I felt like reading a bodice ripper, so I did. However, it was strangely unsatisfying. Apparently I have reached a stage where I no longer find bodice rippers even amusing, although Belli might object to  my characterization of her novel as a bodice ripper, so maybe I just don’t find mediocre books very amusing.

The book is a fictionalized account of Juana of Castile, sometimes known as Juana the Mad. I actually thought it was straight up historical fiction when I grabbed it, and I thought it might be interesting, but it turned out to be one of those story within a story things that I usually hate. Part of the book takes place in the 1960s, and part takes place in the 1500s, and both parts were, uhm, not very good.

I would go into more detail, but I don’t really feel like wasting any more time on this book. One thing the Book Project is showing me is that I am apparently getting much pickier about what I read, and while I haven’t yet broken down and just stopped reading a book because it was bad, I might get there soon. After all, there are so many things I could be doing with my time; why waste it on books I don’t like?

Demographics:

The Scroll of Seduction, by Gioconda Belli. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. English translation published 2006, 325 pages. Fiction.

So apparently everyone is exploding over the Vanity Fair cover featuring Miley Cyrus, because it’s all exploitative and shocking and it “might as well be porn.” I wasn’t going to comment on this issue, but since it popper up everywhere, I sighed and went to Wikipedia to figure out who in the heck Miley Cyrus is, and then I went to Vanity Fair to get the goods on the picture in question.

It turns out that Miley Cyrus is one of the many teen stars groomed by Disney to make obscene amounts of money for their franchise, and to remind Americans that our goal is to be mindless consuming automatons, capturing that all-important tween market which eats up daddy and mommy’s money like Loki snarfs down Zuke’s Cat Treats. Apparently she’s an actress/singer, and it seems like she’s doing pretty well for herself, although I don’t think I’ll be running out to watch/listen/buy/come into contact with anything she’s in anytime soon. The real bone of contention with the picture has to do with the fact that’s she 15.

Go look at the picture. Seriously. I promise it won’t offend you, considering that all you really see is a young woman wrapped in a silky thing with her hair all tousled and her shoulderblade exposed. It was shot by Annie Leibovitz. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She is, uhm, kind of famous for producing amazing and very intimate images.

So everyone’s freaking out about this picture because they think it’s sexualized, and this bothers them, because Cyrus is not of legal age, and obviously when someone’s not wearing a shirt, it means that they are sexy, but it’s not ok to think that 15 year olds are sexy. Because, you know, ew, they’re children so you should think of them as mewling infants, if you think of them at all, and definitely don’t think of them as human beings. Apparently that little shot of shoulderblade is getting people all kinds of hot and bothered, but pictures of said star in a revealing bikini are totally cool, as are lesbotastic photos of her and a friend (do a Google Image Search, man, it’ll make your day). Now she’s apologizing for the “embarrassing” photos in Vanity Fair, after saying “I think it’s really artsy…It wasn’t in a skanky way” in the feature article that goes with the photo of doom, and Disney’s cracking down on her for posing in a photograph which proves, once and for all, that 15 year olds do have shoulderblades. And than 15 year olds who are too thin have visible ribs.

So, here’s the thing. She is a bit sexed up in the picture, with hair and makeup which are obviously designed to make her look older. And Leibovitz is kind of known for pushing the envelope with portrait photography; she’s clearly not afraid of a little controversy, and she is well aware of the power of symbolism in photography. And it is a fact in this society that for young women to advance their careers in the entertainment industry, they pretty much have to appear half naked on the cover of some magazine or another. But the brouhaha over the image is just absurd.

I don’t know Cyrus, so I don’t know how well the picture captures her and her personality. To me, it comes off as a little cold and distant, but there’s also a hint of shyness and insecurity about it which I think is actually rather charming. The photo really brings out her features, which are a smidge old-fashioned, and I like that too. It’s a pretty picture, fundamentally. I wouldn’t make it my desktop or anything, but it’s nice, and it certainly doesn’t make me think “man, I should have sex with Miley Cyrus.”

I don’t know about you, but when I look at the picture, I see a work of art, not pornography. And on the heels of yesterday’s post about the difference between fantasy and reality, I feel obliged to point out that pictures of nude children are not necessarily bad. Pictures of nude children in pornographic situations=bad. Artistic photographs which cover more than most clothes these days? Not bad, and in fact I would call the Cyrus portrait a legitimate work of art.

It made me sad to read Cyrus’ tearful press release about the shoot, because I think she caved to pressure from Disney, who told her that she needs to retain the image of a virginal teen angel…despite the fact that leaked and very unflattering personal photos of her can be found all over the Internet. She claims that Vanity Fair misled her, Vanity Fair claims that she knew what was up, and so did her parents, who were at the site of the shoot and saw the images. It’s pretty clear that she consented, and so did her minders, so to recant now is just silly. In fact, the photograph of Cyrus and her father is a lot creepier than the infamous shoulderblade shot, in my opinion, and that apparently got the greenlight all round.

It’s pretty obvious that Disney treats Cyrus and its other young starts like personal property, and that’s a major bummer. Vanity Fair pretty much nailed it with “That said, I can’t imagine that her minders at the Walt Disney Company want to see Miley Cyrus’s name anywhere near the word “sex,” not in an era when every under-age actress in Hollywood is stalked by the Ghost of Britney Future. And not when so much money is riding on this one’s continued public innocence.” I’m not sure that media exposure of this level is the healthiest thing for any 15 year old, but I think that Cyrus probably enjoyed the shoot, appreciated the fact that she came out looking more mature, and probably regrets her statement about regretting her participation in the shoot. Too bad she’s firmly under Disney’s thumb.

Of course, let’s not forget that the whole brouhaha has attracted insane amounts of attention: just the thing to kick a young star’s career to the next level. And maybe that was the goal all along.

Being a humanitarian tends to be more imperative when one has been faced with the full magnitude of horrors which humans can perpetrate on each other. (Thanks to Vicki for the link.)

And on animals. The subprime loan crisis has a wide ripple effect, apparently: household pets are being left behind, sometimes to die, as people vacate foreclosed homes.

Anorexia isn’t just for teens; it can be devastating for adults, as well. In fact, it’s almost worse for adults, since they lack the support systems available to teens.

40 years after the riots of May, 1968, how is France doing?

Vinyl sales are up, CD sales are down. What does this mean for the music industry?

Junk hauling is getting to be pretty profitable these days, thanks to the rising number of foreclosures.

Ate it Anyway

This book of short stories appealed to me primarily because the title involved eating, and the cover featured a photograph of fried eggs strung up on a clothesline. Alas, that was about the high point of the book. I just couldn’t get into these short stories, although I tried. I would listlessly pick the book up, read part of one, get bored, skip ahead, try another, bounce back, and so forth.

I’m not quite sure what it was that I didn’t like. The stories felt a little too self-conscious and forced to me, in a way which made them really inaccessible. They were also a bit repetitive, with the lines between characters and stories blurring for me.

In the reviews, the author is described as offbeat and quirky, which is something I usually like in an author, but Ate it Anyway just wasn’t my kind of quirk, apparently. A real disappointment from a Flannery O’Connor Award Winner.

Demographics:

Ate it Anyway, by Ed Allen. Published 2003, 182 pages. Fiction.

Good Faith

Another Jane Smiley, and this one is about the real estate craze of the 1980s, and the people who got caught up in it. Smiley has a way of capturing people and places which is really intriguing and somehow very vivid; her characters almost remind me of Picasso sketches, loosely described in brief, bold strokes which somehow come together to create a very distinctive and recognizable person. I also like that her characters are all deeply flawed and often unlikable, much like most of humanity.

As I read the book, I could feel the inevitable, slow buildup towards the conclusion, and I was filled with a sense of pity for the leading character, as well as a smug “how stupid can you be” attitude as I watched him make fundamental and really silly mistakes. Yet, I kept reading, because I wanted to know how soon he would realize what was happening, and how, precisely, his mistakes would come back to bite him.

Good Faith looked at the lust for money and property which fills many of us, along with the nature of love, belonging, and outsiders. It reminded me, in a sense, of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I think I sort of loved it.

Demographics:

Good Faith, by Jane Smiley. Published 2003, 417 pages. Fiction.

I was talking with a friend recently, and somehow the topic of fantasies came up. This person expressed a sense of deep personal discomfort with certain fantasies, and I got a sense of shame and misery from this individual about having those fantasies, and we had an exchange that went something like this:

Me: Ok, I get that you feel like such and such a fantasy is “wrong,” because the behaviour involved is morally questionable, but I don’t think you should beat yourself up over it.

Person: But, its wrong, I shouldn’t feel that way, and it makes me feel like a bad person.

Me: Right, but here’s the thing. Unlike an actual bad person, you would never do the thing that you are fantasizing about. Because you recognize that it is a bad thing, and you understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

Our whole exchange was very interesting, and obviously I’m not going to delve into it, but it got me thinking about one of the reasons I really love Savage Love, Dan Savage’s advice column. (Dan Savage himself, alas, is extremely fat-phobic, but I can separate one dislikable aspect of a person from their more redeeming traits.) Savage explicitly and frequently expounds on the difference between fantasy and reality, and I think it’s a good difference to underline.

There’s a huge difference between doing something and thinking about doing something. For example, I occasionally fantasize about ruthlessly slaughtering my neighbors, but obviously that’s not something I would ever do, because I recognize that it is, you know, not very nice. But I don’t think that imagining the act is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that working out elaborate schemes in my mind while I seethe in bed trying to sleep allows me to express my irritation and anger, thereby defusing it.

America is all about repression, and the mind is a dangerous thing to repress. People in this country wig out about fantasies like the citizens of 1984 fret about thoughtcrime. I just don’t think that the world of the imagination is or should be subject to the same rules which govern actual, physical behavior. Imagination is a wonderful thing, after all.

And, in some cases, I think that there are ways to realize certain fantasies with consenting people in a healthy, safe, and sane way. There are whole communities of people out there who love to do just that, and many of the people in those communities are gentle, loving, caring people who simply have a few unusual extracurricular pursuits.

It makes me sad that we live in a society where people are taught to feel ashamed of themselves when they think in ways which are nonconventional. Obviously, I am not condoning actual atrocities, but I don’t think that trying to repress fantasies is very productive, or healthy. I also certainly wouldn’t condone any acts which were nonconsensual, but I am not opposed to the illusion of nonconsensuality in a carefully negotiated and controlled scene with mentally capable adults.

The boundaries of what we consider to be sexual deviance seem to be constantly changing, but there’s a common thread of treating people who are perceived as deviants like animals. I find this attitude extremely counterproductive, because it suggests that there is no sane, healthy, safe way to express desires and fantasies.

In a world where people were more open about their fantasies, maybe they would understand the difference between fantasy and reality more clearly. If you’ve ever looked at Japanese comic books within the larger context of Japanese society, you can see that people are perfectly capable of expressing some pretty astounding fantasies without actually acting on them. And for those who do want, in some small way, to act out such fantasies, there are healthy outlets for doing so, because it’s a culture where the concept of fantasy is accepted, allowing people to negotiate their own boundaries and to seek out like-minded individuals.

Personally, I’d rather see that than the inevitably explosive results of repression.

We’re still in Afghanistan, and here’s an awesome photoessay to prove it.

Billboards are all over Los Angeles…and most of them are illegal. Which begs the question of why they are being permitted to proliferate.

Butchery appears to be a dying art, and some people want to change that. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

The babymoon is apparently the next big thing. For those of you who don’t know what a babymoon is, it’s a holiday taken while pregnant, presumably to rest up for the perils ahead. Have I mentioned lately that I hate the phrase “baby bump”?

What happened to “reduce, reuse,” and when did we skip straight to “recycle”? We need to start radically rethinking our approach to natural resources if we want to make a difference.

Bonk is reviewed in the Chicago Reader, with a slightly different slant from my own review. I think this commentary on the book is worth reading, myself, because it plunges into a topic Roach glossed over.

Believe in the green revolution? Start in your own backyard.

So, thanks to Haddock, I am now aware that my feeds are apparently awry, and I apologize for that. I think it has something to do with the latest version of Wordpress, which I recently upgraded to, since things are going haywire on the back end as well. At any rate, hopefully those of you who can’t read this because it’s not showing up in your feeds will eventually head to the main page and see this. The direct feed for this ain’t livin’ is at: meloukhia.net/feed, and you may want to update your feed readers to reflect this. There are some other direct links too; you can use your feed reader to find them, if you feel thus inclined, by typing in my URL.

Speaking of which, I do like the latest Wordpress, although it is kind of irritating that it’s making the site go all wonky. For those of you who use Wordpress, it is a good idea to upgrade to the latest version just in general, and it was an easy install. I realize it sounds sort of silly to be plugging the new version of Wordpress when I’m having site problems, but I’m not sure it’s fair to blame Wordpress for all of those problems. So, uh, go upgrade.

For those of you who are completely mystified by the above two paragraphs, here’s a story about rearranging furniture:

So, the thing is, I like to rearrange furniture. It’s kind of a thing with me. Usually, every six months or so, I totally rearrange my house. I start to feel restless when everything remains in a static position, and I get antsier and antsier until I abruptly decide it’s time to tear the living room apart, usually late at night, and then I get all sweaty and covered in dust and then I am filled with a sense of deep satisfaction.

The problem is, I can’t do that in my new house, because my new house is very small, and it has a highly restrictive floorplan. When I moved in last year, I arranged everything in what seemed like the most logical way, and everything is still arranged in pretty much the same way, despite the fact that I moved in almost a year ago. This is…unprecedented for me.

A few weeks ago, I rearranged the objects on the shelves in the kitchen, attempting to channel my frustrated desire to move furniture around, and it really wasn’t very satisfying. The problem is simple: I want to change the way my house looks and feels by moving things around, and I can’t, and I’m starting to feel like I’m suffocating, which makes me bemoan the myriad issues with my house even more.

For example, they could have put in a half-story to make the upstairs lofts useful, but they didn’t. So instead I have what seems like a lot of space upstairs, but I can’t use it, because the ceiling is too low. And they could have made the bathroom, I don’t know, a few square feet larger so that you don’t feel like you’re making out with the hot water heater when you take a poop. Oooh, and they could have put ventilation in the kitchen, so that the house doesn’t always smell like whatever was most recently cooked.

The fact of the matter is that I bore easily, and I think that rearranging furniture allows me to pretend that my house is different, as well as allowing me to work off some excess energy. And the thing is, I don’t really want to go through the headache of moving, because it’s a pain in the behind, so I’m stuck in this furniture configuration and it suddenly feels very oppressive. In short, I’m bored with my house.

I thought about moving my desk upstairs, because there is just enough room to sit on my ball and work up there, but I think I would feel too cloistered, what with the ceiling sloping in on either side of me. And then I would have to skulk upstairs to watch movies, which doesn’t sound all that pleasant. Plus, it’s going to get wicked hot up there this summer, because this house only has one window that opens. And, seriously, ONE WINDOW? It’s not like this is Siberia, people. Cross-drafts are actually a good idea, and I’m not talking about the drafts that whistle through all the cracks in the winter.

So maybe I could move my desk against the west wall, and unstack my bookcases and line them up against the wall that the desk faces now. But then I would have my back to the window, which I think would give me the heebie-jeebies.

I think I might be going stir crazy. Maybe I’ll just burn all the furniture and fit the house out Japanese-style.

Insomnia appears to be a growing problem, and a global obsession. So what gives? How come no one seems to be able to get a good night’s sleep these days?

Stereotypes in film appear to have returned, assuming they ever left in the first place. And while it might seem silly to complain about stereotypes in film, such depictions reveal deeper problems with our society.

Suburban sprawl isn’t just foul, it’s also destroying the once vibrant inner cores of American cities. So why isn’t it an issue in the election?

Is technology destroying the next generation? Some people certainly seem to think it is.

We all know the economy fares differently, depending on the political alignment of the administration in power. The question is, is an issue of timing, or policy? And who presides over greater gains in economic disparity? The answer might surprise you.

China and Japan are ancient enemies, but they also need each other. Situations like that tend to end poorly.

The Kabul Beauty School

This book has been likened to Reading Lolita in Tehran, so when I spotted it on the shelf at the library, I thought it might be worth reading. It’s about an American hairdresser who traveled to Afghanistan with aid organizations, and ultimately founded a beauty school for Afghan women, along with a salon. It was certainly…interesting.

One thing that she addressed early in the book was her sense of initial inadequacy while working with aid groups. She wondered why a hairdresser had been sent to a war zone, and felt like she couldn’t do as much good as the doctors and engineers and so forth that she traveled with. What she learned, however, is that her work turned out to be highly beneficial for morale, and when she established a beauty school, she realized that she could empower Afghan women in a way that other aid workers couldn’t.

She definitely mused on the nature of aid work and privilege a lot, wondering how much good aid workers really do in some areas, as there are some fundamental cultural divides that make aid work much harder. Ultimately, she ended up marrying an Afghan man and relocating to Afghanistan permanently, which I think is pretty neat, and it bespeaks her love for the Afghan people and the culture of the region.

It’s a little glimpse of what life is like in Afghanistan, and for that alone, it was worth reading.

Addendum: As it turns out, this story is a little more complex. I didn’t read up on the book before reading it (or writing this review), and the link above was a reminder that memoirs often leave crucial information out. The women she wrote about are facing death threats, thanks to her frankness, and she didn’t relocate to Afghanistan permanently. In fact, she fled last May, and she hasn’t been back since; apparently love central with her Afghan husband went sour. So much for a feel good read, eh?

Demographics:

The Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez. Published 2007, 275 pages. Biography.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

If you’re as interested in American attitudes about death and the culture of death in America as I am, you need to read this book. The Civil War was a major turning point in American society; perhaps more major than we realize, 150ish years after the fact, and it had a huge impact on the way that we think about death and dying. This book was meticulously researched and simply fascinating; I really found myself drawn in and fascinated by the world of death in the Civil War.

Huge numbers of Americans died in the Civil War, and they died in an era when the “good death” was of paramount importance. The Civil War forced people to rethink death and dying in pretty radical ways, as soldiers died on the field rather than at home in their deathbeds, and as men were mutilated and piled into mass graves. Some families never learned the fate of their loved ones, and in a time when people believed in literal resurrection after the apocalypse, this must have been extraordinarily difficult. In an era when Americans had very precise rituals for dealing with death, everything was turned upside down, and people started to question their faith in a good death, in war, and in religion.

Faust went into the mythology of the good death, and the conditions which prevailed on Civil War battlefields. He talked about the difficulty in identifying soldiers and dealing with their bodies, and he discussed racial and class distinctions in death. Officers, for example, were more likely to be coffined and sent home than ordinary soldiers. The amount of research which must have gone into this book was quite evident, and the book was also extremely well written and engaging. I suppose if you’re less morbid than I am, you might find it hard to stomach, but I’d probably recommend it anyway.

Demographics:

This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust. Published 2008, 346 pages. History/anthropology.

Chasing Kangaroos

This book was both an autobiography and a work of science, intertwining Flannery’s life with his fascination with kangaroos, and it was pretty neat. Kangaroos themselves are rather interesting to begin with, at least in my opinion, and Flannery is quite a character.

Chasing Kangaroos was at once packed with interesting scientific information, and with an honest look at Australian culture and society. At the same time that Flannery was writing about fossilized kangaroo feet, he was also thinking about Aborigines, and the moral implications of eating meat, and the difficulties of motorcycle maintenance, and that’s one of the reasons I really liked the book, because it was at once both very informing, and very human.

I certainly learned a great deal about kangaroos, as he talked about the incredible diversity of modern species, as well as the complexity of kangaroo evolution, a subject which wasn’t really studied until the tail end of the 20th century. Beyond that, I felt like I got a taste of Australian culture, and a sense of the issues which Australia is and will be dealing with.

Flannery is obviously passionately into kangaroos, and the book read almost like a love story, as well as like a cautionary tale. He is obviously concerned about the potential for survival for these natural curiosities, as well as the health of the Australian continent, and I think he made some rather compelling arguments for acting to preserve Australia and its amazing wildlife before it’s too late.

Demographics:

Chasing Kangaroos, by Tim Flannery. Published 2004, 258 pages. Science/biography.

Christ is risen!