Things I’m Not

I am not a graduate student. This causes my parents to turn beet-red with shame (or so they tell me from across the ocean), even though supporting me during grad school was not an option they were willing to entertain.

I am not a bestselling author. I hear you can’t become one overnight, and that it is especially difficult if you’re 22, have two novel-like husks sleeping inside your computer, no connections, plenty of writer’s block and stress, but I am probably just making excuses.

I am not in possession of a coveted, incredibly lucrative job-contract. It doesn’t matter that I’ve just graduated and have no experience. I do have a job that pays my bills and allows me to interact with people I like, mainly English professors, and to save enough energy for carefully slogging through those two novel-like husks and various essays on the side. I guess that makes me into a giant bum who’s wasting her equally coveted Duke education, whaddya know.

I am not good enough. Well, perhaps I am good enough for some people, but not for the people who matter. And certainly not for les parents terribles. Bah.

Forbes Fudges It Up

There have been enough angry and clever responses to the distasteful Forbes article on the evils of marrying career women, responses I can’t even begin to compete with.

I think Shakespeare’s Sister may have put it best when she wrote: “Were this article more honest, it might be titled instead “Don’t Marry a Career Woman if You’re a Lazy, Sexist Shithead Who Doesn’t Want to Lift a Finger to Help Around the House.” Although Discombobulation Station will not be outdone.

A poster who goes buy the name Henry Holland had some interesting things to say about a specific aspect of the article – the idea that men’s work hours have no statistical effect on divorce. Anecdotal evidence aside, I believe that Forbes journalist Michael Noer, who started another exciting article (read: foray into mindless sexism) with the words “Wife or whore?”, really ought to examine the social mores that make it acceptable for men to push themselves in the workplace, while women are often called “selfish” and so on when they work longer hours. He might just get to the bottom of this divorce conundrum.

This is all BESIDE the fact that, as Jill at Feministe has pointed out, some of the statistics being brought forth in Noer’s article are actually gender-neutral. Noer just uses them to attack women, assuming that men are simply entitled to, for example, extra-marital sex if they are highly educated (the latest statistic being that higher education and cheating are somehow correlated). Slate has used the supposed gender-neutrality to stick up for Forbes, but Jill ain’t buying it, and neither am I. The statistics might be neutral, but the language isn’t.

Hm. Now I have to wonder why Slate rejected my piece about trying to obtain emergency contraception in Charlotte. Perhaps Jack Shafer was behind that decision. Har har.

Personally, I think Americans just work too much in general. I think it sucks that all of us, men and women included, have some of the smallest vacations as compared to the rest of the industrialized world. But we are all jumping through hoops here, myself included, and being called “bad marriage material” by a supposedly leading magazine leaves a bad taste in my mouth… No, not for that reason. Pervert.

P.S. From the couch, Khaled is telling me that the statistics used in the article should be created using econometric regressions. You can run them with whatever component you want, and without peer review, they are basically worthless. Polls alone don’t tell you anything, and real causation can’t be established at the drop of a hat. I’d like to look at just what kind of research Noer was looking for. Of course, the article is no longer available at Forbes.com, so GAWD knows what’s actually going on.

Things my teachers didn’t tell me

LitLove has another interesting (per usual) post up, this time about literature’s insidious effects, particularly on a human being’s desire for a “solvable conundrum.”

The post made me think about my own “dangerous” encounters with literature, and how I came to find out things I didn’t want to know (but perhaps needed to know nonetheless).

Nobody warned me that hey, Humbert Humbert does not ultimately regret what he did to Dolores Haze. Sure, the author regrets it, and, I hope, the reader. But Humbert’s “confession” is a fake. “I was a pentapod monster, but…” Humbert’s invocation of art and the way he casts himself as the man who will immortalize Lolita for the masses is sick, cruel, barbaric, and self-indulgent. And Nabokov knows that, and he relishes, I believe, the momentary chance to fool the reader into believing that any sort of repentance has taken place (belledame has a few good things to say about Lolita as well).

Two times in a row, Donna Tartt has lulled me into a stupefied admiration for her visual glories, birch trees at night, warm summer evenings in the South, only to clobber me over the head later on with all that is ugly and unimaginably unsympathetic (and yet oddly fascinating) in the human heart that occupies these magical vistas of hers. I don’t think she likes her characters very much, not because they are bad creations, but because they are bad people (or perhaps not bad, just real). There is something painful and familiar about the characters, occupying all these rich (not necessarily beautiful, but incredibly vivid) settings, and yet ultimately revealing themselves to be grey and dim and downright nasty on the inside. It’s like stopping to admire the campus clocktower in the twilight, one of my favourite activities as I walked back to my dorm in my junior year, only to remember that this jerk I didn’t like happened to live in it.

And Wuthering Heights, of course, was supposed to have a happy ending. Except, of course, the happy ending seemed to be an elaborate joke, and the clouds of jealousy and necrophilia still hung, low and ominous, on my horizon after I snapped it shut. Consequently, my paper on it sucked.

The beautifully built structures of literature can be frightening places to occupy, especially after dark, which makes me glad that I still have the fuzzy, anti-intellectual distraction of network television to fall back on. Well, that, and alcohol and Elektronik Supersonik (Buagaga, as we say back in ze Eastern Europe).

General Weirdness

Men, I believe, are human beings (I know, I know, you’re falling out of your chair having just encountered such a radical notion. Bear with me.).

Which is why I am always saddened to see masculinity turned into a caricature of itself.

Of course, I also can’t help but giggle at how these good Christ’uns are so much like the various conservative Muslims they vilify for, you know, trying to make womenfolk invisible. Recent comments that boil down to “you, wench, dress like I tell you to, because I am trying to be pure,” on Feministe are so touchingly Al-Qauedaish, I have to wonder what would happen if these people stopped waving their Bibles long enough to grasp just how similar they are to the evil infidel.

Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, is moving in a similar direction, if a woman named Kola Boof is to be believed. Despite the fact that he thinks all music issues forth from Satan’s anus, Osama has a crush on Whitney Houston. He even wants her for his harem! Evil De… I mean, Evil West be damned! Sniffing coke in the pitch-black darkness of some cave might present a number of logistical problems, so Whitney better brace herself.

Home-grown conservative wingnuts and Osama & Co. have some peculiar things in common. Both tend to view the women around them as utilitarian props to be manipulated at will, par example. Most importantly, both are batshit nuts.

Monday Night Poetry Club

Song of the Master and Boatswain

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some , alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse,
The homeless played at keeping house.

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me, but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.

The nightingale are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.

– W. H. Auden

This poem is a favourite of Reynolds Price. He recited it in class one day, in a deep and langurous voice (he’s good at that sort of thing), so that the sunlight dimmed just a little as it streamed through the windows, and I, for a moment, really, really wanted a drink, although it was 11 a.m (perhaps that says more about me than it does about the actual poem, or even Professor Price’s recitation).

The poem appears to be broken up into two distinct parts, the first two verses being the prologue, and the last a kind of lyrical punchline. All three drowning in alkeehol, and, while I’m at it, exquisite grief.