The brassy, sassy Molly Ivins is battling cancer for the third time. This is sad, folks. This makes me sad.
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January 31, 2006
January 30, 2006
Very sad at Grace today to hear of the death of Wendy Wasserstein. You can listen to an interview with her here.
And an excerpt from an interview with the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
You are known for being nice. Can a woman afford to be too nice?
WASSERSTEIN
I have a great interest in being ladylike, but there is also something to be said for being direct. What I hate about myself and would like to change is that I get hurt very easily. I’m too vulnerable and always have been. I don’t look vulnerable. I always think vulnerable girls should have Pre-Raphaelite hair, weigh two pounds, about whom everybody says, “Oh, she’s so sensitive.†I admire aggressiveness in women. I try to be accommodating and entertaining, and some say that’s what’s wrong with my plays. But I think there are very good things about being a woman that have not been taught to men—not bullshit manners but true graciousness. I think there is real anger in life to be expressed, there is great injustice, but I also think there is dignity. That is interesting, and part of the plays I want to write.
January 24, 2006
silly, that is why we HAVE a glass ceiling!
"THE BOY CRISIS: At Every Level of Education They're Falling Behind, What To Do?" is on the cover of Newsweek this week about the fact that boys are screwing up in school.
Don't worry, you messy little darlings, everything will balance out when you want to go get a job and there's an actual paycheck at stake. You'll catch up--no, make that leap far far ahead--and STILL get to spend the same number of hours a day playing videogames.
Funny--I thought "The Boy Crisis" was that they keep sending you hot, filthy emails and you can't get any work done.
January 20, 2006
weekend reading:
Eryn Loeb, one of our review contributors and a wildly talented writer in her own right, has a blog: it's about time, girl! Don't miss it: smile, sweetheart.
She seems to have just gotten a new printing thingamajig that looks like so much more fun than my computer and email and to do list. I am tempted to show up on her doorstep with cookies & bourbon and see if she'll let me make a zine. Let's stalk her.
January 17, 2006
Finally something relevant shows up
if you google the words James Frey dry drunk. Even from my minor experience of "dry drunk" behavior this was obvious from the page excerpt I read of the thing. I've been waiting for the big obvious article on this phenomenon but until now there wasn't really any mention at all--funny, in the past week of hubbub.
Heather King, recovering alcoholic and author of the memoir Parched told the truth in her book and seems fun, humble, flexible, truthful--all the traits that characterize someone who has healed an addiction for real, and none of which remotely describe James Frey.
Alcoholism is a nondramatic stasis--no real emotional movement happens despite the accident reports--and a dry drunk just continues that stasis. The kind of rage and self-aggrandizement apparent in Frey indicate a dry drunk--further indicating a lack of a real story. That was always the intuitive repulsion for me in even picking up the book.
I was so grateful for King's article at PW today--she describes it so well. Definitely check out the whole thing if you can, but here's an excerpt:
Drama is the movement from narcissism to humility, but Frey is exactly the same at the end of his story—minus the drugs—as he is at the beginning: an insecure braggart without a spark of vitality, gratitude or fun. "A ballsy, bone-deep memoir," Salon.com called it, but for any alcoholic worth his or her salt, throwing up blood, puking on oneself, and committing petty-ass crimes in and of themselves couldn't be bigger yawns. What's gritty is the moment, knowing you're dying, when the world turns on its axis and you realize My way doesn't work. What's ballsy isn't just egomaniacally recounting your misdeeds; it's taking the trouble to find the people you've screwed over, looking them in the eye, and saying you're sorry. What's bone-deep—or might have been if Frey had done it—is figuring out that other people suffer, too, and developing some compassion for them. Oprah speaks of "the redemption of James Frey"—but redeemed from what, and by whom? Sobriety, in my experience, isn't the staged melodrama of sitting in a bar and staring down a drink to prove you've "won"—as Frey does upon leaving rehab. It's the ongoing attempt, knowing in advance you'll fall woefully short, to order your life around honesty, integrity, faith.
January 11, 2006
never could bring myself to read it
Hillary Frey at Salon's broadsheet called out this James Frey BS back in 2005, yo:
In October, I wrote that "A Million Little Pieces" -- which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and is being made into a film -- is nothing more than "the story of a spoiled boy from the suburbs who nearly lost his life, and then cashed in on his mistakes and the misery he caused to so many people around him." I stand by that, although now I'm not even sure that Frey made the mistakes that he's made millions of dollars from.
These stories about the suffering of men get taken so seriously--again, it was amazing to me how some reviews of Girly emphasized the drug bits when it was mostly only some Californian teenagers smoking pot. Oh, so nihilistic! Jesus--I have a freaking goddess in there narrating whole chapters, letting the reader and the characters know that no matter what this universe is oozing with love if you can grab it. (Which you can, most of the time, certainly if you're a rich white American). It gave me a bit of a giggle that some reviewers were so ready to ship Girly off to the Joy Division of the Sylvia Plath Prozac PMDD Wing. Whereas a man vomiting all over an airline & Courtney-loving his way across the US is, if writer is young rich and white and can reasonably put together sentences from his liberal arts education, automatically serious literature.
Frey played to this marketing slot that exists: the suffering of a rich boy from the suburbs. It is real suffering, for sure, that is at the root of these books: my heart broke to read about Dave Eggers's parents' deaths.
Yet it seems to help the book's sales if the suffering is expanded beyond reality.
And JT Leroy aka that socal worker woman from San Francisco who created "him" knew that a boy suffering prostitution at a truck stop is so much more salable than a girl suffering the same.
This is the trick: you get to access your readers' sympathy while still maintaining the more financially and critically valuable narrative of a guy.
Awwww.
January 10, 2006
Grace Book Club: a debut!
Guess what! We're starting a book club. You may know that Oprah was having such a hard time finding substantive, amazing books for hers that she shut it down for a few years. Here at Grace we know that the gorgeous literature is still being written, it's just not quite finding its way to the audience who wants it.
We will recommend three books a month by amazing women writers, and in our own little way help fend off the literary apocalypse, book by book by book.
The Scoop on our brand new GRACE BOOK CLUB:
Throughout 2005, I found that one lifelong-reader friend after another told me about giving up on purchasing contemporary fiction because of the sheer volume of crap at the bookstore. It was too hard to find books to their taste in the mess of celebrity "novels," etc.
How sad is this? There are obviously still so many amazing writers getting their work out, and to me this is an especially remarkable achievement for women literary writers, since the deck is seriously stacked against us. I created the Grace Reading Series to support women writers, but I also want to find ways to bring hand-picked, guaranteed-not-to-suck books to overwhelmed readers.
So a book club is born!
This month, we bring you four titles because we're catching up with some of the great books of last fall. To purchase a copy of any or all, you can click through to amazon from the review pages and help support the Grace Reading Series and women writers!
Happy January,
Elizabeth
January 04, 2006
Guess what--no Finger in the Throat Book Report this week. I guess you'll just have to satisfy yourself with Anne Ishii's Village Voice review of Memoirs of a Geisha. Check her out:
After I got used to the ESL pace of the story, my difficulty in following the dialogue turned into incredulity at the story. To sum up, the movie is an apology for sexism with two essential conflicts: the rags-to-bitches catfight for geisha supremacy, and the ill-fated love between Ziyi Zhang's Sayuri and Ken Watanabe's Chairman (who turns out to have been a pedophile: His initial attraction to Sayuri was when she was the ripe age of nine). Throughout, the film muses on what a geisha is exactly. Apparently, a geisha is not a hooker, but you can only become a geisha by selling your virginity. I guess the thinking is that if you only sell sex once you're . . . not a hooker?
January 02, 2006
january love
I love me some January, it's true. What a relief, eh? Except I hate the crowded cold-virusy gym in January. And also sentences with more than five or six words are hard to come up with the first week of January, for me, at least.
So, this is the week of Anne Ishii, our Publicity Director. She is totally out of the country on a big adventure, but she is so cool and I miss her so much that I googled her and found this interview with Anne about the amazing publishing company, Vertical, whose marketing and publicity she masterminds (and I mean this woman is a mastermind, I can't keep up with her).
Expect great things from her this week--promise--something even more fabulash than a Finger in the Throat Book Report.