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Thanks for this. I mean, I'm still a little weirded out by the whole vagina thing, but you have a place in my heart; you were there for me back when it mattered. And even though I still can't find Dreaming of Hitler, which I put in a box that was put in storage before I moved to Turkey (didn't think the Turks were ready for you) and then did not appear somehow when boxes were opened upon return, I still really do love you.
I mean, even though I've moved on , I do fondly remember the spanking essay and the not being a lesbian essay and even the fey, inconsequential scarf essay. I also remember the ca. 2000 essay about your stay on what must have been Eye-6, if Eye-6 still existed. I've been out of touch myself. And so to find you talking about this is just so refreshing. Because I've been thinking about it too. And I've been trying not to scream even weeks after, say, my South American father-in-law, holding forth on the crazy Alaskan, sought to impress a dinner guest with this bit o' wit: "She is like that joke about the dumb blonde."
Um. What joke was that? The one about how women suck? Oh yeah, I remember that one! Bwahahaha!
And even though D, laughing, reminds me that he is not to be taken seriously, I still find myself squirming. Is it over yet, Daphne?
On the one hand, it is so much stating the obvious. On the other hand, why aren't more people stating it? And why does it make me feel as per usual that I'm too V for this world? Like that one night I find myself watching SNL for the 15 minutes that I can stand it mostly because you know everyone is suddenly saying that it is so worth watching these days and all, and so I find myself sitting next to D watching a skit about cougars. Cougars, I must be reminded, is a term for apparently desperate and pathetic older women who date younger men. The "jokes" all seem to be about being an older desperate and pathetically still sexual woman, one who wears shapewear. It was so not funny, as I remember SNL to be mostly; but also so darkly misogynistic, as I had forgotten or never noticed that it probably always was. And then cut to a commercial which might have been some relief but was instead even more deeply sad, in a way only an ad executive could imagine. One of the new Ask.com ads where the protagonist has an overweight, unattractive woman on his back. The woman keeps asking questions, until finally we cut to the sell/thesis statement: "Get the best answers to all your nagging questions."
This is when I want to go to bed. This is where I feel the weight of DFW's brutal assessment of this historical moment, our culture as: "a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I'm not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value." This is when it all feels too deeply sad: the women of SNL acting out the cougar fantasy; the deployment of the obese, unattractive woman in this advertisement for an internet search engine; the actual obese unattractive actress who landed the national ad.
Nagging questions, indeed.
Friday, November 21, 2008
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2 comments:
YES.
(And, you know who's great about the whole vagina-vulva thing? Harriet Lerner. Even before I read Lerner, I couldn't stand Eve Ensler or her loyal acolytes; although "V-Day" is such a huge thing now in Santa Fe, with locals like Jane Fonda and Ali McGraw waxing all indignant exactly once a year.)
I don't really know Ms. Merkin outside of the NYer, so this is cool. There's a spanking essay?!
And Kipnis, wow, she sounds like such a smart one—though I'm sorry they made her water down the Marx. So thank you for the tip; I need some post-Palin female-inscribed sanity.
SNL has always been excruciating on gender—which is weird, when they're so often ruthlessly on point about race; but I'm sure someday Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler will shock no one with the appalling revelations in their autobiographies. I only ever watch it on the Huff Post, to spare myself what the Brits would call its "laddishness" (and the still way-too-long, even-though-people-have-been-pointing-out-for-YEARS-that-they're-too-long, so-WHY-are-they-still-so-LONG, skits).
"On the other hand, why aren't more people stating the obvious?"
(Because it's not obvious to them? But how can it NOT be obvious? Because they're not paying attention? Am I *really* paying more attention than most other people? YES.)
I loved this post (obviously!).
Thank you, Ms. Un. As always. I do recommend _Dreaming_ particularly for someone drawn to the confessional memoir. For the most part (but not always), she makes it work. And we share obsessions: Anne Sexton, therapy, plumbing the depths of self-loathing. That sort of thing. The spanking essay is the most famous and, though not my favorite, is worth reading. (I recall hearing her interviewed by Leonard Lopate and saying something about how we are in a post-Freudian, post-confessional moment. Whatever that means.)
Wow, thanks for the Lerner link. Love that.
Yup, SNL sucks as ever and I'm only annoyed that the whole campaign suckered me back into it, if only momentarily.
Oh, and do read Kipnis' _The_Female_Thing_. She's a firebrand and occasionally off target, but I love her for, yes, paying attention and for saying it all, in such a direct, bold, impolite and often disturbing way.
Thanks for the love. Keep rocking.
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