I went to pick up some Sudafed this morning and was shocked that I had to show my photo ID. Apparently, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, your driver’s license is taken, with all of the information recorded into a computer, and only then, after this five minutes of nonsense, are you able to purchase your Sudafed. The effort was initiated in October to go after methamphetamine labs. But this is an utterly debasing thing to go through when you’re standing in line feeling like shit and all you really want to do is rest up and get better. The other thing: does my name go into a fucking database because I had the temerity to want to cure my fucking cold? And is this really the best way to fight meth labs when these drug cooks are going to get their ephedrine elsewhere?
Year / 2006
Cold Begets Cold
Sam Tanenhaus: Finding Chicks Who Write Nonfiction is Just SO GOSH DARN HARD!
Lee Kottner writes a letter to Tanenhaus about the NYTBR‘s well-documented lack of women nonfiction coverage and receives a response. Tanenhaus claims, “The truth, at least as far as we can tell, is that there remain areas in which women authors tend to be less well (that is, less numerously) represented than men: science, philosophy, economics, politics, public policy, foreign policy, to name some obvious ones.” But, as Kottner demonstrates with a list of books, this isn’t the case at all. As Kottner puts it, “hat it’s not that women are underrepresented anywhere in publishing (except perhaps in science, which I’ll get to later), it’s that the topics we write about are not ‘important,’ e.g., interesting to men.” (via The Other)
As to Tanenhaus’s recent claim that litbloggers are sloppy writers, I would suggest that Tanenhaus, with a team of roughly ten, is sloppier than ten litbloggers put together. This site, with its blog and podcast (which came well before the NYTBR‘s rigid weekly offering), is run by one person. That means one person moderating discussions, making calls, responding to emails, reading the books, setting up equipment, cleaning up the audio, and getting the word out. And all this with a full-time job, freelancing on top of that, and a social life. Give ten litbloggers full-time jobs and the resources to run a book review section and I suspect it would be filled with more passion, more enthusiasm, more controversy, more excitement and more grammatical precision than Tanenhaus has in his left pinkie.
I hereby withdraw Rachel the Hack. The point has been made. But if Tanenhaus is going to call litbloggers “sloppy” without evidence, then the time has come to reinstate the NYTBR‘s grand measure.
The True Spirit of Christmas
“It is practical, Mr. Baxter. It’s the most practical idea you ever had. He belongs in here because he thinks he has ideas. He belongs in here until he proves himself or fails and… then… someone else belongs in here until he proves himself or fails and somebody else after that and somebody else after him and so on and so on for always. Oh… I don’t know how to… put it into words like Jimmy could, but… all he wanted, all any of them want is a – is a chance to show – to find out what got while they’re still young and burning like a short cut or a stepping stone. Oh, I know they’re not gonna succeed, at least most of them won’t, they’ll all be like Mr. Waterbury soon enough, most of them, anyway. But they won’t mind it. They’ll find something else, and they’ll be happy, because they had their chance. Because it’s one thing to muff a chance once you’ve had it… it’s another thing never to have had a chance. His name’s already on the door.”
— Christmas in July
Mommy Lit: Bona-Fide Genre or Nonsense?
Lizzie Skurnick appears in today’s Style section with an article offering an overview of mommy lit, what Lizzie describes as “written in the wry voices of a generation of women who came of age after feminism, and they have a newly competitive, higher-end set of woes: $10,000 pacifier consultants, nanny-swiping and Harvard-like nursery school applications. Also present is chick-lit’s familiar cast of characters: the single best friend, the dutiful boyfriend (now husband) and a seductive other man who threatens to upset the apple cart.”
Barking Kitten takes umbrage with this, observing, “These writers are but a sliver of society, the hopelessly out-of-touch wealthy inhabiting the coasts. The article does give mention to blogs complaining about this rarified [sic] air, but the publishing world, personified by editor Stacy Creamer, who brought us masterwork The Devil Wears Prada, is all over the trend, anxious to capitalize on a strollerful of publications before the Mummies turn to divorce and menopause.”
Certainly, there have been books, including those cited in Lizzie’s article, that have attempted to capitalize on how to keep chick lit going. As those who read chick lit in the late ’90’s have started families, it makes complete sense to appeal to these new audiences, particularly if you’re an avaricious publisher. However, I must also take partial umbrage with mom lit — not because I have any objection to books which deal with mothers, but because a novel dealing with hyperaffluent maternity suggests more of a masturbatory fantasy than fiction rooted in realism. At least with chick lit, a genre which caters to valid, albeit wildly optimistic tales that often dwell upon women’s issues, there’s some sense of verisimilitude merged with fantasy. Mom lit, by contrast, involves milking the teat on a cash cow.