years ago. Somehow hearing this from her made me see that this pot of water all of us are slowly being boiled in is really much more toasty than it was just a brief time ago.

It's like someone took a magnet and erased thought and replaced it with discussions of cell phone plans and nosejobs and shitty dumb parties and VH1 shows. I am a little bit grouchy here, no? Time to get out of New York for a bit. I may be going to Chicago in January for a writing spell so that is VERY exciting, my friends. xoxo

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 12:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hey everybody, Elizabeth here. Jessica DuLong, one of our favorite freelance writers and a Grace contributor, will be guest-blogging on Thursdays in December. She has a perspective on the state of women journalists that I have always found very valuable. Check her bad self out:

Back in October I got the chance to sit down with Jill Soloway, the Grace Reading Series debut author. I couldn't wait to ask about her remark in the introduction of Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants that maybe "making a point" is something men invented.

Instead of making a point, she'd written, maybe her introduction offered "something roundishly holistic that adds up to more of a whoaaaahh, less pointy and more warm, funny, and accepting, like vaginas themselves."

I wanted to know more. Was she just trying for a laugh, or did she really think there's a difference between the way men and women think-and write?

I've been pondering this question for some time, actually. And Soloway's suggestion fed my long-stewing notions about the real reason so few women get published in the big-time, ooo-ahhh magazines: New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic, etc.

These seeds of inquiry were planted three years ago at a conference panel I attended, "Telling and Selling the Narrative Nonfiction Story." Editors representing each of the aforementioned publications held court in a hotel meeting room full of hungry freelancers. Every seat was taken. The aisles were clogged and the walls were lined with writers clamoring to learn the secrets of breaking in.

The panel proceeded as you might expect. Editors painted a grim picture of how unlikely it is for any not-yet-established writer to land a story in their publications. Journalists, meanwhile, scribbled frantically to capture every hint that might make them the lucky exception.

Then, a question from the audience during the Q & A stopped everything. A woman stepped up to the microphone. I paraphrase:

"You'll notice the people in this room," she began, indicating the mostly female audience, "and the makeup of the panel." Mostly men, of course. "Why, with all these professionals eager to write for you, do your magazines publish so few stories by women?"

I was floored by the response: dumbstruck silence.

Here was a panel of the country's top editors and they just halted. This wasn't the hush that happens after someone blurts out some racist comment and all the white people in the room shift in uncomfortably their chairs. This was pure bewilderment.

One editor just shook his head: "I don't know." That was it.

And I believe him. He didn't know. What worries me is that it seemed like the question had never before occurred to him.

I hope that increased public awareness of the stark statistics mean these editors wouldn't be rendered speechless by the same question today. I'd like to think it's an issue they've pondered, maybe even discussed in an editorial meeting.

Perhaps they've read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and know that after screens were erected to hide auditioning musicians, the number of women in the top U.S. orchestras increased fivefold. Maybe they're even instituting their own screens for the editorial selection process.

Truth is, I'm not convinced blind admissions would actually solve the problem.

--JESSICA DULONG

Tune in next Thursday for Part 2!

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 01:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you make a to-do list and then cross things off that list, you will feel better. It's a list-masy time of year after all. But if you look at lists of books to buy for Christmas and do the math, as Moorish Girl has done, then you will weep into your sleeve and search for a tissue on which to delicately blow your horn. I was happy to see Louise Erdrich's The Painted Drum on both the New York Times and L.A. Times lists of notable books of the year, and was dancing in the Bavarian clogs, which I purchased during my snow-filled days as an undergraduate at Colby College, to see Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black on the New York Times list. (Elizabeth, you must read Ms. Mantel, darling, she is deep, dark, and hot, too.)
I am headed to lend my services to a bookstore this afternoon and plan to make my own list of books to read and to give as presents, or to give as presents and then ask to borrow to read. And if my list happens to be made up 100% of women of my own gender, then hells bells, call me Myrtle and slap a cookie down on the counter for me.

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 12:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hey everybody. Well we had quite a time at Grace last week--Beth and Rachel were amazing, and they withstood the ultimate mercury retrograde moment at a reading series and shone all the brighter for it. Jessa was in the house and everyone was psyched to see her. Thanks to everyone who came out and had free pizza and beer and got yelled at by Ray and taken great care of by everyone else at Mo's in the before and after Ray moments.

I recuperated from last week's craziness this weekend, and answered questions from Anne about which famous men I think are hottest. Because I am Deep Dark and HOT like that. Deeeeeeep. "Moody, gothic" women writers=just like the rest of us. At the top of my list were Seth Rogen and Russell Simmons, and Anne scrunched up her face and said, "Um, the guy with the curly hair and the shorts?" thinking I meant, yeah, Richard Simmons. It's always good if you and your girlfriends like different kinds of guys, no?

Anne is working hard on the new F.I.T.T. (and some other exciting suprise projects) which should be here soon. I am working hard on getting another round of Girly printed up and revamping the other website and am not going to be blogging much but Emberly will be bringing you some of her dry California sunshine soon.

I leave you with this: more love from Chicago: Tess sends along this article from the Sun Times that points out how women are topping the bestseller list---they provide a list of books by women that have ruled the NYT Bestseller list this past year. What I find fascinating is that none of it is literary fiction (the only one you'd argue about is The Historian but I think it's hard to suggest that is much beyond a commercial thriller, although it was nice to read a thriller with lovely solid sentences in it) AND none of it is chick lit. What does this tell us? Hmmmmm. I will put my moody gothic brain to work and see what I come up with.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 09:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)