Weighty Matters

Last Christmas my Mother bought me comedienne Ellen De Generes' book, "My Point, And I Do Have One." My Mom knows I like books, and after too many years of buying me velour jogging suits I had to return, I was relieved she'd finally considered my tastes. She doesn't need to know it was the worst book I've ever read, and I returned it promptly like everything else.

One bad book, however, hasn't put me off the whole bunch. I still love books and look forward to receiving them as presents. You usually can't go wrong giving or receiving a book. Somehow they're the one gift that elevates both giver and recipient through their imagined implication of erudition. Perhaps DeGeneres' ability to read a TV script is what misled her publisher in this regard - but I digress.

Just as TV was supposed to render us illiterate, computers were going to create a paperless society. While TV has spawned "TV Guide," the computer has yielded a profusion of books. Regrettably, all these new technological publications become obsolete before they're printed - much like your expensive home computer itself.

So, what's current? Last year the Internet was the buzzword. This year, even nostalgia junkie Bob Dole had a Web site. Dozens of tomes on the Web tell us what it is, how to get there and how to build your own home page. One book, "HTML for the World Wide Web," from Peachpit Press, seems like a good choice for the beginner. Filled with easy-to-follow, visual information, you could be marketing your mother's green chile stew on the Internet before the new year.

Or, perhaps your mother, like mine, wants to log on herself. Two books from Seal Press will provide her with some role models as well as practical advice to break into the still male-dominated world of cyberspace. "Wired Women," is a collection of essays written by female computer pioneers who spent the early '90s navigating sexist MUDs and avoiding flames about FAQs. For an explanation of that last sentence, try "Surfer Grrrls." This is a well-written and -designed guide to everything a woman (or man) need know to get online. It includes a glossary of terms, methods to overcome technophobia, the history of women and computers and a section on cyorg-grrrl role models.

Just for a laugh, Harper Perennial and the same people who created the parody of "Martha Stewart's Living," have now published "re>WIRED," a poke in the eye at glossy, homo-social "Wired" magazine. This testosterone-driven send-up is dead-on from the obnoxious articles to the almost-unreadable graphic design - and it explains why "Surfer Grrrl" will do well.

To kids all this computer stuff is old hat. They know more about the Internet by the age of eight than their parents know about Brady Bunch trivia. But before sitting that close to the screen gives them premature glaucoma, you might try teaching them some more tactile skills and introducing them to the world of Native American art at the same time with the Brooklyn Museum's, "
Native American Look Book." This children's activity book reviews the history of mask-making, pottery, and basket weaving and concludes each chapter with a crafty do-it-yourself exercise.

Informational books are fine, but curling up with a computer book next to a roaring fire is as unsatisfying as serving bologna and Cheez-Whiz roll-ups at your holiday party. The major publishers have pulled out all their big gun novelists for this shopping season. From Fawcett, there is "Weighted in the Balance," by real-life murderess and Victorian mystery writer Anne Perry. Dutton brings us the unbelievably-prolific Joyce Carol Oates with her new novel, "We Were the Mulvaneys." Viking has Stephen King's, "Desperation." And because even heiresses need something to do between toting machine guns and visiting their investment bankers, Scriber unveils "Murder at San Simeon," Patricia Hearst's premiere.

For a less-commercial offering, try "Seeing Dell," from Cleis Press. First-time novelist Carol Guess, beautifully tells a wise and human tale about love and loss.

If your pointy ears flutter for non-fiction, check out Doubleday's, "Genesis," by Bill Moyers. It's the companion piece to his new PBS series of the same name. New biographical titles for the winter include, Norton's, "A Desperate Passion," An Autobiography" by Helen Caldicott. This inspirational book is from the doctor who founded Physicians for Social Responsibility and worked at the forefront of the nuclear freeze movement. The father of modern gay politics, Harry Hay, tells his tale in "Radically Gay," published by Beacon. And if you've ever wondered what makes Leonard Cohen so depressed you can finally find out in "Various Positions," the "benignly tolerated" if not completely authorized biography of the Canadian singer/songwriter, from Pantheon.

Reading can be so strenuous after all that overeating. That's why they invented the coffee-table book. For local flavor try, two titles from Clearlight Books, "Christmas Celebrations, Santa Fe Traditions, Food & Crafts" and "Santa Fe Fantasy, Quest for the Golden City." They're full of recipies, crafts and photos and will look great in the guest room. Exceptionally lovely, "Perpetual Mirage, Photographic Narratives of the Desert West,"from the Whitney Museum of American Art. If you consider yourself racy, yet conservative, Powerhouse Books has "Red Light, Inside the Sex Industry," a surprisingly tame collection of gritty, candid photos of urban sex workers."

In the new-age category Tarcher/Putnam brings us "The Vein of Gold, A Journey to Your Creative Heart," a sequel of sorts to "The Artist's Way, " Julia Cameron's popular self-help book for artists. Also Bear and Co. has released a new divination system called "Contact Cards." They're the brainchild of a woman who was allegedly abducted by aliens numerous times. With the help of an artist friend she created a tarot-style ET deck that has all the appeal of the icy genital probes for which these almond-eyed, intergalactic visitors are known. Instead get Bear & Co.'s "Medicine Cards," with their inviting illustrations and book of Native American lore, it's no wonder these cards have sold over half a million copies.

Despite all the threats from technology, reported low reading scores, and the Turner Broadcasting merger, the book publishing industry is booming. Maybe its because books are durable. They're the hard copy that will survive when all the magnetic computer disks on earth are wiped out by a passing meteor. (Think about that IRS.) Maybe it's because they're weighty. Try carrying a box of them into your upstairs apartment.

What I like best about books though, is their beauty, their remarkable ability to transport me to a different place and, of course, their resale value.


Sidebar:
HTML for the World Wide Web, by Elizabeth Castro, Peachpit Press
Surfer Grrrls, by Laurel Gilbert and Crystal Kile, Seal Press
Wired Women, Lynn Cherney and Elizabeth Reba Weise, editors, Seal
Re>wired, A Parody, by Tom Connor and Jim Downey, Harper Perennial
The Native American Look Book, The Brooklyn Museum, The New Press
Helen Caldicott, A Desperate Passion, An Autobiography, Norton
Various Postions, A LIfe of Leonard Cohen, byt Ira B. Nadel, Pantheon
Radically Gay, by Harry Hay, Beacon
Perpetual Mirage, Photographic Narratives of the Desert West, the Whitney Museum of American Art
Christmas Celebrations, Santa Fe Traditions, Food & Crafts, by Richard Clawson, Clearlight Books
Santa Fe Fantasy, Quest for the Golden City, Clearlight Books
The Vein of Gold, A Journey to Your Creative Heart, by Julia Cameron, Tarcher/Putman
Contact Cards, by Darryl Anka and Kim Carlsberg, Bear & Co.
Medicine Cards, by Jamie Sams and David Carson, Bear & Co.
Weighted in the Balance, by Anne Perry, Fawcett
We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates, Dutton
Murder at San Simeon, by Patricia Hearst and Cordelia Frances Biddle, Scribner
Genesis, by Bill Moyers, Doubleday
The West, by Geoffrey C. Ward, Little Brown
Gone With the Wind 60th Anniversary Edition, by Margaret Mitchell, Scribner

Appeared in "Santa Fe Reporter Adobe Holidays" November 1996 © Suzanne Rush 2001

The Passion of Alice
by Stephanie Grant
Houghton Mifflin Company

Eating disorders were the cultural media phenomenon of the '80s. That decade, steeped as it was in the glorification of the superficial -- actors in the White House, "Dynasty," Milli Vanilli -- unsurprisingly, left people feeling empty. While some glutted themselves on denuded new wave calories, others determined to forsake all desire rather than survive on crumbs.

In Stephanie Grant's debut novel, "The Passion of Alice," set in 1984, the characters live in a psychiatric hospital for women with food obsessions. Alice is an anoriexic, who like a nun, has forsworn an intrinsic human hunger. She deprives herself of food as a metaphor for something deeper she won't allow herself - love.

"If I had to say my anorexia was about one single thing," Alice tells us, "I would have to say it's about living without desire. Without longing of any kind."

When Maeve, a voluptuous bulimic checks into the hospital, Alice is confronted with the very longing she has been trying to escape. Despite Maeve's problems, she embraces life fully, gorging herself on food, people and sex. In the wasteland of Alice's emotional life, Maeve, and what she represents is finally something Alice truly wants. Her love of Maeve, in all her flawed, human glory, allows Alice, in the end, to accept her own imperfect appetites.

The Passion of Alice," is wry, intelligent and devoid of the cynicism which feeds hopelessness. Grant's is a much needed, fresh voice from the Blank generation. (The same generation which in 1984, produced the morally bankrupt Brett Easton Ellis.) A laudable first novel.

Appeared in "Santa Fe Reporter" April 3, 1996 © Suzanne Rush 2001

The Republican War Against Women
An Insider's Report from Behind the Lines
by Tanya Melich
Bantam Books, $23.95

There's this cartoon that pictures a woman being dragged hair-first by a caveman. An observer asks, "Why do you stay with that sadist?" The woman replies, "Beats me."

That cartoon kept coming to mind as I read Tanya Melich's account of over two decades as a Republican, feminist activist, "The Republican War Against Women, An Insider's Report from Behind the Scenes. " Her book recounts the systematic betrayal and dismantling of the feminist and human rights plank of the Republican party platform, and the ascension of the Religious Right over the course of almost three decades.

When Melich went to her first Republican Convention in 1948 (her father was as a delegate for Robert Taft), the GOP was the party of Lincoln, and the party that ratified the 19th amendment giving women the vote. It was a party of fiscal conservatism, smaller government, and the one who's values she embraced.

But by 1972, when she attended her first convention as a delegate in her own right, pledged to Richard Nixon, the party of her youth had begun to change. Though Nixon had appointed women to office (albeit token), supported the Equal Rights Amendment and affirmative action, he had also vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill.

Nixon was cannily conscious of the emerging conservative wing of the party. He adopted the New Majoritarian strategy of using control of women's decisions about childbirth and childcare - and fear of desegregation - as a way to win votes from traditionally Democratic Catholics and conservative southerners. Nixon gently sold out women and won a second term by a landslide.

The die had been cast. At the 1976 convention Gerald Ford and running mate, Bob Dole, who Melich and the Republican feminists saw as pro-ERA moderates, renounced abortion to appease the Right-wing. Still, Melich worked tirelessly to support them, and hoped to change the system from within - not realizing the system was already too corrupt.

Ford didn't win, and now the conservatives in the party had four years to gear up for a takeover. Ronald Reagan, the poster child of the New Right, opposed the ERA and abortion but in true political fashion, he issued only mild statements saying he "would prefer a platform plank which opposed sexual discrimination without specifically mentioning the ERA."

"It was," Melich says, "step one in the kind of strategy that would guide the Reagan-Bush campaign - and their administrations - whenever women's issues arose. First, say you're for women. Second, oppose any move that will give them real power, but propose a measure or slogan that gives the appearance of doing so. Third, get some visible moderate women to agree publicly with your approach, but also ensure that they say the issue affecting women, whatever it is, is of lesser priority to the nation that other issues."

The Reagan-Bush years saw the greatest losses in women's rights this century. Pro-choice Republican women watched the party taken over by the Right-to-Lifers. They shuddered in horror with the rest of the nation's women at the death of the ERA, the gag rulings, the appointment of anti-abortion supreme court justices, and the increased violence at abortion clinics. Many of them abandoned the GOP for the Democrats during Reagan's term, but some diehards, like Melich, waited through George Bush's bitter betrayal before they fled.

What Melich repeatedly states as her rationale, and that of other Republican feminists, for staying was that though they were liberal socially, they were staunchly conservative financially. Placing concern with money over humanity has surely been the root of what the Right calls a lack of "family" values. It's the same kind of thinking that makes it okay to pollute when it's fiscally better for corporations, or to dismantle programs that care for the poor while increasing the budget for the military.

Though the GOP has recently reacted with righteous indignation against, racist, sexist, presidential candidate, Patrick Buchanan - speechwriter to both Nixon and Reagan - it's the very policies they have pursued for the past 25 years that have anointed him. This time, however, if the Republicans win the election, it will be without the help of Tanya Melich who has finally left her abuser.

Appeared in "Santa Fe Reporter" March 6, 1996 © Suzanne Rush 2001

All the Powerful Invisible Things, A Sportswoman's Notebook
by Gretchen Legler
Seal Press, $20.95, paper $12.95

Sweat
by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Seal Press, $10.95

The search for our identity is a lifelong quest. We begin in our teens, when we instinctively recognize that something essential is lacking from our ill-fitting, societally-sanctioned facades. We know that the smiling face on our public ID card is not the same one we wake up to alone, in a cold sweat at 3 am. The real self can be denied and forgotten and even locked away like some monster in a closet - but it will never disappear. Eventually, like unpaid taxes, the self will demand a reckoning.

Pushcart prize winner, Gretchen Legler makes the sometimes painful journey into the self in her first collection of short stories, "All the Powerful Invisible Things, A Sportswoman's Notebook." Legler weaves together these tales of hunting, family dynamics and sexuality into one inseparable, complex portrait of a life.

The obviously autobiographical collection -- written in first person, using her own name, and told in chronological order -- reads like a novel, or a diary. In the first tale Legler tells of fishing in the Minnesota wilderness with her husband, a lone woman in a man's world. We follow her in these short stories from fish camp, to duck blind, to silent, snowy woods waiting to shoot a deer. Each beautifully reverent description of nature somehow comes as the explanation to the seeming contradiction of being both hunter and feminist.

It wasn't the shooting that ever mattered," she says, "but what we did with this food we gathered: how we prepared the ducks to eat, how we shared them with friends, how we raised our glasses before we ate, at a long table lit by candles, covered with a lacey white cloth, and thanked the ducks for their lives."

As this elegant prose unfolds we see Legler first as Artemis, huntress and protector of the beasts. Then as "Fishergirl," a construct of the cold father she can never please and her own expectations of somehow pleasing him anyway. Later still in, "Horned Doe," as a woman finally admitting to the other within herself as she unearths her authentic appetites.

"I wondered why they called it a horned doe and not a penis-less buck," she muses in this story about a hunter who has shot what appeared to be a stag, but discovered something out of the norm.

"Maybe an aberrant female, a doe with an added male characteristic - antlers - was somehow more imaginable than a buck without the proper male anatomy. It made me think about the power of language to construct different versions of reality. The horned doe didn't even have its own name -- it was a perversion of two already established 'normal' bodies. I wondered too why there wasn't a category on the form, even an ominous 'Other' with a blank line after it, for something besides male or female, buck or doe. Surely not everything in the world could be depended upon to fit so neatly between those lines."

Exposing her own antlers, Legler is compelled to abandon the safety of her husband and begin a new life in the company of the women she longs for. Becoming a lesbian is not so much a rip in the fabric of her life, as it is a mending -- a coming home to herself. The monster in the closet could not be denied. Facing the powerful, invisible things, however frightening and painful in the moment, is the only choice for a woman who angles in icy rivers, stares down wolves and wears her own horns like a crown.

Legler discovers in her new life that there is just as much pain to be found with women as with men. And she realizes that she does, after all, embody a bit of the father who psychically brutalized her, the mother who drank to dull the pain, and the sister who took a bottle of pills to avoid her own demons. She is all the things she denied and all the things she longed to be, and knowing this, she knows she has only scratched the surface.

Where Legler's book explores the questions of identity, Lucy Jane Bledsoe's, "Sweat," brings us a voice, if not entirely cocky, at least sure of her sexuality. Bledsoe's stories of sportswomen use the language of action to move beyond the first kiss to the heart of relationships, taking the issue of homosexuality for granted. After the princess kisses the other princess, do they live happily ever after?

In this, her first book, Bledsoe emerges as an important contemporary lesbian voice. Her short stories, told mostly in first person, are about girl jocks. In the opening story we meet a high school softball player dealing with her first girlfriend and the betrayal that ensues when her Christian parents find out. In other stories adult characters tackle lust on a bike racing team and homophobia on the basketball court.

These vigorous women, including the incongruously straight, Debbie, in "Under the Cabaña," are never hindered by contemplation. "Look," says one character, "Basically there are two approaches to life. You can mire yourself in precautions as you endlessly try to outwit fate. Or you can let her fly."

While Legler coolly ponders the meaning of the horned doe, Bledsoe, who has long accepted the phenomenon, works herself into a healthy lather, lowers her head and charges forward. In the quagmire of often-mediocre lesbian literature these two new authors, with varying perspectives and styles, rise to the top and demand to be noticed.

Appeared in "Santa Fe Reporter" November 1, 1995 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Listen up
Voices from the next feminist generation
Edited by Barbara Findlen
Seal Press

Gloria Steinem, the young, hip icon of the '70s feminist movement, turned 60 this year. Though still a committed activist - albeit one who now talks and acts more like a philosopher than a firebrand - she's ready to pass the torch. She poses cronelike, in magazine photos with Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf as if to say, "They have the energy. They have the power. I'm handing over the crown."

Yet even "third wave" feminists Faludi and Wolf are already old enough to be role models to their Gen-X sisters featured in the collection, /Listen up. Voices from the next feminist generation./ Like the young musicians who rediscover and claim rock 'n' roll every few years, the twenty-something feminists in this dynamic book of essays weren't the first to experience sexism, racism, homophobia, reproductive injustice, sexual assault or weight stigmatization. They are, however, the first generation to reexamine this social inheritance from the perspective of a lifetime of living with women's rights activism.

From this '90s perspective, life for women is still sometimes treacherous, as Ellen Neuborne reveals in, "Imagine My Surprise." In her story about inexplicably backing down to an abusive male employer she says:

"This was not supposed to happen to me. I am the child of professional feminists. My father is a civil rights lawyer. My mother heads the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. I was raised on a pure, unadulterated feminist ethic. That didn't help."

Here, at the turn of the century, sexism hasn't disappeared as we'd hoped. But if political action does indeed spring from personal experience, then these essays, edited by /Ms./ editor Barbara Findlen, may serve as an entry point to activism. The sheer variety of voices - college students, single mothers, grrrl zine publishers, identified Christians or Jews, black, white, Asian, lesbian and straight women - ensures that this treatise of young feminist thought will have at least one story every woman can identify with.

We hear from an aerobics instructor who encourages women to eat what they want; a young Indian woman who juggles traditional expectations with modern, urban realities; a native American who finds her life purpose in a positive HIV diagnosis; a rape survivor who will bear the scars for life; and a self-defense advocate who says, "Fighting back does not mean warfare it means handing over the money if I'm mugged, but going for the testicles if he grabs me."

In "Reality Check," a very non-San Francisco stance on sex work, Aisha Hakim-Dyce discusses her feelings about the limited monetary options that left her choosing between dropping out of college or becoming a stripper.

"I was troubled by how close I had come to what would have been, for me, a traumatic ordeal. Although in too many instances poor and working-class people are faced with demoralizing and dehumanizing work, most of that work does not explicitly revolve around sexual objectification the way that go go dancing does."

Jennifer DiMarco also fights dehumanization, and emerges with a compelling literary voice in "Word Warrior," a now too-familiar tale of childhood sexual abuse.

"He sneers as he speaks. His eyes gleam shadows. He stands so close to the phone that his shoulder touches it. He watches me. He is always, forever watching me. Whenever my parents call me, he stands with his hands on my neck, locking our eyes. He knows I'm too afraid to even touch the phone. With his sneer he pounds a slice of beef for dinner. Blood splatters the phone... the wall... the floor... the sheets.. all summer long."

Society is at least collectively sympathetic towards incest survivors. Not so for teen mothers. When Laurel Gilbert discovered she was pregnant in high school she found herself battling contempt.

"I was no longer expected to succeed, I was expected to settle. I never considered myself a handicapped person. And I firmly believe it's the status of of "Handicapped" that leads teen mothers into fulfilling the expectations of the stereotypes and failing their own expectation. Many people told me "you can do it," but very few believed it."

It may be a new world order, but as this surprisingly encouraging book, a litany of sexism in the U.S. shows, we still need the E.R.A. One wonders if women would riot in the streets - in the same way blacks rioted when Rodney King's batterers were released - if the courts sanction wife-killing by acquitting O.J. Simpson. If anyone will have the spirit for that kind of action, it will be these heirs to Gloria Steinem's legacy.

Appeared in "San Francisco Bay Guardian Lit" June 1995 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Skin
Talking About Sex, Class & Literature
By Dorothy Allison
Firebrand

In its guidelines for writers, Life Style , San Francisco's newest and blandest Lesbian and Gay magazine, spells out to potential contributors that they want pieces that "avoid being sexually explicit or politically strident. Writers who enter a piece with a strong opinion will be severely edited." Boy, would they have a job editing Dorothy Allison.

In an essay about the politics of sexuality from her new book, Skin , Allison says "We cannot compromise or agree to be circumspect in how we challenge the system of sexual oppression. We dare not willingly deny ourselves, make those bad bargains that can look so good at the moment. I think, for example of all those times we have pandered to this sex-hating, sex-fearing society by pretending, as lesbians, that we are really no different from heterosexuals." When we do these things, she says, "I believe we are in collusion with our own destruction."

Allison's writing is at its best in the passionate, personal explorations of the working class, queer sexuality and the radical nature of literature that are the subjects of this collection of essays. Written over the course of ten years they chronicle both the woman and her place on the time line of feminist, lesbian history. Reading her stories of activism during the last wave of the feminist movement, one is struck by the power behind clichés like consciousness raising.

Without that raised consciousness, Allison may never have survived the class and sexual oppression she describes so eloquently.

"The inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved," she writes, "has had domination over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it."

Teacher, author, trashy dyke, mother, Allison tells us, "I want hard stories. I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, recreating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful -- even if the meaning is only in the act of telling."

These are hard stories, some of them -- hard, strident, strongly opinionated, moving, calls to action -- and thankfully, none of them appropriate for Life Style .

Appeared in "SF Weekly" August 10, 1994 © Suzanne Rush 2001

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