Bookworm

The Ten-Year Nap (finished it!)

The Ten-Year Nap
by Meg Wolitzer

The four women at the core of the novel, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen, are women whose ages are not specified, but whom I presume to be in their mid-to-late thirties or early forties, since their children range in age from 6 to 10 and they all had careers before motherhood.  All four have stayed at home with their children and are now wondering whether they will continue to do so, or whether they will go back to work.  By the end of the novel, two of them are back in the workforce and two are not, but the possibility is left open that they, too, will eventually do so.  

""That world could be absorbing yet was also pulled along by a current of tedium, and everybody knew it." (328)

". . . like so many people she knew, she'd sought satisfaction around the edges, and time had slid past, and until recently she rarely had been idle and often in fact had been very busy. That life could be so boring, of course, she thought, not unlike the way a job could easily be boring." (pg. 323)

I started out thinking this was a "women's novel" or a "mommy novel," but now that I've finished it I think it's not quite as quantifiable that way.  It poses, in some ways, middle-aged "what am I going to be when I grow up" questions that are not gender specific.  Through the examples of the women's husbands and fathers (in short flashbacks), we see that they either enjoy work or don't, get a big "break" or don't. 

One of the women has the epiphany that just having a job doesn't make you interesting -- having an interesting job makes you interesting. We see that both men and women might have the desire to stay home or might wonder if the things that were important to them when they were in school are still their passions. 

This passage made me laugh a bit.  I do think my husband would think of boots, eventually:

"On the morning of the first day back to school after Christmas vacation, the first snow fell upon the city.  From the windows of their financial and legal towers, men and women peered out upon the natural phenomenon.  The men thought of sleds and of their children and of being a child. . . more than a few of the women wondered if their children's boots from last year still fit."

Be Perfect, or Else

EW article is spot on, with regard to the impossible standards expected of actresses:

". . . the rules actresses must obey. Among them: Have a ''positive body image,'' but also a killer body. Stay within the two-pound weight range that will not reveal you as either anorexic or a pig. Age gracefully, but never get older. Don't have wrinkles, but don't use Botox. Be modest, but when you win an award, weep as if a gold statuette is a personalized gift from heaven. If you get pregnant, be prepared to let a dozen news outlets act as your ob-gyn. Express concern about your carbon footprint, but don't be ''political.'' Talk about how living a normal life is important to you, but smile while every aspect of it is scrutinized. Criticize no one. Never speak off the cuff. Smile for the cameras. Don't cross those women on The View. And above all, maintain a stance of deep gratitude for everything while expressing opinions about nothing. My God, do we really want our stars to be that boring? Are we that boring?"  [Entertainment Weekly]

Thomas Friedman: 9/11 and 4/11

"When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction. Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives. . . If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation. Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said. Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem."  [Op-Ed Columnist - 9/11 and 4/11 - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.]

Yet again, it does make you wonder what would have happened if Al Gore had been elected President by the American People the Supreme Court in 2000.  I'm obviously still of the opinion that that a smart science-minded guy without familial ties to the oil industry would've been the better choice.

On the other hand, by not becoming President, Gore has been able to focus on critically important issues in a way our Chief Executive would not be able to do.

And while I agree with Friedman's take on this, for the most part, the consumer can't just "decide" to stop on a dime and stop using fossil fuels.  If the government really wants a quick turn-around on this, we're going to need help changing the heating systems in our houses.  There would have to be a multi-year phaseout of the use of heating oil -- and assistance for people who couldn't afford to switch out their current heating system.  If you want people to use public transportation and/or drive hybrids, there would probably have to be some public monies to help support new and existing public transportation initiatives.  There are large swaths of this country where it's too sparsely populated to support adequate public transportation.  There would have to be an adequate supply of hybrids to buy and charging stations along the interstates.  (Note: I'm not 100% sure how hybrids work!  Think they only go so far on a charge or something?  Or is that just completely electric cars?)

Updated 7/22/2008:  Oh, and the public transportation already in existence will have to be better than described here.

Wyoming

"Wyoming is under assault here, Ms. Fuller said, standing on a road buffeted by the infamous high plains wind. She believes people are being used by the energy industry. In the past several years, dozens of workers have died on the rigs around the West.

“Throwing warm beating hearts at a failed energy policy is a tragedy, whether it’s the war or the oil fields,” Ms. Fuller said. “The jobs are a good thing. But going after it so frantically and doing so much damage is wrong.”

“I travel between these worlds. I couldn’t leave the oil field behind when I came home to Teton County,” she said. It has been hard, Ms. Fuller allows, to tell her friends about the other Wyoming. “I can’t talk about my childhood, I can’t talk about the war, and its hard to talk about what’s going on in the oil field. That’s why I wrote the book.”

. . .“Rather than write in the rhetoric of conflict, she’s chosen to tell a story of one young man,” said Terry Tempest Williams, a neighbor of Ms. Fuller in Wilson, who has long written about the West. “That’s much more powerful because it touches our humanity.”

It is critical, Ms. Fuller said, that people know who to blame. “Teton County has a huge carbon footprint with heated driveways, roofs and huge houses heated all winter long with no one in them,” she said. “I don’t see this as something the roughnecks or the oil companies or the administration alone is doing. It’s something we’re all doing.”

~ Jim Robbins, in the New York Times

Short-Sighted Leadership?

"It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. . .

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite."

~ Thomas Friedman, New York Times

Why I Enjoy Brijit (and response to Barbara Kay piece)

What makes Brijit worth reading?

• Brijit abstracts and reviews nonfiction content -- from newspapers, magazines, a few top tier blogs, radio, and television -- in no more than one hundred words.  It also rates the piece from zero to three "dots" (including half dots), with three dots being the best.
• Brijit reviews some content that isn't available online for free.  This is helpful if you're trying to decide whether to pick up the newest New Yorker or New York Review of Books, or can even help you target the choicest pieces in your slithery stacks of O magazine and Entertainment Weekly. 
• You can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual sources or particular subjects.
• The red, white, and black design is crisp and the interface is clean with a few Web 2.0 touches (for example, you can click to open or close the top headlines on the main page without a page refresh).

What if I want to write for Brijit -- how does it work?

1. Register as a writer.
2. Choose an open assignment (but make sure you can access the content first). Most assignments can be claimed by up to three individuals; a few sources call for only two submissions and one source (The Onion) calls for as many as five.
3. Read the article, listen to the audio, or watch the video.
4. Write the abstract, include relevant tags, and choose your dot rating.
5. Submit your work prior to the deadline.
6. The Brijit editors choose the best submission, edit it, and publish it on the website.
7. You can (obsessively) check the status of your submissions within your profile pages, haunt the main page for a familiar headline, or (for the more Zen among you) simply wait for the congratulatory email telling you of a published abstract.
8. Writers of published abstracts of print sources earn $5 for each; published abstracts of audio and video broadcasts earn $8.  Brijit pays by PayPal or check once a month.

Response to Barbara Kay's article

Yesterday I read an article on canada.com by Barbara Kay, who expressed her distaste for the competitive nature of writing abstracts for Brijit.com.  Her son, Jonathan Kay, gets a thrill from competing against a few other writers (in one particular case, a co-worker) for the prize of getting an abstract published, whereas Kay "shuddered at the very thought of exposing myself to such humiliation," and began talking about gender differences with regard to competition. 

1. First of all, presumably most people aren't making a game out of it the way Jonathan did (although it is very satisfying when your abstract is chosen).  Therefore, in most cases no one but you and the Brijit staff know when your lovingly crafted abstract was not the chosen one. So, really, how humiliating is that?
2. Also, we live in a world where, for better or for worse, we all find ourselves in competition for places on a sports team, for acceptances to the college of our choice, or for our dream job.  I can't imagine a safer environment than the Writers Area of Brijit.com to embrace a little private humility (when someone else writes a better abstract) and deserved, earned pride (when yours is selected and hits the front page). 
3. You can even benchmark yourself against the most successful writers to try to improve your skills.  Brijit is really an English major's dream -- you can get paid for reading and writing.
4. Kay calls the pay scale "nugatory".  Sure, most of us wouldn't be able to afford to work full time for this rate of pay or with this degree of uncertainty.  But perhaps there is sufficient benefit if you think of it differently.  Writing for Brijit causes someone to read, listen to, or watch high quality nonfiction, and hone his or her skills of critical thinking, synthesis, and concise writing.  And, if the skill is sufficient, some extra cash can be had (which is no small thing in the current economy).
5. Finally, Kay states: "Just as most war gamers are male, I bet this Brijit website has been inundated with male “reviewers” and very few women writers." I'm not privy to the overall statistics, but she might be surprised to know that, as of today's date, five of the top ten most prolific and successful writers on Brijit are women.

[Disclaimer: I am a Brijit writer.  But even if I wasn't, I'd be reading the content on the site.]

William Kristol on Obama's Speech & Race

"The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race.

What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. . . A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years” — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren’t stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King’s injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

. . Problems remain. But we won’t make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify. [NY Times]

I'd buy a Kindle if. . .

• If it cost about $100.  (I do understand why they currently cost $399 -- Amazon pays for the wireless connectivity -- there is no monthly or annual fee -- you just connect.)
• If you could buy books from other vendors, not just Amazon.com (much as I love them)
• If it worked everywhere.  Right now, if you live in Montana or Alaska, you're completely out of luck, and there are wide swaths of other states where service isn't available. 

Obamamania

Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as the Great White Hope
in The Washington Post 'Outlook' by David Greenberg, 13 January 2008

David Greenberg expertly analyzes the phenomenon of Barack Obama, which he calls Obamamania, from a historical perspective. He compares Obama's speechmaking skills to those of William Jennings Bryan and Martin Luther King, but contrasts him with predecessors such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who brought new ideologies and innovative policy ideas to the table. Greenberg acknowledges how tempting it is to vote for this optimistic African American man as a way to symbolically wipe out our racially troubled past, but warns that this would be just a temporary sidestep of the many difficult racial issues the U.S. faces.

NPR : Being Content with Myself

Link: NPR : Being Content with Myself.

"Why don't you 'act black'?"

Since my middle school years, I've been asked this question more than any other. It seems to me that too many people have let society program into their brains what should be expected of me, a black person, before ever interacting with me. But I believe in being who I am, not who others want me to be.