#1 Reason to Come to NYC
Tonight Betty & I were watching some combination of Burn Notice, Keith Olbermann, and Law & Order (always L&O), when we heard fireworks out our window. There were some last week too, so we kind of responded with a “must be more of whatever that was.”
It turns out that yesterday, May 22nd, was the 125th Birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge.
So Happy Birthday, bridge of bridges, and well done, Msrs. Roebling: we still love your bridge.
The Brooklyn Bridge is often listed as one of the top three attractions the French come to NYC to see. The other two? That answer tomorrow, but guesses are welcome.
Don’t Worry, Be Equal
Funny, but I don’t expect we’ll see the usual round of panicked op-eds worrying about the poor boys this time around, since there isn’t anything to worry about. Or rather, there’s never been anything to worry about.
Not that most of us didn’t know that. It seemed hard to believe that hundreds of years of male privilege had been undone by a few female math teachers, and that quickly!
(Thanks to Lena for the link)
& Another Thing
So Kentucky voters have said that race matters.
Has anyone actually come out & said they won’t vote for Clinton because she’s a woman?
Is Geraldine Ferraro talking out her ass again?
Gendered Politics
What’s a politico to do? I am an ardent feminist, which most of you reading already know well enough. But I’m so saddened by the way women are talking about the Democratic nomination and how they feel they’ve been sent to the back of the bus. I don’t doubt that there was some sexism at play, in the media & elsewhere, for Hilary Clinton. It’d be a surprise if there weren’t. But that’s not a good enough reason not to vote. I mean, imagine the Suffragists! Imagine what they fought for, what they went through, & imagine explaining how you, as a woman, chose not to vote because your candidate didn’t get the nomination.
I couldn’t do it. I’m not happy about Obama’s “sweetie” remark at all. And it’s true that I just don’t like Hilary Clinton and never have; her ambition scares me. Not because it’s wrong for a woman to be ambitious – I so wish more were! – but because hers seems more about what it would mean to her to be president than being about what she could do for the country. And it scares me, when someone’s goals seem more about having something to prove than about accomplishing something.
If Ann Richards had run for president, I would have worked on her campaign and given up a year of my life to get her elected. And if Obama doesn’t win the nomination, I will work to get Hilary Clinton elected. Because the sad reality is that John McCain is not pro-woman: he’s not pro-choice, he voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act, and he actually had the nerve to suggest that women should get more education and training if they want to be paid as much as men.
So please, Clinton supporters: get out & support whoever the Democratic nominee is. I will.
Female Jocks
Wow this is depressing.
When I was a kid, I beat one of my peers at the 50 yard dash. & He challenged me to race his older (by a year) cousin, who I also beat.
& Then I was told, by my teacher, that beating boys wasn’t something girls did. & Yes, it did kinda take the fun out of running for me; I stopped running competitively within a year or so.
& I’ve watched my nieces grow up & kick ass in sports, and it made my heart proud to hear about them getting a face full of mud in order to steal third. But then I read something like this & I wonder, at the heart of it, how much has really changed.
Sex in America
Has anyone been watching Sex: The Revolution on VH-1? I catch it late at night sometimes, and I’m finding it a pretty decent series. Tonight, on Episode 3: Do Your Thing, the pride movement, San Francisco, Anita Bryant & Harvey Milk, and commenting, Susan Stryker. Next up, Episode 4: Tainted Love.
It’s good documentary, imho – concise, good interviews, capturing some major cultural moments through the music & images.
80
A very happy birthday to my pops, who turns 80 today! 80! & Do you know, at his last checkup, the doctor informed him that 50% of men are dead by their 79th birthday? What kind of nutty thing is that to tell a person?
The secret to his longevity: he doesn’t stress much. & Hot dogs.
T Party
A nice video about a 24 year old trans person who was hoping for a gender-inclusive ENDA. It does a nice job of humanizing the people who are being left out.
PA Writing
I recently read two books that took place in PA, one fiction, the other non-fiction. Baker Towers is the story of a Polish-Italian PA family, which was intriguing since I’m from a Polish-Italian family (except in my family the husband was the Italian, not the wife, & they met in Brooklyn, not PA). I found it lacking because there were historical inaccuracies – there were no Magic Markers during WWII, women used eyeliner to draw their stockings’ seams, – and because the writing was competent, but not interesting, and the characters were so arm’s-distanced that it was hard to feel for them.
The other, called The Day the Earth Caved In, was about the Centralia mine fire, & while it was good, it was – also kind of dully told.
You’d think a mine fire – and a mine disaster – would be easy to make interesting. Maybe there’s something about writing about PA that people feel they can’t be a little flash when they write.
& I say all that because I’ve written two novels (as yet unpublished) that deal, to a large or small degree, with PA, and with coal towns, and even with WWII. Jennifer Finney Boylan tells me there is a whole literature surrounding the Centralia mine fire these days, and that Harper’s Magazine even did an article about it. (Ms. Boylan has also written two books, The Planets, and The Constellations, that take place in PA, & involve mine fires).
I feel sometimes like a reverse snob; I don’t care for literary writers much, except when they’re very very good (like Tolstoy, like Calvino). I’d like to be a writer who sells books. Honestly, trying to be literary probably set my writing back quite a few years. I look back at some of the stories I wrote before college & they have clearer voices than some later stories (but, like most juvenilia, they have almost no authority to them.)
Anyway. I think Twain said once, never let literature get in the way of your writing. Or something similar.