The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:20:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 Joyce: "When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy" http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/joyce-when-i-wrote-them-i-was-a-strange-lonely-boy http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/joyce-when-i-wrote-them-i-was-a-strange-lonely-boy#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:20:49 +0000 Regina Small http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/joyce-when-i-wrote-them-i-was-a-strange-lonely-boy "I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out). When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that some day a girl would love me. But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses. Their false manners checked me at once. Then you came to me. You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like ‘Gentle lady’ or ‘Thou leanest to the shell of night.' But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire."
—James Joyce's Chamber Music is now available online. [via]

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]]> "I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out). When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that some day a girl would love me. But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses. Their false manners checked me at once. Then you came to me. You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like ‘Gentle lady’ or ‘Thou leanest to the shell of night.' But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire."
—James Joyce's Chamber Music is now available online. [via]

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/joyce-when-i-wrote-them-i-was-a-strange-lonely-boy/feed 0 A Photo History of Occupy Wall Street http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/a-photo-history-of-occupy-wall-street http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/a-photo-history-of-occupy-wall-street#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:00:28 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/a-photo-history-of-occupy-wall-street I would very much enjoy this book of photography by always-working photographer Stephanie Keith; it's organized as a chronology of Occupy Wall Street. (To date. Obviously.) It is definitely... art-book priced. (Not cheap!) But that seems reasonable, also, for great documentation of a serious six-month project. Something for Valentine's for the armchair radical in your life?

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]]> I would very much enjoy this book of photography by always-working photographer Stephanie Keith; it's organized as a chronology of Occupy Wall Street. (To date. Obviously.) It is definitely... art-book priced. (Not cheap!) But that seems reasonable, also, for great documentation of a serious six-month project. Something for Valentine's for the armchair radical in your life?

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/a-photo-history-of-occupy-wall-street/feed 2 I Would Never Tell You That You Are Wrong, Lev Grossman http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/i-would-never-tell-you-that-you-are-wrong-lev-grossman http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/i-would-never-tell-you-that-you-are-wrong-lev-grossman#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:40:07 +0000 Regina Small http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/i-would-never-tell-you-that-you-are-wrong-lev-grossman To start: let's not get it twisted, I love fantasy author and Time book critic Lev Grossman. Love. (When "we" (I) write on the Internet, cool detachment and a superior attitude are practically policy, but let's not do that today. Okay?) Grossman is a smart man who consistently says smart things. Overwhelmed by the glut of flatly declarative "this sucks I hated it" reviews that populate Amazon and Goodreads, he argued yesterday for a clearer, better articulated standard of determining literary merit. This is definitely not a terrible idea. And Grossman is also diplomatic about how your love of terrible books is real and valid and you're entitled to it. So what is the problem? Well, this is part of it:

I only bring it up now because I actually think that before the Internet it used to be easier to operate as if all this weren’t the case. It was easier to pretend that literary judgments were stable and universal. Before the Internet opinions about books were a relatively scarce commodity in our culture, and they came from a relatively small group of sources. We didn’t have access to hot and cold running book reviews twenty-four seven, and therefore we weren’t exposed to millions and millions of passionately held, diametrically opposed opinions about books. The wild diversity of readerly responses was not all up in your grill all the time. You went to school, and somebody told you that The Great Gatsby was a masterpiece, and if you didn’t like it, well, something was wrong with you, not it.

First, I would argue that if you are a high school student who is reading The Great Gatsby (who else is reading The Great Gatsby?) there is, in an academic environment, plenty of side-eye given if you say "this is boring." There is no lack of negative reinforcement — in academia, in literary circles and on the Internet — when you hate on a classic piece of literature, especially if it's just because you lack the intellectual fortitude to spend the limited time you have on this earth reading something that bores you. How pedestrian.

But even though Grossman concedes that the pre-Amazon days were oppressive, there is still, even in his measured critique of our book-reviewing problems, the quiet implication that we don't (or shouldn't) merely say "I didn't like this book and here's why..." or "this book is an artistic triumph and here's why..." but that those reviews should function as a (sometimes preemptive) response to other contradictory reviews. It's unclear as to whether Grossman is saying "What is a good book even?" or whether he's just calling for specificity in Telling You About Your Wrongness. Would you value and a appreciate a one-star Amazon review of your favorite novel that went into depth about poor plotting, characterization and overreliance on cheap narrative gimmicks, like how all the characters we're following are connected in multiple ways totally unknown to them? (I don't need this last plot device to die in a fire, but maybe one of you could approach it as it slumbers and gently smother it? Unless that narrative trick strikes a chord with you. Then don't.) Maybe? But probably not? Art touches both hearts and minds, sometimes in ways that are ultimately unknowable. I am sometimes emotionally undone by an insightful sentence in a mediocre novel. That very personal, idiosyncratic experience might generate enough goodwill to make me want to defend that book as worthy. It happens.

It is impossible for criticism of a particular work to exist in a vacuum, to exist apart from your opinions and my opinions. A book is released and we — you, me, Lev Grossman, whoever reads it — enter into a dialogue. In my humble estimation, the most productive criticism, whether it comes from James Wood or SkarsgardLuvr53, is illuminating without being didactic. It's a talking-with, not a talking-to. Does the existence of this dialogue lead us back to a deep existential fear that MY idea of blue is different from YOUR idea of blue and oh god nothing is really real, is it? etc.? AND HOW! Grossman sort of touches on that here:

It’s liberating in some ways, but it’s also a difficult thing to admit. The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

I think Grossman's fear (not to overstate it) of "aesthetic relativism" is more accurately an articulation of an overwhelming need for confirmation that our thoughts are reflective of a world that actually exists. The intersection of literature and philosophy: so tricky! A philosophy professor I respected and admired once told me that "most literature contains bad philosophy." (I did not retort "most philosophy contains bad philosophy," mostly because it took me years to come up with that zinger. Worth it!) I still don't know that I agree with him, but I'm not entirely sure that we can solve the problem of solipsism through literary criticism. I say that totally unsassily. I don't disapprove of Grossman's suggestion that we should talk more about WHY we like or dislike a certain book, but any specific standards we (literary critics? Amazon reviewers? all people who read?) develop definitely could easily be manipulated to justify Why I Love This Book and You Should, Too. So maybe rather than fear the grey void of aesthetic relativism, we should just jump into it? Steer into the skid! Embrace the chaos of democratic expression! The worst that can happen is that you feel a little unsteady, your ideas are challenged ("Is A Shore Thing really the 'bangin'est book fir real'? Is this tenth most-helpful Amazon review right? Could I have gotten it wrong?") and either you change your mind or you don't. But you get to keep talking and so does everyone else — and if there is any way to transcend the crippling fear that you are but a tiny, isolated transient bit of consciousness, the first step might be the weird decision to accept that...you are a tiny, isolated transient bit of consciousness, who needs to hear the plaintive one-star cries of all those people who might be/definitely are/definitely aren't wrong.

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]]> To start: let's not get it twisted, I love fantasy author and Time book critic Lev Grossman. Love. (When "we" (I) write on the Internet, cool detachment and a superior attitude are practically policy, but let's not do that today. Okay?) Grossman is a smart man who consistently says smart things. Overwhelmed by the glut of flatly declarative "this sucks I hated it" reviews that populate Amazon and Goodreads, he argued yesterday for a clearer, better articulated standard of determining literary merit. This is definitely not a terrible idea. And Grossman is also diplomatic about how your love of terrible books is real and valid and you're entitled to it. So what is the problem? Well, this is part of it:

I only bring it up now because I actually think that before the Internet it used to be easier to operate as if all this weren’t the case. It was easier to pretend that literary judgments were stable and universal. Before the Internet opinions about books were a relatively scarce commodity in our culture, and they came from a relatively small group of sources. We didn’t have access to hot and cold running book reviews twenty-four seven, and therefore we weren’t exposed to millions and millions of passionately held, diametrically opposed opinions about books. The wild diversity of readerly responses was not all up in your grill all the time. You went to school, and somebody told you that The Great Gatsby was a masterpiece, and if you didn’t like it, well, something was wrong with you, not it.

First, I would argue that if you are a high school student who is reading The Great Gatsby (who else is reading The Great Gatsby?) there is, in an academic environment, plenty of side-eye given if you say "this is boring." There is no lack of negative reinforcement — in academia, in literary circles and on the Internet — when you hate on a classic piece of literature, especially if it's just because you lack the intellectual fortitude to spend the limited time you have on this earth reading something that bores you. How pedestrian.

But even though Grossman concedes that the pre-Amazon days were oppressive, there is still, even in his measured critique of our book-reviewing problems, the quiet implication that we don't (or shouldn't) merely say "I didn't like this book and here's why..." or "this book is an artistic triumph and here's why..." but that those reviews should function as a (sometimes preemptive) response to other contradictory reviews. It's unclear as to whether Grossman is saying "What is a good book even?" or whether he's just calling for specificity in Telling You About Your Wrongness. Would you value and a appreciate a one-star Amazon review of your favorite novel that went into depth about poor plotting, characterization and overreliance on cheap narrative gimmicks, like how all the characters we're following are connected in multiple ways totally unknown to them? (I don't need this last plot device to die in a fire, but maybe one of you could approach it as it slumbers and gently smother it? Unless that narrative trick strikes a chord with you. Then don't.) Maybe? But probably not? Art touches both hearts and minds, sometimes in ways that are ultimately unknowable. I am sometimes emotionally undone by an insightful sentence in a mediocre novel. That very personal, idiosyncratic experience might generate enough goodwill to make me want to defend that book as worthy. It happens.

It is impossible for criticism of a particular work to exist in a vacuum, to exist apart from your opinions and my opinions. A book is released and we — you, me, Lev Grossman, whoever reads it — enter into a dialogue. In my humble estimation, the most productive criticism, whether it comes from James Wood or SkarsgardLuvr53, is illuminating without being didactic. It's a talking-with, not a talking-to. Does the existence of this dialogue lead us back to a deep existential fear that MY idea of blue is different from YOUR idea of blue and oh god nothing is really real, is it? etc.? AND HOW! Grossman sort of touches on that here:

It’s liberating in some ways, but it’s also a difficult thing to admit. The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

I think Grossman's fear (not to overstate it) of "aesthetic relativism" is more accurately an articulation of an overwhelming need for confirmation that our thoughts are reflective of a world that actually exists. The intersection of literature and philosophy: so tricky! A philosophy professor I respected and admired once told me that "most literature contains bad philosophy." (I did not retort "most philosophy contains bad philosophy," mostly because it took me years to come up with that zinger. Worth it!) I still don't know that I agree with him, but I'm not entirely sure that we can solve the problem of solipsism through literary criticism. I say that totally unsassily. I don't disapprove of Grossman's suggestion that we should talk more about WHY we like or dislike a certain book, but any specific standards we (literary critics? Amazon reviewers? all people who read?) develop definitely could easily be manipulated to justify Why I Love This Book and You Should, Too. So maybe rather than fear the grey void of aesthetic relativism, we should just jump into it? Steer into the skid! Embrace the chaos of democratic expression! The worst that can happen is that you feel a little unsteady, your ideas are challenged ("Is A Shore Thing really the 'bangin'est book fir real'? Is this tenth most-helpful Amazon review right? Could I have gotten it wrong?") and either you change your mind or you don't. But you get to keep talking and so does everyone else — and if there is any way to transcend the crippling fear that you are but a tiny, isolated transient bit of consciousness, the first step might be the weird decision to accept that...you are a tiny, isolated transient bit of consciousness, who needs to hear the plaintive one-star cries of all those people who might be/definitely are/definitely aren't wrong.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/i-would-never-tell-you-that-you-are-wrong-lev-grossman/feed 16 "There Isn’t Anything Inherently Unfeminine About Science Fiction" http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/there-isn%e2%80%99t-anything-inherently-unfeminine-about-science-fiction http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/there-isn%e2%80%99t-anything-inherently-unfeminine-about-science-fiction#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:10:12 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/there-isn%e2%80%99t-anything-inherently-unfeminine-about-science-fiction
In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women.... “A Wrinkle in Time,” the first in a trilogy that was later extended to include two more books, also defied the norm. Though a major crossover success with boys as well (with more than 10 million copies sold to date), the book has especially won over young girls. And it usually reaches them at a particularly pivotal moment of pre-adolescence when they are actively seeking to define themselves, their ambitions and place in the world.

—Just blow past the 2/3rds of this piece that consist of weird gender social-essentialism, because the rest of it is true. (Also, you know, Hunger Games?)

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]]>
In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women.... “A Wrinkle in Time,” the first in a trilogy that was later extended to include two more books, also defied the norm. Though a major crossover success with boys as well (with more than 10 million copies sold to date), the book has especially won over young girls. And it usually reaches them at a particularly pivotal moment of pre-adolescence when they are actively seeking to define themselves, their ambitions and place in the world.

—Just blow past the 2/3rds of this piece that consist of weird gender social-essentialism, because the rest of it is true. (Also, you know, Hunger Games?)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/there-isn%e2%80%99t-anything-inherently-unfeminine-about-science-fiction/feed 19 The Battle For Planet Flanagan http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:20:29 +0000 Maria Bustillos and David Roth http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine with their teen daughters going around giving blowjobs to pretty much whomever, she seems to think? "Servicing boys" she calls this. It is baffling.

David: Yeah, I couldn't tell what crisis she was very certitudinously diagnosing and decrying, there. But the world she describes is certainly bleak and very much in-crisis. I just don't know what or where that world is located. It's like she's been watching the Pirates franchise of porn films as documentaries. "Young kids, dressing like inexpensive pirates, having all these casual, athletic and oddly well-lit threesomes, and always with swords lying around. And because of feminism it's politically incorrect to get mad about that."

Maria: There was a rash of stories about a middle-school blowjob epidemic some years back, I remember. It seemed to many moms, shall I say, overblown.

David: Yeah, "rainbow parties!" If there wasn't a "CSI: Miami" episode about it featuring buff 26-year-old teens, a shivering, clammy Tom Sizemore and some powdery moralizing from David Caruso, I owe you a Coke.

Maria: It reminded me of "wilding" in a way. Pure hysteria-baiting. Razor blades in the apples.

David: Total blowjob apple-blades. The new Satanism. So hot right now.

Maria: And then, right when you start thinking, eh, this is ridiculous, they find another actual monster with an actual dungeon on Halloween. There is a grain of plausibility to every paranoia.

David: It's amazing how different Irin Carmon's "it's not always good, it's not always bad" assessment of adolescence in that interview sounds from Flanagan's DefCon4 Oral Sex Crisis vision of how young women live now.

Maria: Yes. But the bewilderment of Carmon did her no favors in this interview, much as I share it. Flanagan's sangfroid is devastating in the face of the slightest doubt. Although her critique of Girl Land that ran in Salon was awesome.

David: Bewilderment is the rational response to confronting a Palinesque queen bee who writes so maddeningly well about Joan Didion. Have you read Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs?

Maria: A bit. Totally infuriating, I thought.

David: I like Levy a lot, and that to me seems a way more rigorous approach to whatever problem Flanagan believes she's diagnosing. She seems to be actually working towards a diagnosis of specific unfairnesses and uglinesses, instead of working backwards from a sense of same, as Flanagan does.

Maria: Yes, that is true. She is less crazy, in a way. But in another way, equally crazy? Because no one woman knows how all other women should do life.

I mean please, leave enough oxygen in the room for someone to respond: look, you don't care for thus and such a way of life, but it works fine for me.

David: So, at the risk of playing my total-toolish-sports-dude role too well, here: sisterhood is Levy's big thing, and the erosion of it by a casually misogynist culture. Flanagan's thing is telling other wealthy people why they are doing things wrong.

Maria: And yet Levy rejects so many of these alleged sisters.

Anyway, there was zero real "support" or "solidarity" between Carmon and Flanagan in this talk. Carmon was forced to defend herself rather than have a conversation, so she's not to blame. But I suspect that Carmon doesn't approve of the Flanagan approach either, not even for Flanagan.

David: But what should sisterhood look like? How do you teach that sort of basic human solidarity to a child? It seems like Flanagan's idea—sequestration today, sequestration tomorrow, sequestration forever—is based around a fundamental wish to withdraw, which is kind of the opposite of that.

There is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men.
Maria: Children already know it so much better than adults do, is the thing. Four- or five-year-olds tend to love and accept everyone instinctively. Unless someone is mean or hurts them. But puberty is bound to wreck that colorblind, gender-blind paradise no matter how "evolved" the adults are. I guess in the form of death-awareness and also the insecurities that go with sexual awareness. With the fear dawns the oppression. Then you start to unlearn.

David: That, and I think the beginning of the idea that we are supposed to compete with one another. And the first (and way exaggerated) sense of what failure would mean in that regard. Eventually you learn to live with that balance of failing and succeeding, or at least that's the idea.

At that age there's this very real sense of NEVER RECOVERING from the time you barfed in art class.

David: What puzzles me about Flanagan is the same thing that baffles me about your Katie Roiphe types—I can't figure out who she's talking to, or whose fantasies these are, besides hers. There's not a sense of actual engagement or concern.

Maria: She's addressing that caller in the radio interview who goes, "I don't allow the children to have Facebook." Control freaks piquing themselves on their virtue. "Traditionalists."

David: Ha. Nice demographic. Cool peers.

David: I sense her real audience is male magazine editors at The Atlantic. I sense that is her constituency. What Flanagan does is what The Atlantic does—gently provokes wealthy people. Because they are not putting a cartoon of Bernie Sanders kissing a hippie on the cover, or whatever Weekly Standard does, we assume The Atlantic is more forward thinking than it maybe is. I say all this as a subscriber, for whatever that's worth.

Maria: I would expand that to include male anything. This "let me fix you a martini" cooing thing is undeniably seductive. And why not, indeed.

David: They're delicious!

Maria: Also, there is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men. Maybe you think men and women should be friends, equals. These aren't even mutually exclusive strategies.

David: By all means fix your husband a martini, if you want.

Maria: PLEASE. He's crazy! Mr. Flanagan, I mean, elsewhere known as Rob Hudnut, regarding whom more anon. He needs a martini at the very least.

David: He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."

Maria: Left to himself he would just dissolve into hysterical tears and starve, probably.

David: I have been meaning to talk to you about your husband and how bad he is at fixing drinks. Some Crystal Light, Egg Beaters and some Southern Comfort does not add up to an old fashioned.

David: (I am sure your actual husband is excellent at fixing drinks.)

Maria: He's sobbing silently right now. Empty cocktail shaker in hand. I can see him from here.

David: Oh man, is he going to be okay?

Maria: Oh sure, there's gin and bread downstairs in the kitchen.

David: Tell me what you think about Flanagan's husband. Does he mean anything, besides he and his job as a Mattel executive being hilarious in the context of her Goddess of Scorn routine?

Maria: Rob Hudnut explains so much about Caitlin Flanagan. She is always going on about her husband, whom she lives but to serve. It emerges however that this man has to be completely off his rocker. Rob Hudnut is the executive producer of the animated Barbie DVD series, which has sold over 100 million copies, and he's been in charge of it pretty much the whole time, apparently. He has a shared writing credit for the first computer-animated one, Barbie in The Nutcracker (2001).

For some unfathomable reason, nobody seems to have delved too far into the Hudnut oeuvre.

David: Well, it's terrible. That's a fathomable reason.

Maria: But we braved it anyway. Namely: Barbie: A Perfect Christmas, the twenty-second and most recent installment.

David: The Sims-in-leggings production values are good, I can report. But I watched a 15-minute YouTube chunk. You watched the whole thing.

Maria: Yes. And I came away with a much-altered sense of what life must be like chez Hudnut. Because as Flanagan tells it, she is tendin' the hearth, and looking after the boys, and in comes Hudnut after a rough day, and she's all attractive and available and yay, lord and master-ing, right? Dinner on the table, high heels on. Come hither!

David: Dude had a long day out there selling some fucking Dream Houses and Skipper dolls.

Maria: It's far more than that. He also writes lyrics for these hallucinatory Barbie songs for girls on the DVDs, which is what I suspect slowly drove them both into a pink and frilly madness. "Get your sparkle on!" "Magic happens when you believe in yourself!"

Maria: In the Perfect Christmas one, the mystery snow lodge where Barbie et al. wind up is some kind of North Pole Wal-Mart distribution center. And all this, complete with hair-raising songs for "little girls" that make Justin Bieber look like Slipknot, is overseen, for the twenty-second time, by Caitlin Flanagan's husband. Is it any wonder her concept of pretty much everything has gone clean off the rails?

These are the girls Flanagan wants to see more of, according to Girl Land, her new book. Diary-scribbling "dreamers" with soft toys on the bed. Stepford Girls.

David: In every sentence, a voice can be heard commanding, "To a frilly-ass canopy bed, go."

David: Goof on Hudnut all you like, he's making enough to keep her in twin sets, nannies, personal organizers and cask-aged sanctimony.

Maria: I know, I know! So here is a quote from Flanagan in in The Atlantic, because she doesn't want men to be "more feminine". "I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture."

David: What a turn-off. Bitch move, Hudnut!

Maria: IRL he is not alphabetizing spices, though: he is producing Barbie Mariposa and her Butterfly Fairy Friends.

David: "In a minute, I just need to finish writing the lyrics to this song 'To Be A Princess.' Then I am going to TEAR THAT AZZ UP."

(Sorry to type that)

Maria: Ack.

Maria: Here is a quote from Variety:


"We are great believers in the power of little girls," says Rob Hudnut, Mattel executive producer. "We believe they deserve the best entertainment that we can give them. [...]

Illustrating the painstaking nature of the production, Hudnut recalls, "It was the job for six months of one 'Nutcracker' animator to keep Barbie's dress from going over her head. The company has made a serious financial investment in ensuring these movies are the quality that girls deserve."

David: That actually arrives unpacked, doesn't it.

Maria: Barbie's skirt, stubbornly floating over her head! Both Hudnuts trying frantically to keep the damn thing down.

David: When so much is trying to lift it up, up, up.

Maria: Barbie's pink marabou slippers are to blame for much of this, maybe. Plus, the lady is very good-looking.

Flanagan I mean, not Barbie. And in no way disinclined to play the MILF card, as her 2006 appearance on "The Colbert Report" demonstrates so harrowingly.

David: Not at all! She's "using her influence" to get what she wants from boys, or whatever. Which is their undivided attention/hornball obeisance, and which is how she suggests young women empower themselves in general. But what else, do you think, does she really want?

Maria: It's difficult to avoid the impression that the marabou slippers and levitating skirt are playing an, erm, seminal role.

David: Naw, dude, don't type that.

Maria: Maybe she can only relate to men as The Opposite Sex; that happens to a lot of beautiful women, I think.

David: Certainly the amount of dude-flattery—the "let me get that for you, baby, you had a hard day doing whatever it is you do in that big office" that's implied in her whole shtick—seems for that audience, as opposed to her notional sisters.

Maria: I was impressed at how she got even Colbert thinking about her Chamber of Secrets during this interview, from 2006. She is totally smirking. I don't think I have ever seen anyone play Colbert like that.

David: It's funny, watching older—by which I mean younger—Colbert. He's more commanding, now. But she's also awfully persuasive. Pearls, winks and straight white teeth. She's funny, too. And good at flirting!

Maria: She is AWESOME at flirting.

Maria: Okay, the other funny thing is, her dad was an academic, at Berkeley. And Flanagan has written about being a Democrat. So.

David: Oh, she's no Democrat. Has she really said that?

Maria: Yes, she wrote about it for Time in a piece called "We're Here, We're Square, Get Used To It."

David: I'm not buying that. She's a Rockefeller Republican down to her underdrawers. Oh lord, her endless issues with The Feminists. She is always enraging them, simply by being right.

Maria: The really toxic thing about Flanagan is that 2% of her criticism of feminists is valuable and useful. And she poisons that 2% to the point where it becomes difficult to discuss.

He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."
David: What's correct is inaudible over the sound of her just beating the shit out of her strawmen, though, at least to me. It also scans so much weirder when you hear it aloud, as in the radio bit. Her "some people think" caricature/formulations are maddening in print, but when you hear someone saying those words out loud, it's so jarring.

David: "Oh, I don't know that fathers are terribly important in raising a child. And look, if my daughter wants to give some blowjobs on the bus or whatever, then that's her journey, I guess. I am mostly into keeping a healthy diet, personally." That is the person she's debating. That's not a person, Caitlin!

Maria: Yup.

David: I guess she'd change blowjobs-on-the-bus to "servicing boys." Which is 100,000% grosser. Such a simultaneously technocratic and telling word choice.

Maria: She has boys; it's like why doesn't she talk about teaching them to make friends with girls and respect them and talk to them like they are peers?

David: For someone who is impressively exacting with her language and general public performance, it's amazing how lazy she gets when that part of the boy/girl binary comes up. Her men are just these helpless appetite-driven erection-beasts, waiting to be directed, influenced. Which, you know, guilty as charged, but also you are raising sons and that's what you think they're destined to be?

Maria: Her own role in raising boys doesn't just get short shrift, it is weirdly, entirely absent.

David: There's a bit that Heather Havrilesky quotes in her BookForum review of Flanagan's book, where CF mentions it like some sort of slam dunk.

David: "Well, I have boys." QED like a motherfucker.

Maria: That review was great, I thought. But I don't exactly disagree with the helpless boner thing, actually.

David: It'd make me more angry if it wasn't half true. And I suppose her bit about the male of the species responding to direction—that is, her argument that we're more inclined to be good when it's clear that we must be—is good, too, insofar as it's mostly accurate. But men do not exist outside the culture, either.

Maria: In my posse of moms, they are so keen to try to influence their sons to be kind, to think about the consequences of their actions. For a good reason, which is that you will be a happier person and your life will be better if you control your appetites. A unisex message. And you can have real love and friendship if you honor the differences honestly, patiently. And you don't just grab.

David: Boys learn that by participating in the culture the same as girls do. There are people who take, in kindergarten and in finance and wherever else. You learn in life to identify those people and avoid them, is the hope. I always blame the cheapening tendencies of the everything-is-the-market worldview for all this. Mostly because I am a parody of myself.

Maria: Haha, though "the market" is just another way of saying, "never learned not to grab, despite multiple attempts to hammer this lesson into your thick skull from kindergarten through age fifty-seven."

David: Yes, it is. But the kind of sour paranoia and other-denying acquisitiveness—the sense that getting equals taking—in our popular culture all seems to me to spring from the same thing. That being the ubiquito-market's constant, demeaning competition, which is the opposite of a basic, respect-based solidarity grounded in the recognition of our shared and intrinsic human worth. There's a place to compete, it can be fun and useful, but there's something terribly bleak about hearing "I'm not here to make friends," over and over, when that is mostly what we are HERE, as in on earth, to do.

David: And believing that is the sort of thing that both comes from and reinforces a fear of the rest of the world, which you can't control. No wonder Flanagan wants to Rapunzel girls into their bedrooms. Look at what she thinks the world is like.

Maria: If you haven't figured out this self-evident truth, though, you are thrown back on the sugar-coating of the Us and Them materialist purgatory that is Barbie: A Perfect Christmas.

David: And you're terrified of everyone.

Maria: Especially middle-school boys!

Maria: Wagging their insistent erections everywhere.

David: Porn! It's everywhere, they're sending it to your homes, baked into loaves of bread. Feminists! Telling you it's wrong to get mixed up in your daughters' lives. Dog the Bounty Hunter! In general. That last one is mostly me, but I'd want to lock all that out, too.

Maria: And you might not be able to! If you turn on Facebook, fetishists leap right out onto your canopy bed! With erections!

David: Always with the erections.

Maria: That need servicing, and pronto!

David: "Servicing." Like you're getting your tires rotated.

Maria: In her New Yorker piece about visiting Hawaii Flanagan goes on this thing about "an empty tube of 'personal feminine lubricant'" floating over to them in the pool.

David: What a beautiful image for her world.

Maria: The planet Flanagan is a sordid, scary and, thankfully, distant planet.

David: She is only trying to enjoy this luxury vacation in some posh locale—where the food, frankly, is not as good as she'd expected or whatever—but somehow, always, there is some Astroglide bobbing in her direction. Is no place safe?

Maria: NO! But really yes!

Maria: Also: I have girls!

David: QED, motherfucker.



Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

David Roth writes "The Mercy Rule" column at Vice, co-writes the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix, and is one of the founders of The Classical. He also has his own little website. And he tweets inanities!

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]]> David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine with their teen daughters going around giving blowjobs to pretty much whomever, she seems to think? "Servicing boys" she calls this. It is baffling.

David: Yeah, I couldn't tell what crisis she was very certitudinously diagnosing and decrying, there. But the world she describes is certainly bleak and very much in-crisis. I just don't know what or where that world is located. It's like she's been watching the Pirates franchise of porn films as documentaries. "Young kids, dressing like inexpensive pirates, having all these casual, athletic and oddly well-lit threesomes, and always with swords lying around. And because of feminism it's politically incorrect to get mad about that."

Maria: There was a rash of stories about a middle-school blowjob epidemic some years back, I remember. It seemed to many moms, shall I say, overblown.

David: Yeah, "rainbow parties!" If there wasn't a "CSI: Miami" episode about it featuring buff 26-year-old teens, a shivering, clammy Tom Sizemore and some powdery moralizing from David Caruso, I owe you a Coke.

Maria: It reminded me of "wilding" in a way. Pure hysteria-baiting. Razor blades in the apples.

David: Total blowjob apple-blades. The new Satanism. So hot right now.

Maria: And then, right when you start thinking, eh, this is ridiculous, they find another actual monster with an actual dungeon on Halloween. There is a grain of plausibility to every paranoia.

David: It's amazing how different Irin Carmon's "it's not always good, it's not always bad" assessment of adolescence in that interview sounds from Flanagan's DefCon4 Oral Sex Crisis vision of how young women live now.

Maria: Yes. But the bewilderment of Carmon did her no favors in this interview, much as I share it. Flanagan's sangfroid is devastating in the face of the slightest doubt. Although her critique of Girl Land that ran in Salon was awesome.

David: Bewilderment is the rational response to confronting a Palinesque queen bee who writes so maddeningly well about Joan Didion. Have you read Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs?

Maria: A bit. Totally infuriating, I thought.

David: I like Levy a lot, and that to me seems a way more rigorous approach to whatever problem Flanagan believes she's diagnosing. She seems to be actually working towards a diagnosis of specific unfairnesses and uglinesses, instead of working backwards from a sense of same, as Flanagan does.

Maria: Yes, that is true. She is less crazy, in a way. But in another way, equally crazy? Because no one woman knows how all other women should do life.

I mean please, leave enough oxygen in the room for someone to respond: look, you don't care for thus and such a way of life, but it works fine for me.

David: So, at the risk of playing my total-toolish-sports-dude role too well, here: sisterhood is Levy's big thing, and the erosion of it by a casually misogynist culture. Flanagan's thing is telling other wealthy people why they are doing things wrong.

Maria: And yet Levy rejects so many of these alleged sisters.

Anyway, there was zero real "support" or "solidarity" between Carmon and Flanagan in this talk. Carmon was forced to defend herself rather than have a conversation, so she's not to blame. But I suspect that Carmon doesn't approve of the Flanagan approach either, not even for Flanagan.

David: But what should sisterhood look like? How do you teach that sort of basic human solidarity to a child? It seems like Flanagan's idea—sequestration today, sequestration tomorrow, sequestration forever—is based around a fundamental wish to withdraw, which is kind of the opposite of that.

There is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men.
Maria: Children already know it so much better than adults do, is the thing. Four- or five-year-olds tend to love and accept everyone instinctively. Unless someone is mean or hurts them. But puberty is bound to wreck that colorblind, gender-blind paradise no matter how "evolved" the adults are. I guess in the form of death-awareness and also the insecurities that go with sexual awareness. With the fear dawns the oppression. Then you start to unlearn.

David: That, and I think the beginning of the idea that we are supposed to compete with one another. And the first (and way exaggerated) sense of what failure would mean in that regard. Eventually you learn to live with that balance of failing and succeeding, or at least that's the idea.

At that age there's this very real sense of NEVER RECOVERING from the time you barfed in art class.

David: What puzzles me about Flanagan is the same thing that baffles me about your Katie Roiphe types—I can't figure out who she's talking to, or whose fantasies these are, besides hers. There's not a sense of actual engagement or concern.

Maria: She's addressing that caller in the radio interview who goes, "I don't allow the children to have Facebook." Control freaks piquing themselves on their virtue. "Traditionalists."

David: Ha. Nice demographic. Cool peers.

David: I sense her real audience is male magazine editors at The Atlantic. I sense that is her constituency. What Flanagan does is what The Atlantic does—gently provokes wealthy people. Because they are not putting a cartoon of Bernie Sanders kissing a hippie on the cover, or whatever Weekly Standard does, we assume The Atlantic is more forward thinking than it maybe is. I say all this as a subscriber, for whatever that's worth.

Maria: I would expand that to include male anything. This "let me fix you a martini" cooing thing is undeniably seductive. And why not, indeed.

David: They're delicious!

Maria: Also, there is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men. Maybe you think men and women should be friends, equals. These aren't even mutually exclusive strategies.

David: By all means fix your husband a martini, if you want.

Maria: PLEASE. He's crazy! Mr. Flanagan, I mean, elsewhere known as Rob Hudnut, regarding whom more anon. He needs a martini at the very least.

David: He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."

Maria: Left to himself he would just dissolve into hysterical tears and starve, probably.

David: I have been meaning to talk to you about your husband and how bad he is at fixing drinks. Some Crystal Light, Egg Beaters and some Southern Comfort does not add up to an old fashioned.

David: (I am sure your actual husband is excellent at fixing drinks.)

Maria: He's sobbing silently right now. Empty cocktail shaker in hand. I can see him from here.

David: Oh man, is he going to be okay?

Maria: Oh sure, there's gin and bread downstairs in the kitchen.

David: Tell me what you think about Flanagan's husband. Does he mean anything, besides he and his job as a Mattel executive being hilarious in the context of her Goddess of Scorn routine?

Maria: Rob Hudnut explains so much about Caitlin Flanagan. She is always going on about her husband, whom she lives but to serve. It emerges however that this man has to be completely off his rocker. Rob Hudnut is the executive producer of the animated Barbie DVD series, which has sold over 100 million copies, and he's been in charge of it pretty much the whole time, apparently. He has a shared writing credit for the first computer-animated one, Barbie in The Nutcracker (2001).

For some unfathomable reason, nobody seems to have delved too far into the Hudnut oeuvre.

David: Well, it's terrible. That's a fathomable reason.

Maria: But we braved it anyway. Namely: Barbie: A Perfect Christmas, the twenty-second and most recent installment.

David: The Sims-in-leggings production values are good, I can report. But I watched a 15-minute YouTube chunk. You watched the whole thing.

Maria: Yes. And I came away with a much-altered sense of what life must be like chez Hudnut. Because as Flanagan tells it, she is tendin' the hearth, and looking after the boys, and in comes Hudnut after a rough day, and she's all attractive and available and yay, lord and master-ing, right? Dinner on the table, high heels on. Come hither!

David: Dude had a long day out there selling some fucking Dream Houses and Skipper dolls.

Maria: It's far more than that. He also writes lyrics for these hallucinatory Barbie songs for girls on the DVDs, which is what I suspect slowly drove them both into a pink and frilly madness. "Get your sparkle on!" "Magic happens when you believe in yourself!"

Maria: In the Perfect Christmas one, the mystery snow lodge where Barbie et al. wind up is some kind of North Pole Wal-Mart distribution center. And all this, complete with hair-raising songs for "little girls" that make Justin Bieber look like Slipknot, is overseen, for the twenty-second time, by Caitlin Flanagan's husband. Is it any wonder her concept of pretty much everything has gone clean off the rails?

These are the girls Flanagan wants to see more of, according to Girl Land, her new book. Diary-scribbling "dreamers" with soft toys on the bed. Stepford Girls.

David: In every sentence, a voice can be heard commanding, "To a frilly-ass canopy bed, go."

David: Goof on Hudnut all you like, he's making enough to keep her in twin sets, nannies, personal organizers and cask-aged sanctimony.

Maria: I know, I know! So here is a quote from Flanagan in in The Atlantic, because she doesn't want men to be "more feminine". "I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture."

David: What a turn-off. Bitch move, Hudnut!

Maria: IRL he is not alphabetizing spices, though: he is producing Barbie Mariposa and her Butterfly Fairy Friends.

David: "In a minute, I just need to finish writing the lyrics to this song 'To Be A Princess.' Then I am going to TEAR THAT AZZ UP."

(Sorry to type that)

Maria: Ack.

Maria: Here is a quote from Variety:


"We are great believers in the power of little girls," says Rob Hudnut, Mattel executive producer. "We believe they deserve the best entertainment that we can give them. [...]

Illustrating the painstaking nature of the production, Hudnut recalls, "It was the job for six months of one 'Nutcracker' animator to keep Barbie's dress from going over her head. The company has made a serious financial investment in ensuring these movies are the quality that girls deserve."

David: That actually arrives unpacked, doesn't it.

Maria: Barbie's skirt, stubbornly floating over her head! Both Hudnuts trying frantically to keep the damn thing down.

David: When so much is trying to lift it up, up, up.

Maria: Barbie's pink marabou slippers are to blame for much of this, maybe. Plus, the lady is very good-looking.

Flanagan I mean, not Barbie. And in no way disinclined to play the MILF card, as her 2006 appearance on "The Colbert Report" demonstrates so harrowingly.

David: Not at all! She's "using her influence" to get what she wants from boys, or whatever. Which is their undivided attention/hornball obeisance, and which is how she suggests young women empower themselves in general. But what else, do you think, does she really want?

Maria: It's difficult to avoid the impression that the marabou slippers and levitating skirt are playing an, erm, seminal role.

David: Naw, dude, don't type that.

Maria: Maybe she can only relate to men as The Opposite Sex; that happens to a lot of beautiful women, I think.

David: Certainly the amount of dude-flattery—the "let me get that for you, baby, you had a hard day doing whatever it is you do in that big office" that's implied in her whole shtick—seems for that audience, as opposed to her notional sisters.

Maria: I was impressed at how she got even Colbert thinking about her Chamber of Secrets during this interview, from 2006. She is totally smirking. I don't think I have ever seen anyone play Colbert like that.

David: It's funny, watching older—by which I mean younger—Colbert. He's more commanding, now. But she's also awfully persuasive. Pearls, winks and straight white teeth. She's funny, too. And good at flirting!

Maria: She is AWESOME at flirting.

Maria: Okay, the other funny thing is, her dad was an academic, at Berkeley. And Flanagan has written about being a Democrat. So.

David: Oh, she's no Democrat. Has she really said that?

Maria: Yes, she wrote about it for Time in a piece called "We're Here, We're Square, Get Used To It."

David: I'm not buying that. She's a Rockefeller Republican down to her underdrawers. Oh lord, her endless issues with The Feminists. She is always enraging them, simply by being right.

Maria: The really toxic thing about Flanagan is that 2% of her criticism of feminists is valuable and useful. And she poisons that 2% to the point where it becomes difficult to discuss.

He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."
David: What's correct is inaudible over the sound of her just beating the shit out of her strawmen, though, at least to me. It also scans so much weirder when you hear it aloud, as in the radio bit. Her "some people think" caricature/formulations are maddening in print, but when you hear someone saying those words out loud, it's so jarring.

David: "Oh, I don't know that fathers are terribly important in raising a child. And look, if my daughter wants to give some blowjobs on the bus or whatever, then that's her journey, I guess. I am mostly into keeping a healthy diet, personally." That is the person she's debating. That's not a person, Caitlin!

Maria: Yup.

David: I guess she'd change blowjobs-on-the-bus to "servicing boys." Which is 100,000% grosser. Such a simultaneously technocratic and telling word choice.

Maria: She has boys; it's like why doesn't she talk about teaching them to make friends with girls and respect them and talk to them like they are peers?

David: For someone who is impressively exacting with her language and general public performance, it's amazing how lazy she gets when that part of the boy/girl binary comes up. Her men are just these helpless appetite-driven erection-beasts, waiting to be directed, influenced. Which, you know, guilty as charged, but also you are raising sons and that's what you think they're destined to be?

Maria: Her own role in raising boys doesn't just get short shrift, it is weirdly, entirely absent.

David: There's a bit that Heather Havrilesky quotes in her BookForum review of Flanagan's book, where CF mentions it like some sort of slam dunk.

David: "Well, I have boys." QED like a motherfucker.

Maria: That review was great, I thought. But I don't exactly disagree with the helpless boner thing, actually.

David: It'd make me more angry if it wasn't half true. And I suppose her bit about the male of the species responding to direction—that is, her argument that we're more inclined to be good when it's clear that we must be—is good, too, insofar as it's mostly accurate. But men do not exist outside the culture, either.

Maria: In my posse of moms, they are so keen to try to influence their sons to be kind, to think about the consequences of their actions. For a good reason, which is that you will be a happier person and your life will be better if you control your appetites. A unisex message. And you can have real love and friendship if you honor the differences honestly, patiently. And you don't just grab.

David: Boys learn that by participating in the culture the same as girls do. There are people who take, in kindergarten and in finance and wherever else. You learn in life to identify those people and avoid them, is the hope. I always blame the cheapening tendencies of the everything-is-the-market worldview for all this. Mostly because I am a parody of myself.

Maria: Haha, though "the market" is just another way of saying, "never learned not to grab, despite multiple attempts to hammer this lesson into your thick skull from kindergarten through age fifty-seven."

David: Yes, it is. But the kind of sour paranoia and other-denying acquisitiveness—the sense that getting equals taking—in our popular culture all seems to me to spring from the same thing. That being the ubiquito-market's constant, demeaning competition, which is the opposite of a basic, respect-based solidarity grounded in the recognition of our shared and intrinsic human worth. There's a place to compete, it can be fun and useful, but there's something terribly bleak about hearing "I'm not here to make friends," over and over, when that is mostly what we are HERE, as in on earth, to do.

David: And believing that is the sort of thing that both comes from and reinforces a fear of the rest of the world, which you can't control. No wonder Flanagan wants to Rapunzel girls into their bedrooms. Look at what she thinks the world is like.

Maria: If you haven't figured out this self-evident truth, though, you are thrown back on the sugar-coating of the Us and Them materialist purgatory that is Barbie: A Perfect Christmas.

David: And you're terrified of everyone.

Maria: Especially middle-school boys!

Maria: Wagging their insistent erections everywhere.

David: Porn! It's everywhere, they're sending it to your homes, baked into loaves of bread. Feminists! Telling you it's wrong to get mixed up in your daughters' lives. Dog the Bounty Hunter! In general. That last one is mostly me, but I'd want to lock all that out, too.

Maria: And you might not be able to! If you turn on Facebook, fetishists leap right out onto your canopy bed! With erections!

David: Always with the erections.

Maria: That need servicing, and pronto!

David: "Servicing." Like you're getting your tires rotated.

Maria: In her New Yorker piece about visiting Hawaii Flanagan goes on this thing about "an empty tube of 'personal feminine lubricant'" floating over to them in the pool.

David: What a beautiful image for her world.

Maria: The planet Flanagan is a sordid, scary and, thankfully, distant planet.

David: She is only trying to enjoy this luxury vacation in some posh locale—where the food, frankly, is not as good as she'd expected or whatever—but somehow, always, there is some Astroglide bobbing in her direction. Is no place safe?

Maria: NO! But really yes!

Maria: Also: I have girls!

David: QED, motherfucker.



Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

David Roth writes "The Mercy Rule" column at Vice, co-writes the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix, and is one of the founders of The Classical. He also has his own little website. And he tweets inanities!

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan/feed 46 Dave Grohl Is Awesome http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/dave-grohl-is-awesome http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/dave-grohl-is-awesome#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:30:37 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/dave-grohl-is-awesome I don't know that I'd go as far as to actually read it, but I am immensely pleased that there is a book whose title includes the phrase The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. The universe is now complete.

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]]> I don't know that I'd go as far as to actually read it, but I am immensely pleased that there is a book whose title includes the phrase The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. The universe is now complete.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/dave-grohl-is-awesome/feed 3 Quit Your Job! A Q&A With Actress-Turned-Pot Farmer Heather Donahue http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/quit-your-job-a-qa-with-actress-turned-pot-farmer-heather-donahue http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/quit-your-job-a-qa-with-actress-turned-pot-farmer-heather-donahue#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:30:44 +0000 Michelle Dean http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/quit-your-job-a-qa-with-actress-turned-pot-farmer-heather-donahue Heather Donahue, best known as the actress from The Blair Witch Project, has written a book. Now this happens all the time, the once-famous-people-writing-books thing. And often the result is some cookie-cutter “memoir” of which the kindest remark you might make is that it has paid some deserving freelancer’s rent for six months. But Heather Donahue’s story caught my eye, regardless, because her book, Growgirl, was said to be about her quitting acting to grow pot. Medical marijuana, of course, all sanctioned by California law, but pot nonetheless, and, being self-interestedly attracted to stories of people who do about-faces in their careers in their early 30s, I was intrigued.

I’m not sure what I expected, but Growgirl is pretty wonderful. Donahue is not only a funny, sharp, endearing narrator, she’s downright wise about the experience that is, literally, torching a previous life. (Donahue burned a lot of her leftover Hollywood things in the desert before heading north to start her new business.) As a bonus, I learned a hell of a lot I didn’t know about pot. Here we talk about the “lady zeitgeist,” making peace with “tit whiskers” and the waves of fear that come with Quitting Your Job.

Michelle Dean: At the outset of your book, you write that, "I'm sure somewhere on the cover of this book will be the words The Blair Witch Project, and believe me, I will have tried to prevent that." Plainly, you lost that battle; the movie is on there. How do you feel about that?

Heather Donahue: My publisher's first idea for the book cover was basically a reenactment of the Blair Witch confessional scene with a pot leaf on my face. Which felt, um, wrong. So we worked from there. I offered the idea of me, naked with a pot plant, thinking that there was no way they were going to go for it.

As far as books that have their author on the cover go, I like it. I like that it's nudity, because it's a very naked kind of book, but it's a sort of desexualized nudity. It's a little bit Eve, a little bit Green Tara and a little bit Dove ad. The photographer, Michele Clement, got what I was trying to do and I love the photograph we ended up with.

I just never thought of Growgirl as the kind of book that has its author on the cover. The only book of that ilk that I own is Dolly Parton's autobiography, because she is awesome. It was more than a little heartbreaking to see the cover mock-up and think, I probably wouldn't pick this up in a bookstore. At some point, I just let it go and started hoping hard that word of mouth will make up for it.

Oh my god, that first cover idea is kind of horrifyingly smart in a crass marketing way.

The first cover idea is good if we're talking about a brand, rather than a person. A brand doesn't evolve in the same way that a person does.

Part of me thinks that I should have written Growgirl pseudonymously and then there would have been no possibility of packaging it as a non-celeb celeb memoir. But then it wouldn't have really been my story.

The Blair Witch Project continues to repeat on me like cucumbers or chili. I understand why it ended up in the subtitle. I understand why it's the initial focus of the press coverage. It's such a weird thing, in terms of its effects on my life: not bad, not good; just big.

Your Dove ad analogy strikes me as apt. Not just because the visual cues are the same, but also because it represents the kind of tightwire you have to walk. You want people to read the book (or feel better about themselves) so you have to sell it. But there are all these pre-set ideas about what kind of things sell that are hard to overcome (i.e., books with their authors on the cover), and some of them end up misrepresenting your work. Because I wouldn't call your book a Dove ad, either. It's too raw for it.

I agree that the book is much, much rawer than a Dove ad, but in some ways it's also more innocent—less concerned with branding, but more concerned with empowerment. One of the big narrative drivers for me is the tension between binary pairs: legal/illegal, public/private, revulsion/attraction, etc.

I understand that a lot of people wouldn't have that money. I understand that it's a privilege to change a life. But I also understand that what really changed my life was my decision to write every day, which cost nothing.
Some people have commented that some of the more revolting physical stuff [in one sequence, gastrointestinal issues result from the excessive consumption of energy drinks; in another, she worries about hair growing on her breasts, dubbed “tit whiskers”] is gratuitous, but I would suggest my preoccupying ideas in Growgirl are around identity—and that to get to identity we have to go through the body. As I was all up in my cozy little forest chrysalis, I started to realize how I'd started to become charmed and almost impressed at my body's adaptations, the attractive ones of losing weight and toning up from all the farm work, and also the revolting ones of callouses and blisters and burning and peeling. Having a good relationship with my body, tit whisker and all, had maybe the most significant effect on my overall happiness. That was why I chose to be naked on the cover, that's why I chose to be completely naked at the shoot, even though you wouldn't be able to tell. I was also 165 pounds and a size twelve at the time of that shoot. I think I look pretty fucking lush.

I love that “tit whisker,” which is one of the metaphors that opens the book. I mean, talk about a bodily experience women are afraid to talk and be whimsical about: hair growing on areolae is definitely still in that category. Women are only allowed to talk about their bodies, it seems, to the extent it can be commodified and resold, like the Dove ad.

Ah yes, anal bleaching is okay, but tit whiskers are verboten. So it goes. At the risk of sounding all women's studies-y, I think the commodification of ladybodies has been more disempowering than any other financial, or social restrictions, because how can we be strong and steady enough to exercise our power when we're frittering it away by wrestling against our own skins? And really, fuck that. As I teeter on the brink of middle age, I feel better than ever. I am acutely aware of my declining fuckablilty, and my initial struggle with that has largely passed and given way to a softness and humility that has made me fearless.

It fits into a certain tradition of these books, and so I have to bring this up: are you an Eat, Pray, Love fan? I think your quest differs considerably from Elizabeth Gilbert's, don't get me wrong, but there's an analogy here that's inescapable: media-driven job, longing for something with more spiritual/meaningful calories in it…

I think it's funny that you're the first person to bring up Eat, Pray, Love, because I think that book gets a bad rap (phenomenal success will do that to a media nugget, I should know!) and I think Growgirl does have a few things in common with it. Fundamentally, they're both seeker books. I didn't have money going in, so doing my travels in other countries was out of the question. I had to get domestic, and I think it served me at least as well. I think the other thing the two books shared is a flawed and chatty narrator who is sincerely trying to answer the question, "How to live?" and willing to fail and fail again.

I can only really talk out of my ass about Eat, Pray, Love. I've only leafed through it, and when I did so I could tell my seething jealousy of the money would interfere with my being able to internalize whatever the book might have to offer. I mean, you write in the book about coming from a working-class background, so the class thing isn't invisible to you, but I wondered if you had any thoughts about that aspect of it.

There's nothing like growing up in a working class family where your dad up and loses his union job after 30-plus years and everything that he raised his kids to believe about dreams and hard work and freedom has turned to disillusionment, unemployment and debt. Witnessing that first hand in my family, and seeing its effects only made me want to work harder, but not to line the pockets of some abstract mystery douches, that was what I wanted to avoid at all costs.

When I made a little money from acting jobs, I never left the apartment I moved into when I first arrived in LA and was working as a temp. I stayed there for ten years, until I moved to Nuggettown, because it was rent controlled. That's a reason I still had something left to get my growroom going. I understand that a lot of people wouldn't have that money. I understand that it's a privilege to change a life. But I also understand that what really changed my life was my decision to write every day, which cost nothing. My decision to meditate, even if only for 15 minutes. Those two things have a bigger daily effect on my day than anything I've ever bought or rented. They were the seeds of the bigger, more systemic changes. And really, anyone can do either of those things. A little silence goes a long way. And laughing.

Do you like "Enlightened," too? That’s the other thing your book reminded me a lot of.

I love "Enlightened." When I first saw it, I got goosebumps because I thought, holy shit, this reminds me of my story too. It's time. The lady zeitgeist is afoot and not a moment too soon. Did I mention that all the marijuana plants are female too?

I agree with you that a lady zeitgeist is afoot, but there are times when it comes all the way back around the bend and bites us in the ass. I mean, it's not an unqualified boon, in other words. Exhibit A: you talk in the book, a lot, about the skepticism you held of the woman you call Cedara's Mama Earth stuff. I found your distrust of it so refreshing and true-feeling; like you say, no New Age bullshit, you're determined to earn your meaning.

But it did put you in opposition to the "pot wives," the young women who are, as you put it, “like Beverly Hills trophy wi[ves] with more body hair.” On some level you were frustrated with them for sort of sublimating themselves into supporting their "pot husbands." Is that fair? I know you told the New Yorker and Reuters that one of them heckled you at a reading.

On the one hand, I was frustrated with the "pot wives" and on the other, I was jealous. Here I was, with all my independence, trying to find my place in the world, and then another, and then another—and there they were, at ease, relaxed, being taken care of. God just typing that, "being taken care of" sounds so nice for a change. Some people have suggested that the treatment of pot wives is misogynistic, but I think just because something is anti-feminist doesn't necessarily make it misogynistic. In the evo-bio sense, the pot wives had a very clear job to do, to nurture, to nourish, to support, and there are times when I wish my life was like that. There are times when I wish I would have just married in my twenties, had kids and a husband, maybe a house. Is that what you mean about it biting us in the ass?

People have called Growgirl a book about me trying to "find myself." This feels like a colossally oppressive pile of bullshit to me. I would suggest that I've known exactly who I've been at each step along my way...
Yes, I was heckled by a pot wife at the Humboldt HempFest. She told me to shut up because I sucked. But how could she not get defensive? I was basically critiquing her choice and reducing her to a checklist. Granted, she could probably check off every single item on the list, but is that fair? The pot wives brought my own questions about my choices into sharp relief. I would have been tempted to go the pot wife route, if I'd seen any 40-year-old pot wives.

The idea of gender intrigued me while I was growing, because my first round grew green testicles under stress. And it struck me that I too, was growing testicles as an adaptation to stress. That I was becoming a sort of social hermaphrodite, capable of competing in a male-dominated field—but at what price? It's taken me a long while and a lot of sitting to recover my softness, and I still have to remind myself sometimes that there's strength in that.

What I meant was something like: it seems to me that whenever we get too sure of what women "are," that's when feminism of any kind ends up failing us, because all of a sudden you have to be a certain way to qualify for ladyness. And it's never a compromise: you have to be independent, or you have to be a nurturer. Full stop.

The growing of plant testicles in response to stress is an interesting analogy in that sense, because I can see people wanting to step in and object that toughness bears no specific relationship to testicles.

I absolutely agree with you: When we get too sure of what women "are," feminism ends up failing. I think this is partly because if we stop talking about what women "are" we don't need feminism anymore.

I think adaptability is very different from toughness. I mentioned the plant balls more as an example of adapting to stress, how if you adapt to become everything to yourself—it's hard to remember to need. I think of it as softness, because you're basic position has to be softness, ease, to be responsive to change.

Well, and as to adaptability, do you ever think about going back to acting? Do you ever regret the “scorched earth” approach” you took to it?

I've never thought about going back to acting, but I do enjoy the performance aspects of book tour. And I loved being in the band that I write about in Growgirl.

I came to acting from a love of telling stories; it's how I understand the world. In that respect, I haven't changed jobs, I've just dug to the core of what I really wanted to do, and, with Growgirl, have finally put something in the world that I'm really proud of and want to share. I love collaboration, but I love that writing a book is not really a collaboration. It's nice to have something (finally!) about which I can say: this is mine

Sort of an aside: People have called Growgirl a book about me trying to "find myself." This feels like a colossally oppressive pile of bullshit to me. I would suggest that I've known exactly who I've been at each step along my way, but I've also known that to assume a stable self would have just been to resist change and thwart whatever I was becoming. Why would I do that? That's not a rhetorical question.

Well, and you ended up leaving pot farming, too, because it was too hard, which I kind of liked. I mean, we've talked about Eat, Pray, Love. One of the things that I resent about the cultural narrative attached to it is that it implies that if you just "go after your dreams" everything will, in the end, turn out okay.

Of course everything won't, in the end, turn out okay. It will turn out very not okay at many, many points in your story. And sometimes it will turn out so great you think your head might just pop right on off. The gut compass is kind of a pain in the ass that way.

I didn't quit pot farming because it was too hard. Writing a memoir is actually a whole lot harder in a lot of pretty fundamental ways than growing pot. I quit pot farming because I decided I was going to write Growgirl and felt that for the safety of myself and the community, it would be better if I got out. I also fell in love with "Uwe," who was deathly allergic to cannabis. Weird, right? I like to think of weird shit like that as fate, it helps move my story along. Another reason I quit was because I knew it was hard on my parents, worrying about my safety all the time and feeling like they had to lie to people about what I was doing. I didn't think that was fair.

You’re right: My formulation of “hard” was clumsy. What I meant was something more like: ultimately whatever benefit you were drawing from it, it wasn't enough to outweigh the burden.

I really liked the passage towards the end you had where you write that “One thing I will miss about this job is that it was really clear what I was supposed to be afraid of: getting caught. It’s a deep and ever-present fear, but it’s also pretty simple, and it keeps other vaguer and more slippery ones at bay.” I thought that was fantastically smart, and at the same time, it made me wonder if it's the right approach, to keep your psyche away from those questions. It is definitely the Buddhist/mindful one, at least I think so. And yet the act of writing a memoir is diving right back into them, isn't it? Or was it for you?

I think your new formulation of "hard" is more apt. And also a pretty good metric for when it's time to let go of something: job, town, boyfriend, cheese.

The work did put the more existential worries to the side in the sense that they were more abstract, and weren't the triggers. It’s just that they weren't what triggered the fear tsunami, the more immediate and visceral fears were. Of getting caught, of spider mites, etc. The abstract stuff just compounded those more immediate and realistic fears until it hit critical mass and imploded, then passed. The repeated experience of those terror tides made me more skillful when I finally put on my authorial captain's hat. Is that a heavy-handed metaphor? Yeah, probably—but it's also the most concise way I know how to put it.

My garden was a metaphor to a sometimes irritating degree. As goes the grower, so go the girls. [“The Girls” is how pot growers refer to their marijuana plants, who are, remember, all female.] A dog reveals the heart of its master, too. The Girls and the dog were my mirrors, every step of the way. I lost my ability for fiction, thanks to them. When I was fucking up, losing my equanimity to chaos, they let me know instantly.

Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.



Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her on Twitter.

---

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]]> Heather Donahue, best known as the actress from The Blair Witch Project, has written a book. Now this happens all the time, the once-famous-people-writing-books thing. And often the result is some cookie-cutter “memoir” of which the kindest remark you might make is that it has paid some deserving freelancer’s rent for six months. But Heather Donahue’s story caught my eye, regardless, because her book, Growgirl, was said to be about her quitting acting to grow pot. Medical marijuana, of course, all sanctioned by California law, but pot nonetheless, and, being self-interestedly attracted to stories of people who do about-faces in their careers in their early 30s, I was intrigued.

I’m not sure what I expected, but Growgirl is pretty wonderful. Donahue is not only a funny, sharp, endearing narrator, she’s downright wise about the experience that is, literally, torching a previous life. (Donahue burned a lot of her leftover Hollywood things in the desert before heading north to start her new business.) As a bonus, I learned a hell of a lot I didn’t know about pot. Here we talk about the “lady zeitgeist,” making peace with “tit whiskers” and the waves of fear that come with Quitting Your Job.

Michelle Dean: At the outset of your book, you write that, "I'm sure somewhere on the cover of this book will be the words The Blair Witch Project, and believe me, I will have tried to prevent that." Plainly, you lost that battle; the movie is on there. How do you feel about that?

Heather Donahue: My publisher's first idea for the book cover was basically a reenactment of the Blair Witch confessional scene with a pot leaf on my face. Which felt, um, wrong. So we worked from there. I offered the idea of me, naked with a pot plant, thinking that there was no way they were going to go for it.

As far as books that have their author on the cover go, I like it. I like that it's nudity, because it's a very naked kind of book, but it's a sort of desexualized nudity. It's a little bit Eve, a little bit Green Tara and a little bit Dove ad. The photographer, Michele Clement, got what I was trying to do and I love the photograph we ended up with.

I just never thought of Growgirl as the kind of book that has its author on the cover. The only book of that ilk that I own is Dolly Parton's autobiography, because she is awesome. It was more than a little heartbreaking to see the cover mock-up and think, I probably wouldn't pick this up in a bookstore. At some point, I just let it go and started hoping hard that word of mouth will make up for it.

Oh my god, that first cover idea is kind of horrifyingly smart in a crass marketing way.

The first cover idea is good if we're talking about a brand, rather than a person. A brand doesn't evolve in the same way that a person does.

Part of me thinks that I should have written Growgirl pseudonymously and then there would have been no possibility of packaging it as a non-celeb celeb memoir. But then it wouldn't have really been my story.

The Blair Witch Project continues to repeat on me like cucumbers or chili. I understand why it ended up in the subtitle. I understand why it's the initial focus of the press coverage. It's such a weird thing, in terms of its effects on my life: not bad, not good; just big.

Your Dove ad analogy strikes me as apt. Not just because the visual cues are the same, but also because it represents the kind of tightwire you have to walk. You want people to read the book (or feel better about themselves) so you have to sell it. But there are all these pre-set ideas about what kind of things sell that are hard to overcome (i.e., books with their authors on the cover), and some of them end up misrepresenting your work. Because I wouldn't call your book a Dove ad, either. It's too raw for it.

I agree that the book is much, much rawer than a Dove ad, but in some ways it's also more innocent—less concerned with branding, but more concerned with empowerment. One of the big narrative drivers for me is the tension between binary pairs: legal/illegal, public/private, revulsion/attraction, etc.

I understand that a lot of people wouldn't have that money. I understand that it's a privilege to change a life. But I also understand that what really changed my life was my decision to write every day, which cost nothing.
Some people have commented that some of the more revolting physical stuff [in one sequence, gastrointestinal issues result from the excessive consumption of energy drinks; in another, she worries about hair growing on her breasts, dubbed “tit whiskers”] is gratuitous, but I would suggest my preoccupying ideas in Growgirl are around identity—and that to get to identity we have to go through the body. As I was all up in my cozy little forest chrysalis, I started to realize how I'd started to become charmed and almost impressed at my body's adaptations, the attractive ones of losing weight and toning up from all the farm work, and also the revolting ones of callouses and blisters and burning and peeling. Having a good relationship with my body, tit whisker and all, had maybe the most significant effect on my overall happiness. That was why I chose to be naked on the cover, that's why I chose to be completely naked at the shoot, even though you wouldn't be able to tell. I was also 165 pounds and a size twelve at the time of that shoot. I think I look pretty fucking lush.

I love that “tit whisker,” which is one of the metaphors that opens the book. I mean, talk about a bodily experience women are afraid to talk and be whimsical about: hair growing on areolae is definitely still in that category. Women are only allowed to talk about their bodies, it seems, to the extent it can be commodified and resold, like the Dove ad.

Ah yes, anal bleaching is okay, but tit whiskers are verboten. So it goes. At the risk of sounding all women's studies-y, I think the commodification of ladybodies has been more disempowering than any other financial, or social restrictions, because how can we be strong and steady enough to exercise our power when we're frittering it away by wrestling against our own skins? And really, fuck that. As I teeter on the brink of middle age, I feel better than ever. I am acutely aware of my declining fuckablilty, and my initial struggle with that has largely passed and given way to a softness and humility that has made me fearless.

It fits into a certain tradition of these books, and so I have to bring this up: are you an Eat, Pray, Love fan? I think your quest differs considerably from Elizabeth Gilbert's, don't get me wrong, but there's an analogy here that's inescapable: media-driven job, longing for something with more spiritual/meaningful calories in it…

I think it's funny that you're the first person to bring up Eat, Pray, Love, because I think that book gets a bad rap (phenomenal success will do that to a media nugget, I should know!) and I think Growgirl does have a few things in common with it. Fundamentally, they're both seeker books. I didn't have money going in, so doing my travels in other countries was out of the question. I had to get domestic, and I think it served me at least as well. I think the other thing the two books shared is a flawed and chatty narrator who is sincerely trying to answer the question, "How to live?" and willing to fail and fail again.

I can only really talk out of my ass about Eat, Pray, Love. I've only leafed through it, and when I did so I could tell my seething jealousy of the money would interfere with my being able to internalize whatever the book might have to offer. I mean, you write in the book about coming from a working-class background, so the class thing isn't invisible to you, but I wondered if you had any thoughts about that aspect of it.

There's nothing like growing up in a working class family where your dad up and loses his union job after 30-plus years and everything that he raised his kids to believe about dreams and hard work and freedom has turned to disillusionment, unemployment and debt. Witnessing that first hand in my family, and seeing its effects only made me want to work harder, but not to line the pockets of some abstract mystery douches, that was what I wanted to avoid at all costs.

When I made a little money from acting jobs, I never left the apartment I moved into when I first arrived in LA and was working as a temp. I stayed there for ten years, until I moved to Nuggettown, because it was rent controlled. That's a reason I still had something left to get my growroom going. I understand that a lot of people wouldn't have that money. I understand that it's a privilege to change a life. But I also understand that what really changed my life was my decision to write every day, which cost nothing. My decision to meditate, even if only for 15 minutes. Those two things have a bigger daily effect on my day than anything I've ever bought or rented. They were the seeds of the bigger, more systemic changes. And really, anyone can do either of those things. A little silence goes a long way. And laughing.

Do you like "Enlightened," too? That’s the other thing your book reminded me a lot of.

I love "Enlightened." When I first saw it, I got goosebumps because I thought, holy shit, this reminds me of my story too. It's time. The lady zeitgeist is afoot and not a moment too soon. Did I mention that all the marijuana plants are female too?

I agree with you that a lady zeitgeist is afoot, but there are times when it comes all the way back around the bend and bites us in the ass. I mean, it's not an unqualified boon, in other words. Exhibit A: you talk in the book, a lot, about the skepticism you held of the woman you call Cedara's Mama Earth stuff. I found your distrust of it so refreshing and true-feeling; like you say, no New Age bullshit, you're determined to earn your meaning.

But it did put you in opposition to the "pot wives," the young women who are, as you put it, “like Beverly Hills trophy wi[ves] with more body hair.” On some level you were frustrated with them for sort of sublimating themselves into supporting their "pot husbands." Is that fair? I know you told the New Yorker and Reuters that one of them heckled you at a reading.

On the one hand, I was frustrated with the "pot wives" and on the other, I was jealous. Here I was, with all my independence, trying to find my place in the world, and then another, and then another—and there they were, at ease, relaxed, being taken care of. God just typing that, "being taken care of" sounds so nice for a change. Some people have suggested that the treatment of pot wives is misogynistic, but I think just because something is anti-feminist doesn't necessarily make it misogynistic. In the evo-bio sense, the pot wives had a very clear job to do, to nurture, to nourish, to support, and there are times when I wish my life was like that. There are times when I wish I would have just married in my twenties, had kids and a husband, maybe a house. Is that what you mean about it biting us in the ass?

People have called Growgirl a book about me trying to "find myself." This feels like a colossally oppressive pile of bullshit to me. I would suggest that I've known exactly who I've been at each step along my way...
Yes, I was heckled by a pot wife at the Humboldt HempFest. She told me to shut up because I sucked. But how could she not get defensive? I was basically critiquing her choice and reducing her to a checklist. Granted, she could probably check off every single item on the list, but is that fair? The pot wives brought my own questions about my choices into sharp relief. I would have been tempted to go the pot wife route, if I'd seen any 40-year-old pot wives.

The idea of gender intrigued me while I was growing, because my first round grew green testicles under stress. And it struck me that I too, was growing testicles as an adaptation to stress. That I was becoming a sort of social hermaphrodite, capable of competing in a male-dominated field—but at what price? It's taken me a long while and a lot of sitting to recover my softness, and I still have to remind myself sometimes that there's strength in that.

What I meant was something like: it seems to me that whenever we get too sure of what women "are," that's when feminism of any kind ends up failing us, because all of a sudden you have to be a certain way to qualify for ladyness. And it's never a compromise: you have to be independent, or you have to be a nurturer. Full stop.

The growing of plant testicles in response to stress is an interesting analogy in that sense, because I can see people wanting to step in and object that toughness bears no specific relationship to testicles.

I absolutely agree with you: When we get too sure of what women "are," feminism ends up failing. I think this is partly because if we stop talking about what women "are" we don't need feminism anymore.

I think adaptability is very different from toughness. I mentioned the plant balls more as an example of adapting to stress, how if you adapt to become everything to yourself—it's hard to remember to need. I think of it as softness, because you're basic position has to be softness, ease, to be responsive to change.

Well, and as to adaptability, do you ever think about going back to acting? Do you ever regret the “scorched earth” approach” you took to it?

I've never thought about going back to acting, but I do enjoy the performance aspects of book tour. And I loved being in the band that I write about in Growgirl.

I came to acting from a love of telling stories; it's how I understand the world. In that respect, I haven't changed jobs, I've just dug to the core of what I really wanted to do, and, with Growgirl, have finally put something in the world that I'm really proud of and want to share. I love collaboration, but I love that writing a book is not really a collaboration. It's nice to have something (finally!) about which I can say: this is mine

Sort of an aside: People have called Growgirl a book about me trying to "find myself." This feels like a colossally oppressive pile of bullshit to me. I would suggest that I've known exactly who I've been at each step along my way, but I've also known that to assume a stable self would have just been to resist change and thwart whatever I was becoming. Why would I do that? That's not a rhetorical question.

Well, and you ended up leaving pot farming, too, because it was too hard, which I kind of liked. I mean, we've talked about Eat, Pray, Love. One of the things that I resent about the cultural narrative attached to it is that it implies that if you just "go after your dreams" everything will, in the end, turn out okay.

Of course everything won't, in the end, turn out okay. It will turn out very not okay at many, many points in your story. And sometimes it will turn out so great you think your head might just pop right on off. The gut compass is kind of a pain in the ass that way.

I didn't quit pot farming because it was too hard. Writing a memoir is actually a whole lot harder in a lot of pretty fundamental ways than growing pot. I quit pot farming because I decided I was going to write Growgirl and felt that for the safety of myself and the community, it would be better if I got out. I also fell in love with "Uwe," who was deathly allergic to cannabis. Weird, right? I like to think of weird shit like that as fate, it helps move my story along. Another reason I quit was because I knew it was hard on my parents, worrying about my safety all the time and feeling like they had to lie to people about what I was doing. I didn't think that was fair.

You’re right: My formulation of “hard” was clumsy. What I meant was something more like: ultimately whatever benefit you were drawing from it, it wasn't enough to outweigh the burden.

I really liked the passage towards the end you had where you write that “One thing I will miss about this job is that it was really clear what I was supposed to be afraid of: getting caught. It’s a deep and ever-present fear, but it’s also pretty simple, and it keeps other vaguer and more slippery ones at bay.” I thought that was fantastically smart, and at the same time, it made me wonder if it's the right approach, to keep your psyche away from those questions. It is definitely the Buddhist/mindful one, at least I think so. And yet the act of writing a memoir is diving right back into them, isn't it? Or was it for you?

I think your new formulation of "hard" is more apt. And also a pretty good metric for when it's time to let go of something: job, town, boyfriend, cheese.

The work did put the more existential worries to the side in the sense that they were more abstract, and weren't the triggers. It’s just that they weren't what triggered the fear tsunami, the more immediate and visceral fears were. Of getting caught, of spider mites, etc. The abstract stuff just compounded those more immediate and realistic fears until it hit critical mass and imploded, then passed. The repeated experience of those terror tides made me more skillful when I finally put on my authorial captain's hat. Is that a heavy-handed metaphor? Yeah, probably—but it's also the most concise way I know how to put it.

My garden was a metaphor to a sometimes irritating degree. As goes the grower, so go the girls. [“The Girls” is how pot growers refer to their marijuana plants, who are, remember, all female.] A dog reveals the heart of its master, too. The Girls and the dog were my mirrors, every step of the way. I lost my ability for fiction, thanks to them. When I was fucking up, losing my equanimity to chaos, they let me know instantly.

Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.



Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her on Twitter.

---

See more posts by Michelle Dean

13 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/quit-your-job-a-qa-with-actress-turned-pot-farmer-heather-donahue/feed 13 Harry Crews Is On Your Horizon http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/harry-crews-is-on-your-horizon http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/harry-crews-is-on-your-horizon#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:40:01 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/harry-crews-is-on-your-horizon Are we going to get some new things to read from dynamite author Harry Crews? Signs point to yes! [Via]

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]]> Are we going to get some new things to read from dynamite author Harry Crews? Signs point to yes! [Via]

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/harry-crews-is-on-your-horizon/feed 1 Make Easy Money with E-Book Publishing, Ask Me How http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/make-easy-money-with-e-book-publishing-ask-me-how http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/make-easy-money-with-e-book-publishing-ask-me-how#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:00:27 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/make-easy-money-with-e-book-publishing-ask-me-how
Luke Ethan's author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual [sic], and it doesn't appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1.... A highly prolific scribe with the pen name Boston Fiction Writer, whose story, "Boston Halloween Massacre" had been transposed into an ebook titled Massacre on Halloween and sold under Robin Scott's name, threatened to hurt the person who stole her work, "even more than they hurt me, so that they'd think twice about stealing another story from me. I dare say, she'd have no more fingers left to steal anyone's stories, ever again."

—It's hard out there for a literary pimp.

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Luke Ethan's author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual [sic], and it doesn't appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1.... A highly prolific scribe with the pen name Boston Fiction Writer, whose story, "Boston Halloween Massacre" had been transposed into an ebook titled Massacre on Halloween and sold under Robin Scott's name, threatened to hurt the person who stole her work, "even more than they hurt me, so that they'd think twice about stealing another story from me. I dare say, she'd have no more fingers left to steal anyone's stories, ever again."

—It's hard out there for a literary pimp.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/make-easy-money-with-e-book-publishing-ask-me-how/feed 4 Trenne Is The Jonathan Richman Of Pastas http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/pasta-shapes http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/pasta-shapes#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:40:36 +0000 Dave Bry http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/pasta-shapes
"It’s a mirror universe where everything is pliant and groovy, and in that universe there’s someone that stands out, and it’s the boring-looking trenne with its sharp edges.”
—Architect George L. Legendre, who along with his partner, Marco Guarnieri, has made an art book called Pasta by Design, which presents mathematical equations detailing the shapes of 92 different types of pasta, along with pictures and suggestions for accompanying sauces. That is a ridiculous and fun-sounding project. I wonder which pasta Legendre would say is the most pliant and groovy in the mirror noodle universe? Who is the Papa John Philips, the Jimi Hendrix of pastas? Maybe saccottini, which looks like a sort of vortex folding in upon itself, infinitely. (It's name also harkens to the grooviest of eras—"Sock it to me!") Man, stare at one of those saccottinis long enough, and the whole world is there for you to see.

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"It’s a mirror universe where everything is pliant and groovy, and in that universe there’s someone that stands out, and it’s the boring-looking trenne with its sharp edges.”
—Architect George L. Legendre, who along with his partner, Marco Guarnieri, has made an art book called Pasta by Design, which presents mathematical equations detailing the shapes of 92 different types of pasta, along with pictures and suggestions for accompanying sauces. That is a ridiculous and fun-sounding project. I wonder which pasta Legendre would say is the most pliant and groovy in the mirror noodle universe? Who is the Papa John Philips, the Jimi Hendrix of pastas? Maybe saccottini, which looks like a sort of vortex folding in upon itself, infinitely. (It's name also harkens to the grooviest of eras—"Sock it to me!") Man, stare at one of those saccottinis long enough, and the whole world is there for you to see.

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