James Patterson tries to save bookstores

At left: The Open Book, the first place I ever worked here in South Carolina, closed its doors permanently four years ago.










Mega-successful author James Patterson is on a mission to save the beleaguered, independent bookstore. Good luck, James!

As I have written here before, I looove bookstores. And so many bookstores are closing; Amazon and e-books and the net have threatened the book industry. (In fact, my photo in that last link, Carolina Book Rack? Like the Open Book, it is now long gone.)

Patterson is giving away $1 million to bookstores, in what he calls a "bookstore bailout":

The best-selling author James Patterson has started a program to give away $1 million of his personal fortune to dozens of bookstores, allowing them to invest in improvements, dole out bonuses to employees and expand literacy outreach programs.

More than 50 stores across the country will begin receiving cash grants this week, from Percy’s Burrow in Topsham, Me., to Page & Palette in Fairhope, Ala., to A Whale of a Tale in Irvine, Calif.

“I just want to get people more aware and involved in what’s going on here, which is that, with the advent of e-books, we either have a great opportunity or a great problem,” he said. “Our bookstores in America are at risk. Publishing and publishers as we’ve known them are at stake. To some extent the future of American literature is at stake.”

The current health of independent bookstores is mixed. While some have benefited from the disappearance of the Borders chain in 2011 and a shrinking Barnes & Noble, the stores have been hit especially hard with consumers switching from paper copies to e-books.

And though many communities remain loyal to their shops, and the American Booksellers Association says its membership has recently grown, the online discounters have wreaked havoc on the independent bookseller’s business model.

Patterson began complaining last year, that the book industry needed a bailout from the feds, just like Wall Street got a bailout. Not surprisingly, nobody paid any attention, so he took matters into his own hands:

Last year, Mr. Patterson placed full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly arguing that the federal government’s financial support of troubled industries like Wall Street and the automobile sector should extend to the bookstore business. Since that appears to be a pipe dream, Mr. Patterson decided to create his own bailout fund as part of his mission to promote literature, especially for children.

“I’m rich; I don’t need to sell more books,” Mr. Patterson said. “But I do think it’s essential for kids to read more broadly. And people just need to go into bookstores more. It’s not top of mind as much as it used to be.”

He began his project last year by getting the word to store owners that he was willing to begin writing them checks, which will range from $2,000 to $15,000, according to a spokeswoman for Mr. Patterson.

Bookstores responded with informal mini-proposals, explaining what they might do with some extra money. Bank Street Bookstore in Manhattan said it would use the funds to post and stream online video of in-store events. Hicklebee’s in San Jose, Calif., said it wanted to buy a new computer system, replacing its “small, ancient screens with green print” and perhaps bestow a bonus on its hardworking manager, Ann Seaton.

“I think it’s going to have a huge impact,” said Linda Marie Barrett, the general manager of Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, N.C., which successfully applied for a grant to replace badly worn carpeting and a damaged parquet floor. “He seems to be keenly aware that bookstores operate on small budgets.”

And I love seeing the name of MALAPROPS, one of my favorite places in the world, in the New York Times. I am SO PLEASED they are getting some of the bailout money... and believe me, their carpet sorely needs replacing!

I am wishing all the best to James Patterson and the bookstores... and wouldn't it be nice if other rich people took this kind of initiative, to help others in their field? Millionaire musicians should be helping music stores; millionaire athletes ought to be helping small-town teams; millionaire chefs should be teaching young folks to cook, etc etc etc. Let's see some civic responsibility, rich peeps!

As it is, it makes international news whenever Bill and Melinda Gates or James Patterson or Bruce Springsteen or Dolly Parton or Oprah or someone like that, spends money altruistically and helps regular people.

That should be the norm, not the exception.

Atheism and (lack of) morality

Are atheists more moral than those of us who do not classify ourselves that way? I often think they are. Perhaps this is why they aren't unnerved about the long-term effects of atheism; they are doing fine, and they assume everyone else will, too.

The 'new atheists' are basically moral and well-behaved, so they don't realize that some of us are moral and well-behaved simply to keep from burning in hell for all eternity.

If there was no God or no law or no karma, we would SETTLE SOME SCORES.

I started thinking about this after participating on an atheist blog some years ago, when I was still identifying as Christian. I was struck by the fact that one of my serious questions was thought to be a joke, or at the least, a sarcastic rejoinder. It wasn't. I was dead serious. But the atheists didn't think I was serious, and that is what I found alarming: this means they do not understand what a serious matter it is.

Once again, I felt we were trying to communicate across a huge abyss.

I asked, "What about the fact that believing there is a God, keeps lots of people from killing each other?"

HAHAHA, they all responded, virtually as one unit. Well, they sneered back, one can learn not to kill someone without God. They acted like it was a simple decision, not a seductive thought that one consciously wrestles with (as in Woody Allen's great movie Crimes and Misdemeanors); an act that you eventually logically decide is... not nice. And so, you don't do it.

But why not, in that case? I asked what would be the deterrent, if there is no hell-fire? No bad karma and/or no punishment? Again, they sneered and thought I was joking or being a wise-ass. (It is also notable that they apparently assumed I was talking about someone else, i.e. The Bad People, rather than myself and other regular people like me.)

I wasn't. I was being rational. Belief systems (various kinds) have kept a lot of us from going off on people and committing violence. If there is no divine retribution, no holy justice, no guarantee the evil will be punished... do you understand how dangerous such an idea is?

Let me be very clear: Do the privileged understand that if the poor stop believing in God, they will no longer be safe? Are they ready for that world? Because I don't mind telling you, I'm not.

"Are you saying God is the only reason people act morally? What does that say about you and your view of humanity?"

My view of humanity is utterly realistic: humans have enslaved each other, pillaged, raped, and committed mass genocide. There have been Final Solutions, prison camps and Gulags. People have killed each other for insurance policies, parking places, brand-name shoes and having the wrong tattoos. And this has been possible even though the perpetrators DID believe in divine retribution and everlasting hell-fire. What if they stopped? What if all that matters is only what we see right in front of us: what you can get away with?

Will that be a better world? Doesn't it frighten you?

I don't think it frightens the atheists, because they are intrinsically moral people. This is why they can do without Gods, while the rest of us have floundered, made serious moral errors, became addicted or went to jail ... we have messed up again and again. We have had to pray late into the night, to be delivered from soul-devouring anger, envy or desires for revenge. We have suddenly left crowded parties because if we didn't, we were going to grab someone by the hair and throw them into the wall, before they even knew what hit them. We can taste the blood; we want to HURT people. We want to make them PAY.

And then, we tell ourselves, wait, that isn't up to me: Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. (This phrase has the effect of deflating my anger immediately.) Karma, we assure ourselves, will deal with that individual. It isn't up to me. "What goes around comes around"--we remind ourselves and everyone around us. The overriding concept, of course, is that there WILL be justice. Therefore, I do not have to be the one to administer it.

But you atheists are telling me--it IS something I should administer myself, or it won't get done? You tell me justice will not inevitably happen?

This is something I wrote about in an old post, first quoting bell hooks:

[Quote from bell hooks]: my grandfather [was a black] sharecropper, and definitely the white man was on his back, but what I remember about that, when this man would walk through his fields and see his vegetables that he grew, he’d say, “See these vegetables. White men cannot make the sun shine. They cannot control..”

I mean here’s a black man who did not go to school, who did not have an education. But he found a sense of self that transcended the idea of him as a victim. Because he could say “yes white men have power over my life. They exploit and terrorize me, but at the end of the day, there’s a power higher than white men that I can lend my imagination to.”

[my comment]: And I would add, this is one reason why belief in god(s) has such a hold on people. To some, it is a synonym for a higher justice, a higher truth, a higher law--above and beyond unjust earthly authorities that dominate us on a daily basis.

When the atheists sneer at that, it can be experienced by non-privileged believers as endorsing the material world as it is (with oppressive powers intact) and negating the self-preservationist experiences of the oppressed.

What do the atheists intend for us losers who use religion and sky-fairies to feel better? (If religion is indeed the opiate of the masses, do atheists think believers will happily greet the people who propose to take away our opiates?) What do they have to put in its place? Will it serve the same purpose(s) and properly spur us to leave the party when we see the person we want to throw headlong into the wall? Or will we think, hey, fuck it, NO GOD, NO MASTERS, and follow them into the restroom where there are no surveillance cameras and dunk their head into the toilet repeatedly, as in LA Confidential?

Why not?

~*~

For some of us, morality has not been easy. We have had to work at it, think about it, study it and dedicate our lives to it. We study theology and religion, because we are obsessed with morals. If you rip the rug of theology/religion/rules/myth out from under us, it would leave us empty, since this is where we initially got our morality from (in a way that we could understand) and how we learned to integrate it into our being. Some of us really do need the rules... because if there aren't any, we will go hog-wild. We know this, since we already have. We have to engage in continuous remedial education about the rules, and the reasons for them, to keep us from breaking them again and again.

I think the 'new atheists' underestimate the importance of God/belief systems in keeping us moral. Is it possible that the atheists are more moral than the rest of us, and do not need rules to govern their behavior? How can we impress upon them, that for some of us, it is in the interests of society that we adhere to these beliefs, or there could be unbridled chaos, Lord of the Flies?

And why have so few believers made this argument? Probably because believers like to think they are moral. This is likely because we think about morality a good deal; I think this is because WE HAVE TO, TO STAY MORAL.

The reason so many religious adherents believe atheists could not be moral, is because WE cannot imagine ourselves moral in the same existential circumstances.

~*~

At the end of Flannery O'Connor's short story, Good Country People, the simple country man posing as an innocent Bible salesman is suddenly uncovered as a freaky, abusive sociopath. The educated, atheist PhD in the story, has accepted him at face value ... right up to the end of the story, when he unexpectedly and cruelly humiliates her. "You ain't so smart," he schools her, "I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!"

The end of this story, and those words, have always chilled me to the bone. Because whenever I read all the highly-educated atheist discussions on the net; whenever I read ultra-smart authors like Steven Pinker; whenever I admire the smart, self-sufficient, rational atheists who know where they are going and how to get there... I suddenly remember the sociopathic Bible salesman. And I worry that the 'new atheism' may be more successful than it should be. It might branch out from the moral, rational, educated people like Steven Pinker and Dan Fincke... to sociopaths-in-training, like O'Connor's Bible salesman... and to morally-struggling (and/or morally-confused) people like me. I think I am a fairly average person in many ways, and I know that the overall message we take away from the New Atheism, may not be the fresh-faced utopian vision of ideological and intellectual freedom, that the new atheists obviously wish for us. The atheists believe that their cleansing experience of rationality would also be ours, but our experience might not be anything remotely like that.

It may be the experience of finally doing those things that we have always held back... because... well, why not?

...


And I wish they would start taking that idea seriously.

Gore Vidal 1925-2012

You will be greatly missed.

Ray Bradbury 1920-2012

He changed us. He made us different than we had been in the mere seconds before we picked up his stories.

One of my special favorites is All Summer in a Day, an incredible story about bullying, long before the subject was hip. (1954)

Reposting the obit from RayBradbury.com, which can't be improved upon:

Ray Bradbury, recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91 after a long illness. He lived in Los Angeles.

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury has inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. In 2005, Bradbury published a book of essays titled Bradbury Speaks, in which he wrote: "In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior."

He is survived by his four daughters, Susan Nixon, Ramona Ostergren, Bettina Karapetian, and Alexandra Bradbury, and eight grandchildren. His wife, Marguerite, predeceased him in 2003, after fifty-seven years of marriage.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."

And we were all so much richer for that. Thank you Mr Electrico!

We will miss the master. (bows) Rest in Peace.

Onward and Upward

At left: Occupy Greenville has kept our plucky heroine from dissolving into hopelessness during her long period of unemployment this year: THREE CHEERS FOR THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT, which has restored many folks' faith in America.

~*~

I used to wonder why people (usually women) deleted their blogs. No longer. I get it now.

As net-denizens Google various religious-and-Christmas-oriented-posts I have written over the past four-and-a-half years, I feel theologically and emotionally bereft. I was so certain, and now I am not.

Or rather, I am certain that uncertainty is the state of humanity. I no longer unequivocally declare that particular existential points of dogma are true, except to say, this is what I feel right now. This is what I believe is true right now.

And this is, in fact, what we are always saying, we just don't seem to realize that our personal truths collide over time. We re-arrange the biography to make our wildly different, disparate truths make sense. But they simply don't.

This is because we are not the same people we were.

The person that started this blog is me, yet it is another me, a past-me. I do not agree with everything the past-me wrote, in fact, I wince at a good deal of it. I can understand why people feel the need to delete that which makes them embarrassed and makes them wince. And women, specifically, can find this nearly intolerable. On the above-linked thread, Feminist Avatar wrote:

I almost deleted my blog as I was fed up with discussions going on in my online community, which I disagreed with and felt had been done so many times before, with no resolution. And, my gut response was- get out of here- and I think I saw leaving my blog up as leaving a part of myself 'there'; in that conversation, even tho' I wasn't and hadn't posted in ages.

A wiser person than me once said that women were more reluctant to 'let go of the authorial signature' than men (that is to stop owning their words- seeing cultural products as a creation of society and context rather than individuals), because they had only recently won the right to own them in the first place (ie women's right to a public voice is historically new and hard won). Perhaps, as a result, when we need to walk away from particular online communities or just the internet as a time suck, we feel we can't leave something of ourselves there- we can't stop owning our words (even if they may be out of date or not where we are any more). And perhaps, because of that sense of ownership, if we move beyond those ideas or no longer agree with them, we also can't leave them out there, as it is no longer us.

Yes, I understand that, as well as the Buddhist concept of impermanence.

~*~

I nearly titled this post "Can Ron Paul win the Iowa primary?" and then thought the better of it. Nah. But I am once again voting strategically for the good doctor, as I did in the last South Carolina Republican primary four years ago.

I heartily recommend Conor Friedersdorf's piece in The Atlantic, titled Grappling With Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters--currently up to a whopping 633 comments. The money quotes:

Do I think that Paul wrote the offending newsletters? I do not. Their style and racially bigoted philosophy is so starkly different from anything he has publicly espoused during his long career in public life -- and he is so forthright and uncensored in his pronouncements, even when they depart from mainstream or politically correct opinion -- that I'd wager substantially against his authorship if Las Vegas took such bets. Did I mention how bad some of the newsletters are? It's a level of bigotry that would be exceptionally difficult for a longtime public figure to hide.

For that reason, I cannot agree with [The Weekly Standard's Jamie] Kirchick when he concludes that "Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing -- but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics."

On the other hand, it doesn't seem credible that Paul was unaware of who wrote the execrable newsletters, and although almost a million dollars per year in revenue is a substantial incentive to look away from despicable content, having done so was at minimum an act of gross negligence and at worst an act of deep corruption. Indeed, Paul himself has acknowledged that he "bears moral responsibility" for the content.

Given its odiousness that is no small thing.

For the record, I certainly agree. I also agree with this quote--although regular readers might recall that as a true believer, I defended both Jeremiah Wright AND Bill Ayers:

For me, the disconnect between the Ron Paul newsletters, which make me sick, and Paul's words and actions in public life, which I often admire, put me in mind of the way I reacted when candidate Barack Obama was found to associate with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, both of whom had said execrable things. I couldn't defend any of it. But I could never get exercised about the association in exactly the way that writers like Victor Davis Hanson wanted, because it seemed totally implausible that if Obama was elected he would turn out to secretly share the convictions of the Weather Underground, or hope for God to damn America. It always seemed to me that those relationships were the unsavory product of personal ambition. I don't mean to suggest that the two circumstances are entirely analogous, but I do find it hard to believe that if Paul were elected, he'd turn out to be a secret racist, implement policies that targeted minorities, or drum up support by giving speeches with hateful rhetoric.

And then, he makes the points I wish I had been smart enough to make, says the things I wish I had been smart enough to write. YES!:

[Congressman Ron Paul] has a long history of doing what he says when elected, and no more.

"How could you vote for someone who..."

Isn't that a thorny formulation? I'm sometimes drawn to it. And yet. We're all choosing among a deeply compromised pool of candidates, at least when the field is narrowed to folks who poll above 5 percent. Put it this way. How can you vote for someone who wages an undeclared drone war that kills scores of Pakistani children? Or someone who righteously insisted that indefinite detention is an illegitimate transgression against our civilizational values, and proceeded to support that very practice once he was elected? How can you vote for someone who has claimed to be deeply convicted about abortion on both sides of the issue, constantly misrepresents his record, and demagogues important matters of foreign policy at every opportunity? Or someone who suggests a religious minority group should be discriminated against? Or who insists that even given the benefit of hindsight, the Iraq War was a just and prudent one?

And yet many of you, Republicans and Democrats, will do just that -- just as you and I have voted for a long line of past presidents who've deliberately pursued policies of questionable-at-best morality.

In voting for "the lesser of two evils," there is still evil there -- we're just better at ignoring certain kinds in this fallen world. A national security policy that results in the regular deaths of innocent foreigners in order to maybe make us marginally safer from terrorism is one evil we are very good at ignoring.

Prison rape is an evil we're even better at ignoring.

It is a wonderful thing that Americans are usually unable to ignore the evil of outright racism. It hasn't always been so. The change is a triumph. But important as rhetorical issues of race and ethnicity are in America, we're by necessity choosing the lesser of two -- or three or seven -- evils when we pick a candidate. And so it's worth complicating the moral picture with some questions we don't normally consider when we talk about race.

For example: What American policy most hurts people who'd be a minority group in this country? I'd say cluster bombs, missiles and bullets that inadvertently kill them while we try to kill terrorists or convert tribal or sectarian societies into democracies. Or perhaps an even graver harm is done by the subsidies we give to agribusinesses, destroying Third World agricultural markets and opportunity. To think of the damage done over the decades by sugar dumping in Haiti alone! And isn't it uncomfortable to think about how race and nationality is implicated in the priority we assign to folks who suffer from the aforementioned policies? The policies aren't rooted in personal racism, like the lines in racist tracts -- sugar dumping is rooted in an amoral agricultural lobby that wants to enrich itself -- yet it's hard to imagine such policies would persist as uncontroversially if "people like us" were the victims.

In the U.S., the War on Drugs arguably does the most grave damage to poor communities, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods, where the majority of arrests take place, though whites use drugs more often. The greatest threat to an ethnic minority in the United States isn't that doctrinaire libertarians are going to reverse the Civil Rights Act -- it's that Muslim Americans or immigrants are going to be held without trial in the aftermath of a future terrorist attack because we've allowed our and their civil liberties to erode.

Were it 1964, I'd never vote for Paul, precisely because my desire to protect and expand liberty would've placed the highest priority on the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Paul once said in a speech that "the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty," despite the fact that it clearly enhanced the individual liberty of blacks, the group the state was most implicated in transgressing against.

But it is not 1964. Other injustices better define our times. In 2012, when accused terrorists are held indefinitely without charges or trial, and folks accused of drug possession have their doors broken down by flash-grenade wielding SWAT teams in no-knock raids, Paul would arguably protect the rights of racial, religious or ethnic minority groups better than Obama, regardless of whether Paul is now or ever was a racist, and irrespective of the fact that Obama, as the first black president, has in some ways transformed Americans' thinking on race. (LBJ, who signed the Civil Rights Act, was not know for his personal progressivism on race or women's rights, but he nonetheless backed policies that had powerful consequences for women and minorities).

What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies, including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012 who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy or action or association. Paul's association with racist newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn't save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not to support his candidacy, even if we're judging by the single metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies, Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them.

Read it all, and at least a few of the hundreds of brawling comments, well worth your while if you care about the Republican primary and the next election.

~*~

Check out our show tomorrow, where we will be doing a year-end round-up. In upstate South Carolina, join us at 9am on WFIS radio, 1600 AM and/or 94.9 FM on your radio dial. We have online streaming, so drop by.

And winding up with some holiday tackiness/nostalgia. At left: The Great Southern Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, my hometown. As you can see by the cars, this photo was probably taken some time in the early-to-mid 60s, and certainly, my fondest Christmas-shopping memories come from this period. (This shopping center was only a short distance from one of my very favorite and beloved Drive-In movie theatres, which I know I have rhapsodized about here before.)

The shopping center featured the SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD in miniature, and we used to walk around them as kids, taking photos and gawking as if they were real. Surely, this was as close as most of us were ever going to get. My absolute favorite was the Taj Mahal, which apparently even had real water for awhile, but mostly I remember dried-up water with dirt and leaves in it. Unfortunately, my dogged net-searches could NOT bring up the Taj Mahal or Eiffel Tower, presented right alongside Woolworth's and hardware stores and everything else. At Christmas time, the tacky Christmas lights and faux-evergreens were draped around the SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD, and we thought it was the greatest thing we had ever seen.

Confession: I still think it was, but I have since learned how uncool it is to say so.

Thanks to Otherstream for the photo of little-Pisa, which brought back a nice Christmas memory.

PS: And if you have never read Truman Capote's amazingly wonderful A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, you should. Too wonderful for words, but get out those kleenex.

If Men Had Hot Flashes

Of course, we know that hot flashes are caused by menopause. But what causes them? Why do they continue in some women and not in others? Why do some foods seem to precipitate them? Why do they occur in the dead of night?

As you may or may not know, if you look up "causes of hot flashes"--HOW they happen, the physiological mechanism--you repeatedly read the following:

The exact cause of hot flashes isn't known, but the signs and symptoms point to factors affecting the function of your body's thermostat — the hypothalamus. This area at the base of your brain regulates body temperature and other basic processes. The estrogen reduction you experience during menopause may disrupt hypothalamic function, leading to hot flashes.

Well, duh!

I could have written that. I know what the hypothalamus does. Most of us who wake up soaking wet, have figured out that it's something like that.

But what CAUSES the hypothalamus to go wacky? What is the exact way lowered-estrogen affects the hypothalamus? How and why does hormone-level impact it?

(((crickets)))

Wait, they can figure out how to make hard-on drugs for old guys, but they still don't know what causes hot flashes?????

Now, let me guess. Why do you suppose that is?

Are women, specifically OLDER women, just not that important? Why has some high-end study not been conducted? THIS IS 2011!

Wait, let me guess again. Someone tried to fund a study, and couldn't get funded. The pharmaceutical industry specialized in giving women cancer for decades, and that was judged good enough. It was only when various medical studies came out, definitively condemning Hormone Replacement Therapy as a medical risk, that many women started studying the issue for ourselves. After all, our mothers and grandmothers had used HRT, and we assumed we might also.

But my mother had breast cancer (when she was exactly my age) and my grandmother had fibrocystic breast disease (to such an extent that she had several large, but benign, breast cysts surgically removed). Hm, thought the baby-boomer women. Maybe they're right, and we shouldn't use astronomical levels of hormones? (And why didn't they study the safety of hormones, before dosing millions of women with them? Well, why would they?)

Okay, we thought, let's study the condition, and figure out what might help; first, the cause of hot flashes. If we can isolate the cause, we can figure out what natural or alternative treatments might be. At the very least, we can figure out catalysts and try to minimize their occurrence.

(((crickets)))

They. Don't. Know.

They put a man on the moon (man on the moooooon) -- so yes, it is reasonable to assume they might care about their moms' discomfort. Isn't it?

Ha!

I started menopause in 2006, and as regular readers know, I celebrated my postmenopausal self (defined as one year of not menstruating) by starting this blog in June of 2007. I still have hot flashes, although not the wretched slow-boil kind (known as "ember flashes"), which are mercifully behind me. Some women continue to have those, too, though. Why? And why are they notably less common in Asian women? Is this cultural, and possibly diet-related? A good way to determine this would be to study hot flashes in Asian women still living in Asian countries and eating Asian diets, vs Asian women who live in the USA and eat the usual American diet of processed foods, salty snacks and Taco Bell. Is there a difference in number of hot flashes? Or perhaps there is a genetic component.

And have they done this? I have no college degree, and yet, I can figure out this much.

(((crickets)))

Last night--BANG, in the middle of the night, I woke up and wiped off the sweat. I wondered if it was something I ate at a wedding reception, and then... was instantly peeved: I SHOULD KNOW THIS! I SHOULD KNOW WHAT FOODS TO AVOID, DAMMIT! WHERE IS MY GUIDE FOR THE MENOPAUSAL SWEATY WOMAN, WRITTEN BY SOME ASSOCIATION???!!! As the diabetic associations and the gluten-intolerance associations and the salt-free associations offer guides for their people.

No, they can't provide this, since they are clueless.

Women have lived on this planet as long as men, and yet--? Hot flashes are still described as a "mystery."

And so, in a nod to Gloria Steinem's witty piece titled "If Men Could Menstruate"--here is what occurred to me in the dead of night.

~*~

If Men Had Hot Flashes, there would be a Hot Flashes Association (HFA) with foods marked "HFA" (logo inside a macho male symbol), the way Cheerios have a little heart on them, for "heart healthy." Needless to say, they would KNOW which foods to eat and which not to eat, since extensive research and causality studies would exist.

If Men Had Hot Flashes, the Weather Channel would feature a daily Hot Flash Report, instructing men with maps of Hot Flash Regions for the day (since extensive research will show that weather is a factor). Men at work will ask each other (not in whispers, either), what the Hot Flash Report said that morning: "Did anyone catch the Hot Flash report? Whew, is it hot in here?" Raucous laughter and high-fives.

If Men Had Hot Flashes, there would be hot-flash drugs tomorrow morning. And they would be advertised in pricey, cutesy TV ads, just like Viagra, Cialis, etc. (Drugs with NO female equivalent, BTW, since older women's sexual enjoyment is as low-priority in this culture as the dilemma of hot flashes is.)

If Men Had Hot Flashes, when it's time to toast at the wedding and they flush unexpectedly, they will stand up boldly and proudly announce, "I AM HAVING A HOT FLASH!"--and all men in the room will applaud, laugh and cheer. It will be like announcing which team is going to the Orange Bowl. No shame, no apologies. No giggling by anybody when they turn beet-red. What is to apologize for? It's a sign of MANHOOD, isn't it? And therefore, it would be roundly celebrated.

If Men Had Hot Flashes, women would hear how we really don't understand the mysteries of the human body, the stages of life, the natural progression of age. We would hear jokes about "women menopause"--how women suddenly have to acquire sports cars and young hottie-boys in old age. Or is that just too funny to think about? Yes, you're right, never mind. (Let's skip this one, too sci-fi to be believable.)

If Men Had Hot Flashes, they would brag about how hot it was, how long it lasted, and who had the biggest. They would institute suitable competitions and a Champion thus installed: Hot Flash Champion. And everyone would know this man's name.

If Men Had Hot Flashes, they would probably wake up their wives at night and demand to be taken to the ER. Some Nice Guys(tm) would quietly and politely not wake the Missus, take a cold shower, and go back to sleep... only to be called MANGINA, WIMP, WUSS, PUSSY-WHIPPED and such, by his fellow males. Suitably chastened, Nice Guy(tm) will attempt to make a big fuss next time, like a proper man should.

If Men Had Hot Flashes, there would be literary works throughout history about Hot Flashes. Shakespeare's Henry V would have given a rousing speech, "We happy Few! We who burn on the pyre manhood!" (Males thrust weapons into the air and shout in response: AGGGHHH!!!!) TS Eliot would write great poems about his hot flashes, while Hemingway would turn it into an existential drama about hunting. And we would have to study all of this in school, and it would be nothing to take lightly or laugh about. THIS IS MANHOOD WE ARE TALKING ABOUT, people!

If Men Had Hot Flashes, John Wayne would have said: "I gotta hot flash, pilgrim, whats it to ya?" This famous manly comment, shrugging off the tortures of the damned, will make it into Bartlett's Quotations.

If Men Had Hot Flashes, well, I wouldn't even have to write this. ;)

This is the way the world ends

At left: Street preacher at Bele Chere unequivocally informs us we are destined to hell, as the fellow at right advertises "Sexy Man Dance $2"... and do I have to tell you what kind of huge wad of bills he had by the end of the day? Priceless entertainment, my friends. (More of my Bele Chere photos HERE.)



Yes, I have numerous excellent excuses for why it has taken me two weeks to update. ((hangs head in shame))

But damn, I am not sure why I should feel guilty for not updating a blog that it appears no one reads any more (according to Sitemeter, et. al.) Lately, whenever I go to the library, I make sure to give my own blog a hit, that's how pathetic the situation is. Beyond that, I have been thoroughly confused regarding which writing goes where.

For example: I have been chastised many times here on DEAD AIR that ____ (whatever it is I wrote) does not belong on this blog, but on a (pick one) 1) Livejournal 2) Tumblr 3) Dreamwidth 4) Facebook, Twitter or MySpace (etc etc etc). It does? And who decided that? I am afraid I simply do not understand the protocol, as usual.

Roughly speaking, the guidelines are that "personal" stuff is not supposed to be on a blog, unless you have a "personal blog"... but then they get upset with personal bloggers when they blog about politics or religion. If you have a "political blog"--then you are not supposed to write about "personal" issues. Further, if you have a quarrel with someone within Blogdonia, you are supposed to go to Tumblr or one of those, to air your differences. (Got all that?)

As I said, I am unaware of who wrote all these nosy-parker rules, and when. But they have left me confused, wondering if I am doing it wrong (again) and so forth. Even after four years of blogging, I become hesitant, but of course (as you see!), not for long. But I absolutely hate the fact that all of these dumbass, informal "rules" have wormed their way into my head. Bah.

And so, the personal and impersonal will continue to be all mished-mashed together on DEAD AIR. Sorry about that, rule-keepers and protocol-enforcers of Blogdonia!

~*~

I devoured Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood" (2009) in one sitting. I did not realize this novel was contemporaneous with the totally-fabulous "Oryx and Crake" (2003)--I had mistakenly believed it was a sequel. And I refuse to read sequels to end-of-the-world tales... either it's the end or it isn't. I have always found "Oryx and Crake" to be the most believable and realistic version of the End of Days--and I have read a parcel of em.

Yes, this is the way the world ends.

I loved "The Year of the Flood"--the apocalypse as told from another group within the same time-frame and using the same motifs (and some of the same characters) as "Oryx and Crake." The religious cult in the novel, God's Gardeners, is the best fictional religious cult I've ever come across; I would most assuredly be joining if I was there. The sermons and hymns in the book are fantastic. Atwood's idea that in the future, rather than the Litany of the Saints, we will have litanies of extinct species, is one that will stay with me forever.

Margaret Atwood is a genius, straight up. If she wrote a bunch of these books, I would read them all; she needs to set up shop and do a whole series, like Narnia or something. It would turn a lot of us into junkies, and she would get very rich.

Okay, but what, you sensibly ask, does this have to do with not updating your blog?

Well, because as with JG Ballard, I started thinking seriously about the end of the world and how it would happen. And then, the Tea Party began (continued?) their major economic fuckery, and it was suddenly as if the book was being acted out right in front of me, or at least the earliest stages. Are we going to end up privatizing the police forces and prisons? How can we pay for government if these "budget cuts" keep continuing? Will a huge multinational corporation, Manchurian Global or one of those, run the world at last? Will we put the worst criminals into something called "Painball" (possibly a nod to ROLLERBALL), organizing them into gangs and providing them with laser-like weapons and then broadcasting their deaths on TV? (And WHY shouldn't capital punishment be profitable also?)

In short, the President has surrendered on the Debt Ceiling issue, putting all of our futures at risk... this is crucial not just to us oldsters who are rapidly approaching decrepitude, but to the future of our environment as well. Nero fiddles, as The Tea Party continues to mouth their well-calculated fibs. My favorite article-title in this debacle, hands down, quoted Missouri's Democratic congressman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver: The Debt Ceiling Deal: 'A Sugar-Coated Satan Sandwich'

You just can't get any more to the point than that, now can you?

I dunno about yall, but I am thinking of starting a God's Gardeners parish, or cell, or whatever they are going to be called.

How I spent Lent

First, I read Gary Null's book, Death By Medicine, which promptly gave me a kidney stone.

Well, okay, I know the book didn't, but it sure felt that way.

For those interested, my weight loss is going extremely well. I am told that actual numbers "trigger" people in various and sundry ways, so I will refrain from providing actual poundages. I will simply say that my BMI is now in the merely "overweight" category, and has exited the alarming "obese" category. I lost 10% of my body weight during Lent, which believe it or not, wasn't that hard. Now we are approaching the same weight I have dealt with my whole life, which likely will be hard. Still, I have to say, after being repeatedly guaranteed that a woman my age with thyroid disease SIMPLY CAN'T lose weight, I am glad to report that this is another myth. Yes, it is possible... and in fact (here's the dirty secret), I think it's far easier since I no longer have a surplus of estrogen coursing through my body, demanding that I eat to ensure the safety of my progeny. You know those deadly-serious cravings you get about 10 days before the end of the menstrual cycle? (I guess the time-span is different for everyone, but you know what I mean.) Well, I am happy to report that THE CYCLICAL CRAVINGS ARE GONE. Along with my estrogen, that is... which of course means there is a down side to everything.

And I feel great (sans kidney stone), and my left knee stopped hurting!!! (Right knee? A stubborn lil sucker!) I took the kidney stone as a symptom of rapid weight loss, as gallstones can be also.

After reading Gary's scary book, I decided to avoid doctors, since I knew exactly what they would say anyway (I typed medical records, including nephrology, for a good long while) and realized they would use this golden opportunity to test me to an obscenely-expensive fare-thee-well. No tests, no crap, no sirree Bob!

I figured: 1) it probably was a stone, from the symptoms and likely cause and 2) ain't nothing you can do about it except take their nasty toxic drugs and wait for it to flush out. (I also knew that I should go to the ER if I started running a fever, which was virtually impossible while sweating non-stop, as I was.) So, I opted for what I tell my customers: literally gallons of dandelion tea and magnesium citrate. It passed within a day, but it was um, quite memorable... and during this unpleasant time, I locked my keys in my car while it was running and had to call Mr Daisy away from work (he was unusually kind and sympathetic about my stupidity!)...

~*~

If you think it's easy for a big-mouth like me to shut up for 6 weeks, you are RIGHT. Thus, I didn't.

I commented here (Alas, a Blog) on the newest pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, and called on the Pope to resign. Of course, no one seriously replied to me (as they never do over there)... but I needed to post that somewhere to get it off my chest immediately.

Easter Sunday, woke up to more infuriating news that the whole scandal has been reduced to "petty gossip" by the Vatican.

(((Daisy yowls for emphasis)))

~*~

One of my favorite spiritual books, The Joy of Compassion by Lama Zopa Rinpoche which I also posted about here. It's a wonderful study guide for the layperson to use!


I had two genuine moments of all-encompassing karuna during Lent, that took me by storm. I was startled and unprepared. They were only a few minutes or so in duration, but they were overwhelming.

I was reminded of a passage from the William Butler Yeats poem, Vacillation (and such a perfect title):

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

I felt great compassion for everyone on earth, even the people I dislike most. Maybe especially for them; I could suddenly see how they had become the people they were. I could see their suffering, and how they/we have bent ourselves into all sorts of unreasonable shapes and angles, to avoid that suffering (which of course, causes even more).

In both cases, in both instances, I was left very shaken by this awareness. I felt myself almost deliberately withdrawing from this consciousness in the last instance: But I don't want to feel compassion for bad people! And I was fighting my own awareness. Concurrently, I realized I was withdrawing my request for enlightenment by fighting the compassion. My ego, my innate desire to feel superiority to others, my desire (need?) to dislike others, all defilements rooted in the material world, fought my desire for enlightenment.

And I heard my deepest self's incredulity: But isn't this what you wanted?

Ego replies: I don't WANT to feel compassion for evil people, they don't deserve it!

Deepest self: Do you deserve it?

Ouch! I remembered the Eucharistic liturgy, and the specific request that God not grant us what we truly deserve. During the (endless) Good Friday liturgy, and subsequent Veneration of the Cross, I took note of the role of the laity in the liturgy: we are the ones who shout "Crucify him!"... it isn't someone else who does it.

Give us Barabbas, not this one!

Do we forget our role in the Passion? Why do we think it would be any different if He returned now? We would do the same thing, all over again.

Look around, we do it all the time.

~*~

Glad to be back. Hope all is well with you, and please take note of my new moderation policy, inspired by people who would tell me getting an abortion is majorly right-on and terrific, but chew me out over trying to prevent a heart attack. No more, folks. New sheriff in town, etc.

I loves you guys and I missed you!!! (((sobs)))

We won't give pause until the blood is flowing

Photo of the greatest writer and philosopher of the 20th century, JG Ballard, from The Northern Light.







I have been trying to articulate what I dislike about mass-market holidays. In particular, the mass market holiday that Christmas has become.

And I find myself going to my late guru to explain; may his soul rest in peace. I miss him like he was my own father. Maybe he was, in a way.

From V. Vale's quite invaluable J.G. Ballard: Conversations, some excerpts that say it far better than I can:

People use mental formulas that they've learned from TV. Even in ordinary conversation, if you're talking to the mechanic at the garage about whether you need new tires for your car, you and he probably talk in a way that his equivalent thirty years ago would never have done. You use--not catch phrases, but verbal formulas. Suddenly you realize you're hearing echoes of some public-information, accident-prevention commercial. It's uncanny.

[...] What's interesting [about Reality TV shows like Big Brother] is that almost nothing happens. There's a certain amount of bitching and gossip and sitting around the supper table talking in a sort of half-hearted way, but there's no drama. Nonetheless, the audiences are riveted. And they're riveted by very similar programs where TV producers put people on desert islands and see how they survive; a series called Survivor did just that. I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for "reality"--for ordinary reality. It's very difficult to find the "real," because the environment is totally manufactured.

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs, and presentation techniques. There's nothing "natural" about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment--we're living inside commercials. I think people realize this, and they're desperate for reality, which partly explains the surge in popularity of "adventure" holidays. People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer. And there's no escape.

Holidays like Halloween and Christmas are spectacles that people engage in, because they are on TV. Working retail, I consider a certain type of existential-shopping (wherein people don't really know what they are "looking" for) part of this Ballardian phenomenon.

There are so many fabulous quotes in this book, I will be blogging lots of them. For instance, about the disparity between rich and poor:

In England [this conversation was recorded in 2003], we're getting unprecedented disparities of wealth. The people who run our biggest corporations have begun to affect life in London primarily by buying up property, and the old middle class (doctors, civil servants, teachers, salaried professionals) can no longer afford to live in central London. Now there are whole areas of central London given over to the rich. I've often thought that in due course all these very rich financiers are going to leave very large sums of money to their children. Then you'll get a sort of New Leisure Class who never work, but have huge spending power--like the ancien regime in France. Supposedly, the same thing is happening in Manhattan: the middle class has been forced out...

V. Vale replies that the same thing is happening in San Francisco; New York and San Francisco are the two most expensive cities in the USA. I would add that it's even true in lil ole Greenville; the 'centers' of towns/cities are now priced out of range for the actual natives of those towns/cities. Most of the people moving into the new high-priced condos in downtown Greenville, for instance, come from someplace else, often from Europe or the coasts. The rich colonizing the cities and leaving the outlying suburbs to the poor and the rabble, is the exact reverse of what happened in the 60s, when the rich moved to the suburbs and left the inner-cities to rot. Now that they crave authenticity, they have moved back to cities in droves. However, they still aren't getting the authenticity they crave, since the only people who can afford to live in cities are rich, affluent people who are all just like them.

In the cities, a bizarre new class-based uniformity has taken hold, while in my suburban apartment building, every race and age and nationality and economic status is well-represented.

Authenticity has been priced out of the market.

Speaking of which, here is Ballard on the future of sex:

[The] time is going to come when no young woman will regard penetrative penis-and-vagina sex as real sex, because it isn't deviant enough to be considered "real sex." These days, magazines for teenagers sold openly on newsstands have headlines like, "Interested in S&M sex? Junior Cosmo explains all you need to know." And this is a magazine that's going to be bought and read by 14-year-olds. The period of conventional, penetrative, penis/vagina sex will be over by the time you're about 15, and then you'll move into the area of conceptualized sex, S&M, and whatever--and that's what will be regarded as real sex. To me, this seems like a daunting thought.

Ballard on the future of reading:

People don't use libraries as much as they used to. One thing I miss terribly--I don't know if the same thing applied in America, but over here in the Forties and Fifties when I first came to England, what I loved were the second-hand bookshops. Every small town had a second-hand bookshop, which was constantly being stocked up... when someone died, the family took their books to the second-hand bookshop and got sixpence each for them. There were a lot of unserious materials, popular novels and the like...but there were a lot of very serious books. You know, one serious collector in a lifetime could produce enough books to keep a second-hand bookstore open for a year.

I did most of my reading in second-hand bookshops. I remember when I was living in London somewhere I used a local one. Also, serendipity came into it [...] You made accidental discoveries all the time. And this sort of refreshed one. You were constantly being surprised, constantly making discoveries. All this is gone now, of course. There can't be more than a half a dozen used bookshops in the whole of West London, if any.

What we've got now is a new kind of literacy. We've got people who are expert at reading the labels on products, expert at reading instructional manuals that come with a new kind of vacuum cleaner, or a computer or what have you. They're expert at that kind of reading, but not at anything else. Not with a more traditional book.

I don't know if the internet has affected that. I have very high hopes for the internet, which I think could be the sort of--if we're entering a New Dark Age, the internet could help to keep the lights on!

I'll be revisiting these Conversations often, which Ballard would be pleased to know, I found by browsing bookstores in the serendipitous manner he has described so well.

I miss you, man.

~*~

Ballard would have understood this song/video, which is where we get today's blog-post title. Caution, may trigger, may offend, watch out, yada yada.

(Not for the faint of heart or the oversensitive. Really.)

Vicarious - Tool



Note: Well, damn, there is some argument over exactly the lyrics I was going to quote. I always heard:

We all feed on tragedy
It's the virtue of empire

Other listeners report: "It's the virtual vampire," and still others, "like blood to a vampire." (Does anyone know the official lyrics?)

I guess you can still understand the concept, though.

Put another way:

Scary openings, etc.

I guess I shoulda used these for Halloween, but decided to save them for Friday the 13th. :)

~*~

The first is from the British anthology TV series titled Journey to the Unknown, which used to scare little Daisy to death.

Wikipedia link says:

The series had a memorably famous whistled theme tune by [famous horror moviemakers] Hammer's Harry Robinson and title sequence involving a deserted and apparently haunted Battersea fairground.

Journey to the Unknown - TV opening (1968)



~*~

Rod Serling's 70s anthology series Night Gallery was often too goofy-spooky for me, and I was still a kid. I am sure much of it is even goofier now.

But every now and then, one of them would blow your mind and you'd be up all night. My all-time favorite was "The Diary" (first episode at link, length is about 26 minutes)--which featured the ever-fabulous Patty Duke. I have thought of it at least once a month since seeing it, eons ago. Terrifying and truthful.

All of these paintings (in the opening sequence) represented a different episode and sometimes at the end of a show, the frame would freeze and morph into the painting. I loved that!

Night Gallery - TV opening (1970)



~*~

And looky what I found?! My second-favorite Night Gallery of all time, Silent Snow, Secret Snow, from the story by Conrad Aiken, narrated by Orson Welles.

A few clunky glitches in this ancient video, but well worth your while. Take a peek, I guarantee that you are in for a big treat.

Silent Snow, Secret Snow - Part I (Night Gallery)



Silent Snow, Secret Snow - Part II (Night Gallery)

Fascism is sexier than communism

Lara Logan, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for CBS News, held forth at some length on the Charlie Rose show on Tuesday night. And in doing so, she deprived me of sleep. Her starry-eyed warmonger vibe was terribly disturbing, her bloodthirsty ranting and raving reminding me of General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.

Dear God, I thought, I hope nobody else is watching this.

We must, she insisted, finish this war. More troops! (When pressed, she said at least 40,000.) She was adamant that we must track the terrorists into Pakistan and kill them all.

Logan clearly relishes repeating the word "kill"; she didn't use any of the new and improved euphemisms for warfare. I almost expected her to lick her lips in anticipation. I have rarely seen someone so exultant at the prospect of more war, of expanded war. And I realize, she startled me because she is a woman and I have seen advanced war-fever in women so very rarely.

Logan is beautiful, blond and South African. When she speaks of terrorist attacks on convoys, her eyes sparkle with vengeance. She reminds me of the character of Jane in VS Naipaul's novel Guerrillas, a beautiful British woman who also enjoyed being where the action is:

She was without consistency or even without coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unassailability.

And this is what is so thoroughly hypnotic about Lara Logan: unassailability. Like Robert Duvall waving away the pesky incoming enemy fire in Apocalypse Now, one intuitively knows Logan will emerge intact, eyes gleaming, from any war she covers... possibly holding some executed terrorist's head aloft, as Judith brandished the head of Holofernes.

On some level, I am stunned that such an openly pro-war political partisan is considered an objective journalist. (If anyone still believes in "journalistic objectivity"--Lara will talk you right out of it.) Then again, it is entirely logical that this is the type of person who wants to charge right into the thick of it. Do we expect anti-war journalists to choose the wartime beat? (Ed Bradley was an exception, may his soul rest in peace.)

Undoubtedly, Lara Logan is a gal who loves her work.

Investigating, I see that Logan is married to a federal defense contractor from Texas whom she met in Iraq. (Well of course she is.) But then I find a series of cool stories on HuffPo about her. Our Lara is a homewrecker! The defense contractor already belonged to someone else when she met him. (And I can tell you right now, speaking of guided missiles, that dude didn't know what hit him.)

Keep your eye on her. She is our very own Tokyo Rose, threatening Al-Qaeda over the airwaves, pumping up the reputation of the US military and encouraging the never-ending storm of war-death to continue. She is a collaborator with the war, and takes a proprietary interest. She unabashedly loves it.

I expect her to enter politics. I predict she will go very far.




~*~

My wonderful blog post title comes courtesy of the late Susan Sontag.

Library Thing is cool

I love my new LIBRARY THING widget! (see lower right of blog) I'm afraid I got very obsessive, and easily composed my 200-book list with nary a second thought. They allow listings of 200 books per free account; you can pay a premium to list your entire library. (PS: That's another thing that happens when you get old--I figure I've read thousands and thousands of books by now.)

You can match the widget to your blog colors and craft it to show however-many-books-you-want per page load. (Any more than 9 at a time seems to make the covers virtually microscopic, and that's no fun.) What's neat about LIBRARY THING is, if you are poor, you can change the book-display to a nicer cover, and no one will know you read it second-hand for 10 cents. Then again, some of the new covers are shit, and you can also keep the old ones if you like them better. (I also chose at least one cover of a foreign translation, since I thought it was prettier and showed up better on the widget.)

I didn't know if I should list books that changed my life, or just books I love since I eat up certain scandals like ice cream, or what. So, I went in several directions at once, and tried to make my list fairly representative. However, some aspects of my identity got decidedly short shrift; I think there is only ONE vegetarian book listed ((guilt)) and that is probably because it's the official cookbook of Michael Stipe's restaurant. Since this is ostensibly a feminist blog, I listed several now-forgotten Second-wave feminist books that I think are terrific, as well as important. I tried hard to keep the celebrity bios to a minimum, but sometimes, you simply must include certain people.

Library Thing also lists other members with your books in their catalogues. I have already noticed there is significant overlap in various cult-followings, particularly those of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and J.G. Ballard (RIP, dearest one!) and I find this fascinating; I am trying to figure out why and how these writers' sensibilities are similar...or are the READERS the people who are similar, and our attraction to these writers ideas is about US, not them?

Some books have a mere 6 followers*, and some, of course, have followers numbering in the thousands. I have not yet reviewed books or participated in any of the conversations, but I hope to do so at some point. Right now, mere escapism. (I haven't had as much time to myself since one of my co-workers decided to walk off the job and I have taken up the slack.)

It's lots of fun to browse old books in musty second-hand bookstores and public libraries, and it's fun online, too.

~*~

*Nan Goldin's I'll be your mirror is also reviewed here.

Marilyn French 1929-2009

Marilyn French has died at age 79. Her novel, The Women's Room (1977) was a major bestselling sensation. We all read it, even my grandmother. It was like the radical feminist Peyton Place, finally assigning the blame where it belongs.

The first part of the amazing novel mirrors accounts by male writers such as John Updike and John Cheever. They wrote about suburban New England life from the affluent white male perspective. French's protagonist Mira, it seemed, could be one of their wives, writing about what the women were doing while the men were away in their offices, on the golf courses, with their mistresses, in the city. This was the other half of the story, the one we didn't get. The women's version. (And in the telling, we suddenly realized: there has always been a women's version that we have not heard, a mute reflection throughout history.)

The second part of the novel concerns Mira's feminist awakening, which is electrifying. She returns to college (Harvard, where French obtained her Ph.D.) and sees that female students have scratched out "Ladies Room" on the restroom door, and have written instead THE WOMEN'S ROOM. Mira stares at the sign, considering the changed meaning, and knows that everything will now be very different for her. As it was for all of us.

In the late 70s, it was not uncommon to see the word "Ladies" scratched out on various bathroom doors, from New York to Berkeley, and the word WOMEN'S in its place. (Who you callin a lady? The hell with that shit.) It was a special welcome, extended to feminists: other feminists have been here before you.

I remember how happy I was, whenever I saw the words.

The Women's Room was made into a bad TV movie in 1980, starring Lee Remick as Mira. There was undue emphasis on Mira's love affair with the younger man, regarded as pretty hot stuff back then. But even so, feminism was present and centered. I can still remember that I was living in a small duplex on a crowded street, in which I could hear the conservative born-again neighbors sneeze on the porch next door, and I could hear that they were watching the movie, too. What would be the reaction, I wondered. Even as a bad movie, it was powerful for its time.

After the scene in which Mira gives birth to her baby, I heard the women and men arguing on the porch next door: A man couldn't handle that, he'd be complaining to high heaven at the very first labor pain! I heard the men defending themselves, and I was surprised at how forceful the argument became. I was impressed: even at a remove, even the soapy-Hollywood version of The Women's Room, had the power to make women speak. I remember sitting inside, listening to them argue, feeling such pride in Marilyn French, and in feminism.

Who else among us had such ability, such storytelling power?

Resquiat in pace, dear Marilyn French, who prompted women to scrawl on bathroom doors, and argue with Baptist husbands. We love you.

J.G. Ballard 1930-2009

The greatest living writer of our time has passed.

There is nothing else to say.

And now he belongs to the ages.

~*~

Ballardian contains many pertinent links remembering Ballard; Simon Sellars writes:

Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination -- of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.

His work embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard's characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power. This is predicated on concurrency: Ballard's writing turns objectivity into subjectivity, opens up gaps where there is room for new subjects. His scenarios are what I term 'affirmative dystopias', neither straight utopia nor straight dystopia, but an occupant of the interstitial space between them, perpetual oscillation between the poles – the 'yes or no of the borderzone', to use a phrase from his work.

Here, dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. He reinhabits the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a 'state of mind'.

To read and to understand Ballard, then, is to be gloriously, finally liberated.

To James Graham Ballard: thank you.

Amen.

From Iain Sinclair:

“Everything that everybody else was bored by or appalled by, he was excited by. He wasn’t really interested in English literary parties and kept himself outside that.

“He was bored by the heritage of Central London and, unlike other writers, never wanted to talk about what he was writing. He preferred to talk about ideas, or some weird news cuttings he had brought along.

“Living out in Shepperton for so long, he was one of the first to understand that the psychosis of suburbia was a fascinating thing to pursue.

“He loved the edges of cities: shopping complexes, motorways and airports. He was very taken up with Watford because of its multi-storey car parks.

“Where other people were terrified by the consumerist culture he saw it as exciting, something he could manipulate, shredding it and making his own world out of it.”

One of my first addictive tastes of Ballard was The Crystal World, one of the quartet of disaster novels described here by Tim Martin:

From the peerless science fiction of his stories in the Sixties, to the later dystopian satires on middle-class England, Ballard's fictions circled relentlessly around the most troublesome of modern preoccupations: tribalism, self-immolation, the fiction of belonging. Assisted by a peculiarly unliterary style that was heavy on aphorism and jargon and light on character and dialogue, Ballard created a literary microcosm all his own: a place where everyday life is a nest of competing psychopathologies, where human dreams and desires are reflected in their physical environments and where the workings of the mind become indistinguishable from external reality.

Ballard's work seized upon the vocabulary of marketing and the media, mixing them with techniques learnt from surrealism to create a new kind of fiction. His first quartet of novels told the story of four apocalypses, as the Earth was variously reclaimed by air, water, drought and a strange creeping crystallisation. In each novel, the world's changed circumstances were mirrored in the mental landscapes of Ballard's small group of characters. These complicated, troubling works, which included The Drowned World and The Burning World, began the games of repetition and identity that would resurface in all Ballard's subsequent writing, as well as giving first proof of his uncanny capacity for prediction.

Surreal though the early novels undoubtedly were, they paled beside The Atrocity Exhibition, a collection of stories and fragments that may prove to be Ballard's most influential work. Ostensibly a fever-dream taking place in the mind of a deranged psychiatrist, this was a work of violent postmodernism, drawing on the war in Vietnam, the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the world of advertising to create a terrifying and uproarious new form of satire. Prescience was everywhere at work: he noted Ronald Reagan's habit of using "the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring", while a frightening comic piece about focus groups analysing the "optimum sex-deaths" of female celebrities in automobile accidents not only looked forward to his later novel Crash but ensured that the newspapers besieged Ballard for comment when Diana died.

More:

How JG Ballard cast his shadow right across the arts (Guardian)

JG Ballard remembered (Sameer Rahim, UK Telegraph)

J.G. Ballard, 'Empire of the Sun' Author, dies at 78 (Huffington Post)

J.G. Ballard (Scriptorium)