Women Writers

Chasing down information on the (new) New Republic website, I was sidetracked by links to articles about the VIDA survey of women writers and their publication histories, links I want to reproduce below, because I found both pertinent follow-ups to what for women is a searing question: why do women writers continue to be underrepresented in major media? A year or so ago, after the first VIDA survey, there was also a good article in Slate, which, as I recall, asked the taboo question (of any underrepresented group): Aren't we as good?

The links: Ruth Franklin in a recent New Republic; Meg Wolitzer in a recent NYTimes Book Review; and from 2011, Meghan O'Rourke in Slate.

Aren't we as good? nags. But both 2012 articles raise the question of why men aren't interested in reading writing by women, the way women are / have learned to read and respect men's writing. Boys at a prep school may not find Dickinson and Austen on their reading lists; girls routinely read Mark Twain. And so on. I jump on such articles, when I come across them, in the Times, for instance; my husband jumps them.

Once I told husband and son it would take them 3000 years to learn to do the dishes properly; now they are both far more persnicketty than I am, with their hot and cold water rinsing systems. So how come, a hundred years after A Room of Her Own, there's still a problem with the writing? 

Aren't we as good?

Keywords:

• New Republic
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• NYTimes
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• Slate
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• VIDA
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• Women writers

My Olympics

were mostly watched in silent mode from an exercise bike in the gym, and only at the hours NBC deemed suitable; ie, marketable. They were interleaved with commercials, roughly a sheaf of them every 10 minutes, with garishly colored square pizzas at unbeatable prices and aging men with incredible sixpacks.

My London daughter, like every other British person I know, grumbled (the NYT taught us a new word for this, "whinged") in the months leading up to the games, swore she would leave town; but once they started kept sending me links to Youtubes I couldn't watch, because "this video is not available in your part of the world"; eg., the BBC version of the Queen being escorted to her chopper by James Bond. NBC had exclusivity on that.

By the end of Week One, my daughter, who is not British, though she has lived in London for a fair number of years, told me that for the first time in her life she found herself saying "we" and meaning "we British."

Me too, I almost felt British, though that goes back a few generations to some salt smuggling sabbath breakers in Scotland. Four years ago I wondered how London was ever going to put on an Opening Ceremony after the Beijing Extravaganza. Mais voilà! All you need is a sense of humor. Thanks, GB. 

(And now at the gym it's American football, which I don't begin to understand and baseball, which is not a spectator sport.)

Keywords:

• London
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• Olympics

Another Squirrel Story

This morning, standing on the balcony, trying to figure out which redwood tree I overheard the management talking about cutting down recently, I noticed a really rather plump squirrel with a good-sized, still green apple in its mouth rushing around the shredded bark mulch on the ground below me, dithering. It was looking for a place to bury it, for winter, I suppose, though really it's never winter here--perhaps it knows something I don't know. It tried, with its front paws, several spots: in the mulch under a couple of smallish camellias, both of which looked to me like good spots to bury an apple. Then it went through the fence into the next door neighbors' patio and tried their flower pots, eventually settling on a largish one with a geranium. 

Across the street, there's a small house with a couple who collect apple trees, including on the strip of ground between sidewalk and street. Ever since the August some kids picked an apple fight, they hang little homemade pieces of paper from strings in the trees at this time of year: "These apples aren't ripe yet, please don't pick them." 

Earth Tones

ah, the pleasures of foraging for food, one of those frontal lobe things. And the annoyance of discovering that the squirrels are getting all the best apples, at the top of the tree, and wasting them, dropping them to the ground half-eaten, bruised, turning brown around the edges. That would be the apple tree in front of the housing office, next door to the eco-dorm, where the students have gone off and left lettuce bitter and flowering, but also a few tomato plants into which I plunge my nose and inhale the inexpressibly delicious smell of tomato leaves. I picked six small red tomatoes and left another half dozen almost ripe that I will return to check on today.

Then, I discovered a wild plum tree laden with small yellow plums--could they be mirabelles? They are the size and color of, but not quite the almost spicy flavor of. I have two bags full, two bagfuls and I am going to stew them for dinner tonight with Minnesota ex-SanFrancisco in the 70's friends passing through town.  With creme fraiche. Of course, were I more ambitious, I could find a recipe for mirabelle tart--I had one once, the fruit embedded in a quilt of something custardy, but bursting through yellowly, like cobblestones.

And the picture?  Can't resist.  It's one of my friend Susan Cantrick's Ponges.  It's the earth tones.

Keywords:

• mirabelles
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• the forager

Bedtime Reading (3)

No, not the second volume in Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose trilogy.  Bad News.  The hero, whom we last saw being beaten by his father with his father's leather bedroom slipper (in my time and place, it was hairbrush), now 20-something, goes to New York to collect his father's ashes--and I grant you there are some very funny passages, as when he takes the ashes on to dinner, and his hosteass asks "Is that your father you've got there?" and instructs the maid or the butler to set another place.  

I didn't want to know this much about cocaine and heroine and Quaaludes, not to mention needles, dirty and clean, bent, straight, crooked, disposed off, and veins and dealers...it was so terrifying (do I feel vulnerable?) that I, as they say in French, read diagonally. It's gone. Gone.

Keywords:

• bad news
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• St Aubyn

Hardware

 Just back, sleep-deprived but well-fed and -wined from five days in Napa  at the writers' conf.  From the total silence of a cottage in the foggy woods to the sound of teenagers departing from the houses across the street. They mill around the front lawn moaning "byyyye....byyyye...looove ya".  

Napa = strange mixture of the cute and the authentic. Like the shady front porches,  like the tanned, rotund Spanish-talking  cowboys chewing the fat on a bench in front of the supermarket in Calistoga two nights ago.  About four of them, watching life go buy, and the women, behind them sun setting on a range of mountains I have in other seasons climbed.  Would gladly have climbed again, but this week no time between readings and driving up and down the valley to events.  Vineyards amazingly lush--all irrigated, all head high, undulating, greener than any vineyards I've seen in Provence.  Must be the drip systems.  They say the Valley is running out of water.  Movie memorabilia at the Francis Ford Coppola Winery.

 The hardware store:  downtown St Helena, with everything a hardware store should have, nails to pipes to housewares, happy customers and clerks who looking like they'd been selling U-bends for decades and could not imagine anything they'd rather be doing. 

Keywords:

• hardware
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• Napa

Breathing through my toes

Summer activities:  visiting the student garden for herbs.  They've planted less this summer, no--not many--exuberant zucchini, but a few strawberries, a few tomatoes, lots of basil and thyme, which I don't feel guilty about cutting, since really I'm keeping the plants under control.  

Meditation aka Stress Reduction.  This is something I believe I first took up in preparation for giving birth.  I might be getting better at it (meditation), though I confess that there comes a moment in the tape when I wonder if I couldn't be doing something else with my time. However, part of the purpose is to develop a different relationship with Time, so I'm hanging in there.  What do monks do when their right leg, folded over their left leg, falls asleep?  Do they really manage to "breathe into it"?  Why do I feel I'm a failure when I shift position?  (But, I know, part of the purpose is not to feel like a failure:  "nothing is good, or bad'). Afterwards, ok, I do feel swept clean of my obsessions, as if I'd had a good session with the dental hygienist.

Keywords:

• meditation

Adornment

In January, returning from Vancouver, I tried to smuggle a polished lump of jade green beach stone through Airport Security.  A polite young man asked me to open my suitcase.  "Did I have a large rock inside?" he asked, puzzled.  Well, I did, in the toe of a sock, and he was chagrined to confiscate it, though if I wished to return to the airport concourse, he said I would find everything I needed to mail it to myself.  But I wasn't that attached  to the stone, even if it did feel good in the palm of my hand and came from my parents' beach.  It was a stone with a history.

I thought of this yesterday, going through Security at Vancouver Airport again. This time my socks were full of sea-polished oyster shells:  tools, not weapons, my inner primitive told me, though my stone would have made a nice tool as well, raw material for a stone blade, maybe a hammer to break open a live oyster, or pound a teepee pole into hard ground.  My oyster shells made it through Security.  I have given them to my Park City, Utah (I have travelled from sea level to Katmandou) granddaughter; like good primitives we have made them into a necklace.