Author: girl

Republican presidential candidates debate

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Uh, Mitt? I’m legally required to carry my green card with me in order to be able to produce it upon the request of an officer of the law. But, you’re saying, it’s ‘un-American’ for an officer to request it? Take some responsibility for your own house, dude.

Since when does any reasonable person think that Canada has any desire to become part of a North American amoeba with this country? Oh, right. Nevermind.

As a sociologist, the inability of these people to differentiate between economic systems and state structures is mind boggling. Of course, as any political sociologist will tell you, they’re interrelated in complicated and interesting ways.

Aw, Anderson, why didn’t you hit Ron with the question-dodging hammer?

I’m getting the impression that Mitt didn’t do so well in math when he was in school. I hope he has a secret skill at reciting Blake or some such thing to balance it out.

Thank you, Fred, for pointing out that entitlements are in fact such a rinky dink part of the federal budget that cutting them doesn’t begin to address the problem. Oh wait, that’s not exactly what you’re saying. But it’s the truth.

Three programs? Oil subsidies, illegal wars, and corporate welfare. I could get behind DHS, but OMGLOLZ the IRS! Tee hee.

John, John, John. I kind of used to like you when you were the new Bush alternative. It’s true, Ron, that John doesn’t understand that difference, but it’s also true that you are an isolationist. Sorry. It’s true.

Booyah corn subsidies! My new favorite questioner. Mitt, I’m sorry, but I spent my early life surrounded by fields of inedible corn destined for industrial uses, and I can tell you this: corn subsidies are not about food security.

Anderson! Do your thing.

Let’s reiterate: it’s against the law to employ people who cannot prove their legal ability to work in this country. It is, in fact, the legal responsibility of the employer to determine eligibility before hiring. Period. So, be realistic, yo!

As a person who’s had a handgun pointed at my head–in a college dorm, by an ROTC member–and lost two friends to self-inflicted gun wounds, I lack the ability to take the pulse of this issue. I’ll always be in the no-guns-ever camp, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Oh no you didn’t, Mitt. You did not just bring Bill Cosby into your madness.

Number one priority. Huh.

Anderson! Bring them back to the Jesus question.

I can’t think of anything more clear than thou shalt not kill, but somehow the minister manages to be all for the death penalty one minute and all about the literal interpretation of the bible the next? My brain is starting to hurt.

Rudy. Are you trying to be ironic? You’re a smart guy. Surely you understand that reduced snowfall has to do with global warming, which you have likely contributed to by your energy policies.

John. Please stop making me fall off my chair with the giggles. Please stop saying the words ‘winning’ or ‘surge’ or any such, m’kay? Thanks.

Convenient not to mention the people we killed with sanctions leading to lack of food and medicines in various countries.

Mitt. Gah. I am trying to keep this blog PG, but holy mother of the baby Jesus you are making it hard for me.

John! The former John rears his dragon head! You go, my old friend.

But then…John. How can you be so inconsistent? How can you say things that are so clearly reasonable and moral one minute and things that make it sound like you’re mainlining illegal narcotics the next? How can I admire you in these circumstances? You pain me.

Whoa. What did I miss? Did one of these old white dudes just name-drop Reagan like it was going to help them? Yowzah.

Speaking of name-dropping, can I get a ‘go Cheney yourself!’

Do not lie about soldiers to your own ends, people. The majority of enlisted men and women are working class, and not idealogues.

If the middle of an active war is not the time for more soldiers, when is? This is not meant to be a critique of the public, but rather of the candidates. Still, I cannot help but wonder what kind of Republican boos a 42-year Army veteran and thinks to retain any kind of moral or ethical stance? Feh.

Billions of dollars on foreign invasions, dude, not space travel, make for a big deficit. Just tell the truth.

If by ‘moving people off welfare’ you mean ‘busting public service unions and replacing them with low wage workers,’ you did a great job, Rudy!

Time to go watch network TV and leave these guys to their fans.

Republican presidential candidates debate

Black and White, by Dani Shapiro

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This was an interesting book, one of those that I couldn’t tell you whether I liked or enjoyed. Even having finished it, I’m still on the fence. The attraction of the book for me was the portrait of the artist as Sally Mann, and the speculation about her daughters’ lives. I don’t know how this book would read to someone not familiar with Sally Mann’s work, and the attendant controversies; since this is the element that fascinated me, I found it hard to evaluate the prose on its own terms.

I was introduced to Sally Mann’s work in college, in a feminist art history course. We studied major 20th century women artists who were challenging norms of gender, sexuality, and femininity, as well as the lines around art itself. Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Kruger are the ones I remember. Nikki Lee hadn’t begun showing her self-portraits at the time I took the course, but they would have been at home in this group of artists. Of all of them, Sally Mann’s work was the most intriguing, perhaps because the reactions to it were so polarized. On the one hand, she was seen as an avant garde visionary who was challenging all kinds of dearly held social beliefs: nudity as sexual, children as asexual, rural life as pastoral and naive (to name a few). On the other hand, she was attacked as an abusive and manipulative mother, exploiting her children for the creation of pornographic images. Probably there were some middle positions, but they weren’t getting much air time back then.

One thing is certain. Sally Mann–like her fictional alter ego in Dani Shapiro‘s Black and White–took staged photos of her naked children. How the children came to be naked, and why Mann was called to photograph them that way, remains a mystery of sorts. Does it matter what she was thinking? Does it matter what her children’s experiences of being photographed were? Does the art stand alone? Can photos of naked children, or even topless children, ever be art in our contemporary U.S. culture?

To my knowledge, these remain open questions about her work, and speak to the degree to which context informs interpretation and reception. Images are never just images, and Mann follows in the footsteps of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe. Whatever her original intentions, the concerns of social culture layer the life of the photographs. The most basic set of questions, perhaps because it is one we can never really have answers for, centers around the impact on her children. These questions are at the heart of Shapiro’s book. In the end, the author creates an artist who is not Mann in significant ways, and the resolution of the narrative depends on those differences. By relocating the family from rural Virginia to New York City, and continuing the naked–sorry, nude–photo shoots through her daughter’s teen years, Shapiro creates a level of tension that requires action and resolution. It’s not clear that Mann’s own children related to her art in the same way, but it’s one possibility, and a possibility that seems easy to imagine.

This resonance makes Shapiro’s book compelling, but again: I couldn’t say whether that would be the case for someone who wasn’t familiar with Mann’s work and hadn’t already asked the questions to which Shapiro’s version offers an answer.

Black and White, by Dani Shapiro

National Novel Writing Month strikes again

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I wake up, look around, and it’s November. October got away from me, I confess. I made absolutely no headway with regard to book reviews, and posts about walks to the pond and adventures in cooking are hanging around the back-end of the site only half-conceived.

Unfortunately, they are likely to linger in that state a bit longer, as National Novel Writing Month is once again upon us. This will be my sixth year of participation, and while I’m pretty much over the official organization, I still enjoy the challenge. I have a core group of far-flung friends rounded up to type away with me, and I’m glad to resume my unofficial role as cheerleader on our little message board. This year I hope to get out and about with my wee clamshell and join some locals in coffeeshop meetups.

Either way, I’m going to be head down and fingers typing for the month of November. Don’t despair: I’ll be back in December with an updating vengeance, to ring out the year with a posting bang! Or something.

National Novel Writing Month strikes again

Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis

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I was somewhat disappointed in Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis. This was another book that had the reputation of being clever that didn’t resonate with me. It was entertaining at times, in a light period kind of way, but I didn’t find myself saying, ‘oh, the wit, the wit!’ as I read. I certainly enjoyed the detailed description of the various styles and fads of the era, in clothing, entertainment, and especially home decoration, as well as the attempts of the child narrator to make sense of the somewhat ludicrous setting in which he found himself. Beyond these elements, though, the attacks on middle class mundanity didn’t really do much for me.

Reading books like this makes me realize that what critics, reviewers and fans call clever, witty, or cutting, I frequently find boring and mean-spirited. Anyone can insult someone else, and judgments of taste are only funny when we share them. Insults dressed up as ‘biting social commentary’ are still just name-calling and trash-talking. This kind of thing can be a breath of fresh air when everyone’s pretending to agree, however it’s not quite as entertaining when it’s coming from those with greater social power. Cleverness has historically been a way to rise in a social hierarchy, through education or wit, and as such is a much vaunted personal characteristic. The exercise of cruel wit, though, seems most frequently to be a tool for enforcing those hierarchies, and as such, it’s not a habit I respect.

Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis

book challenge 2007 update

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As I roll into the last quarter of the year, I’m pausing to take stock of how well I’m doing on my own personal book-related challenges.

As expected, I have had no trouble actually reading, but a bit less success powering through some of the denser works that have been sitting by the side of my bed for years. Of the books I’ve read this year, just over half have been from the public library, and quite a few more have been books I’ve acquired this year. Only about 20% of what I’ve read have been books I’ve had kicking around my shelves for years. Which means, oh math whizzes, that on the order of a quarter of the books were books I acquired this year in one way or another.

I think I’ve done pretty well at not buying books. There are a few measures for ‘pretty well.’ I purchased very few new books at full price (the works of China Miéville that I didn’t already own in order to get them signed because I’m a geek that way; Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent book; the new books in two fantasy series that we read; two books by Canadian authors; and Sherman Alexie’s new novel for young adults). I purchased several books from the bargain table that I’d been wanting to read for some time or couldn’t resist once I’d read the cover (The Big Year is solidly in this last category). And, I obtained quite a few used books during the time I volunteered at the bookshop (many of these are cookbooks, actually, although a good few were ones I subsequently read for this challenge). Oh, and: I purchased at least one exhibition catalogue new.

I’m not sure what this says about me beyond the obvious: I like books.

Looking ahead to the next 10 weeks, my goal for the end of the year is to write reviews for the books I’ve already read. I trickled off with this at about book 20, so that means 30 or so reviews, which is roughly 3 per week for those following along at home. I’m on it.

book challenge 2007 update