A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style

Just for funsies, I picked up Tim Gunn's A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style when I forgot to take my book to work one day. It seems like there are a whole new slew of "Guides to Style" out there begging the question: If one has neither taste nor style, can they acquire it through a book? I think no, but, it's an amusing prospect.

Gunn's book is delightful when it is clearly written by Gunn - I liked the bit at the beginning where he describes his own style journey, largely related to his career path. His extravagant vocabulary is as marvelous in print as it is on Project Runway - he's all ne plus ultra, and chacon á son goût. His co-writer, (look for that tiny, tiny print on the cover) Kate Moloney seems to take over shortly thereafter. I find it quite hard to believe that Gunn's advise is to wear a "whimsical" headband while washing the face.

The Gift, part 1

The Gift was originally published in 1979 by Lewis Hyde under the title The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Now it's called The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. His definition of "erotic" perhaps confused. Anywho, the book's highly recommended by folks like Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood. And in Amazon, most of the comments read something like, "life-changing".

I recently read Atwood's Payback, a concise book that defines debt, including literary and cultural analysis that's so unbelievably spot-on you really can't help but read the book and say, "Yes, that's what debt is all about." In comparison, Hyde's book is a rambles along with a non-sense definition of "gift". But who doesn't look unorganized compared to Atwood?

One of the main reasons I found (part one of) The Gift so frustrating is because my definition and his of a gift are wildly different. My definition is simple - a gift is something that is given, and nothing is expected in return. True gifts are rare. His definition is that a gift is something that creates a bond between the giver and the receiver, and that a gift must be kept in motion. He also seems to believe in the "gift" of talent (like a muse); I don't really believe in that. To me, people have potential that they do or they don't take advantage of.

In fact, Hyde's definition of a "gift" sounds oddly familiar to a "debt." His folk-tale and "primitive" society examples of gift economies do little more than attempt to elevate the idea of the "noble savage" and belittle people in impoverished communities as better off for being removed from the capitalist system. Don't get me started on what he has to say about "publish or perish."

Right now I'm kind of skimming part 2 for worthwhile information. The book's not completely terrible, there are a few interesting bits. It caused me to put a little more thought into defining gift for myself, and I think it's quite clear that it was influential to Atwood in her writing of Payback. If you have read it, I'd be very interested to hear what you think!

Animals in Translation

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior is written by Temple Grandin (and Catherine Johnson) a woman who has autism.

Grandin's theory is that autistic persons and animals have a lot in common because they both think non-verbally. Both think, she writes, in a series of images. When I first started reading the book it kind of blew my mind because I'd never really thought that people might think in different ways. I had recently seen Iris, about writer Iris Murdoch, who loses her considerable language skills through autism. At the time, I couldn't imagine anything worse than loosing language, but I have more recently broadened my opinion.

Grandin has created a useful career in which she visits farms to make sure animals (that we eat) are being treated humanely. She has the unique ability to look at the farms and slaughterhouses from, for example, a cow's point of view, and identify areas that would be confusing or terrifying to the animals.

A couple aspects of the book I didn't like - Grandin refers to two types of people: Autistic people and "normal" people. Every "normal" grated my brain - I wish she hadn't used it that way. Also, she really beats a point into the ground. She's quite repetitive.

It's a fascinating book that taught me a lot about both animals and autistic folks. She brings up some important questions - like, how can we not just provide animals (that we'll eat, which, let's face it, is an industry that's not going anywhere) with an ok death and an ok life, but actually like, a pleasant, meaningful life.

The Whitney Woman

The Whitney Women and the Museum they Made is by the granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Flora Miller Biddle.

I'm not able to finish the book, for now, at least. Biddle's writing is uneven and the book has a chaotic organization that's driving me a bit crazy. The first part is about the elder Whitney's childhood - a sort of unbearable poor-little-rich-girl story interspersed with how the art word has changed so much that you could hardly run a museum they way they did back in the glory days. Yes, a whole new team of wealth and privilege has come in - it breaks the heart, it really does.

Here's a passage:

...our parents were neither pretentious nor ostentatious. They gave us few material things, except for what we needed to learn what they deemed important - horses, shotguns, tennis racquets, classic books, fishing rods, bicycles - but even these came only for Christmas or birthdays. Our monthly allowances were minuscule. Movie houses and movies were rarely allowed (too germ-filled and exciting, respectively) - no candy either, and, once in a very great while, an ice cream cone. Our lives were protected, monitored, and structured. We had no fabricated entertainment. We learned early to amuse ourselves.

I might come back to this book later, because I'd like to learn more about how the museum was started, but, alas, it's not a page-turner. I definitely wouldn't suggest it for casual reading.

Undead and Unread

I've been striking out with books a lot recently. I think there were no less than three books this month that didn't make the cut. And, believe me, I have a fairly high tolerance.

I made it to page 79 before I decided Undead and Unemployed by Mary Janice Davidson was simply too insulting to my intelligence to continue. It's about a woman who's recently become the queen of vampires somehow. I guess it's the second book in a series. It could have used one of those Sweet Valley Highesque introductions that brings all readers up to speed.

In a genre where the bar for engaging writing is already extremely low, Davidson's style is something like a 16 year old practicing stream-of-consciousness. The vampire, for example, is beyond excited to get a job in a mall, where she can be surrounded by shoes.

Maps and Legends

I read Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends for my book club. I'm a big Chabon fan so I was quite sure I'd like it. By rather amazing coincidence, he was speaking at the uni where I work so I got to see him read just a few weeks before we met to discuss. That was a real treat.

Maps and Legends is a collection of essays/book reviews. For the most part, it's a defense of genre writing. Chabon rights about how, with some exceptions, genre writing (sci-fi, fantasy, etc) is not considered high literature. This is expressed on the best-seller lists and in the book stores, where there's a "literature" section, and then all those "other" sections. As a writer and a reader, Chabon's sensitive to that literal and figurative delegation to the "other". It is just those books that walk on the boundaries (he argues) that make for the most interesting stories anyway.

I'm a big believer that, at most, we should have a fiction and a non-fiction section in our book stores and libraries (but I'm leaning toward alphabetical by author across the board) so I really loved seeing my opinion so neatly matched with one of my favorite writers. Reading Maps and Legends was a lot like watching a Woody Allen film - it made me feel really smart when I got all his literary references (I'm a terrible elitist at heart, it's true).

What I didn't like about the book was how, in seeking to elevate genre stories, he found it necessary to denigrate a lot of contemporary fiction, which I also happen to enjoy. He also revealed something else that I won't go into for fear of ruining the book for you. However... at our book club we talked about how this book is so ... specialized, aggravating, elitist ... that there are basically no people that we'd recommend it to. For me, there were two people, and I've already told them. But, I'll leave you with one of the lovely bits, to spark your interest:

In the meantime, I had begun to publish stories of my own, stories, in some cases, about fathers who disappointed their sons. The fathers in these stories were golem-fathers. I wove alphabetical spells around them, and breathed life into them, and they got up and walked out into the world and caused trouble and embarrassment for the small man of the flesh and blood in whose image they had been cast. Or maybe it was I who was the golem, my father's goldem, animated by the enchantment of the narratives and lies, then rising up until I posed a danger to him and all the unlikely things that he, strangely enough, believed in.

Kitchen

Only read about 50 pages of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto before I gave up on it. It's one of those interminably dull books sort of in the style of Never Let Me Go. These days if something even slightly reminds me of that book I can barely stand it.

Despite being about a Japanese transvestite that's suddenly murdered, I found Kitchen extremely boring. Yoshimoto's prose is sparse, to say the least.

Like Life

Like Life is a book of short stories by Lorrie Moore - a friend introduced me to her work a few years ago with her book, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore is a very funny and poetic writer. Her short stories remind me of M. Atwood (she's that good!)

In one story, the main character is a poet who writes poems about "whores" - Moore intersperses the story with poems:

They come down to the truckers
or the truckers go up
to the rooms with the curtains pell-mell.
They truck down for the fuckers
or else they fuck up
in the Pepsi Have a Pepsi Hotel.

Later she writes:

She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them. She should live where there were trees. She should live where there were birds. No bird, no tree had ever made her unhappy.

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf caught my eye in the library. I read the first 150 pages before I admitted to myself that it was going nowhere. It's hard for me to quit on a book.

Kahf's novel is about a woman who grows up in a small Muslim community in Indiana. I just love reading a book about a place I know, but it really read like the author had little familiarity with Indiana. The characters in the book are Islamic fundamentalists who run into oppression both mild and extreme in Indiana (and the US). Maybe it's because I grew up there, but the Indiana bits really stuck out for me as clumsy and a bit hackneyed. For a book about, essentially, diaspora, the sense of place was simply not real for me.

The book kind of rambles along, occasionally switching POV and timeframe rather inexplicably. I started skimming ahead and saw that the main character went through a couple of dramatic (and cliched) changes until, it appeared, she finally became a racecar driver in the Indy 500?

I was also disappointed because some rituals of culture the characters express were unfamiliar to me and there was little explanation - I know the book's not meant to be a 101-Introduction to Islam, but I think greater detail would have enhanced the story.

Michael Chabon & Amazon Fail

By amazing coincidence, Michael Chabon was speaking at Northwestern tonight - just two weeks before our book club for Maps and Legends! Naturally I told everyone I arranged it personally, and they all believed me for approximately 30 seconds on accounta the previous surprise of free books. Ha ha!

He read a very long essay about his love of Edgar Allen Poe, including his childhood fantasy that he was, in fact, the reincarnation of Poe. It was the perfect reading for me because he spoke at length about the themes in Maps and Legends. He has a rather elegant allegory for how literature and reading and writing are geographical - I won't try to summarize that - and his love for what we call genre fiction today - Poe being a perfect example.

I wish he had spoken more extemporaneously rather than reading from his script - alas, few great writers are great readers, but, it was very exciting to see him and to be part of the audience.

It's also quite a coincidence that I saw him today, as all this Amazon shit is hitting the fan. If you ask me, Amazon's practicing a particularly nasty brand of censorship based on genre profiling - namely anything "they" (but who are they?) consider GLBT, erotic or romantic, with some pretty shocking inclusions like Lady Chatterly's Lover and, one of my personal faves, Bastard Out of Carolina. (Oh no they didn't!) Amazon is hiding the books' true sales rank, thus making it less likely they'll appear in searches.

After the shitstorm of controversy, especially on the blogs and apparently Twitter (thus possibly proving that Twitter might be worthwhile), Amazon is claiming that the whole thing is a "glitch", which sounds like total bullshit to me. But, why are they doing this? Supposedly they're not run by religious fundamentalists, which this whole things reeks of - then why?

Anywho, I'm doing a bit of Amazon searching myself to see what I find. So far:

• a search for "homosexuality" - first result? A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality O.M.G.
  
• Lady Chatterley's Lover is currently ranked 33,508 - D.H. Lawrence hasn't had this much press since...
  
• A biography of Ellen Degeneres by Lisa Iannucci does not have a ranking
  

Body of Evidence

Patricia Cornwell first popped on my radar in 2002ish when I saw her on cable tv talking about her book, Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper -- Case Closed. It caught my attention because she was talking about how everybody has this kind of fascination with Jack the Ripper, turning him into legend, while the people he killed are practically forgotten in the gory, bloody footnotes. Then she proceeded to delve right into those details. I changed the channel.

A few years later I was taking a class on 19th & 20th c. British Art and studying an artist named Walter Sickert when I remembered Cornwell. Sickert, like most Londonerns, was fascinated with Jack the Ripper and painting a series sort of based on them. Sickert's the person Cornwell decided was Jack the Ripper. My professor was sort of loathe to even acknowledge this, but anywho said her conclusion is largely disputed, at least by art historians.

What was rather interesting to me, just having had read The Big Sleep, was how influential that book was the contemporary detective novel. And now I've just started reading Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon, which is so far a sort of defense of "genre" writing, or, in this case, the murder mystery/detective novel, and Cornwell's book def. fits the description of the very "entertainment" (read: not high-literature) book that Chabon is defending. Maybe. I'm only on like page 20.

Anyway, just to prove how low-brow and Chandler-like it is, I'll leave you with this quote from Body of Evidence, which was at once my favorite bit and the most ridiculous:

[...] I stared out at the day, and never had the colors been so bright or the sun shone so magnificently on the tiny offshore island of Key West. I would buy a condo where Mark and I would make love for the rest of our lives. I would ride a bicycle for the first time since I was a child, take up tennis again, and quit smoking. [...] I would watch sunlight dance of the sea and say prayers to a woman named Beryl Madison whose terrible death had given new meaning to my life and taught me to love again.

and what now?

I'm pretty excited about this book: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It's made quite a little stir in the book community, and I just love it when books are in the news. The book is apparently Jane Austin's original text with the added story line of zombies overtaking Elizabeth Bennett's village. The authors are actually listed as Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has just about the coolest cover illustration I've ever seen. While I'm not really a fan of either Jane Austin or the zombie genre, something in me really wants to read this...

The Big Sleep

The book club wanted to read a "hardboiled" detective novel, so we settled on The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's first Philip Marlow novel, published in 1939. It was fun reading such a great example of the genre, even though the language seems a little corny or cliched today.

At first I thought I wasn't going to be able to make it through, Chandler's book is chock-full of adjectives and I prefer a tighter prose. Chandler never met an adjective he didn't like. Or a simile. Here's a two-fer: The purring voice as now as false as an usherette's eyelashes and as slippery as a watermelon seed.
It must have been exciting, we remarked at book club, to read this stuff for the first time, when the genre was new.

She blew a soft gray smoke ring and poked her finger through. It came to pieces in frail wisps. She spoke smoothly, indifferently. "In his early forties, I should judge. Medium height, fattish. Would weigh about a hundred and sixty pounds. Fat face, Charlie Chan moustache, thick soft neck. Soft all over. Well dressed, goes without a hat, affects a knowledge of antiques and hasn't any. Oh yes. His left eye is glass.

Now, that's hilarious. And marvelous, isn't it?

I've read a lot of Dashiell Hammett, who I like because his books are quite amusing and he lived in San Francisco just a few blocks from our apartment. I like how Nick and Norah always referred to their apartment building by it's name, and M and I tried to get people to say, "Let's go over to the Warrington for a drink" but it never really caught on. I suppose The Big Sleep should be read by Angelinos just like I read Hammett in SF. When it comes to noir, I'd say Chandler really comes in and kills it in a way that Hammett doesn't. Even though Chandler's book is fairly convoluted, with one exception it makes sense, and his dialogue!

"My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you."

I snicked a match on my thumbnail and for once it lit. I puffed smoke into the air and waited.

"I loath masterful men." she said. "I simply loathe them."

"Just what is it you're afraid of, Mrs. Regan?"

Yellow

I sorta wrote my art history master's thesis on the color yellow, so, naturally my interest is a little piqued when I hear about similar studies. I swear I read a different description of this book when I ordered it... it wasn't anything like I thought it would be, but, who cares? Sometimes we stumble onto things.

The book is called (what else?) Yellow, by Janni Yisman, a British writer (who went to the Slade, no less). Yisman and I clearly share some common ground on color theory, and particularly yellow color theory, but the book just minimally touches on those subjects. It's about an agoraphobic (hey, another shared interest!) and work-from-home (naturally) aromatherapist who's suspicious of the guy she's dating.

Without going into the details of the plot, I'll say that Visman's book is quite interesting for the way she very sparingly writes about rather luscious things like scents, touch, peeling and eating, for example, an orange. For example:

Ylang-ylang for shock.
Tangerine for emotional emptiness.
Rosemary for disorientation.
The oils are effective. I am neither languid with despair nor rigid with anger.

She has an ascetic style:

On my left foot, I have a red shoe. On the right I have a blue. The cat is watching me look at my feet.

When I first started reading it, I thought, Oh dear god, not more of the soi-disant 'prose stylings'! I was afraid I'd fallen into another Never Let Me Go, although it's not nearly as agonizing as that. In fact it's hardly agonizing at all! Now, what kind of recommendation is that?

If someone in the continental US wants to read it, I will gladly mail it to you!

Your Disgusting Head

I've been sick lately, and unable to think about much less than my sinus-infected, puss-filled head (ugh) - so, to distract me, I pulled out my copy of Your Disgusting Head, ostensibly by Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey, but really by Dave Eggers et McSweeney's crew.

Starting with the rather gorgeous cover design (Acclaimed worldwide and translated into several languages, including Texan), it's full of hilarious text and amusing illustrations. Chapters like Where Does all the Snot Come From and How to Choose the Best Tongue for You (subheading: Caring for Your New Tongue) are the sort of things you'll find inside, hopefully, effectively distracting you from your own disgusting head for a while.

The History of Love

I read The History of Love a few years ago, but too quickly, and was confused at the end. I suggested it for my book club and reread the book, taking my time, drawing a little family tree on the back page as if it were a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (someone in book club actually compared it to Garcia Marquez).

Nicole Krauss's novel is quite beautiful; her writing style is elegant and her characters are richly developed. The History of Love has several narratives, and two stories that, I don't think I'll ruin it by telling you, become entwined. Here's a favorite passage:

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were time in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a state of mutual disgust. I used to let the door slam in people's faces. I farted where I wanted to fart. I accused cashiers of cheating me out of a penny, while holding the penny in my hand. And then one day I realized I was on my way to being the sort of schmuck who poisons pigeons. People crossed the street to avoid me. I was a human cancer. And to be honest: I wasn't really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn't know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself: It's not to late.

Krauss does some interesting things with text which I just love. She really reminds you that you're reading a story, on paper - she somehow make the act of turning the page very exciting. It feels very inclusive and personal to read such a book.

A lot of this hot crop of young writers have a similar style, most notably Krauss's husband, one Jonathan Safran Foer, who, if you've read his books, you'll assume the two sat side by side at their computers, sharing the same outline*. But, others are doing marvelous things too: Dave Eggers, Marisha Pessl & Joe Meno. I spend a fair amount of time bitterly wishing *I* were hobnobbing a various writers' wooded retreats and publishing multiple novels before reaching the age of 35. Anywho, they basically drive me insane with envy. But I do think these folks (don't forget Bender, Freudenberger, Z. Smith...) are making major contributions to the literary cannon.

* Apparently they did not read each others novels before they were finished.

Give Aways!

I like that old adage: one person's trash is another person's treasure. Must be why I like thrift stores and garage sales so much!

So, these weren't my favorite books, but I ain't gonna judge you if you want to read them! If anyone wants All Is Vanity or Kiss My Tiara, leave your email address in comments - I'll get your real address and mail it to you!

No Fond Return of Love

No Fond Return of Love, by Barbara Pym, is something of an ensemble story. As the title implies, hardly anyone's love is fondly returned. There were some standout moments in this book, but overall it did not excite me the way Excellent Women did.

The main character, Dulcie Mainwaring, is similar to other Pym heroines - perpetually single, seemingly selfless, a good friend. But her character really frustrated me because she cast herself as an observer in her own life. Writes Pym:

It seemed - though she did not say this to Viola - so much safer and comfortable in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with an air of detachment as if one were watching a film or play.

Although Dulcie's clearly fascinated by a man she meets, instead of acknowledging her feelings, she practically stalks him. She invites him and a few other folks and her young niece, Laurel, to dinner:

Laurel looked at the two women scornfully. If only they could realize how ridiculous and embarrassing they were! She began to clear away the soup plates rather noisily. There was something so depressing about the culture of middle-aged people.

Now, that's funny.

Now doubt Pym knew what she was doing - Dulcie's character exemplifies a type of person who waits for things to happen to her. She may seem "sweet" and "nice" - but I think Pym's (not so subtly) mocking her.

However, what's really interesting about Dulcie's character is how she doesn't match the typical stereotypes of the female heroine. What Dulcie lacks is any kind of eroticism - she doesn't seem to desire love, and people find it vaguely impossible that she could be a romantic person. In the midst of this "romantic" novel Dulcie is the one who never seems to long for that fond return of love. I love how Pym balks at the traditional by turning the novel on it's head - now I've read three of her books in the last few months and each one in unconventional. Read this conversation between Dulcie and her cleaning woman:

"You could make so much more of yourself, Miss Mainwaring," said Miss Lord almost on a despairing note, "if only you would."

"What should I do?" Dulcie asked.

"Well, you could have your hair restyled by one of those Italian hairdressers - in the bouffant style, they call it - it would add fullness to your face, make your head look bigger."

"Do I want my head to look bigger?" Dulcie fingered her fine, smooth hair. "Would it be an advantage? Anyway, I don't think my hair would go like that."

"You could have a perm - to give it body," said Miss Lord eagerly. "They use rollers to set it, you know. And you could use more eye make-up. It would make your eyes look bigger."

Dulcie laughed. "Goodness! Head bigger and eyes bigger - then what?
...
"You read too much, that's your trouble," said Miss Lord, seeing Dulcie settling down at the table with a book. "They [men] don't like it."

"No, I don't think they do," said Dulcie, but absently now, as the world of the book began to seem the real one.

Finally, my favorite passage - from the perspective of the object of Dulcie's fascination:

He read the notice on the front door - "JUMBLE SALE - IN AID OF THE ORGAN FUND". This was really too much! The things women did to men! Had anybody ever really made a serious study of the subject, of the innumerable pinpricks and humiliations endured by men at the hands of women? How could he enter the house with flowers for his wronged wife when the place was crowded with women buying and selling jumble in aid of the organ fund!

Yes, well, it's all for the best that Dulcie never got to know him...

Payback

I just finished Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth for book club. I'm a big fan of Atwood, I love her short stories, her poems, her novels, I've even read a kid's book she wrote. This is the first non-fiction book of hers I've read (I was sort of shocked to see all the non-fiction she's written - I thought I had read all her work) and I really (surprise!) loved it.

What Atwood's written is a lecture - an argument - about debt. How it came to be (shortly followed by the invention of language, to keep track of transactions), how money and debt are conceptual and theoretical (a point not unclear to those of us who are watching the financial crisis playing out right now.), what it means to carry debt (throughout time). Atwood is thorough - she writes: humans have debt... now, what is a human? The only reason debt is possible is because we have an innate sense of fairness. And then she'll list half a dozen examples of how children (and monkeys!) seek fairness.

She does a rather in-depth analysis of The Mill on the Floss, which I just read last year. I thought her reading of the book in relation to debt was spot on. I was less enraptured by her frequent returns to the story of Scrooge - I'm not a big Dickens fan.

It was exciting to talk about the book with some folks who haven't read Atwood before and I hope that we've hooked a few more fans!

Kiss My Tiara

I wish I'd read Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a Smartmouth Goddess, by Susan Jane Gilman 10 or even 20 years ago. Although, since it was just published in 2001, I guess that isn't possible. But, for my 34 year old self didn't learn very much, while by 24 and definitely 14 year-old self could have really stood to read this. Kiss My Tiara, a "guide for intelligent women" reviews many of the various ways women are discriminated against or culturally disadvantaged and has some smartass ways to deal with them, and urges us to drastically overhaul our thinking on some issues.

Alas, basic things like supporting other women and not beating ourselves up about the shape of our bodies are the sort of things that bear repeating. Also this prize piece of wisdom, which nobody told me until I turned 30: The twenties basically suck. Dang it! I wish someone had told me that so I didn't spend a whole decade wondering why I wasn't having the time of my life and feeling bad because I wasn't.

One thing I didn't like about this book was how Gilman casts the snide remark around about our feminist foremothers. Take this paragraph from her introduction:

For in certain ways traditional feminism just isn't cutting it with us. For women today, feminism is often perceived as dreary. As elitist, academic, Victorian, whiny and passé. And to some extent- Goddess forgive me for saying this - it's true. I'm not knocking the women's movement of the past years. I'm a huge advocate and beneficiary of choice, workplace-protection laws and domestic-violence legislation. But...

Eek. "I'm a feminist, but"??? I'm proud to call myself a feminist, but it's pretty clear Gilman isn't, because she skirts around it all through the book. For one thing, there's no such thing as "traditional" feminism - there's not a feminist handbook out there that says Feminists hate men; Feminists don't shave their legs; Feminists burned their bras (they didn't) - much as so many people think. So what, exactly, isn't cutting it for Gilman? For a woman who uses the term "Goddess" over and over, and apparently without irony, I can't understand why she can't proudly proclaim she's a feminist when she so clearly is. This is a semantic issue, but I'm a feminist who plays close attention to language - it is, after all, male-centered. (Did you notice, for example, how I wrote she "skirts" the issue? Why are skirts such a great example of avoiding and passively ignoring?) A book that does a great job at explaining the roots of feminism and it's future among young women is Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer Baumgardner. That was the book that helped me understand the women's movement better than anything I'd read before. I'd recommend it to persons young and old who are interested in a more intellectual approach to women's issues, and I can't imagine finishing that book and not being proud to label yourself a feminist.