Gringo Lunch

La Mordida on Calle de los Fuentes might look like a seedy dive, and yes, the place was full of Americans under 25.

So what.

If I had to select my own execution method, it would be to have their guacamole rammed in my throat in order to expire in an orgy of avocado.

And the burnt-ish cheese on tortilla chips?

Fan-fucking-tastic.

Heaps of it all for ten euro.

Plus the gracious staff smiled with patience at my poor attempt at the language.

Can you think of anything more civilized than two museum visits, followed by a plate of nachos and a margarita?

I think not.

More Travel

My hardworking husband has scored an expenses paid trip to Spain (woot-woot) so we're off tomorrow until next week for Madrid and Barcelona.

I need to find a dress for the Irish Blog Awards.

And shoes.

A good life; I know.

Let's Watch a Woman Getting Abused

Almodovar's "Broken Embraces" serves as another installment in the Beauty Must Die series.
Viewers are invited to ogle Ms. Cruz's stunning figure all while knowing that she's doomed.
Lookit, the film's poster is a screen shot right after she's thrown down a massive spiral staircase by her lover. She's a hotty even when she's broken and bruised.
That seems to be the directive here.
Let's watch the bitch suffer.
You know, since she's gorgeous, well of course some dude will be obsessive, controlling and out to get her.
So many critics trip over themselves to praise Almodovar for being the ultimate director for women, and yet with each project it becomes harder to declare with a straight face.
I've watched at least a dozen of his films.
What we get more often than not is the depiction of women as masochists or the all too natural victims of male brutality.

The most enjoyable part was the scene he revisits from "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Penelope Cruz repeats Carmen Maura's preparation of the sleeping pill-laden gazpacho. That was lovely.
The pretty bitches be doomed theme has worn thin.

Risky Fashion

There are several trends getting hyped about now which I would sooner eat week old pasta than attempt.
So-called cowboy chic.
Underwear as outerwear.
Pastel makeup.
Leather shorts.
Perhaps the most risky out there is the deliberate clashing prints motif.
This brings to mind a woman I worked with who tried that in 1997.
Janet was a devotee of fashion long before I gave a shit.
Edith Wharton wrote in a novel that among New York society it was considered vulgar for a young woman to wear elaborate or expensive jewelry because in their stylistic economy, youth was all the decorative gem a woman needed. Women were given jewels as compensation for getting older. That could somewhat explain why I didn't care much about clothes until I was in my 30s.
One day in work, Janet was telling me about her clashing prints experiment. She felt all cool and Prada-esque she said, until she took a seat on the bus next to a man who looked her up and down and declared "You look like Raggedy Ann."
Oh, how we howled.
Clashing prints?
No thank you.

Carnival of Cruelty

More than a dozen audience members left the screening of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” at the Smithfield cinema today before the end. Maybe the film was too long with a three hour running time. Perhaps it was because there were too many scene that felt unnecessary or that the print seemed scratchy with uneven sound volume. I’d like to think that the real reason folks left is that Fellini’s idea of the sweet life more closely resembled a carnival of cruelty. The Bitter Life or the Mean-Spirited Life veers more to the point of his film. Where I was smitten with the winsome tone of longing on hand for “8 ½,” this one left a sour finish, which is a pity in the presence of a few truly brilliant scenes and images. Anita Ekberg walking down a cobblestone street on the cusp of dawn with a white kitten perched on her head is beyond delicious. The opening scene where a helicopter drags a golden jeebus statue to the Vatican promised many envious shots of Rome and an underscored connection between celebrity culture and religious idolatry.

Marcello Mastroianni plays the protagonist Marcello, a journalist who hates his job, particularly when he’s covering the celebrity beat. In the course of the film he drives his fiancé to attempt suicide and later tells her that her love is “a degradation” to him as he hits her and leaves her in the sticks in the middle of the night. He’s a horn dog after Ekberg and another woman while perving after a teenager. At a party he refers to one woman as a fat farm girl (she weighs at least 25 pounds less than Ekberg’s movie star character) and then rides her around like a donkey. He douses the woman with water then tears open a pillow, dumping feathers on her in order to make her a chicken.

There’s twinned daddy sub-plots. In one, Marcello’s father visits and requests to go to the Cha-Cha club so he can ogle and pick up a show girl. Marcello laments to the photographer Papparazzo that daddy was rarely at home when he was a kid, so he doesn’t really know him. Here, we get the sense that a father’ absence or neglect is something to regret. Only later, the friend Marcello admires as a devoted father to two small children goes berserkers and kills them both and then himself. So being ignored by daddy at least ensures kids won’t be murdered in their sleep? What the fuck, Fellini?
Nasty, brutish and long.

Book Your Tickets

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival starts today and runs through the 28th.
There's a host of stellar celluloid features in the line up.
I have fond memories of going to see a dozen films as part of DIFF back in '96; in particular, seeing Terry Gilliam at a round table discussion after a screening of "12 Monkeys."

We have tickets for "La Dolce Vita" as well as Fergus Daly's & Katherine Waugh's documentary "Outliving Dracula: Le Fanus's Carmilla."
Pass the popcorn.

Girlhood Anthem

"I woke up with the lyrics to 'Cherry Bomb' in my head after reading an early review of the movie late last night."

"Huh?"

"Obviously you were never a 14 year-old girl."

So I sang it (badly) for him.

Can't wait to see it.

Another Wannabe Novelist

Blah, blah, blah I'm writing a novel.

I'm 10,000 words in and starting the third chapter.

What the hell, right?

Mr. M gave me the title "Class of Frankenstein" for my own "hideous progeny" based on my first year of graduate school. He said there's a potential for it to turn women away from entering grad degree programs in the event that it finds a publisher. Maybe. A happy ending could fix that.

It's set the year I started in 1999.

I'm trying to recall trends from the year.

Those mini butterfly clips for ladies in their hair.

Capris and three quarter sleeves were big. All the ladies looked like their clothes shrunk in the dryer. Low rider jeans. Steve Madden platform slide ons. Stupid Kid Rock was everywhere.

Thankfully, this all seems like it happened a long time ago.

Marked for Life

Melissa McEwan has a post about Tina Fey's Vogue cover which laments the way the actor asked for the scar on her face to be edited out as part of the deal for the shoot. I'm a fan of McEwan's writing and find myself agreeing with her on most points, but not on this one.
Tina Fey was brutally attacked and knifed in the face as a child.

I also have a distinct scar on my face, so the motivation behind Fey's request seems reasonable.
If I were given the incredibly unlikely opportunity to appear on a cover of shopper's weekly, let alone Vogue, I'd do the same. One of the reasons that I'm so fond of my high school yearbook photo despite the scary hair and eyebrows is that it's the last one I have of myself before the scar took over my right cheek. When I smile, it plants a huge hole in my face and reminds me when I see it in the mirror of the car accident when some maniac driver maimed me and my friends. Photo-shopping gives Fey the ability to see her ideal self separate from the violence she suffered. She can glimpse herself before the psycho came at her with a knife.
It's a basic human desire to view ourselves untouched by victimization. This is not in the same league as the fashion industry shaving off women's flesh in order to present unattainable bodies to readers. No one will develop an eating disorder just because the scar has been erased.

I can't fault Fey for wanting to see her own face without the mark of violence.
Cut her some slack.

Ache of the Age

Although I was unable to correctly identify Michael Fassbender in "Inglorious Basterds," I doubt I'd make that mistake again after watching "Fish Tank."
From his first scene, when he appears shirtless with the top of his bum sneaking out of his jeans, I thought sweet baby jeebus this man is sex personified in denim.
Each time he had a scene with Mia (Katie Jarvis) I hoped he wouldn't prove to be an asshole.
The film left me gutted.
Jarvis captures the ache of the age in her performance, that heady mix of rage and frustration brimming up in a 15 year-old girl. You want more than anything to be noticed as your own person and to start living already.
During the last scene, when she faces her mother and they do a line dance, she's seeing herself in 15 years and change.
Brilliant.
This is one of the best films I've seen in ages.

Italian Gem

In my personal encyclopedia, that grey matter list of associations which straddles the subconscious, the default setting for "restaurant" is Italian. Give me a salad and a plate of pasta or a pizza and I'll almost always be contented. I've tried 6 Italian eateries in Dublin thus far. Of the lot, Aprile Ristorante on Lower Kilmacud in Stillorgan had to be the biggest surprise. Namely because it's above a chipper and across the street from the hideous Stillorgan shopping centre. Yet the place is stylish and far hipper than you would anticipate for the location.
Although I was craving pizza, I was wary of ordering one without seeing anyone else sitting with one in front of them. I neglected to follow that rule when we went to Mario's in Sandymount and then was crestfallen when the undercooked crust arrived with too much cheese. That combination spells glue, folks. Gluey, gluey crust.
While we were on dessert, pizzas were flying around the restaurant looking like perfect pillowy discs of sauce and cheese.
My spinach ravioli was too much for me to eat, so I gave a portion to Mr. M since he had a 5 hour mountain bike ride earlier and needed the calories.
Service was sincere.
My only complaint would be with the house white, the acid content of which had me fearing for the enamel on my chompers.
Aprile is worth the trip.

Slow Pace and No Pay Off

*Spoilers*

If not for the dead mama having her period on her scared daughter in bed, I would have turned "A Tale of Two Sisters" off when it took 48 minutes for something to happen. I just couldn't resist what they might do with menses/menarche symbolism.
The whole thing was shit rather than blood though.
Before the second scene was over I said "oh, so the other sister's dead, huh?"
Pretty obvious.
But the idea that I should buy a 14 year old girl should feel guilty and driven mad because she couldn't save her younger sister is beyond reasonable.
What kind of crap are they mucking out when they have the mother hang herself in her youngest daughter's closet? Make your cheating husband deal with your corpse if you're out for a revenge suicide.
Also, women don't screech, convulse and vomit when they see a ghost.
Just awful.

Stay for the Second Half

The first half of Natasha Walter’s book comes too close to the tone of Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs” that I nearly stopped reading. First, why make the title the “return” of sexism? Please tell me of that magical period when sexism disappeared. I must have had my eyes shut and missed it. Right from the doll metaphor on the second page, my eyes were rolled so back in my head, I was in danger of passing out.

“The fusion of the woman and the doll at times becomes almost surreal. When the singers of Girls Aloud launched Barbie doll versions of themselves in 2005, you could look—to paraphrase George Orwell—from doll to girl and girl to doll, and it was almost impossible to see which was which.”

No, Ms. Walter, I’m pretty sure that most folks can tell an inanimate object apart from a real live human woman. One half expected to read “literally” in the sentence. During the first four chapters Walter takes her pearl-clutching cue from Levy and blames girls for their participation in raunch culture and for following the overriding directive that being beautiful is their primary concern. That approach may get you a book deal or job at the New Yorker by being non-threatening or not asking men to navigate their moral compass with some degree of effort, but ladies, that doesn’t make it feminist. Walter even goes further than Levy in the first half of “Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism” in a rhetorical hand-wringing move which laments women having sex without love involved and in accumulating a promiscuous tally of sexual partners. Since there have been plenty of conservative women and men already raising public alarm over women and casual sex, it’s a wonder why a feminist needed to add to the mix. Really, the last thing anyone should care about is how many sexual partners a woman has because it’s sexist in itself, none of your business, and it has fuck all to do with a woman’s worth or her commitment to being a good person. Walter makes strange bedfellows with folks who tear their hair over sex without strings. Just because you can find a few women who proclaim to be modeling themselves on Samantha Jones hardly means that a generation prefers sex without an emotional connection. This sort of anecdotal example feels trumped up, alarmist and designed to prove the point she wanted to make rather than reflect how the majority of young women think about their sex lives.

Overall, I’d say skip the first six chapters, especially if you’re a feminist who keeps tabs on the news and pop culture. Walter won’t have anything new to tell you about the pink normative and cum dumpster assignation. If you persevere, chapters 7-10 are worth the purchase price. It is here that Walter assembles the scientific evidence that circulates to “prove” essential gender difference and de-bunks the hacks such as Simon Baron-Cohen, Susan Pinker, Louann Brizendine among others. She takes the time to point out that all the research being done to prove gender stereotypes all take pains to describe themselves as rebelling and ground-breaking, against the “politically correct” mantra set by feminists. Pray tell, where is this super powerful, wealthy cadre of feminists and how may I join? It would almost be hilarious that folks who were trying to sell you reductive stereotypes about men and women thought of themselves as daring rogues, if it weren’t so sad and frightening. Walter includes many passages where they’re all citing the same bad science and the writing is so similar, it sounds like they’re questionably plagiarizing each other.

For example, Walter points to a study done by Jennifer Connellan, a psychologist who worked with Simon Baron-Cohen. Connellan approached day-old infants and recorded their reactions to either her face or a mobile that was painted with misaligned human eyes. According to her findings, which were reported across the mainstream media, boys preferred to look at the mobile while the girls preferred the human face. The social determinists in the scientific community point to this as proof of genetic, historical, intractable difference between male and female. Boys/men like systems and objects and girls/women are empathically invested in relationships. Walter consulted Elizabeth Spelke, a leading expert on childhood development in order to understand why this experiment fails to prove the point. Spelke explains that the flaws begin with the fact that the experiment was not replicated, it ignored the more than forty years of research that had already disproven such results (and showed that boys actually looked longer at faces and attempted to engage reactions more often than girls). Additionally, Connellan conducted the study herself, so there’s doubt about the veracity of her reports. Walter observes that there’s also no proof that a protracted infant gaze equates to a preference. It’s also possible that the children felt anxiety at viewing images which did not align with expectations, such as the fucked up eyes on a mobile. These sections where Walter goes over the bad science authorizing gender stereotypes are the most powerful in the book. They make the first half feel even more of a waste of time.

She includes the work professor Mark Liberman did in de-bunking evidence used in Louann Brizendine’s “The Female Brain,” where the author claimed that women used 20,000 words a day versus the male’s 7,000. She was citing a self-help book and not actual scientific research. Walter turns to Deborah Cameron’s excellent “The Myth of Mars and Venus” and Melissa Hines “Brain Gender” for additional examples of folks who take the time and effort to denounce bad science about women and men. Hines’ study of the research on testosterone shows how difficult it is to lay any claim to the powers of hormonal roles in society. After three decades of study on the hormone linked with aggression and masculinity, she admits that results are easy to see in rats that are given extra testosterone. Men are not so easy, on the other hand. In a fascinating section, Walter discusses a study done on London taxi drivers which found that after two years on the job the drivers’ brains had grown in size in the posterior hippocampus, a result of storing The Knowledge, that map of information about the city streets. This useful example illustrates that men and women are not static creatures of an either/or model at birth. Our brains and bodies grow and change over time. Walter writes “the complicated story of how the brain we are born with develops in response to our life’s experiences cannot be summed up by a narrative that seeks to reduce it to a rigid stereotype laid down at birth.” I could read sentences like that all damn day. There’s a great deal of funding going to folks who want to use science to maintain and validate gender inequality and difference.

Walter then makes the connection between gender stereotypes and the narrowed scope of women’s lives by turning to research which proved that when women see a gender bias, they score less than men or get thwarted by gendered expectations. The “Stereotype Threat” is when the Mars and Venus myths take over and impede individual women from getting ahead. Three researchers split university students in two groups to administer a maths test. One group was told the test revealed a gender bias towards men. It will come as no surprise to learn that women scored far lower on the test after hearing that. But in the second group, students were told that men and women scored equally, and as a result, they did score equally, once the stereotypes were removed. Those pesky Mars and Venus myths have real material consequences for women and men, from self-image to performance and lack of equality. Walter reminds us that we're more complex and deserve better in the second half of her book.

Where's the Rapist?

*Spoilers*

There's a chapter in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" where the narrator, in university, gets charged with driving a rich white patron around. The white dude says that he wants to meet a local man he heard about who had fathered children with both his wife and his daughter. They pull up to a rural shack so that he can get the man's story first hand. The local man describes his circumstances, how he had rolled over in the night from bride to daughter. At their parting, the white man shakes his hand, saying what an honour it was to have met him, pressing a large bank note in his hands. The protagonist was chastised for having taken the rich dude there, for showing him proof of what he expected to find out about black folks.

This episode popped in mind after watching "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" this afternoon. Aside from "all the good folks are light skinned" and obvious offenses that Armond White has already detailed at length, there's a fatal flaw in the film's creation of villainy. How is it that the rapist father only skirts the film in furtive flashback scenes?
Why is he not front and centre, rather than having the monstrous abuser role fall squarely on her mother Mary, played by Mo'Nique?
The man who has sexually assaulted and raped his daughter from the age of three gets less time in the narrative than even Hamlet's dead father. My nostrils have to flare at the film's glee in making a poor black woman a fucking monster.
What kind of social worker is Mariah Carey's Ms. Weiss, to hear a minor say that she carried two babies from a rapist father and she does nothing? No intervention for Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) or any action to remove her from a sexual predator? But instead, Weiss can arrange a meeting for Precious to repudiate Mary for being a bad mother.

I can't help but rankle at a film that wants to position an African American woman on welfare as a heartless demon when the rapist gets to slink off blame-free.

Impossible Tasks

Stretch yourself for a moment, dog lovers, to pause upon what it takes to tire two Cattle Collies.

7am two-hour death march.

2pm hour-plus unbroken run on the beach.

7pm hour walk.

This will only suffice for a result of tired pooches.

Smirking Dude Officially a Jackass

Bradley Cooper, Hollywood's new frat-boy extraordinaire, makes me want to rip my eyelashes out rather than watch another of his smug, smirk-filled performances. He's the new and less stoned Owen Wilson.

Do we really need one more dude running away from the crazy bitches and their need for relationships and conversation onscreen?

No, I think not.

Although I did smile to see this vain mega-dick show up on the red carpet wearing half a face worth of tanner.

That's it, fella.

Accentuate the douche.

Corrosive Comments

Gary Dexter compiled a juicy collection of what writers had to say about each other in "Poisoned Pens." There are more than a few laugh out loud moments. Apparently Virginia Woolf thought every writer who ever lived was second-rate. She's such a bore.

Woolf wrote of Katherine Mansfield:
"We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a--well civet cat that had taken to street walking."
Philip Larkin said of Mansfield:
"Katherine Mansfield is a cunt, but I share a hell of a lot of common characteristics with her [...] she luxuriated in emotion [...] Admittedly the head is an evil thing and she's a woman & I'm a tied-up bugger, but anyone who can spew out their dearest and closest thoughts, hopes, and loves to J.M. Murray must be a bit of an anus."
Joyce gets all the credit for the stream-of-consciousness style when really, Mansfield did it before him.

Some dude named James Gould Cozzens dimissed Faulkner's work thusly:
"Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It's sentimentality disguised by the corncob."
Ouch.

There's an anecdote Hugh Walpole wrote about being out walking with Henry James when they came upon tiny street urchins. James was trying to give them money and directed the children to buy a specific type of sweet at the candy shop. He was droning on and on about the sweets until the children screamed and ran away in fright. Walpole recalls "He stood bewildered, the pennies in his hand. What had he done? What had he said? He had meant nothing but kindness. Why had they run away screaming? He was greatly distressed, going over every possible corner of it in his mind. He alluded to it for days afterwards."
Geez. Talk about clueless.

D.H. Lawrence on "Jane Eyre":
"I find Jane Eyre verging towards pornography and Boccaccio seems to me always fresh and wholesome [...] Wagner and Charlotte Bronte were both in the state where the strongest instincts have collapsed, and sex has become something slightly obscene, to be wallowed in, but despised. Mr. Rochester's sex passion is not 'respectable' till Mr. Rochester is burned, blinded, disfigured, and reduced to helpless dependence. Then, thoroughly humbled and humiliated, it may be merely admitted."
I'd still prefer to think that Bronte was giving Rochester payback for locking his wife in the attic for ten long years. Bertha burns the house down and maims him in the process in the 19th century "burning bed."
George Eliot also displayed no sympathy for the lady in the attic:
"I have read 'Jane Eyre,' and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase. However, the book is interesting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports."

"Poisoned Pens" also includes Mark Twain's famous take on James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, which he suggested a counter title should be the Broken Twig Series. He properly nails the tricks Cooper deployed for the man without a cross:
"He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig."
Google the whole thing; it's very funny.

Modernity looks Cold, Cruel and Dated

Sure, Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" is a cinematic gem.
Scenes from this 1936 production have echoed across pop culture from Lucille Ball to Terry Gilliam to name a few. And Paulette Goddard, she of "The Women," one film I am compelled to watch twice a year, possesses beauty and moxy out the ying-yang. (She has one of the best lines in "The Women" as Miriam Aarons, the woman who steals the husband of Sylvia Fowler, played by Rosalind Russell. At one point Miriam counsels "any ladle's sweet that dishes out some gravy," words to the effect that ladies should not look a gift horse in the mouth.)

My problem with the film is why choose an antiquated method of story telling when by 1936, talkies were firmly a fixture in the business? This is essentially a silent picture save the score and the staged, winky dialogue provided by record players or Chaplin singing a song in gibberish. Many of the scenes are eye-meltingly gorgeous, but the end result is less about plot and more geared towards delivering a series of skits bent on sight gags and physical comedy. The viewer cannot help get the impression that Chaplin is fighting against the titular period. He wants to play it safe with the genre he knows best and resist the trend towards dialogue or truly three dimensional cinema. Also, just watching him, he looks so unwilling to inhabit his own body. Hence all the clownish makeup (eyebrow pencil, eyeliner, pancake base), the bristle brush 'stache, the shoes three sizes too large, the cane. He's hiding in plain sight. I felt kind of sorry for him in his awkwardness in anything other than broad physical comedy.

"Modern Times" has a brilliant cocaine gag. Cheech and Chong owe him big time.

Keep Your Hands to Yourself

After glimpsing many women on public transit reading "Grazia" magazine, I picked one up a few weeks ago at the checkout and have kept on buying it. You have to keep tabs on what the ladies are being told.
There's usually one central salacious celebrity gossip story and then pages of "buy this new trend." On the back page there's a column "Single, Actually" which reads like a hyper-derivative mix of Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw and every other single lady in her 30s. The most recent plot line revolves around author Frankie and some veternarian she's dating even though she almost always displays little more than ambivalence about the relationship. In the last issue (Feb 8) Frankie draws up a list of pros and cons about the dude, like she's comparison shopping for a new television or something. She recalls that he once moved "the crisps out of reach with a tut-tutty wag of his finger."
Are you shitting me?
If a man had ever tried to tell me I've had enough and to stop eating, I'd have dumped him on the spot, without question.

Gender Normative Saturday

There's no shortage of chi-chi hair salons in the city.
I'll pick Peter Mark over the sniffy salons any day of the week.
The wool blanket on my head needed its bi-annual de-mange, otherwise known as a haircut.
Cut, blowout in less than forty minutes.

This was followed by browsing in dress shops and getting puzzled looks by clerks for my body lingo.

"Nope that doesn't work. I'm too pigeon-y for this."
Translation: my shoulders are too narrow, small, what-have-you.

"Love this one but it accentuates my frog physique; can't do it."
Translation: I have virtually no torso.

In the end I walked into a shop for the first time (I had avoided it thinking it was yet another frumpy Fran and Jane type) and fell in love with a Nanette Lapore spring coat, and then bought a pink fucking dress.
I must have been overdosing on the femme-essence from the salon or something.
Gah.

Shakespeare in a Greasy Spoon

Yesterday I was writing an allusion to Lady Macbeth's compulsion for clean hands and immediately thought of Maura Tierney's performance in the role stylized after the Bard's Spotty Handed Mistress. "Scotland, PA" (2001) ranks as one of my favourite adaptations of Shakespeare right from the tagline "What if the McBeth's were alive in '75?"

There's funny schlocky stuff from the 70s layered over the timeless themes about ambition, greed and power. Tierney, James Legros, Christopher Walken, Kevin Corrigan, James Rebhorn, Amy Smart and even Andy Dick are all fan-fucking-tastic.

Need to see this again.

This Calls for a Smack

So students the world over are thoughtless, ruffian book bandits?
Book vandalism is all over North American campus libraries. Same story here apparently.

The first time I went to the James Joyce library on UCD campus, I walked off the bus and found it without even looking at a map. Love the staff who were gracious enough to allow me to check out books and are always friendly when this old lady shows up. Librarians must have the patience of a zen master. If I caught a student perpetrating any of this nonsense using pen, highlighter or even pencil on any part of the collection, there would be a severe dressing down, followed by a temptation to punctuate the speech with a smack. Anne K Mellor's brilliant "Mary Shelly: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters" is a favourite on my shelf at home. It's depressing to see her work defaced and disrespected.

What the fuck does all this underlining and highlighting even tell you?
How would it help you when almost everything in these pages is marked up?
Hey Einstein, if you underline the whole page, then how does any of it stand out.
Also, the genius commentary in the margins is beyond cringeworthy.
"Victor wanted to create life."
Hey, thanks there Ms. or Mr. Obvious!
Your insight will be invaluable to anyone interested in the novel.

Jeebus wept.

Stop the Presses! Girls to Blame

Gender myths provide marketing tools at the ready, because all those hoary notions about what it means to be a "real" man or woman have been used to sell people shit for as long as the cash nexus has existed. Instead of blaming capitalism or patriarchy for the trend in young boys dousing themselves in rancid sprays as part of some desperate build to feel confident and popular, the real business in the article in the NYT is to blame girls. Tween girls are discussed as though they're some sort of all-powerful femme fatales who boss boys around with unchecked authority. There's also a strong hint of alarm that boys are reporting close friendships with girls. As if the cootie aversion rule should remain in place keeping boys from learning that girls are real people. We wouldn't want that now would we? And Wiseman chimes in with the charge that she "defies" someone to say a 14 year old girl isn't more powerful than a boy. What is she a Faux News commentator? Let me school you, then. 14 year-old girls may look older or more mature than boys at that age, mostly through the faster rates they develop physically, but also through the practice of compulsory femininity. Girls are socialized to mimic adult women through hair, makeup, clothing style and mannerisms. This is anything but real power. It's an illusion, a trick of lighting, all smoke and mirrors. They are still children. I don't find it productive to reduce discussions about teen development down to who has it worse, but if you want to play that game, you could not dispute that the average 14 year-old girl hates her body far more than any boy in her class. When you live in a lady-hating culture, body loathing is part and parcel of the female experience. It takes ages for girls to reconcile those issues.
Wiseman's just another lap cat of patriarchy who gets media attention by lamenting how much boys suffer now that those pesky girls expect to be treated like human beings.

"What further drives the boys’ rush to the products are girls themselves. Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for the market research firm NPD Group, said that in a recent survey, 41 percent of boys ages 8 to 18 said that one of their best friends was a girl.

'They shop with girls, and girls influence them,' Mr. Cohen said, much as the girls in the hit Nickelodeon tween show “iCarly” hold sway over Freddie, their hapless male buddy.

'Boys are paying attention to personal brands more than ever because it’s too easy to be criticized virally by a girl,' said Pat Fiore, a market consultant for body image products in Morristown, N.J. 'The peer pressure is starting from the girls, who are discussing how much someone smells or what they look like, and it’s being recorded in real time by e-mail and texting.'

These girls are also becoming sexualized at earlier ages, applying lip gloss and wearing racier clothes. Boys, a bewildered developmental step or three behind, feel additional pressure to catch up.

Ms. Wiseman, who also wrote “Queen Bees & Wannabes,” a nonfiction book about the social pecking order of tween girls, speaks with students around the country. Even in rural North Dakota, she said, 12-year-old boys were highlighting their hair, a focus on appearance that was almost nonexistent five years ago.

'We consistently look at boys in a position of privilege and power,' she said. 'But if you ask a 12-year-old boy if they’re in a position of power, they feel out of control of themselves, their bodies.' She added: 'I defy anyone to tell me that an eighth-grade girl doesn’t look like she has more power and control than a boy.'

Enough of That

Although I've enjoyed two of Bateman's other books, I had to put this one about the case of the Jack Russell down after I reached this passage on pages 26-27:

"Books are like women. They can be hard on the outside, or they can be soft. They can be fat, they can be thin. They can be funny, they can be serious. They can be utterly demented. There can be lots of sex, there can be no sex at all. Some books might tease you along with the promise of sex but ultimately chicken out. Trying to read more than one at a time can be dangerous. And when you're finished with a book, you can put it in a box in the attic."

Did your blood just curdle from the creepy factor?
For me, that kind of lazy, corn-pone, faux tough guy description demeans women and is a complete deal-breaker. You have lost my readership.
Jokes about women as objects, sex dispensers and shit you can stuff in a box may pass for entertainment for some folks.
I'm not one of them.
What's next, the Paglia argument that women are like cars who should expect to get raped when they leave the keys out?
Enough already.
Next time you're unsure if your writing sounds ridiculously sexist, try substituting men in the metaphor and see how much sense it makes then.
Asshole.

Crush Killer!

Julie Walters gave a spirited performance as Mo Mowlam in Channel 4's "Mo" biopic last night.
Too bad the script spent more than half the time on the grisly cancer treatment and resulting sickness rather than how she forced fractious, armed thugs to grow the fuck up and come to peace.

But what made me scream outright was seeing John Lynch play Gerry Adams.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
If pressed to single out my favourite Irish actor, oh yes, I would choose the Celtic Montgomery Clift. The man has an emotional range. Plus he's dreamy.

But oh my stars Gerry Adams is a libido killer.