i’m bringing sexy back

I just wrote four pages in my journal and I started with “I really don’t like my body.”

It’s not bad, for sure, but there are some things wrong with it. Namely, a) my thighs are always a tad bit too jiggly and thundery for my taste, b) all of a sudden my stomach is where I harvest extra fat, and it’s pudging out in a very unattractive way, c) my breasts won’t stop growing, and d) blah blah cellulite and all that stuff that everybody hates. I certainly wouldn’t trade my body with a vast lot of other people’s, but there’s always room for improvement, and who would I be to the female race if I didn’t stress about my problem areas?

But then I was thinking about something that is both reassuring and terrifying, at least when applied to me personally. I don’t know about everyone, but with most people I know, none of whom have perfect bodies or perfect personalities, but who have high enough marks in both areas, it is not a real problem to have a sex life even when you don’t look like a celebrity. Clearly famous people are not the only ones who get laid. I suppose I don’t have much of a problem in that area; I can certainly find people to sleep with me, if not to date me, so where I need to work on my personality, I evidently don’t need to work on my body. Even though I do. According to me.

So I guess what I’m finding out is that, at least in my experience, it doesn’t take a perfect body to get what you want. Is it that guys are just horny and don’t care? Is it that I’m too easy? Or is it that guys don’t notice imperfections, even if they are actually quite noticeable? I’m assuming it’s a combination of all of these things. But, given that I am probably not the only girl who has hooked up with people when she has wanted to, I’m confused as to why we flip out so much about not looking perfect. And why magazines can’t find a way to say this in a real way, rather than saying something like, “You’re perfect just the way you are!” or “He likes you for who you are.”

That said, sex is not enough for anyone. Not even for me. Most of the time. But I don’t like the attitudes about it. Maybe I’m just a socialist, but I think that even if the farmer is willing to give you some free milk, if you like the taste of it, you should damn well buy the cow off of him. Because we all need to make a living.

(500) days of summer

Indie for the masses.

I am going back and forth between whether I liked it or not. Some things were really cute. Like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Expectations/Reality. But I’m just not sure it was a good movie. I never know whether movies are good anymore.

oh, and

Somehow in my last post I forgot to connect the two issues, but I think they’re related, which is why I wrote about both of them. There is a problem with people thinking that audience is the same thing as genre, and then booksellers and librarians shelve books in the wrong way, and then publishers don’t realize that they don’t have to be marketing books the way they are. The reason we don’t have more books with nonwhite people on the cover is partly because the covers that do have them are in the “urban fiction” section or somewhere similar. And this is also the problem with developing a national literature. We want to have one, but we try so hard to divide things by race and ethnicity because black people are the only people who want to read “black fiction,” so we can’t just have one place for everything.

I’m terrible at explaining this stuff. Someday I’ll do better.

dearth. of lots of things.

Yesterday, while I was waiting for my final flight home from LAX, I decided I wanted to buy a magazine. That was silly, because I knew I would have lots of magazines waiting for me when I got home (I subscribe to Interview, Glamour, Latina, Essence, American Songwriter, and Nylon), plus all the online reading I have been starting to do (Narrative, the New Yorker, Necessary Fiction, YA Fresh), plus all the hundreds of books I want to read in general. But as I’ve been a bit disappointed with my reading, and as García Márquez is very tedious in a second language, I said, “What the hell,” and spent $6 (why are magazines on newsstands so damn expensive!?) on the Ficion 2009 issue of Atlantic.

I’m not quite finished reading it (I read all magazines cover to cover, except sometimes Interview, because I’m getting a bit tired of it and “society pages” really don’t interest me at all–I would like to do a post about magazines later), but I did get to the set of four essays on the topic of “national literature” and whether it exists. The four writers addressing the question of the place of “national literature” in an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan world were Margaret Atwood, Joseph O’Neill, Monica Ali, and Anne Michaels. Unfortunately, the only of these authors that I have read is Atwood, but then again, most of the most helpful books I’ve read on writing are by authors whose novels I have not actually read. Funny how that works.

The essays were short, so they couldn’t really go in depth, but I was pretty disappointed with the lack of opinion or resolution in any of them. None of the authors really seemed to end with their opinion; most of the essays just talked about their feelings about how they fit into a lot of “communites” (Do I write as a woman? As a Canadian? As a writer? asks Atwood; Not all Brits look, feel, and act the same, Ali points out) and how that makes it harder to define a national literature. But I didn’t really think that was the point, really, and I think all four writers really missed the mark and missed out on an opportunity to talk about the way “genre” is defined today and how that helps and hinders the formation of a national literature. But, you may as well still go on and readBorder Crossings, because the essays are well-written, if boring.

So now I’m home and catching up on my blog reading, and I went over to one of my favorite blogs, especially when it comes to blogs about the world of publishing, Jacket Whys. One of the latest posts is about the amount of human models on YA books this year, and how few of them feature black models. I was so happy to see this addressed, as this was always something I noticed as a child. There was rarely a book that had a character that looked me, and almost never are there books about non-white characters that don’t have major plot devices revolving around the fact that that character is non-white. For example, you could never do the show “Malcolm in the Middle” (blue collar family with unexpected genius middle child) unless you also added that the family had just moved into a predominantly white neighborhood and had trouble assimilating, or if you had an episode where one character starts dating a white girl and has issues with it, or something. Those things drive me crazy. I have no problem if a white writer wants to write a white character, or if a non-white writer wants to write one. Write what you want; it’s your prerogative. But it always bothered me that a writer couldn’t just change someone to be black or Hispanic or Native American without changing most of the arc of the story. So many stories you read don’t have to be about white people; they just are because that’s the default. So many books I read as a child where I said, oh, that character could so be me! But no, the model has blonde hair and celebrates Christmas, so no. Damn.

Obviously, a lot of this problem is general hegemony and the fact that white is still the driving cultural force of our nation. Peggy McIntosh wrote this great essay years ago that I’ve read for classes, recommended to friends as reading, and just link to very often because it’s fabulous and often helps illuminate for white friends why it is “harder” for me to get by sometimes, even though I’ve been raised mostly white. Unpacking the Knapsack of White Privilege is an excellent, quick read that everybody should check out, regardless of their racial or ethnic background. I commented on Jacket Whys and linked to it and am still reading the other excellent comments.

However, I want to know what it is that could help facilitate a change in publishing. Of course more writers need to abandon the magical Negro and other stereotypes and write diverse characters, but since writing is only one part of the package that is a book, I wonder what else it is that keeps us from seeing more interesting protagonists and models on covers. Do we not have enough non-white editors and graphic designers? Do we lack models? Not working in the publishing industry, I can only go so far to make suggestions as to what we need. I’m confused as to the easiest way to solve the problem.

School Library Journal also published a fantastic article on race in literature. Read it, do.

summer reading #3

Haven’t updated for awhile, and I am moving very slowly in some books, but I also read very quickly some others. What else is there to do but read when you are stuck in bed with the flu? Now, of course, I am better and off on adventures, but here are the latest books I’ve finished.

I have not read books that I expected to read, due again to the fact that I did not expect to be sick with so much free time. So I’ve been a bit disappointed in things. But such is life.

1. Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham. So disappointing! This woman, who also writes as Sophie Kinsella, has always impressed me, because while she writes chick lit, which basically means dumb, she writes it in a way that makes you want to read it, because both she and her characters have clearly read other books before. This one, however, was utter crap and made me really, really angry. Pregnant women being alcoholics, women being stupid, and just stupid, stupid, stupid. Don’t read it. That is all.

2. Social Justice: A Jewish Perspective by Bernardo Kliksberg. This was lent to me by a friend at Hillel after I was told to stay in bed for three days, and it’s a very good and pretty easy read. Since this is a vaguely religious trip that I’m on (or was on, since now I’m just vacationing and traveling), it was nice to kind of get in touch with my Judaism a bit and remember that there are ways I identify with my religion, even if for me it’s not about being completely stuck in the past or really Orthodox or keeping kosher. Even if you’re not Jewish, this book has a good outline of what social justice is and why it’s important that it exist. It didn’t exactly tell me things I didn’t believe in before, but it was nice to have them outlined well.

3. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I didn’t want to read this book, but my friend lent it to me and I figured I’d at least look at it, and then I finished it in a day. Whoops. I guess part of my reasoning for not wanting to read it was my resentment for Americans who do “spiritual” things to be trendy, and also because I generally feel kind of icky when talking about it. For me, religion is very personal, and while I’m glad I have my beliefs, I don’t particularly care if anyone knows them or not and I don’t really enjoy evangelicals who are constantly trying to tell me what they believe and why I should believe it, too. Maybe that’s mean of me, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. But this book, even when it got borderline sappy, was a great read simply because Gilbert was a really great storyteller. I haven’t felt like writing lately, and in the middle of the book I just had to run upstairs and journal. And it reminded me how much I enjoy traveling, even when I don’t, and how much I like to write personal essays. So I would recommend the book above all. Plus, who wouldn’t want to read about living in Italy?

So that makes 10 books thus far through the summer, and I’m well into the middle of two/three others (a García Márquez book that I’m reading simultaneously in Spanish and in translation and a book of poems). We’ll see if I make it to my goal of thirty, though. And hopefully the rest of the books I read will be better.

Stuff about my latest adventures later.

summer reading #2

Since I’m stuck in my hotel room with the flu, I figured it was time to update. Unfortunately I do not have enough of the books on my reading list with me, so I’ve had to resort to reading books that I borrow from others (the horror!). But as I haven’t updated in awhile, here are the books I’ve read since my last summer reading entry:

1. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I read the title story in high school, and I read The Namesake soon after it came out, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading this entire collection. It was good to read, because I should definitely be reading more short fiction, and New Yorker “short” fiction starts to piss me off after awhile. This was a pretty good collection, though occasionally it got a bit boring. I suppose it’s something all authors have to do–spend a couple hundred pages in one of their first major works writing thinly veiled autobiographical things (ahem, The Kite Runner) or otherwise similar-to-life stories, and there’s nothing really wrong with knowing something very well and writing about it. But after awhile, I was a bit bored with already knowing the setting (East Coast), characters (Indian immigrants to the US), etc. Still, really great stories, easy to read but not in an over-simplified sort of way, and largely enjoyable.

2. Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne. This was totally not what I was expecting. Well, it sort of was, because it was definitely really funny teen angst, but I was not quite ready for the really, really ridiculous talk about sex and erections, nor was I prepared for the absurdist tone of it all. It’s definitely a good 500-page read, though. I love it when teenagers in novels have preposterously good vocabularies but still find themselves obsessing over crushes. Good stuff.

3. Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger. I will be the first to admit that I own a copy of her first novel, The Devil Wears Prada, and I have read it multiple times. I have also seen the movie twice. It’s perfectly fun, and this book and books by Sophie Kinsella/Madeleine Wickham are probably the only chick lit books that I feel happy reading, because they’re not completely WASPy (read: annoying, predictable, full of harping ladies a la “The View” and “Sex and the City” who hate their parents for no real reason, obsess about what they’re eating and whether they’ve farted in front of their partners, and don’t ever go to work) and they at least read like they’re written by someone who has read good books and has a good vocabulary. But this book, though kind of fun, ultimately fails because the only way it is fun is the exact same way that her first novel is fun, because it is exactly the same as The Devil Wears Prada, just with different names and a different job. Even The Babysitters’ Club was not this formulaic.

4. The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll. This beautiful, large edition of the book comprises both novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, which together are usually adapted to make the movies that we know as “Alice in Wonderland.” Reading the annotated version was fabulous, because they just allow you to understand so much more. The “absurd” parts aren’t really that absurd, there are tons of math games, and the poems are often based on popular songs and poems of Carroll’s day. The annotations also explain his “pedophilia” in detail. AND the second Alice book, which is a lot more fun than the first, is actually very cleverly modeled after a chess game. Do children’s books do all that anymore? I think not. Awesome. Read it.

movies are less good but more fun to watch

**This post may have vague, unimportant spoilers about the movie “Revolutionary Road.”

As I get older, I like movies on a whole less, but I enjoy watching them more. Weird? Not really. Most movies are just not all that phenomenal, though there are plenty that I adore. Like, the writing is great, but the rest is so-so; or visually it’s cool but there’s no real story; or it’s awesomely realistic but also boring; or the acting is amazing but the story is just lame or too easy or not well-adapted from the book or just done too, too many times.

Yesterday I watched “Revolutionary Road,” which was a tad disappointing after all that Oscar buzz and all. Not having read the book even, I can guess that it’s probably a bit too dense and that the movie is too simplified, but still. Throughout watching, I could guess everything that was going to happen, and not in a good way. Just in a I’ve-seen-this-in-Closer-and-We-Don’t-Live-Here-Anymore-and-tons-of-other-relationship-movies sort of way. And I “got” the point too easily, I think. Nothing about the story really challenged my thinking in a new way.

The acting, though, was great, and so were the sets and costumes and all. I’m generally more of an actor person than an actress person (though that might just be because I fantasize too often about all the movie stars I’m going to meet someday and marry), but Kate Winslet has always been one of my favorite people in the entire world. I just love her and pretty much everything she does. Just as no one does teen angst like Winona Ryder, no one does sympathetic adulteress like Kate Winslet.

I really like to be able to watch movies now with a bit more of a critical and educated eye as I get older and learn how to read better. Close reading skills and a good English teacher can make you a good movie-watcher without being annoyingly too cerebral about everything. Not that I know all that much technical stuff about film, but I know enough for the average person, I suppose. I love to analyze the stories like you do a book and to be able to gauge good and bad acting better than I could when I was little.

But really, most movies are nothing new. And since movies are stories or statements or essays or lives, as a writer, that scares me. It’s supposed to be the way you tell a story, not the story itself, right? Is that why literature continues to exist and evolve? But what if you tell an old story in a fairly old way? What’s left?

the summer reading challenge update #1

That’s going to need a better title. One that doesn’t sound like…well, that.

So. Since my last entry, I have finished three books:

1. Trickster’s Choice by Tamora Pierce. I read this once years ago and totally forgot just about everything that happened, except I remembered I wanted it to be made into a movie, and I knew which part I wanted to play. It’s pretty excellent. It was nice to read something fantasy again, which I haven’t done for years probably, and equally nice to read some YA that’s actually good, as that’s a slippery “genre” to write in. Pierce really knows how to do fantasy well, which is why I happily went on and read the sequel,

2. Trickster’s Queen. It seemed to lose a bit of steam, or maybe that was me. More happened, but in a way less happened. Still, a pretty worthy group of books, and nice to have a change in the stuff I was reading.

3. History Lesson for Girls by Aurelie Sheehan. Last I heard, she was the current director of the creative writing program here, in which I have a minor. The book took place in the 70s, which was probably the single most interesting thing about it. That and horses. It made me want to ride horses a lot. All in all, it was very well written. It was one of those coming of age stories where an unlikely friendship with some normal but kind of fucked up girl had a deep, profound effect on the narrator’s life. Heard that one before?

Here’s to the next batch of books being a bit better.

normal people and famous people and those in between

So I touched Ira Glass tonight.

I also heard him speak and saw him, you know, like all the other people in Centennial Hall did. But then my friends and I went up and acted silly and talked to him.

Anyone who doesn’t already know how awesome Ira Glass is is a fool. Hi spresentation was pretty awesome. He just has such a wonderful voice, and it was just an interesting presentation, though in some ways disappointing. Ira Glass is not someone you feel like listening to while sitting upright in a chair, smooshed against lots of other people. For some reason I felt one of my headaches come on, which didn’t make it any nicer to be uncomfortable, but it’s also one of those things that is weird to experience in person when you’re used to radio or the podcast. I wanted to be lying on the floor or on my bed with my eyes closed. That is how you should experience This American Life.

Regardless, it was cool. And of course I went up with the rest of my friends afterwards to go talk to him. I wanted him to sign my ticket, since I didn’t have anything else for him to sign. And while waiting in line was fun, just because we all got to hang out and because I talked to this other nice random girl who is about to graduate from law school. But meeting interesting people in this way makes me feel very, very uncomfortable, because I can never make myself look smart or interesting while doing it. Even if I had a burning question to ask Ira Glass, it would never be something that would just come to me while I’m standing in line with a ticket stub and a ballpoint pen. Just like people want to wait after concerts to meet the artist, it was something that needed to be done, but I also didn’t want to. I’m sure if I spent hours with him, we’d find something interesting to talk about, and I could actually make myself appear as smart as I’m pretty sure I am, and I could ask some good questions. But accosting someone after a performance is awkward and nerve wracking. I’m not one of those people who can just go up to a stranger and spill all of my life and dreams and ask for advice. Is it because I know the advice will likely be something I’ve heard before or because I know the advice of a famous person isn’t necessarily better than the advice of someone who knows me better? I’m not sure.

It’s a strange form of networking, and I’m not sure whether it’s better to be good at it or bad at it. Generally, I am pretty good at meeting strangers (at least adults and professionals…I’m terrible at people my own age) and being friendly, talking about myself, and ending up with advice or encouragement or connections or a job offer or something. It’s this conniving but genuine thing that I’ve sort of mastered. And I’ve just been lucky, I think. But when you’re meeting someone who is famous, even when they’re only famous to you, like Ira Glass, it’s hard to gush without sounding swoony, to ask for advice without being a cliché, to ask questions without being boring. I never know what to do.

Not that I’ve met a huge amount of famous people. But it’s still awkward. I hate listening to people fall over themselves at a book signing or an event like this one, and I know it’s mean of me. Who am I to tell someone to be less excited? Just because I’m inhuman doesn’t mean they need to be. But it’s so embarrassing. You know those times when other people, even when they’re strangers, do something so weird that they’re not embarrassed by that you end up being embarrassed for them, just because the thing you share is both being human? It’s horrible. I’m such a bitch sometimes.