Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

Girlfriends at a distance

Did I spend time thinking about Nora Ephron before yesterday? A little. I admired and enjoyed her movies, her books, the wise and funny things I heard or read from her. But I never met her and, in truth, I didn’t think about her often. Until yesterday, when I was caught by surprise by my intense reaction to her death.
Here was a woman who, really, had spoken for and to the rest of us women. To my generation, for sure, but also, I think, to a much broader group. She chronicled the pleasures and displeasures of all our lives, the petty annoyances and indignities of aging and upkeep and societal demands, and the great joys of friendship, love, family, and relishing good moments and experiences. 
I had one of those experiences last night, out to dinner with Dr. D. and a tablefull of friends. The women–and the men, too–toasted Nora as if she had been a personal friend.  There was a down-to-earth quality about her that made each of us certain that, given the chance, Nora and we would have certainly been friends.
It felt like that, too, when Wendy Wasserstein died. Maybe what so many of us felt in remembering these two women, was how fearless they were in exposing what they felt and thought and believed and how their fearless honesty helped us define and understand and respect what we felt and thought and believed, too. And what we experienced. Yes, they both lived lives of huge accomplishment and resulting recognition. Yet somehow they included us on their journey. Somehow we got the sense that they were not rarified creatures living in a world we could never hope to know, but that they were us, writ larger. And way funnier. They inhabited the very same world, It will be so much less without them.
Posted on

New on the Bookshelf: “What I Saw.” by Jack McCarthy

I’m not going to start off with a disclaimer that Jack McCarthy is one of my favorite poets and one of my favorite people. I’m not going to say how eagerly I offered to write about his new book. Nope. Just going to start right in and tell you about it.
The book is called “What I Saw,” and that in itself foreshadows its pleasures and its wisdom: what Jack sees is what lies beneath the details of daily life. Give him a chipmunk darting in front of his car and he sees the urges that have us all in their thrall. Give him a box of non-winning raffle tickets and he sees a benediction for a bridal couple’s future. 
He’s not seeing miracles, mind you. In the poem, “What I Saw on My Walk,” he lets you know right away that he saw no bears or cougars, hawks or eagles. No major celebrities of the wild, in other words. But a coyote and a deer looked him in the eye, a rabbit melded into a prayer, and an old woman with an old dog led him to a vision of what the world is. He sees no more than what most of us see, really, but what he does with the noticing is his gift to us. 
I’ve often thought that Jack’s poems look like him in a way–long and lean and loose-limbed, with a tendency to amble comfortably and then zero in unerringly.  I’d like to quote a few lines from one of the poems to give you a small taste, but that ambling conversational style with its detours and roundabouts doesn’t make it easy. He doesn’t go straight for the easy linear narrative. Take some random lines out of context and they just don’t give you the whole picture of, say, glimpsing a copy of Poetry magazine in the corner of Hannibal Lecter’s cell or taking his small daughters hiking. Can’t do it. Sorry. You just have to get the book.
Posted on

The art of fielding the big book

I just finished reading “The Art of Fielding,” by Chad Harbach. It has a lot of wonderful writing and I found it engaging, despite my having only a marginal interest in baseball and a low tolerance for reading about guys being guys. (In fact, I know so little about baseball that when the fictional Aparicio Rodriguez is introduced my thought was, “Is that A-Rod?”) And yet there’s something bothering me about this book.  
This book arrived on the scene with Major Buzz.  Not to make light of the 10 long hard years Harbach worked on it, but this book was anointed. It was on all the “best of 2011” lists, was a finalist for the National Book Awards, and was among the favorites not selected for this year’s Pulitzer in fiction. A Vanity Fair article and, later, an e-book, was written about it. It carries a blurb by Jonathan Franzen, among distinguished others, and has inspired comparisons to David Foster Wallace. HBO is reportedly making a film of it.  
And yet…and yet…there are things that bother me. There are cliches (Owen, impossibly cool, stylish, handsome, brilliant, fanatically clean, AND effortlessly athletic, introduces himself with “I’ll be your gay mulatto roommate”); verbal tics (who uses “freshperson” without irony? who uses it all the time?); and ham-handed plot devices (was ever a death more conveniently timed?) In a climatic scene a character reads an excerpt from “Moby Dick,” a book intimately entwined with this one, and the excerpt is not given. What’s that about? Sure, you can Google it, but was this intended only for readers who would know it?  Surely a trusted mentor, not to mention a good editor, might have steered Harbach away from some of this.
And there’s one more thing. Just indulge me for a minute, but I’m trying to picture a big fat good read about women doing “women things” (though I’m not sure what that would be–shopping? primping? cooking dinner? studying neurobiology? applying for a Fulbright?  Ok, I’m ranting.) in a book that has only one major male character getting one-tenth the literary respect that this book has received. Or even getting published.
I’m just saying.

Posted on

Generating good

I just heard it again on a talk show. A newspaper editor, commenting on President Obama’s history-making statement yesterday, called support for marriage equality “generational.”  With my generation coming out as the losers who are against.  I beg to differ.
Yes, I’ve seen–and cringed at–all the photos of those of a certain age, pursed-lipped, their faces hate-contorted, waving Tea Party or anti-choice placards, cheering from the front pages of the papers. Maybe those were cheap shots. Maybe there were just as many earnest young haters in the crowd. Who knows?
What I know is this: my generation sat in at segregated lunch counters and marched for civil rights. My generation protested a war–the first in a series, as it has turned out–that threw away the lives of young people for dubious reasons.  My generation worked for gender equality and women’s reproductive rights.  
Hatred is always an equal opportunity handicap. I would assume, in fact, that the bullies who make life intolerable for gay teens are of a generation that prefers to see itself in a quite different light. No generation gets it all right. But I’m standing up for mine and the people in it who have tried to add their lives to the human evolution toward justice, human dignity, and respect. We’re all evolving.
Posted on

Humbled by their voices

The news is mesmerizing, all the people orderly and thoughtful, gathering to insist their voices be heard. Although I cannot read the signs being held up, I am awed by the reasoned comments I have heard, the women and men standing insistently and surprisingly patiently, waiting for Mubarak to announce that he is leaving, confident that he will do so. Listening to them speak, I cannot help but think about what passes these days for public discourse in my own country, the self-proclaimed beacon of democracy. What would a similar demonstration look like here? Would there be similar camaraderie and mutual support in evidence? Calm discourse? Trash pickup and recycling? How long might it be, if the demonstration were here, before someone opted for a “second amendment solution”? We have no idea what will unfold next in Egypt but right now all I can see is a lesson in democracy and in the ideal of human rights.

Posted on

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://blog.ellensteinbaum.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.ellensteinbaum.com/feeds/posts/default.