marksbury
jessica roake has a middle name, and she intends to use it. in the third person.
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March 6th, 2011This is not a mom blog, babies, writingWow, the internet and I are in such a huge fight! A piece I wrote for The Hairpin, something I thought would be read as satire and summarily ignored, has ignited a war in the comments section. The last time I checked it had garnered 186 comments (I stopped reading them for the sake of my will to live), which makes it the most commented piece on the site right now, ahead of the truly astounding “Ask an Abortion Provider.” That’s just absurd, especially since over half the people have logged on only to say how much they hate it, me, the kind of mom they think I am, the kind of piece it is, and the very fact that it was published. I’m not going to dwell on the irony of internet traffic here: that by getting up in arms about how much you hate something you are only driving up its popularity. Instead, despite the part of me that thinks I shouldn’t have to explain myself, I wanted to just write about my intentions with the piece.
I honestly intended the piece as satire. Here’s a pretty good working definition, which also sums up some of with the problems I ran into:
“In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon…A common feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm—”in satire, irony is militant”… This “militant” irony or sarcasm often professes to approve (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to attack.…Because satire often combines anger and humour it can be profoundly disturbing – because it is essentially ironic or sarcastic, it is often misunderstood.…Common uncomprehending responses to satire include revulsion (accusations of poor taste, or that “it’s just not funny” for instance), to the idea that the satirist actually does support the ideas, policies, or people he is attacking.”
My intent in writing the piece was to satirize both the outsized scorn a small but vocal pocket of priviliged urbanites express towards those who choose to have children, in addition to the self-righteous, harried mommy-warrior types of those same enclaves. The point was to show the absurdity of both poles, to exaggerate the voice in order to illustrate the ridiculousness of these stereotypes, and to adopt a militant irony in the tone. I understand that it is really annoying to encounter new agey mother-goddess types who seem to think their pregnancy makes them just a smidge less holy than the Virgin Mary, just as it is incomprehensible that some people get seriously angry when they see a woman walking with a stroller through their own neighborhood, as though she and her baby were criminal yuppie interlopers.
And yes, like all satire, it hews sharp, and mean, and reads as though it might be real. In that way it was a success, I think. And it’s (obviously) completely valid to think it’s not funny, or to think it missed the mark. I don’t understand how people don’t get that it was satire (the Editor definitely got it, as did many readers), but it’s not for me to guess at the hows here.
What I find really shocking is the amount of vitriol in the comments. As a writer, it is completely bizarre to have a persona you created for the sake of a satire be completely mistaken for your own and summarily attacked by strangers who feel compelled to make sweeping judgements about your whole being. This is not a pity party, and I’m not going to get into how completely needlessly cruel it is to log on to a website in order to write awful things you would never say to people in real life (unless you are a horrible monster), but God, the internet is nasty (OK, that was a little bit of a pity party).
But here, because I am trying to not let the bastards get me down, I will end on a positive note. Along with all the misreading, insult hurling, and personal mean-messaging (I had one lady sign up for twitter JUST TO CALL ME A HORRIBLE HYPOCRITE! That’s dedication/an anger problem!), I have also heard from all sorts of people who got it and liked it, including some tremendously talented moms who write in a very real and far more sensitive way on the subjects I was joking about (like this one!). I really hope that this doesn’t leave a sour taste in Edith’s mouth about bringing a parenting perspective onto the site; there are so many voices out there that I would love to see get more attention (and not just those of moms). In the end, all those nasty Do Not Want comments actually succeeded in getting me more traffic, thicker skin, and a trial by internet fire. My son also contributed to this– what kind of role model would I be if I let strangers and critics keep me from doing what I love? I want to be courageous for him, and if that means drinking the haterade every so often, so be it.
Tags: A Mom Responds Before Crowding You Out of Your Local Coffeeshop/Bar, comment wars, controversy, haterz, moms, parents, satire, The Hairpin -
I decided to hide out from the mama heat for a bit in the safe confines of sports writing, where no one ever gets irrationally upset (hahahahaha! I feel I have to add that now every time I’m being sarcastic/kidding). It was super fun to attend a game as a member of the press (did you know they give you free chili and sodas and sheet cake and donuts?! Members of the press eat very unhealthy food!). Even though the Timberwolves lost and I wasn’t able to photograph any naked players in the locker room (prudes), it was a fantastic experience. Basketball!
Tags: adventures, basketball, sports, timberwolves, wizards -
January 27th, 2011UncategorizedIn The Vintage Book of American Women Writers, Elaine Showalter celebrates the often unsung heroines of American literature in a groundbreaking and revelatory anthology. I got to speak with the celebrated (and super-friendly) feminist scholar about the challenges woman writers face, the Great American (male) Novel, and the odious ‘chick-lit’ label for The Express, and then I got to publish the unedited awesomeness on my blog! Huzzah!(portions of this interview are available here)*Are there any writers in the anthology you like to highlight at your readings?I want to read the short piece by Ursula Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” and I thought I’d read some of the other parables or allegories. This is a genre that women specialize in, especially American women, these short ironic or prophetic pieces about gender. “She Unnames Them” is a great story that came at a wonderful time; it summed up so much thinking about the women’s movement. Edith Wharton also wrote one a century earlier– they’re both terrific but also of their time. American women invented the genre in a way; it reflected the way women thought about society.*How did the book come to be?
A look at American women writers hasn’t been done before, which is really shocking. This is the 21st century and it hasn’t been done! My goal was to find things that were really fun to read and really memorable.
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Did you face any limitations in the writers you featured?
I couldn’t include novelists, which leaves out an enormous range of writers. Toni Morrison has only ever published one short story and it’s constantly anthologized. There are so many extraordinary women novelists, but I thought, people will just need to buy more of their books, that’s a good thing! I didn’t have to leave out anyone because they objected to being in a woman’s anthology. 30 years ago, some writers would object– I’m not a ‘woman’ writer, I’m a writer!’ Being a woman writer was not respected. To me, if you’re a woman, and you’re a writer, you’re a woman writer!
There are other considerations, like how expensive pieces are. The 1st book I ever published, Women’s Liberation and Literature– the title really gives it away!– was at the beginning of the Women’s Movement, 1971, and it was a very radical idea to a lot of people. I wrote to Sylvia Plath’s sister-in-law and asked to reprint a couple of poems, and she wrote back and said I could have this poem for $100 or 2 poems for $50 each. It was a real shock to me as this young scholar; it never occurred to me to think of poems like that! Of course, writing operates on a market, and I adjusted to that. All the writers I feature in this book operated in a market. You can’t be a writer just scribbling alone.
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What kinds of challenges do contemporary female writers face?
The assumption that there shouldn’t be a problem, that the playing field is level and that there’s nothing about women’s writing that requires a special focus. That’s not at all true. For instance, there are real problems with reviewing. When some young women critiqued the reception of Freedom, there was this tidal wave of reviewers declaring it to be the Great American Novel before they even read it. People do not look at women writers to capture The American Experience, because it’s defined as a male experience.
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When women write about experience, it’s described as a domestic drama, or ‘chick-lit’...
What a terrible term, chick-lit! I’m keen on women becoming more assertive– you don’t see women writers talking about their theories, their writing processes. They’re too self-effacing and they get overlooked. When writers like Salinger die, there are always these lists of Great American Novelists, and there’s maybe one women included. But there are women writers who are producing astonishing fiction right now! We still struggle with this idea of The Great American Novel, the GAN, like it’s the GNP. If a woman says anything she’s dismissed, ‘you’re so old-fashioned, stop complaining!’ On the other hand, women can write about anything they want to now. They don’t have the cultural censorship, where they’re not allowed to even write certain words. It’s really about the attention they get, so I hope this book will begin to remedy that. If you ask people, who are some great women writers from the 20’s, they don’t know. You can’t remedy that if the women writers are not available to be read! You have to be able to see the writing coherently in a historic way.*You can buy the amazing Vintage Book of American Women Writers at your local awesome bookstore, or here
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January 10th, 2011Celebrity!, Cinephelia!, writing
Oh hello! I wrote this piece about the seminal racist studio propaganda clip-movie, 1974′s That’s Entertainment!
Tags: bad-great movies, That's Entertainment, thehairpin -
January 6th, 2011InterviewsI interviewed Tom Rachman, author of the fantastic The Imperfectionists, in advance of his Politics and Prose reading on January 7th. He was thoughtful, kind, terribly intelligent, and indulgent– I loved talking to him. He spoke to me for about 15 minutes, but because he’s an erudite Canadian/Englishman, he speaks in almost full paragraphs, carefully considered words that are not meant to be cut apart and re-contextualized. This means that though he’s fascinating to listen to, I knew it was going to be hard to cut the interview into nibbly Washington Post Express bits. So when it came time to turn in my piece, it meant some nasty cutting. I was supposed to get to 350 words, and I got to 600 before I realized that THIS IS WHAT EDITORS ARE FOR, and I just passed the buck rather than Deborah Solomaning the hell out of it. But of course when I saw it I was disappointed, because I knew how much MORE had been said. So here it is, all 4 of my readers, the whole thing, the whole shebango, Tom Rachman uncut (with the Express lede intact):Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists vividly captures both the romance of the foreign correspondent’s life– drinking in Venice, loving in Paris– and the frustrating realities of the common workplace. Yes, the obit-writer lives in Rome; but as his writing always ends up “between the Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather”, the glamour is faded. Rachman, a former editor for The International Herald Tribune in Paris, drew on his own experiences to evoke the life of a struggling newspaper in Rome. The paper’s writers and editors are alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, flawed and familiar, and ultimately, completely compelling. The Express spoke with Rachman about the un-cinematic lives of foreign correspondents, the beauty of the obituary, and writing chops, Orwell style.What’s changed since you bridged from journalism to fiction writing? Even though they’re largely disconnected, the staff writers on the paper are still working together– do you ever miss that?
I think that writing is certainly a more solitary pursuit than working in an office. And for the millions of people who do work in an office or have done, we all know that they offer just as many frustrations as they do charms. There is, however, the social element of it, which is always a pleasure. Or can be a pleasure. The tough part is being compelled to be with people you might otherwise not choose to spend your time with. On the other hand, you also find yourself among characters you might not otherwise find yourself, and that can be extremely agreeable. When you’re just writing fiction, or writing on your own as I do, then yeah, you spend a great deal more time just with your thoughts. When I was working as an editor at The International Herald Tribune in Paris, the way I was working at that point was that I would do about 6 months of working there full time and then I’d save my earnings and go and write. So I did have some experience before I left journalism of that sort of lifestyle. And while it is different, I do enjoy it. I like the ability to pursue my own thoughts at length and indulge in the reading I want to do and need to do and organize my days according to the work I want to accomplish rather than according to the work my superior needs me to accomplish that day. So it has its advantages and disadvantages.
The book gets to both the romantic idea of the foreign correspondent’s life– the drinking in Venice, the wandering in Paris and Rome– and the banal, day-to-day realities of any working environment. Did the pull of that romantic notion have any influence on your decision to become a foreign correspondent, and how soon did you see through that?
My initial intent in entering journalism was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. I was in journalism for approximately ten years, and during that period I was often caught up in the more particular motivations of wanting to do a story or get a particular posting, and amid all that there’s no question that I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a really creative, exciting, thrilling and exotic environment. And in some ways it absolutely was; in other ways it really wasn’t what I expected. The romanticized notion of the business I think is a combination of something that in a certain form did exist in the distant past that doesn’t exist anymore, and on the other hand something that was always a bit of a romantic notion of the business. I think that it was pretty early on that I realized it wasn’t going to be quite as I had expected; it wasn’t likely to be like All the Presidents Men, or The Front Page, or the other classic films about what it’s like in the press.
So you didn’t relate personally to the Hemingway experience; the hard drinking, carousing international reporter?
One thing that declined, at least in American journalism, was drinking. There was a lot less of it when I entered the business in the late-90’s. It that point it was much more of a profession- most of the journalists had gone to journalism school, had been trained in journalistic ethics or other notions. If you had gone back 50 or 60 years, it was more often a hodge-podge of characters who had come from all sorts of backgrounds, often with no particular kind of training, and were often just sort of flung into the pit of night cop reporting and the hazing that other journalists, almost entirely men in those days, gave them, in a very kind of macho, heavy-drinking attitude. And it certainly wasn’t that world that I entered, and obviously in many respects it was better than that world. It wasn’t very much like the Hemingway experience, no.You have some characters– like the 70-year-old struggling freelancer Lloyd– who are really unmoored and lost in this new world.
In his case, it’s a variety of factors: it‘s partly that the work world has changed significantly, but it also had something to do with age. To be a reporter, as you get older, gets tougher and tougher. There are some people who go on into their 70’s or 80’s, and continue to perform at a very high level. But it requires an awful lot of energy and the ability and willingness to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice, to get a call in the middle of the night being told to run across the country if necessary, and to deal with a completely irregular and punishing schedule. Also, there’s an intense competition that tends to be the terrain of slightly younger people. You do see that there’s a more common progression from reporter to, in middle age, the editing side, because they’re just sort of tired of the exhaustion of reporting. In addition to the present day context that Lloyd is struggling with, there’s the fact that he still, even in his personal pife, up until that point, has been clinging to the young person he was and that he no longer is.
Then you have Arthur, who though he’s younger, still doesn’t want to leave his family to go interview a woman two countries away for her own obit. That was such a vividly drawn scene. Did you draw on any personal experience for that scene?
I have written some obituaries; just because when I was a reporter for the AP, you tended to do a bit of everything. So there aren’t many journalism pieces I haven’t written. Obituaturies were often among my favorite to write because they have elements that no other news story have, which is that they’re the story of an entire life. A story from start to finish with a proper conclusion that almost no normal news story has. A news story is usually ongoing with a next step. In an obituary, it’s a completed story of a person’s life in its entirety, and i always found that fascinating, and a way to recognize the full breadth of a person when viewed within its start and conclusion. So I aways had a particular affection for reading and writing obits.
There was no personal experience that that scene was based on: a character came to mind and I used that scene to discuss many of the issues, both within that story and within the book at large: issues like ambition, and death and the way things fade in life, and all those are discussed quite directly in that chapter. The character, Ertzberger, was a great one to be able to use in that way, because she’s an intellectual with decades of thought and discussion behind her, but in the situation arthur finds her in, she’s aging, unwell, in a sort of forced state of isolation, because she is a rather difficult woman, and she’s not terribly likable, and as a result she has a mind that’s still fizzing with ideas but has very few outlets. So when he arrives there there’s a great opportunity to talk about her thoughts and all that she’s been battling and striving for over the decades that have now been coming a fairly rapid end. She has the prospect now, of looking back on it all, almost as an obituary writer could, because of course, she’s aware that’s what he’s there for. It ended up a very rich scene for discussing some of the ideas central to the book.You did that really well, because intellectual dialogue can often sound rather stilted, just as it does, I suppose sometimes in real life?
Yes, it was actually quite tricky for exactly that reason. Because on the one hand you want to convey all sorts of thoughts. But the thing is that in regular conversation, people don’t typically speak in a particularly intellectual way. They might have ideas, but they’re guarded and hidden behind other claims and statements, and people tend to be uncomfortable talking directly about intellectual things. Very few people ever do. To get into fascinating, even philosophical issues like that and make it seem like dialogue is tricky, so I’m glad to hear it came off.I know you admire George Orwell, who was also both journalist abroad and fiction writer. What did you take from how he approached fiction and/or nonfiction writing?
I think the process of the two is quite different. The journalism I did was predominantly daily news with deadlines, so it’s a very different experience from having a long period to work over a piece of fiction. On the other hand, there are certain principles of writing that do translate quite well, and I would say there’s almost nobody whose principles of clear writing are better than Orwell’s. The training of having been a journalist, of having worked with words for thousands of hours over the years, is an extraordinarily useful experience for a fiction writer, and I think that in past decades it was pretty much common if not standard. The old style of the Hemingways or the Orwells and Graham Greene and others who thought, ‘I want to become a writer’ as a broad term, which meant eventually writing fiction and doing nonfiction and the whole thing. Today you have journalism schools and creative writing programs and often there’s a sense that there’s a very strong distinction, that they’re almost separate professions, and they usually are dealt with that way. I think perhaps because some of my idols were people like Orwell, I was looking to a model that was outdated, and that was why I pursued journalism.Tags: books, The Express, The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman -
January 6th, 2011This is not a mom blog, babies
this is insaaaane:
“Once upon a time, infants were quietly removed from orphanages and delivered to the home economics programs at elite U.S. colleges, where young women were eager to learn the science of mothering. These infants became “practice babies,” living in “practice apartments,” where a gaggle of young “practice mothers” took turns caring for them. After a year or two of such rearing, the babies would be returned to orphanages, where they apparently were in great demand; adoptive parents were eager to take home an infant that had been cared for with the latest “scientific methods…“Cornell’s program ran from 1919 to 1969…At Cornell, eight female students at a time spent a full semester living in a fully-kitted out practice apartment. The women were there to learn the entire spectrum of homemaking skills, and, the exhibit says, “an early proponent of the program, believed that babies were essential to replicate the full domestic experience. Albert Mann, Dean of the College of Agriculture, called the apartments ‘essential laboratory practice for women students.”
http://blogs.plos.org/wonderland/2011/01/04/real-live-practice-babies/
Tags: babies, home-economics, science -
December 6th, 2010Uncategorized, music, writing
A lil’ piece I wrote for The Express was run through Google Translator and posted on this here website, and I think it really deepens my writing. This is my favorite line: “Conduct of riffs, a singer-showman noisy and lyrics about “book Queens” and “golf course, golf, golf, golf” If only I could write like that.
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December 4th, 2010music
When I was 14, I was a really half-assed Goth. Like an ‘I like The Cure + Anne Rice + Siouxie and the Banshees + dyed black hair + my one pair black and white striped tights’ Goth. I flirted with the subculture, but I kept meeting people who actually believed they were vampires (you’re going to suck my blood, dude? No, you are not going to suck my blood. It is 2:00 p.m., I just met your mom, and you have some pimples on your chin & a trig test tomorrow), and the boys always tried to do a really bad ‘intense hypnotic smolder’ thing, and they didn’t have any sense of humor, and the hard-core Goth music kinda sucked and scared me in equal measure. I remember being particularly scared of Ministry and their fans (I know this is technically industrial, relax Dr. Gothatron), because they seemed too intense (maybe it was because the beginning of The Hunger was so effectively creepy?). So I abandoned goth and went more grungy/punky/nineties alternative (which made me super outsidery! I was the only one who really got Green Day!), and then I got embarrassed about that and went more indie, and so on forever and ever down the obscure pitchfork rabbit hole until I no longer cared about being cool because I have a child to raise and so what, turns out Elton John is awesome.
Anyway. Yesterday I heard a double dose of Ministry on the radio (sirius new wave, duh), and could not believe I’d ever been intimidated by it. It is so tame, and so cheesy in its melodrama, just like an actual 14 year old goth kid! Frankly (and yes, fine, it’s probably because they all ripped Ministry off), it just sounded like electroclash on downers instead of coke (ya burnt electroclash! Take that decade old tiny music scene!). It was sweet, really, in the way that goths are always kinda sweet. They want to come off as dark and tortured, but for the most part, they are just synthy cheeseballs (metaphor fall apart).
So here is a very famous Ministry song that is kinda catchy and you can dance to it! How could anyone be scared of a song that includes a badoobumpbump chorus?
Ministry Everyday is Halloween
Tags: dance!, faux-vampires, goth kids, ministry, teenagers -
I wrote this for The Awl. It’s a bit more serious than my already sophisticated Juggalo-analysis.
Tags: art, censorship, Hide/Seek, National Portrait Gallery, the awl -
December 2nd, 2010art
On YouTube, you have to be 18 to see “Fire in My Belly“, the recently censored piece from Hide/Seek:
On the other hand, Juggalo stuff is free for all, because this is America, duh! Sure, makes sense. I’d much rather the kiddos hear “Santa’s a Fat Bitch” than be exposed to a visual artist’s stunning portrait of loss and grief. Because, aaaaagh, ants! No ants! Blaspheeeeme!
Tags: "Fire in My Belly", art, censorship, Hide/Seek
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