Posts Tagged ‘ books ’

Keeping Your Focus:a Happiness Project

Rubin, Gretchen (2009). The Happiness Project. New York: Harper. ISBN: 9780061583254

I seem to have a lot in common with Gretchen Rubin. Writing. Living in an urban setting. A tendency to be irritable. Would usually rather read than do almost anything else. A sense of wasting my life, letting small details of getting through the day override the greater aims I have. But I really knew I would like her book The Happiness Project when she started talking about Benjamin Franklin.

Ever since I first read Franklin’s Autobiography in undergraduate school, I have thought about his habit of tracking his habits as a tool toward self improvement. I remember the other students and the professor in my American Literature class mocking Franklin for keeping track of his “errata,” but thinking how much it reminded me of something I might do. But it never occurred me to actually try this method until Rubin’s book.

I have created a chart on a piece of paper that has the days of the week in columns, and the elements of my life I would like to make sure I accomplish down the side of the page. Eating breakfast, flossing, walking, reading poetry are all there. I also have some specific goals in terms of writing, socialization and business development listed. I quickly saw how this was a great tool for helping me focus my time, and make sure that I actually make time for the things I consider important but have been actually doing in a haphazard fashion.

Gretchen Rubin is also a great motivator because she details her own weaknesses, her failings, her perfectionism. Similar types of books have been off-putting to me in the past because they seem so high-minded. Here is someone showing her own imperfections while nudging us to improve our own.

Rubin also focuses on what she calls “Being Gretchen,” and is essentially a great place for all of us to start: focus on the things you like to do, are good at, and in work with your natural inclinations. Diets, exercise programs, and other setups to change habits frequently ask us to take on some imposed structure that goes against our natural inclinations. For writers, I think this is an important meditation in terms of how we write. there are so many books and websites out there about how to develop a writing discipline, how to write a book/novel/poem/how to blog/how to journal/etc. and, really, when you study the great writers in all of those genres, they each have their own idiosyncratic way of approaching the task.

Rubin also is very good at combining factual research with her own personal experience, creating a balance between expertise and real life. Nobody really likes a know-it-all who seems to have all the answers; we relate better to someone who eats junk food, snaps at her family,and wishes to change but doesn’t really want to be different person.

Gretchen Rubin’s blog is : http://www.happiness-project.com

Watching Others Cook

Collins, Kathleen. (2009). Watching What We Eat: the evolution of television cooking shows. New York: Continuum. ISBN: 0-8264-2930-0

I’ve learned so much about food and cooking from watching cooking shows on television. As a teenager I would watch and long to be able to make the kinds of recipes being shown; dreamed of having a fancy kitchen, a professional mixer or food processor. Kathleen Collins has made a very detailed study of how those shows have changed over the decades of television history, and how those shows have influenced those of us who like to cook and eat.

The history of television cooking shows is much longer and richer than I could have imagined. Some of the earliest shows sound like some of the crazy Food Network shows on now. And it is interesting that throughout the entire history of cooking on television, here has been a voyeuristic quality and also a vicarious quality. In other words, we love watching others cook thins we know we will never cook ourselves. And yet I think a regular viewer of these shows learns about cooking and technique, much like watching someone cook in a kitchen , but because television cooking shows are such controlled and “chopped up” presentations, they do not teach how to plan a meal, how to cook a whole meal or party so all the food is ready at the same time. They never teach you about cleaning up, or planning your shopping and menus so you don’t have a lot of waste.

Food is entertaining becuase it is part of all of our lives, and have used the cooking shows to help live out and shape our fantasies of the ideal life. Collins does a great job of showing how these shows have excelled at that and captured the moving target of the American Dream over the last fifty years.

The Stand-up Linguist Comedian

abcjuice Blount, R., (2008). Alphabet Juice: the energies, gists, and spirits of letters, words, and combinations thereof; their roots, bones, innards,piths, pips, and secret parts, … with examples of their usage foul and savory.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Blount is certainly knowledgeable about the English language. I can say I learned a great deal from this book; unfortunately, I found his attempts at humor a bit tiresome, and I sometimes felt like he was trying to show off all of his knowledge in one book. Not comprehensive enough to be a useful reference work, and not funny enough to be a language humor book. Still, enjoyable.

Burn This Book, Thinking About Censorship

Morrison, T., (2009). Burn This Book. City: HarperStudio.

Anyone who has read even one book, poem or article or who has seen even one scripted play, movie or television program knows the power of the writer. The eleven writers of the essays in this book flesh out the reasons writing can affect people’s emotions and their actions. Toni Morrison calls this power a “necessity,” and each of the essays gives a different point of view as to why we should all be vigilant to see that the power of the written word remains freely available to all people everywhere.

These essays call into question what happens when writing makes us uncomfortable, makes us angry, makes us sick. The diversity of viewpoints presented includes Salman Rushdie, David Grossman, and Nadine Gordimer. Wherever you fall on the philosophical and political spectrum, you still have to face the question: Where do we draw the line on allowing the freedom of ideas?

Burn This Book says that trying to suppress ideas, and the written expression of those ideas, dehumanizes everyone, and breaks down social and cultural bonds. If you want to think about these things, and are interested in engaging in a dialogue to answer the questions, this is a good book to start with. If you find these ideas too uncomfortable and would rather avoid the whole subject, I think reading this book is a necessity.

Nora Ephron’s Crazy 70s salad

Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975, 1983). 2000 Modern Library Paperback Edition.

Crazy Salad, Nora Ephron To me, Nora Ephron has always been the writer of When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail and involved in writing other similar of my secret pleasures. I’ve seen her on talk shows. I read her book I Feel Bad About My Neck because my mother had it. I am always reading books I would never read because my mother has them lying around when I visit.

This book is a collection of magazine pieces from the 1970s, and it reveals much about Nora Ephron. Despite a privileged Beverly Hills upbringing, amazingly successful Hollywood writer parents, her own successful career endeavors, she always comes across as funny and real. And certainly this collection has some great laughs and is entertaining in itself.

She writes, in the early 1970s, about women’s liberation, feminism, with an immediacy and sense of… sort of manifest destiny, “when we are liberated,” which I admit is somewhat disconcerting for me , born in 1975, to see a writer I am entertained by now, for her jokes about aging and cosmetic procedures. I am entertained by her because she seems to capture the mainstream essence of a kind of cultured, urban, vaguely preppy, liberal life– and with it a kind of smirky, breezy, in-the-thick-of-it laugh at divorce, the upscaling and designing and gourmeting of every aspect of upper-middle class life in the last thirty-odd years.

But I wonder, then, was feminism, this in-your-face feminism, that kind of social norm deconstruction, mainstream in 1973? Apparently, yes. So then I ask, how did those same women become, by the mid to late 1980s, characters in When Harry Met Sally? When I watch that movie I do see the remains of the women described in these early columns, but I don’t understand how the change happened.

I wonder what kind of conclusions people will draw about my generation in thirty years. We were grunge, could-care-less about the world going to hell, Generation X that refused to be identified or pinned down to anything. Have we been? Are we now seen by the younger generation as seriously preppy, conservative, let’s reclaim the heyday of idealized American culture? Do they? Have we?

But back to the point: I do see one thing clearly: feminism now seems to ring a bit hollow. It seems like it has become associated with radical lesbians, bitter aging women on the one hand, and women who spent their youth burning bras and fighting equality only to get married and suddenly seem happier than ever, if for a time. Did these women just finally meet the perfect man (an anti-feminist thought)? Were they lonely? Or did they achieve enough “liberation” in the workforce, through the sexual revolution, and with the new casual society that they became comfortable?

It seems that many women do have choices about their life path today: married or single, mothers or not, and if a mother, stay home or career. And that makes the oddity, the huge amount of anger and resentment women have about and towards other women who’ve made a different choice. Wasn’t that the idea? To make the various choices available? To liberate women from the required drudgeries of housework and birth? Yet still leave the choice of motherhood and domesticity open to women?

Economics does still influence these decisions for many women. Surely it impacts some men as well, though I suppose not as dramatically.

Have we, the mainstream, just continued to marginalize feminism because it upsets conventional ideas that reassure us? Do we then punish these women for making traditional choices some of the time, while still thinking the ones who stay radically feminized as somehow too masculine?

From what I see, and that is of course a warped view (33 year old, gay white male, middle class), straight men have evolved since 1973. They seem to accept that they will be part of, perhaps not equally part of, but part of doing domestic duty. And parental duty. And of course most straight, educated men I know now actually want an educated career woman as a partner. They don’t seem to want a dependent woman, clingy and intellectually undeveloped. But of course they do have to somehow keep the masculine edge. Is that what gyms and sculpted muscles are all about? And the rise of men’s grooming as a bigger industry?

These men seem to feel themselves even more progressive than they are. You can still catch many of them, in telling quick moments, taking emotional dominance over their “equal” partners. They can still get as testy and irritable with women as my father’s generation.

In this election season we are all thinking and talking about things like race, gender and class. I think going back a generation and reading the views that Nora Ephron shares here is healthy for us. Not that it answers questions.

Celeb Detox

Celebrity Detox, Rosie O'Donnell I just read Rosie O’Donnell’s book Celebrity Detox. As with her other book, Finding Me, it is absorbing. Very real in one sense but then somehow inexplicably flawed or warped. But this is life, and all of us. At first I thought that maybe it was just not being used to such honesty, such vulnerability in a book by a celebrity about his/her own life. But what I think the actual problem is that she presents a real attempt to be honest and truthful and yet the truth that comes out is a flawed person with a giant ego. Still reading her books gives me a feeling of immediacy. I hope she writes more in the future.

On a personal level it makes me think about celebrity. We all want fame in one way or another. Fame seems to be the primary marker of success these days; we think that touching fame or being famous will make us better or happier or more fulfilled. I do feel those things, far more than I usually want to admit. But I also fear it; look at all the examples of famous people who have problems. Fame, both thinking about it for myself and paying attention to the fame of other people pulls me from myself. It is at best a time waster because it always pulls me from reality, from productive creativity. It also skews the reality center. I love Rosie’s idea that fame is an addiction.

What I don’t relate to in the book is her attack on people who like control, order, and for things to be smooth. I feel I have both elements in myself, the real raw feeling that Rosie describes and the desire for people to get along and for the surface to appear as cohesive as possible. Most of us have those as conflicting impulses. For me I think the two forces balance me out so I’m not a total monster or a totally obsessive person either.

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