Mad Men: Reflecting on the end of the season

I know a lot of you like me have been glued to the couch on Sunday nights watching "Mad Men." It's been an incredible season--dark and portentous with a few rays of hilarity and hope. I thought last's nights finale was a pitch-perfect hour of TV and I've avoided my usual Monday-Morning indulgence of reading "Mad Men" open threads so I could jot down my thoughts and ask you yours.

SPOILERS BELOW.

(my how they've grown since season 1)

I thought the episode was marked by Don and Betty's inverted efforts to build a new life for themselves. Don's new venture looks like a repeat, but is in fact an uncharted course; Betty's plans look new but it's going to trap her in the same prison she was in before.

Don's new company has the same DNA as the old one: the same core people he's been working and fighting with forever with a name that starts out the same as well--but the reality is very, very different. He's abased himself in front of everyone: Sterling, Peggy, Pete, and has to acknowledge them as equals. Now he's played his cards of telling these colleagues exactly why he admires them-- and needs them--rather than keeping his little "does Don like me?" guessing-game power-trip game going. This awareness and openness is clearly spurred on by what was happening at home, *and as people on the internets reminded me, his memory of the grisly fate that befell his dad when he "abandoned the collective." So Don succeeded with Peggy and Roger where he failed with Betty. And as Peggy's retort to Roger about the coffee shows, Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce is going to be a very different place from the original SC.

Meanwhile Betty, who is rightly furious at her secretive womanizer of a husband, thinks she's found her fairytale prince and her ticket to happiness and freedom. But with a protective, overly-chivalrous guy who wants to do exactly what Don did--put her on a pedestal and provide for her--she may be doomed to a repeat performance. What Betty needs is not another father figure, but the ability to let go of that little-girl persona and grow up.

As broken-hearted as I was by Betty's decision, and especially its effect on the kids, I also felt a flood of relief that this tense standoff between the two of them was over. And I felt poignantly the tragedy of an era, and two people, who wouldn't allow, wouldn't even consider, of Don's warm and natural parenting instincts to ever influence or take precedence over Betty's horrible childishness at home.

So what did you think? And what are your hopes/predictions for next season?

This Week In Jane

Yes, the blogs are abuzz with news of the Jane Austen exhibit opening at the Morgan... it's a writerly exhibit of manuscripts and letters, so no Colin Firth paraphernalia to be found, just raw genius. I will be going to this and reporting on it forthwith, dear readers.

The Pride and Prejudice graphic novel we've talked about before is shooting up the bestseller charts.

You know, every single time I go to the bookstore I see more Jane-related titles. At what point will news reporters realize that Jane-ism isn't just a fad?

Question of the NaNoWriMo Weekend: What are you writing?

I'm not furiously writing a new novel this month--still revising the old one (yet again) and trying to come up with a new batch of freelance journalism pitches to take me through the holidays.

But what about you guys? I know I have some NaNoWriMoers in the audience, and I know that a lot of you are also working on personal writing projects, whether it's journals, blogs, theses, poetry or fiction. So here's your chance to tell us how your scribbling is going.

Good luck!

PS for those who haven't, I recommend joining the new social network for female writers, www.shewrites.com. And be my friend!

Why Do Writers Get Compared Only to Writers of the Same Ethnicity?

A really funny--and also true-- post at HuffPo from Celeste Ng about the way every single writer of East Asian descent seems to be compared to Amy Tan in blurbs, back-cover copy, promotion and even book reviews. And it's not because of their approach to prose. The same goes for writers of other backgrounds:

Check any bookshelf of contemporary fiction and you'll see what I mean. Black writers get compared to black writers; Jewish writers to Jewish writers; gay writers to gay writers. According to the publisher's description, my friend Preeta Samarasan's novel Evening Is the Whole Day is "sure to earn her a place alongside Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Zadie Smith." I teased her: a place on the shelf of Brown Women Writers. As someone of Indian descent, Samarasan can apparently hope to become a Bharati Mukherjee or a Jhumpa Lahiri, but not -- say -- a Toni Morrison or an A. S. Byatt. Or an Amy Tan, for that matter.

Well worth a read. I've always found it funny that this is done, because a lot of the writers who get compared to each other have little in common in terms of style and tone, even if their subject matter overlaps: Gish Jen, Sam Chang and Amy Tan are all EXTREMELY different, as are Kiran Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri.

55 Years of Pouring Water Down the Mail Chute

"I am a city child. I live at the Plaza."

Happy 55th birthday to Eloise, the most mischievous scion of wealth who ever grew up in NYC's Plaza hotel, and star of one of my absolute favorite childhood books. I can still hear my mom chuckling over the phrase "city child" as she read it aloud; indeed, prank-loving Eloise is a quintessential fictional New Yorker.

The Daily Beast has an interview with Hilary Knight, the book's illustrator.

And Knight will be giving lessons on how to draw the iconic character in NYC!

Another Top Ten Book List Sans Les Femmes

While things improve slowly, we've certainly seen this before.
This time, the culprit my (otherwise wonderful! really!) occasional employer, Publishers Weekly.

Here's the list. Fact-check me if I'm wrong about the complete lack of estrogen here.

Previously:

Another Book List Leaves the Ladies Out: WSJ Edition

Another Book Listie Leaves the Ladies Out

National Book Award: Testosteroney

Anti-feminist book critics review feminist works

Times' Gender ratio improves

Pulitzers: kinda testosteroney

Question of the Weekend: Scariest moments in literature?

Happy Halloween!

As an overly-imaginative reader, I've never found it very hard to get creeped out by a book I'm reading. This has been true from the early days when I used to read Alvin Schwartz' "Scary Stories to Read in the Dark" children's series in bed with a flashlight to spook myself out.

Still, it's harder for books to truly frighten their readers than it is for films , and writers often do their work on us not by mood music or lighting or camera angles, but by presenting something uncanny:

From Wiki; The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

If you go back to classic gothic lit and read the narrator's description of the various monsters: Frankenstein's creature, Dracula, Mr. Hyde, they all describe that feeling, noting that the evil creature bears a resemblance to something familiarly human in form-- but is also so strange as to cause a feeling of phyiscal revulsion or illness in the viewer.

Playing with twins, doubles or dopplegangers also contribute to that uncanny effect.

Here are a few of the creepiest moment I can recall from my reading career--I'll try to avoid spoilers. What are your most fright-filled reading memories?

1. An empty boat runs ashore in England, with all its crew members missing except for the dead captain, who is tied to the ship. A wolf jumps off the ship. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Nothing like an empty ship to send chills down the spine.
   
2. And speaking of ships and dead men, the reanimated corpses of the dead sailors in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner pick up their oars and row home. Ick.
   
3. Mrs. Danvers stands behind the second Mrs. DeWinter, urging her to jump. Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier. Psychological terror at its finest.
4. The second black cat appears, missing the same eye as the cat the narrator killed, The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe. The Doppelganger effect in this tale freaks me out more than all of Poe's other stories put together.
5. Marian Halcombe makes a surprising discovery while visiting the mysterious "Woman in White" at an insane asylum, in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Revealing more than this constitutes a spoiler (and if you read this book as an adult you'll likely guess the twist) but this is one of those shocking moments that I encountered early at a credulous enough point in my reading career so not to predict it beforehand. Readers, it blew. my. mind!

Have a spooky but safe All Hallow's Eve!

Invincible Louisa, Back in the Spotlight

"Invincible Louisa": That was the award-winning YA biography I read of Louisa May Alcott as a kid, a book which made me kind of obsessed with her, even more than I already was as a die-had fan who'd read and re-read all the Little Women/March family books as well as Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Now as a grown-up I can add that I've also read her thrillers, including the amazingly-titled A Long Fatal Love Chase. I think you can pretty much guess what that one's about. (P.S. Yes, it was awesome.)

Anyway, Ruth Graham at DoubleX has a great piece pegged to the existance of a kind of Louisa-hoopla in American culture.

Her piece focuses on the author's struggle--so evident in her books for young girls--between her fiery radical feminist side and a moral duty side. Alcott had a genuine wish to reign in her ambitions and needs in the service of the people and ideals she loved, even those who took advantage of her. Writes Graham:

That idea of compromising—expecting less, accepting fate—is one that shows up frequently in Alcott’s work, and throughout her life. As John Matteson pointed out in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father, most of Alcott's heroines, including all four March sisters and many other lesser-known characters, respond to life's challenges not by speaking up for their needs, but by learning to tamp down their own desires.

Alcott saw sacrifice as part of a worthwhile life—even at the expense of self-expression and fulfillment.

Well worth a read. On another note, this radical feminist still wishes Jo and Laurie had found a way to make it work, though if the rascally heir had reformed his ways post first proposal and made a second go of it, that would probably have turned Little Women into Pride and Prejudice II: Boston Nights. (Seriously, f*** Amy, that little man-stealing brat!)

Some Things Never Change

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Originally uploaded by fellowette

What were your reading habits like as a kid? Were you nuts like me, sneaking out a book in the middle of the night and reading throughout long car trips (can't believe I did that!), or did your bookworm proclivities develop later?

Monday Morning Poem: Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire"

I saw brilliant Jewddhist-Montrealer/citoyen du monde Leonard Cohen in concert this Friday night. Afterwards, my sig oth and I thought that of all the great songwriter-lyricists whom we love, Cohen's literary background renders him the truest poet: many of his words could stand alone without music. Here's one example.

"Bird on a Wire"

Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If i, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If i, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, you must not ask for so much.
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, hey, why not ask for more?

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

Shelf Discovery

I know a lot of my readers are fans of the same group of YA novels as I am--Madeleine L'Engle, Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, and so on--plus some insanely awesome middle grade books from the era of my youth like The Westing Game and classics like The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
All these books show up as the subjects of essays in Shelf Discovery, which as most of you already know, is Lizzie Skurnick's girl-YA Bible, a guide to life-changing, emotion-evoking tomes we used to adore.

The book, like Skurnick's Jezebel column "Fine Lines" is a nostalgia-fest with a strong dash of literary analysis. It reads humorously and breezily and if you're like me, you'll skip to your favorite books of yore first (The WOBP, A Ring of Endless Light, Tiger Eyes--all the death+ sexual awakening ones for me, I guess) and then leisurely sift your way through the rest.

The only nitpicks I have are that some of the entries are a mere paragraph--you tease us, Skurnick!--and a dearth of unifying analysis. Are these books just great reads or are they meant, subtly, to prepare young women for life as adults and adolescents? I wanted more heft and depth at times and I wonder if time constraints prevented Skurnick from tying her hilarious, wise essays together. But that's just a quibble from a dorky English major--if you've read enough of the books in the table of content, then this is a worthy purchase indeed.

BOO--How well do you know your Gothic lit?

A great quiz from the guardian just in time for All Hallow's Eve. I got a 6/10 on my first round, then using process of elimination aced it on the second. As always with the Guardian, it's very Brit-centric.

How well did you do?

Art Blogging: JW Waterhouse and the Lady of Shalott

Last week I didn't post here because I was in Montreal...while I was there, I happened upon an incredible art exhibit, a retrospective of one of my favorite painters of all time, John William Waterhouse, "the modern Pre-Raphaelite." Pre-Raphaelite because of his subjects from mythology and modern because of his naturalistic, free-brushwork techniques and the stark drama of his poses, often confronting the viewer or challenging our perception of space and "the plane."

Waterhouse interests me beyond the beauty of his work because like my beloved Victorian lady-authors, he deals with the conflicting themes of female strength and entrapment, power and domesticity, beauty and transgression. All of these themes play out to varying degrees in his paintings of mythic ladies, sorceresses, nymphs, magic-practicers and queens.

The coolest thing for me about the exhibit was that all three Lady of Shalott paintings were together in one room. If you don't know the story of the Lady of Shalott, it's an Arthurian legend about a young woman doomed to sit in a tower spinning thread, who can only look at the world through a mirror. But when she sees Lancelot riding by in its reflection, she has an awakening of, err, desire to join the world, is put under a curse, dies, and floats down the river towards Camelot. Yep, there are some subtexts and undertones there alright! The Tennyson poem has just been posted below so you can cross reference it with the paintings. Here they are, in order of the date painted and also the story: restless captivity, sexual awakening and entrapment, despair and impending death.



I encourage you to click over to www.jwwaterhouse.com, where I got the images, to learn more about him.