I’m back from vacation and illness and in-laws and more
vacation. I’m going to try to be a good
blogger for several weeks in a row, make things look pretty around here, link
to the things I actually like, and make things work a little bit more like a
library. Then I will have earned the
right to remind all of you of the existence of this site. The good news is that during my prolonged
silence, I was reading lots and lots of things.
I’ll start by talking about Unless by Carol Shields,
a novel I really, really loved, about a woman whose daughter Nora drops out of
college, breaks up with her boyfriend, and starts sitting on a Toronto street
corner with a sign that says “Goodness” hanging around her neck, silently
begging. This unraveling breaks her
mother’s heart, in the classic sense, and much of the book, written while
Shields was struggling with the cancer that eventually claimed her life,
concerns the nature of grief. Everyone
tries to figure out why Nora, went off the deep end – was she triggered by a
traumatic event, or was it the more gradual realization of her own
powerlessness, as a young woman in a society whose entire framework is still
dominated by the experiences of men? In
the end, every one and no one are right, and Shields manages to create a truly
feminist novel of accurate and beautiful complexity. Around the same time, I read “Holy Fem-bot, Batman!” by Rebecca
Traister, an article in Salon about the very public unraveling of
Katie Holmes in the early days of her engagement to Tom Cruise that, well,
broke my heart. Katie may not be a
vagrant (not yet anyway) but her proclamations of goodness, happiness, and love
for all things Cruise seem more and more unhinged. Was it a $10 million contract (a friend of a friend of a relation
knows Katie and says yes!), a scientology brainwashing, a Hollywood power play,
or some genuinely messed-up love? I
predict it will be years before we really know how it all went down, but in the
interim, it’s no longer so fun to watch the beautiful, seemingly fairly
intelligent Holmes turn her personality over to a self-loathing, domineering
know-it-all. I’m not sure I agree with
Traister, who posits that all of us who willingly ingest the story of her
transformation are somehow complicit, but when I see TomKat coverage now, my
stomach often gives a little lurch, before I hold my nose and scarf it down.
I've been loving Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution by Cornelia Butler so much I can barely stand it. It's perfectly organized: pictures, biography, essays. The biographical section is a different kind of paper so you can look at the whole big, thick, thing and land in more or less the right place. It's a great mix of artists and does it a good job of trying to represent the performance work that's so central (for me anyway) to the intersection of feminism and art. It's not just the usual suspects -- lots of South American artists I hadn't heard of, inspiring textile stuff, cool looking film. It made me feel all hungry. I want to own it. Love Catherine Lord's essay.
