A few more literature-in-the-media moments:

Paul Krugman writes in the NYT:

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

I cracked up when I read this -- perhaps because I'd just been grading. It's a good thing he's interpreting the economy and not Yeats.

* * *

More disturbingly, a New Republic article about David Axelrod, Barack Obama's consultant, pitches him as an expert in convincing white voters to accept black candidates. His recipe?

The self-described "keeper of the message" for Obama's presidential bid has taken the lessons he learned from his mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns and made them cohere into something that approaches a unified theory of how to elect a black candidate--emphasizing biography, using third-party authentication, attacking with an unconventional sideways approach, letting voters connect to the candidate by speaking to them directly in ads, and telling voters that supporting the black candidate puts them on the right side of history.

Ouch. I guess I have to give Axelrod credit -- it's tried and true. Really tried and true. For instance, in abolitionist slave narratives. (And as we keep hearing, Obama's memoirs are, as it were, "written by himself.") But it is painful to read that such a formula still seems necessary.

* * *

Stanley Fish, meanwhile, compares Barack Obama to Jesus in a way that only Fish can (or would), via Milton's Paradise Regained. I must admit to being amused.

* * *

And finally, according to a NYT article, some researchers in Massachusetts are using Thoreau's notes to study climate change.

Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.

The profound weirdness of Walden, curiously, goes unmentioned in the article. The researchers also seem surprised that archives could, I don't know, matter.


Rock Hudson's Thoreau-quoting character in Douglas Sirk's 1955 All That Heaven Allows, sitting next to Jane Wyman

Quick notes on three recently-read children's books

Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, some Soup, and a Spool of Thread, 2003.

     In case you were wondering whether a fat working-class girl with a hearing impairment could be a princess, the answer is no.

Shannon Hale, Princess Academy, 2005.

     The Book of Esther meets Heidi. Yes, including Peter and the goats.

Blue Balliett, The Wright 3, 2006.

    Charming, as must be any book in which a major plot point revolves around the box of free books outside Powells. Interesting sensitive touch on the awkwardness of mixed-sex friendships in sixth grade. Alas for the "Bach symphony" moment, however. 

An Open Letter to Sherman Alexie

[I have decided to submit this piece to the Chronicle. I'll re-post it after they reject it.]

[The Chronicle is silent, so here is my letter to Sherman Alexie, once again.]

Dear Sherman Alexie,

I recently read your young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I found it funny and moving. And, of course, disappointing, because I was hoping to find in it a book that was not actively harmful to girls. Such books are rare, so I should not have been surprised that this was not one of them. And yet, I had hoped for better from you.

The main character, Junior, objectifies women left and right. It is clear that, with the exception of his mother and his grandmother, he sees women primarily as decoration. Now, that may be an accurate representation of how this fourteen-year-old boy thinks of women, but it was disappointing that this viewpoint was never undercut. Even his sister, we are assured, is "beautiful." Obviously, you can’t talk about a woman under the age of thirty unless you know how decorative she is!

Looks, girls are so frequently told, are the only important thing about a woman. Although the causes of eating disorders are not fully understood, it is unlikely that hearing this message constantly does anything to discourage them. When we first meet Penelope in the novel, it is her beauty that is emphasized (beauty being defined by whiteness, of course; women of color need not apply).

We later find out that she is bulimic, and while Junior makes some obligatory anti-bulimia comments, Penelope’s mental state is never truly taken seriously, and we never hear a word about Penelope recovering from this serious illness. We do, however, hear a lot about how sexy she is – over and over, both before and after we learn of the bulimia. The overriding message is not that bulimia is serious and harmful, but that the most important thing about women is their sexiness, and that sexy women are bulimic – and, as far as we know, they stay that way.

As you must know, gender is the semi-permeable membrane of the children’s literature market. Because women’s experiences are seen as particular and men’s as universal (men are human, women are Other), books with female protagonists are usually marketed to girls only, while books with male protagonists are marketed to all children. You can therefore expect that The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian will be read by many girls.

Girls are used to identifying with a male point of view; they are asked and indeed required to do it constantly. So should they then identify with this male protagonist and learn to internalize the view that women exist primarily as decoration and/or masturbation fodder? Or the view that bulimia is bad, but that bulimia also correlates with sexiness, and that sexiness is the pinnacle of young female achievement?

Oh, yes, there is one relatively young female character with an element of humanity, Mary. But even she is a cipher; we never hear her speak, but only hear her spoken about (by male characters). And while Junior lauds her as a brilliant, creative woman, we find in her the same tired tropes about creative and intellectual women:

1. A creative woman is at the least maladjusted, but more likely mentally unstable.

2. A woman’s creative ambitions are merely a substitute for her real desire, namely a man.

3. A creative woman will come to an early and gruesome end.

This is why the woman writers who remain canonical and in the public imagination are famously mentally ill and preferably suicidal – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson. This is why when Hollywood makes a “bio” pic about the singularly well-adjusted Jane Austen, the screenwriters must invent a narrative that puts a man at the center of Austen’s life and writing. Mary fits the mold exactly, behaving oddly, “following her dreams” by getting married (not by getting published), and dying young as a direct result of “following her dreams.”

After reading this book, I realized that I could not in good conscience give it to a young woman. I think the stereotypes about women that the novel perpetuates are also harmful to young men, but the novel specifically calls on young women to see themselves as either personalityless projections of male fantasy or doomed by their intelligence and creativity. They get to choose between going up in flames or dying slowly, beautifully, and bulimically. To a young man, this novel says, choose hope. To a young woman, it says, choose your flavor of mental illness and death.

To you I say, choose your words more carefully.

Yours truly,

Natalia Cecire

Some notes on recently read children's books

1. Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring

I read Pope's The Perilous Gard when I was a child. It was a Newbery Honor book, and I liked it a lot, although I don't know how it would hold up to adult re-reading. The Sherwood Ring is entertaining, but not as good, and most of the time Peggy's actions are just an excuse for ghosts to narrate more of their own stories. The sexism in the novel is... very 1958. Appallingly so. At least Pope got the humanities scholar=poverty thing right. She was a humanities scholar herself, and probably knew from experience.

2. Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series

I've read two of the books in this series, and right away I was annoyed by the days-of-the-week conceit. Okay, seven days of the week, seven wacky adventures. This is, of course, no worse than the Harry Potter seven years in school, seven wacky adventures. Still. Seven keys to the kingdom is like six Signs of the Light, and like Will in The Dark Is Rising, Arthur keeps being directed by magic beyond his understanding, which, I am sorry, is irritating.

Nix's cosmology is interesting, filled with pastiche but in a self-aware way. Grim Tuesday reflects slightly (not deeply) on the meaning of pastiche and originality in art. The cosmic and the comic intertwine playfully in this series, which is much different from Sabriel's high seriousness.

Sabriel seemed to be Nix's Oxford School shout-out, deeply tied to land, kingdom, lineage, and law. The Keys to the Kingdom is also in love with the law, but the rightful heir is (thankfully) no longer part of a particular blood line. Arthur is chosen as the rightful heir nearly randomly: asthmatic, he is chosen because he is on the point of dying (or so the chooser thinks). Unlike Sabriel, whose Ancelstierre is clearly a fantastic England, Arthur apparently lives in Australia, slightly in the future (Monday features email; Tuesday has "luminescent e-paper").

I'm always fascinated by Nix's representations of text. In Sabriel, text is lex, an emanation of both reality and law (the two are nearly interchangeable in that series). In The Keys to the Kingdom on the other hand, text is either completely banal, i.e. telegrams, receipts, memoranda, and endless records which are filed and can never be found, or the embodiment of will. Which is to say, there is a legal will, which is a volition in and of itself, and is moreover an actual character in the series.

It's hard to tell the two kinds of text apart; there's a critical moment in Monday in which Arthur and Suzy have to work alone, because a pit of "bibliophages," adders that will annihilate any text-bearing thing, separates him, the Will, and Suzy from Mister Monday's lair. The Will cannot cross because it is, ultimately, just text, "entirely composed of type" (interestingly enough), and in that sense indistinguishable from the label in Arthur's shorts. It also has no real medium and no materiality; in Monday it inhabits the body of a frog, and in Tuesday it takes the form of a woman and a bear. These media are incidental to the actual Will, which can flit about as disembodied type if necessary.

There is, of course, a unique codex, the Compleat Atlas of the House and its Immediate Environs, but in spite of its foreign, hand-written text it resembles nothing so much as Wikipedia, for Arthur always opens it seeking specific answers, and gets them (although, as with Wikipedia, some entries are more helpful than others). The textual world of The Keys to the Kindgom is that of the information age, ephemeral, abundant, both banal and all-controlling.

I need to think more about this approach to text in comparison to that of the Sabriel trilogy.

Dumbledore "is" gay.

From the great swamps of authorial intention:

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

Allen Ginsberg's Howl was deemed too obscene to broadcast.

Whereas, apparently, spending millions on a home and then spending millions more to furnish and renovate it is not obscene.

Lit notes

1. Mark Twain is being produced on Broadway:

Twain returns to Broadway after, ahem, almost a century of death with a “new” play called, oddly enough, “Is He Dead?” A mixture of farce and satire, the comedy centers on a group of artists who plot to drive up the price of a friend’s paintings by faking his demise.

If I'm not mistaken, Shelley Fisher Fishkin unearthed this play from the archive at Cal and had it adapted.

2. Madeleine L'Engle died a few days ago, of natural causes, aged 88.