Category: books & writing

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Girl Reader

From an article in the December 2008 Atlantic Monthly about why teen girls love vampires:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life – one that she slips inot during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice pasat her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs – to be undisturbed while she works out the big quetions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others – are met precisely by the act of reading.

I don’t agree with the gendered conclusion she comes to, but I thought it was a nice description of reading, especially of reading novels, especially when you’re a child or young teenager. At least it described me somewhat, right down to the passé composé (which I did manage to pick up, eventually).

I remember reading a theory once that young female readers figure out how to masturbate sooner than their peers, exactly because they’re used to & look forward to time alone.

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Buy Books!

This just in, from Roy Blount of The Authors Guild (of which I’m a proud member). I’ll add that all this is especially true for your local independent bookstores, so if you love, go buy books! Even if you aren’t a writer, it’s still a good idea – and tell them an Author’s Guild member sent you!

I’ve been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren’t known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don’t lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn’t in the cards.

We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let’s mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that’s just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they’re easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children’s books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they’ll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: “Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see…we’re the Authors Guild.”

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

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Some Cool Stuff

Here are some cool things I’ve unearthed in recent weeks that I’ve been meaning to blog about at length but find myself to busy to do!

I am writing and reading a lot this fall, and most of the writing is not for publication, sadly – like my personal statement for my Ph.D. application, amongst other things. So keep sending me cool stuff, or I may start posting descriptions of classes I want to teach, and other odd things.

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Old Drugs

I know I’m often somewhat cynical about scientific studies, but this one especially seems to take the cake. Not because it’s not smart, or comes to wild, unfounded conclusions, but rather because it’s – well, obvious: thoughtful people tend to get depressed.

Verhaeghen, who is also a novelist and describes himself as a “somewhat mood disordered person,” had a particular interest in the connection between creativity and this ruminating state of mind.

“One of the things I do is think about something over and over and over again, and that’s when I start writing,” he said.

Psychologist types can tell me if anything specific is meant by “ruminating” – that is, if the term is used in your field to mean a kind of obsessive thinking and reviewing of thought – because otherwise, to us lay folks, ruminating just means thinking, reviewing. I don’t think of it as being a negative activity by any means, or even an obsessive one.

What they seem to miss – or don’t articulate – is that writing is a kind of thinking for a lot of writers. It’s a way of kind of nailing down a certain kind of looped thinking, following wild hairs to their logical end, sorting out complex connections. In other words, it’s a kind of sanity-making thing to do when you’re thinking all the time.

I had a writing prof who used to say that it’s impossible to tell if people who have a lot of vivid dreams become writers or if writers have a lot of vivid dreams – that is, whether the inclination to write causes someone to dream & think very intensely, or whether people who naturally dream & think intensely find writing is their only good outlet for all the stuff going on in their head. Writing, to me, is an anti-depressant, but in a certain sense it creates this other place you get to go, and like with other drugs, maybe you just get to a point where pushing the button doesn’t result in relief anymore. With DFW, it would be easy to come to that conclusion – he wrote so intensely, so intricately, for a long while, & it’s as if the moment he stopped – he couldn’t stand it anymore. Maybe, as with other drugs, we have to be careful how much we press the button, because we become resistant to its palliative qualities, eventually.

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Soeur Emmanuelle

Here’s a woman who got a heck of a lot less press than Mother Theresa, but who, in my opinion, took the best stands on things like contraception. I’m entirely flummoxed at her descriptions of her own desire & flirtation, all of which she gave up at 21 or 23 years old = young to give up a sex life.

I am fascinated by nuns like this, who practice what they preach in terms of living with the poor and having compassion for all. Truly remarkable, as was Dorothy Day before her (though Day was never a nun).

I’m looking forward to reading her autobiography but can’t find it – not even on www.amazon.fr. If anyone else does, or find the English translation, let me know. (Though I’m thinking it would probably be a good book for me to brush up my French!)

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New Column

Well go figure, but I’m writing a new relationships advice column at www.ourchart.com called Ask Big Sister. & No, I’m not actually a big sister – youngest of 6 – but I always wanted to be! This is an introductory piece, of course, so the readers there get to know who I am and what my gig is.

Since readers over there can ask me questions, of course you can too! I’d love to hear any you’ve got, especially the ones you’d like to see addressed in a column.