Anya Kamenetz has been writing about "generation debt" for the Voice for over a year, and since I'm about to enter a life of debt myself (at least once I get around to applying for those student loans), I'm getting interested. Her book - Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to Be Young - is just out, and I might need to read it. Except I'm sure it's horribly depressing, like most doses of reality. Also, she is also my age, and a columnist for the Voice, and has written a book, so it makes me feel a wee bit inadequate. But I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who said that the national debt has been shifted onto students in the form of interest on our loans... and shit, that is an important thing to think about. Anyway, in yet another accomplishment she has an editorial in today's Times about shitty internships. I'm glad to see it. I've never had an internship and don't really want to. You can do internships in my grad program ("my" grad program... weird), and are encouraged to, but um, I'd rather work. You know, for money? Kamenetz writes, "Instead of starting out in the mailroom for a pittance, this generation reports for business upstairs without pay." Nicely put, and what a crappy deal.

Hey, how'd you like to read a totally depressing feature about men dealing with life after coming back from Iraq? What if I told you it came with new photographs by Eugene Richards, my most favorite photo man?

Yesterday Audrey and I had a beautiful day hanging out in Central Park. Then we went to a random Irish pub, where we met 2 marines who were in town for Fleet Week, and proceeded to drink with them for about three hours. Aud managed the military small talk like a pro, but I had to have two drinks before I could figure out that particular kind of banter. The best moment was when Audrey said, completely straight-faced, "So, what's the most powerful weapon you've ever fired?" Now I know more than I ever wanted to about the symbolism of a marine dress uniform, along with a few other things. In case you were wondering, those shiny shoes hurt their feet a whole lot. I told them they should try stilettos (as if I ever do), and my North Carolina soldier looked down at my legs, which ended in $3 flip flops on my filthy feet and said, "Yeah, but stilettos make y'all look a lot better than we do in these." Touché.

the irony never ends...

Condaleeza Rice spoke at Boston College's graduation, where she was - surprise surprise - greeted by protest. But she didn't ignore them:

She acknowledged the protests, receiving applause after urging graduates to consider perspectives different from their own.

"There is nothing wrong with holding an opinion and holding it passionately," Ms. Rice said. "But at those times you're absolutely sure that you are right, go find somebody who disagrees. Don't allow yourself the easy course of the constant 'Amen' to everything you say."

...Because, ya know, the Bush administration is always happy to consider "perspectives different from their own." A similar thing happened when John McCain spoke at the New School graduation:

After yesterday's event, Mr. McCain told reporters he felt "fine" about his reception. "I feel sorry for people living in a dull world where they can't listen to the views of others," he said.

Yes, John, I feel real sorry for them too.

grrrrrrrr.

There's nothing like some good old fashioned rage at the literary establishment to get a girl's blood pumping on a gray Thursday morning:

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years."

According to those surveyed, the winner is Toni Morrison's Beloved. Hooray, I guess. What a huge surprise. But that's pretty much the last time a woman writer appears on the extended list. Out of 4 runners up and 17 "Books That Also Received Multiple Votes," Philip Roth is cited 6 times, Don Delillo cited 3 times and Cormac McCarthy twice (for a total of 4 books - including a trilogy). There's also John Updike and Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson et al, but the only other woman is Marilynne Robinson for Housekeeping, a "book that also received multiple votes."

Aside from this tally being pretty disgusting (but - blah blah - not surprising), a good question is, why bother? WHAT IS THE POINT of choosing one book that is the very best out of the countless numbers published in the last 25 years?

A.O. Scott has some interesting things to say about that in the accompanying essay, but he also never stops to wonder about the lack of women on the list, though he does note the lack of young(er) writers. He's usually one of my favorite critics, partly because he is so damn smart and versatile - he's the film critic, and he writes for the Book Review all the time! He was on book leave, writing, it turns out, a book about the American novel! But come on. I don't understand why people do surveys about things with such obvious and terribly boring results.

For the record, the judges consisted of 38 women and 86 men. I don't necessarily think that more women judges would have meant more women as "winners," but I do want to point out that 38 to 86 is not any kind of balance, even if it looks a lot like it when compared to the results that group came up with. Not that anything as simplistic as "balance" is the goal here anyway.

If I could travel through time, I would go to the 50's and get people to make dresses that did not have teeny tiny waists, so that I could buy them on ebay right now.

Last Friday: Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott read from the new novel they co-wrote, Which Brings Me to You. I looooove Steve Almond, but had never heard him read before. He was just as hilarious and crass as I wanted him to be. His short stories (check out collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil BB Chow) are observant, tender, funny and smutty. His nonfiction book Candyfreak is also pretty excellent. So, he and Julianna hardly knew each other but really liked each other's writing, and she had this idea for a book that consisted of two characters writing confessional letters back and forth to each other, so she asked him if he wanted to write the book with her. As he tells it, he was in a bad place with his own writing at the time, so he said no. She wrote the first chapter anyway and sent it to him, and then he said he'd do it because he loved what she'd written. In full self-deprecation mode, he writes about the process of collaborating on a book in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Julianna read from that very first chapter, and she is tiny and manic and obnoxiously funny, and Steve, predictably, read 3 sex scenes from different parts of the book. He is so good at that shit. The reading was great, largely because they didn't treat their book like a sacred text. They interrupted themselves and made snide comments and talked to the audience, and it made hearing them read totally different than reading their work on the page, which is how I think readings should be. Afterward, a guy asked if they could record an audiobook that included all of their verbal footnotes.

Last night was T Cooper, Emily Barton and Paul LaFarge at Bluestockings. They made it "love to hate it/hate to love it" night, with each of them reading something from their own work (that they presumably loved) and then something else that they either loved to hate or hated to love. Emily read from Neuromancer by William Gibson, T read from Ethan Hawke's first novel, and Paul read some lines from an earl stage/experiment in writing what would ultimately be his seriously beautiful book The Facts of Winter. This was such a smart and entertaining way to organize a reading. It could even carry a whole reading series...

Speaking of books (um, when am I not?), here's the latest Bookslut column. It contains mention of poop. And here's my review of La Perdida. You really have to read this book. I'll even sell you a copy, when you come see Jessica Abel at the Grace Reading Series at Mo Pitkins next Tuesday, May 16th at 7pm. Deal?

the most smartest

I heart Kurt Andersen, always, but especially for his new New York magazine article:

The schadenfreude also has a righteous tint: Just as the Duke-lacrosse-team case confirms ugly stereotypes about privileged white jocks, Kaavya Viswanathan, the only child of a brain surgeon and gynecologist, confirms the invidious stereotype of privileged meritocrats gone wild. She is a flagrant example of the hard-charging freaks that our culture grooms and prods so many of its best and brightest children to become, a case study in one sociopathology of the adolescent overclass.

We are squinting at each other and I start to keep on walking, but then we both sort of stop.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey," I say, taking off my sunglasses. "How are you? Um.... when are you at the store these days?"

"Oh, I'm not today, I have the day off," he says.

"I mean, when are you there in general?"

"I don't work at the store, I hang art. So I'm mainly outside. It's good." Pause. He looks at me intently. "You look good."

"Thanks."

He laughs. "I'm hung over, going to get some coffee."

"Yeah, I wish I was, instead of going to work." I point up the street.

"So, maybe I'll see you over at Odessa Bar sometime."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Are you going there tonight?"

"Probably not."

"Okay. Well... it was good to see you."

"Yeah, I'll see you around."

How often is it that 2 people both think they know each other, but have in fact never met before? A few seconds into this conversation - which happened in the middle of 5th street on this insanely gorgeous and good mood-inducing Friday morning - I realized that this guy was not who I thought he was. And I have no idea who he thought I was, except to infer that he probably thinks we slept together. Pretty funny, since I am really never mistaken for anyone else (except occassionally Sarah Gilbert from Roseanne, which I still don't get). I let him keep talking because it was just easier than telling him that I never go to Odessa and have no idea what he's talking about. Also, I enjoy receiving compliments at 10am when i'm walking to work with wet hair (other than those shouted in passing by men licking their lips), and because he was pretty cute, if not the ambiguously gay boy of my casual acquaintance I originally thought he was. Oh well. Those skinny pale boys with black frame glasses really do all look the same.

friday dumping of the links.

-- What does it say about me that I get so much happiness from a critic absolutely slamming something that deserves to be slammed? The best example this week is Ben Brantley, who must have had a blast writing his review of the new musical Lestat:

Joining the ranks of Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata and other prescription lullaby drugs is "Lestat," the musical sleeping pill that opened last night at the Palace Theater....Hugh Panaro, in the title role, resembles a slimmed-down, foppish Fabio, the onetime top paperback cover model for such fare. And there is plenty of dialogue to match. "Whatever happened out there with the wolves has changed you, Lestat." Or: "I will never find solace! She was my solace! She stood between me and the abyss!"

-- This whole Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism drama is ridiculous and entertaining. But once again, the dirty secrets of publishing kinda fascinate me.

The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory.

-- Ginia Bellafante notices that books about Mommy-ing have gotten a little out of control.

Five hundred or so years from now, graduate students surveying our national library will wonder: So what was with all the mommies and babies? Had babies come before? Or was it simply that millennial Americans produced better babies, power babies (maybe)?

-- Then there's Janet Maslin's weird and not too convincing article about chick-lit:

Dizzy doesn't necessarily mean dopey. It means rejecting a caricatured version of feminism, studiousness or ambition in favor of even more caricatured womanly wiles. And it cuts a wide swath, from housewives to high school girls, from Bergdorf's all the way to Botswana.

-- Clare Zulkey interviews Michelle Tea. I knew Rent Girl was in development for TV, but did not know that Jill Soloway might be writing/directing.

-- Oh yeah, and on top of everything else, American Apparel is fat-phobic.

The New York Times Magazine this weekend featured a profile of Dov Charney, a couple years after the rest of the world had one (oh yeah, and after their own Style section wrote about him and American Apparel in November 2004, and Alex Kuczynski wrote about him in her "Critical Shopper" column last June). It presents him as a curiosity, when his weirdness has already been kind of beaten to death in the media. The difference is that this profile was largely flattering.

It's practically impossible to make the guy seem uncontroversial, but the writer of the article seemed more impressed than disturbed, interested in the ways Charney pushes boundaries and the positive implications of his obsession with style and youthfulness. I can see how Dov Charney can be seductive, both as a person and as a symbol, and how American Apparel is in many ways a great and innovative company. I want to believe that there can be socially responsible, "youth-driven" companies that treat their workers well and don't fuck up the environment and make stuff I want to buy. I even want to believe that someone like Dov Charney could be the one to do it. But I don't really think he is.

Charney's taste is fairly eclectic, but there are certain things at which he draws a hard line. Makeup is one. Plucked and trimmed eyebrows are another. To my surprise, short hair is a third. Looking over some fetching snapshots of a pixieish U.C. Santa Cruz student, "half-Japanese, half-white," showing herself off in a polka-dot bikini and biting into a strawberry, Charney nixed it on account of her Audrey Hepburn haircut. "You never see a girl we shot with short hair," he said. "That's unnatural."

Whereas your handlebar mustache, douche bag, just "naturally" grew on your stupid face like that?

Today I went out to get lunch (for a change), and stumbled on a brand new coffee shop on Mercer Street. It's called "think coffee," so it already gets points for a good name and a cute logo. It's also 100% Fair Trade (which, while it's not Rainforest Alliance Certified, is maybe the next best thing), and they're donating 25% of their profits to neighborhood charities. Which is A LOT. On top of that, the coffee is delicious and the place itself is huge - a serious plus since it's impossible to find a seat in a cafe around here. AND, it's open till midnight, unlike most of the places close to my office. So I think I have a new favorite place.

Shit. I just realized I missed Nan Goldin's latest show.

I saw Friends with Money this weekend (in an actual movie theater!), and thought it was brilliant. Lauren and I hated Nicole Holofcener's last movie, Lovely and Amazing (we now refer to as "Stupid and Insulting" or "Insipid and Annoying"), but it's bothering me that I can't remember why. Almost enough to see it again, except probably not. I also watched A History of Violence, which was good, but I'm not really sure why it's supposed to be this amazing commentary on violence and society and identity. In one of the special features they show the difference between the US and international release versions of 2 very violent shots: basically, the MPAA thinks American audiences can handle oozing blood, but not spurting blood. So the international audience got to see a little bit of spurting, while in the US version we were only allowed to see blood slowly oozing from the face of a guy who had his nose bone or whatever slammed into his brain. I'm so glad they're looking out for me.

I got home from Bluestockings yesterday before 5pm, for maybe the first time ever, and was amazed that there was such a long night ahead to get all sorts of things done. So I did the huge pile of dishes. I put away the mountains of clothes that were all over the place, and sorted through a ton of mail and pieces of paper. I went through stacks of magazines and organized them, kind of, or at least put them in new piles. I'm waaaaaay too attached to all this stuff. But I don't know what to do about it. And then, last night Emily asked me if I had a particular issue of the Review that she needed something from, and I got excited thinking that some of this obsessively archived crap might actually be useful, and then it turned out that the issue she wanted was the only one I didn't have.

New York magazine has a short thing about This American Life's upcoming Showtime show. Says Ira,

It’s like two worlds colliding, right? Pay cable and public broadcasting. But it’s been a really happy thing for us. We kept waiting for the meeting where they say, ‘Okay, when do the girls take off their tops?’ But that meeting never came.

I had no idea they were moving to NYC to do this! It actually makes me a little sad. Kind of a serious loss for Chicago.

didja miss me?

I haven't blogged in a month. While I was not blathering away on the interweb (or at least not on this blog), I was getting accepted to grad school (wheee!), getting a stomach virus in Guatemala, going to my parents' for Passover, unsuccessfully shopping for a bridesmaid dress in New Jersey and playing house with Betsy, among other exciting things. More on all that later, maybe.

I'm writing something a little different for Bookslut this month, less a review and more of a meandering thing about traveling and and books. And I'm having fun writing it, for a change. I came back from Guatemala with more than just illness... I have stories and pictures, some of which I'll post here and some which will probably make it into a zine. In case you want to get up to speed, here is last month's Bookslut column, and here is my review of The Seas at Grace. The reading series is tonite, by the way... Ellis Avery and Shari Goldhagen, 7 pm at Mo Pitkins, if yr interested. If you come you will get to see me doing my very best merch girl impression, while wearing this cool skirt I got for cheap at TJ Maxx this past weekend in the NJ. The NJ can be good for things like this. That and breakfast at Le Peep, even if Lauren always berates me for never eating all my food, and also for Lauren herself, even if she is the reason I was at three bridal shops in one day. I was very well behaved. She seemed surprised.

Here's a good piece from Nancy Goldstein, based on this genius cartoon:

I wasn't sure whether to use chorizo or bacon in my paella last weekend, so I called South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli and asked him to make my decision for me.

And Analee Newitz's column this week at Metroactive is excellent:

My friends said: Ignore it. They said: Those guys are morons. They said: Let's just read and write things in other places where men aren't dicks. But slowly I began to feel about their comments the same way I feel when a right-winger tells me that if I want to promote socialism, I should just move to another country. The problem is, I love my country. It fucking rocks. And I love Slashdot, too. I don't want to run away. This is my home, and I want to stay here and fight for justice. I want women to get excited by all the cool articles on Slashdot and not get driven away by a community that values them for their bodies instead of their thoughts.

v for verdict

Anthony Kaufman at Alternet says, Above all, "Vendetta" should be enjoyed as the first true anarchist movie Hollywood has ever made.

While at the Times, Manohla D spits, The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.

Hmmm.

Plaintive punk has become the soundtrack of white adolescence... Kill me. Kelefah Sanneh hearts emo, ponders gender at the Times:

A genre that was once mocked for its supposed earnestness is now home to some of the most flamboyant boys in rock 'n' roll....emo bands are doing something unlikely: they're reviving the fierce, fey spirit of glam rock, complete (sometimes) with eyeliner and lipstick.

He eventually concludes:

...no one can claim that these emo boys aren't putting on an enormously entertaining show. Here's hoping that, somewhere in America, a budding pop star is watching it all, and taking all of it much too seriously.

I don't know about K Sanneh's take on emo being somehow subversive, or "exciting." Flamboyance and theatricality are not inherently interesting, especially when paired with boy-as-victim love songs, and they are still whiny straight boys underneath all that eyeliner. At least he mentioned Jessica Hopper's genius emo-is-sexist essay.

Hey, here's my boyfriend talking about people talking about DIY abortion. How much fun is that to say? DIY abortion. (I didn't know The Stranger had a blog! Fuck.)

Sure, Naomi and I were asking for it when we went to see the universally panned Failure To Launch last night. We knew it. The nice thing about going to a movie and expecting that it will make you violently ill is that it's hard for it to be as bad as you think it will be. Yes, it can happen. But this one was more a case of sitting there marveling at the insipid plot, two unlikeable characters, SJP's digitally enhanced scary blue eyes and constant piercing shrieks, and Matthew "Douche" McConaughey's sweaty, orange face. Coulda been worse. Sort of.

The much worse part were the previews: apparently, the anticipated audience for this movie can also be expected to shell out $10 for a tween melodrama. We can look forward to Akeela And The Bee, yet another inspirational spelling bee movie, this time produced by Starbucks Entertainment. When that logo flashed across the screen it might have finally been enough to pry the cinammon dolce latte out of my hand. (You can read the press release about Starbucks' latest move towards world domination here, but you should do it on an empty stomach.) Offense #2 was a preview for some shitty gymnastics movie a la Bring It On, with lots of skinny girls running around in leotards, incorporating craaaaazy moves into their routines and luring boys to gymnastics meets through the enduring power of lycra and dance music. Jeff Bridges plays the coach - a sacrilege - and the main girl character, who starts off a bad-ass (signaled by her Black Flag t-shirt and skateboard), is very obviously at least 5 years older than the other shiny blondes on her high school team (who are not exactly high school age themselves). On top of this, there was a prolonged commercial for some new energy drink from Coke, which ended with the tagline "Let Your Man Out." The design on the can looks like the tribal tattoo on the arm of every dude you hate. And this was all before the brilliant film even started.

For balance... two good movies I just saw are The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and My Summer Of Love, which was probably the most beautifully shot movie I've ever seen. It was like a Justine Kurland photograph come to life. I wanted to lick the screen.

Claudia Goldin tries to set the record straight on the "opt out" revolution. Are women giving up their careers to stay at home with their kids? Totally. No way. Yes. No. All the time. Never. Blah blah blah. Let's go write another book about the mommy wars!

girls, grrrls.

Here's Naomi Wolf writing about Young Adult fiction for girls in the Sunday Book Review:

But teenagers, or their parents, do buy the bad-girls books — the "Clique," "Gossip Girl" and "A-List" series have all sold more than a million copies. And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren't really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers.

It's not such a new thing to be disappointed by Naomi Wolf, but this article doesn't say a whole lot. Yes, these stupid books are bad for girls - I don't even think there's much redeeming value to kids reading about the junior high A-list instead of watching it on TV. Yes, they reproduce double standards about sex that girls have to deal with off the page, too (and not helpfully). They make girls grow up "too fast," and they're obsessed with shopping. It's true that these books are far from Little Women. And?

I'm really glad this shit wasn't around when I was a kid (there were the craptastic Babysitter's Club books, and the Sleepover Friends series, but at least the girls in those books weren't constantly trying to undermine each other). I was obsessed with Norma Klein, who I was just telling Emily about. She wrote a ton of stuff that was totally genius and full of unrepentant sex. At least that's how I remember them (the genius part, I mean. There's no question that they were smutty). And they were meant for teenagers. Which meant a lot of us read them when we were 13. I remember hoping my mom wouldn't look at them too closely in the giant pile of stuff I was checking out from the library.

Speaking of books that don't suck, here's my review in this month's Bookslut of Michelle Tea's new book Rose of No Man's Land, which may or may not be a YA book, but is fucking great either way. Michelle will be reading at Bluestockings on April 13th (with Katia Noyes, who's book Crashing America also looks awesome), and also at the Happy Ending Reading Series on the 12th (with Heather McGowan and Yannick Murphy). You should come.

Also: next Thursday 3/23, Jennifer Baumgardner and Gillian Aldrich are screening their documentary Speak Out: I Had An Abortion at Bluestockings. This is connected to Jennifer's "I Had An Abortion" t-shirt project (which she wrote more about here), and should be cool. My fellow volunteer Dee will also be showing her film Pink Minute, an experimental narrative about a woman having an abortion. She rocks.

admissions.

Waiting to find out is funny. There's all this energy that goes into trying not to think about what it would be like if I got the outcome I wanted, convincing myself that I don't really want it anyway, all these stern attempts to be realistic. All these ways I try to get control. There's all sorts of energy that goes into not talking about it, keeping semi-secrets, postponing sending certain emails until I have an answer. There is the idea that if I acknowledge it, I might create some kind of crazy cosmic coincidence and thereby protect myself from news I don't want to hear. Then I wonder if I might be risking something by even writing about it in the abstract. But it doesn't matter how hard I try to make this all scientific, how hard I try to avoid admitting what I might want. Sometimes I like to let my oh-so-vigilant guard down and imagine the answer being yes.

surrender.

Now, I love Nikki McClure, but the March illustration of this year's calendar is just... I don't know. I can't say I don't like it, even though, well, I really don't. It's raining down on some big tree, that I guess is maybe kale (does kale grown on trees?), since the inspirational saying for the month is "eat more kale," which I thought was funny for a minute, but now, when it's hanging here above my desk, it just makes March seem like a bleak month. It seems like for 2006 Nikki's gotten more demanding in general. April says "make a run for it." That will be very very tempting.