so i was catching up on my blog reading and one of my favorite authors, Jenny Crusie, had responded to a new york times op/ed piece by Maureen Dowd... not wanting to be one sided, i had to go find the piece and read it...
Heels Over Hemingway
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
I was cruising through Borders, looking for a copy of “Nostromo.”
Suddenly I was swimming in pink. I turned frantically from display table to display table, but I couldn’t find a novel without a pink cover. I was accosted by a sisterhood of cartoon women, sexy string beans in minis and stilettos, fashionably dashing about book covers with the requisite urban props — lattes, books, purses, shopping bags, guns and, most critically, a diamond ring.
Was it a Valentine’s Day special?
No, I realized with growing alarm, chick lit was no longer a niche. It had staged a coup of the literature shelves. Hot babes had shimmied into the grizzled old boys’ club, the land of Conrad, Faulkner and Maugham. The store was possessed with the devil spawn of “The Devil Wears Prada.” The blood-red high heel ending in a devil’s pitchfork on the cover of the Lauren Weisberger best seller might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics.
I even found Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with chick-lit pretty-in-pink lettering.
“Penis lit versus Venus lit,” said my friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who was with me. “An unacceptable choice.”
“Looking for Mr. Goodbunny” by Kathleen O’Reilly sits atop George Orwell’s “1984.” “Mine Are Spectacular!” by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger hovers over “Ulysses.” Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” series cuddles up to Rudyard Kipling.
Even Will Shakespeare is buffeted by rampaging 30-year-old heroines, each one frantically trying to get their guy or figure out if he’s the right guy, or if he meant what he said, or if he should be with them instead of their BFF or cousin, or if he’ll come back, or if she’ll end up stuck home alone eating Häagen-Dazs and watching “CSI” and “Sex and the City” reruns.
Trying to keep up with soap-opera modernity, “Romeo and Juliet” has been reissued with a perky pink cover.
There are subsections of chick lit: black chick lit (“Diva Diaries”), Bollywood chick lit (“Salaam, Paris”), Jewish chick lit (“The J.A.P. Chronicles” and “The Matzo Ball Heiress”) and assistant lit, which has its own subsection of Hollywood-assistant lit (“The Second Assistant”), mystery lit (“Sex, Murder and a Double Latte”), shopping lit (“Retail Therapy”), the self-loathing genre (“This Is Not Chick Lit”) and Brit chick lit (“Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging”).
The narrator of that last, Georgia, begins with a note to her readers: “Hello, American-type chums! (Perhaps you say ‘Howdy’ in America — I don’t know — but then I’m not really sure where Tibet is either, or my lipstick.) ... I hope you like my diary and don’t hold it against me that my great-great-great-grandparents colonized you. (Not just the two of them. ...).”
Giving the books an even more interchangeable feeling is the bachelorette party of log-rolling blurbs by chick-lit authors. Jennifer “Good in Bed” Weiner blurbs Sarah Mlynowski’s “Me vs. Me” and Karen McCullah Lutz’s “The Bachelorette Party.” Lauren Weisberger blurbs Emily “Something Borrowed” Giffin.
I took home three dozen of the working women romances. They can lull you into a hypnotic state with their simple life lessons — one heroine emulated Doris Day, another Audrey Hepburn, one was the spitting image of Carolyn Bessette, another Charlize Theron — but they’re a long way from Becky Sharp and Elizabeth Bennet. They’re all chick and no lit.
Please do not confuse these books with the love-and-marriage of Jane Austen. These are more like multicultural Harlequin romances. They’re Cinderella bodice rippers — Manolo trippers — girls with long legs, long shiny hair and sparkling eyes stumbling through life, eating potato skins loaded with bacon bits and melted swiss, drinking cocktails, looking for the right man and dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like, “Any guy who can watch you hurl Cheez Doodles is a keeper,” and, “You can’t puke in wicker. It leaks.”
In the 19th century in America, people often linked the reading of novels with women. Women were creatures of sensibility, and men were creatures of action. But now, Leon suggested, American fiction seems to be undergoing a certain re-feminization.
“These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,” Leon said. “And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down ‘Will Francine Get Her Guy?’ and pick up ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ ”
The novel was once said to be a mirror of its times. In my local bookstore, it’s more like a makeup mirror.
now, having read the column, i can definitely say that i am offended by her ignorance, and thought a response at this date may seem some what belated i cannot just let it slide, maybe because i am a participant in the so-called "re-feminization" ... although i am not sure you can have a re- without actually having been feminized in the first place, and, as a culture, that did not happen in spite of what second wave feminists may think... i think that this pinking (and i want to go an record as saying i hate the color pink) of the covers is a male marketer's response to books that they don't know how to categorize anymore - they are not traditional romance or memoir - they are written by women and we want women to buy them so let's make them pink - i think that the rant should have been about the poor marketing, rather than a criticism of book she hasn't taken the time to read... the more i hang out on authors' blogs, the more i realize that you can't judge a book by it's cover, because the content isn't how the cover is chosen, marketing is...
apparently the anger genrated by this column was not just on the part of us poor, misguided women readers who have made this state of affairs come to be (by buying and reading books)... of the many letters the times must have recieved in response, they published ones from a sociaology professor, "So just let us girls read anything we want. Some of these girls may still grow up to be college professors.", an independent bookseller, "People who make the decision to spend their money in the large chain stores instead of in New York's few remaining independent bookstores bring about the much-lamented demise of the culture they claim to want.", and a father supporting his daughter's reading, "Turns out, there are bad pink books. There are good and bad books of every color."... none of the letters seemed to agree with ms. dowd's point of view... some other responses were: Booksquare and Fearless Voices ... others posted the article with no comments, so maybe they agree with what she has to say, but it seems to me that the general consensus is that pink does not, in fact, give you cooties, but sometimes it gives you a good read...
tacky or not, the holiday wish list is making an appearance - it is by no means a complete list of my desires, and if you feel inspired to get me something not on here, feel free... and if you don't want to give me anything at all that is fine, too... but several people have asked what i want, so here it is in all of its greedy glory...
fun, writer-type stuff:
anything from here, cause they are fun: http://www.ninthmoon.com
Scrivener
Curio
kitchen stuff:
le creuset cookware
a digital kitchen thermometer
a mandolin slicer - talk to squid first, though cause she said she might =)
and the ubiquitous book category:
Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich
Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Restaurant Reviews, Articles, Memoir, Fiction and More by Dianne Jacob
The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller
More Great Good Dairy-free Desserts by Fran Costigan
Rejection, Romance and Royalties: The Wacky World of a Working Writer By Laura Resnick
any of the Andrew Lang Fairy Books
this category could go on indefinitely, so i am stopping...
that is more than enough greediness for the year... and really i don't need presents from anyone, but honestly, who doesn't like presents...
my nod to the commercialism of the season has been fulfilled...
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