Grown Women Don’t Read Twilight: Here’s an Alternative (That Just Might Save America)
Yep, the world is a horrible place, thinks mom.
Good thing she ferries her children everywhere instead of letting them take the bus, and sets up play dates and makes them wear helmets and shields them from peanut butter.
She photographs every move her children make. She does it because all the other women do, too.
Plus she has some vague notion that all this picture-making is an outward visible sign of her affection.
But in reality, she’s avoiding reality, carefully constructing a future-past instead of living in the moment, and holding up a small but powerful barrier — a camera, a cellphone — between herself and the kids.
Just like getting those children into the next “good school” is more important than what’s happening now.
At the end of a long day doing all that stuff, mom likes nothing more than to curl up with a good book, or maybe a favorite movie.
Something from one of those billion-dollar franchises like Twilight or The Hunger Games.
Which revolve entirely around teenagers fighting each other to the death.
I see you’ve met the bints I went to high school with, although you forgot “sharing snarky cartoons about how overworked and underappreciated and drunk Mommies are on Facebook.” They spend hours on that, at least as much time as they spend sharing photos of Precious Snowflake’s Latest Poopy in the Potty.
I haven’t been reading as much as I should because I have re-taken up quiltmaking. It’s pretty mindless, but after a few months I should have something to show for my time. I will admit to reading children’s literature lately, though…I’ve been re-reading the work of LM Montgomery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._M._Montgomery). Blows my mind that a hundred years ago 10-year-old girls were expected to understand vocabulary that today’s authors won’t put in books for adults because it’s too advanced for the market.
Ah, yes, stop reading modern childrens literature, rather concern yourself with classical children’s literature.
And the difference? None. Is it so hard to grasp that there was, at the time of Montgomery, a mindless Kathy Shaidle going on about Anne of Green Gables? Fortunately, that version had no internet with which to promulgate her twaddle.
Well. Judgmental much? I’ve read both the Twilight and Hunger Games series. The former because my elder daughter asked me to, the latter because my younger daughter asked. Lo and behold, I was able to know first-hand what they and their peers were consuming and could discuss the books with them, which we did – at length. Notably,I am not at a spa, nor do I have a tattoo, nor do I fit any of the other stereotypes you casually threw out there. My own preferred reading is not People magazine, but rather post-Roman through medieval British history and smart historical fiction. I am also politically engaged and consume an awful lot of conservative political commentary – I even follow PJ Media on Twitter, which is how I got to this piece of crap article.
Does the type of mom you describe exist? Sure – but there are an awful lot of us engaged, intentional type moms who would use those books, or music, or tv shows to connect with our kids and learn what they’re thinking. So I’ve listened to Katy Perry, and watched perhaps 1 episode of Jersey Shore or Honey Boo Boo – enough to place an embargo on them, and say, nah, you can do better than that. I guess this possiblity escaped you?
And just a quick FYI – Katniss does eventually do what you think she should do. You should read before you opine.
I was thinking the same thing about Katniss. It appears that she only saw the first movie and didn’t read the books.
Boom! Holed you below the waterline, did she? Ha ha!
Should’ve done it in the first ten pages. The bigger issue is: why do you get off watching/reading about children kill/ing each other?
Bigger question is why you don’t?
I haven’t read them and feel no need to, but if I read something non-technical, it’s probably a history or an alternate history. Whether it’s a fantasy/sci-fi or not, the question is, is it a good story? You do realize no children were harmed in writing the books, right? With the clumsy aspersion and vapidity of your question, I’m not certain you do. They’re words on paper telling a story. Sounds like it’s a good story, just the Gulag Archipelago in a way, but with what sounds like a more fitting, uplifting ending.
Sounds like you’ve misjudged the Hunger Games completely, Mrs. Shaidle, and I won’t be surprised if you’ve gotten anything else all wrong, because most of what I see from you is you can barely figure out the signifiers for the clique you want to be in.
…..what I see from you is you can barely figure out the signifiers for the clique you want to be in.
Baaa-aaaa
INTJ’s don’t conform to cliques.
Their ideas or opinions don’t flip flop depending on the company they are in.
If you are referring to Mrs. Shaidle as an INTJ, what you haven’t realized is, she is out of her area of expertise, and she is regurgitating pop psych blather without understanding.
She can write competently, just not on these topics.
The line about Katniss shooting the tyrant with an arrow right off? Only a fool could write that.
Yeah, she’s an INTJ. I think that part of the problem with both pieces is that she pulled her punches and wrapped everything up as cotton candy pop culture. She’s got her finger on the pulse of a growing disatisfaction that is showing up in different arenas of life all over the webs. Whether it’s the “End of Men” or “Man up” themes or the “American women are vapid entitlement princesses” theme.
If you read Whisky’s comment on the “Real Men don’t read comic books”, this is another theme that is popping up. Whether we agree or disagree with these themes, the fact that they seem to keep popping up is worth noting. And perhaps a social commentary piece instead of a pop fluff piece.
Kathy – why don’t you write the great American novel that appeals to youth and adults alike; one that has characters that do all the right things in philosphically relevant situations. I am sure someone with your huge talent (although self-professed) would just sell millions of books, have a successful series and change the lives of everyone on the planet. peace would break out and we would all be finally happy, all thanks to Saint Shaidle.
Better yet – read the novels you criticize before putting words onto the screen. Listen to the lyrics before you criticize the songs.
Even better – take a course in comparative literature. Your critical thinking skills could use some exercise.
Best – stop being such a professional firebrand/scold. I am sure your feel so good that your vain glorious writings are attracting such attention, but your intellectual efforts are way off the mark.
Note: Are you really recommending we send our young daugters on the bus rather than drive them to their activities? 1. It’s not as safe as it used to be (especially if you are a woman on a bus in India) and 2. I get to spend time with my daughrter and have a conversation.
Everyone else: this is one of those situations in which you should just walk away. You are all getting so wrapped up with her mishigas (that’s a yiddish term), that you are boosting her ratings and ensuring her literary survival. Her writing are the real trash here, not the novels, comics, movies, etc she excoriates. She’s a bitter, ignorant, scold who seems to live a cold miserable life telling everyone else how to live.
“She’s a bitter, ignorant, scold who seems to live a cold miserable life telling everyone else how to live.”
And I’m guessing you don’t even see the irony in your words. Funny stuff.
Perhaps because it’s excellent literature with well-developed themes about conflict, government, autonomy, control, mortality, gender, race, classism, and duty. Why does anybody read fiction? Not because they “get off” (ew, by the way) to the obviously negative side of the plot, but because there are strong, important themes running through the plot that interest them. By your logic, you get off to the conflict in your beloved Austen novels, which are hundreds of pages of people dithering over a choice they should have made “in the first ten pages.”
This whole article is utterly ridiculous. If you’re not going to read Twilight it should be because the relationships in those books fit all of the psychology association’s criteria for abusive relationships and are lauded as ideal relationships, not because you’re on your high horse about what grown women do.
Jules, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the loss of what used to be called “middlebrow” culture. There was a time when it was not at all unusual for middle-class people to go to the symphony, visit an art museum or gallery, read one of the classics, build a television from a kit, visit a Frank Lloyd Wright building, or learn to play a Coltrane song. Admittedly, these didn’t happen every day, and yes, they had their trashy and escapist entertainment too. But the point is, that wasn’t all they had. People expected more of themselves back then. Today’s students regard Steinbeck and Faulkner as stuffy exercises to be survived and then forgotten, but there was a time when both of those men were best-selling authors.
People like you are trying to revive the middlebrow culture, and more power to you. But it’s going to be a long uphill climb. Far too many people today have nothing but excuses: the symphony is too stuffy, the history books are too hard to read, they haven’t the slightest idea how a television works, and they’ve never heard of Wright or Coltrane. That’s the sort of people Kathy is talking about with these two articles.
That was exactly the point of this article.
I am old enough to remember all of that!
Interesting point about “middlebrow” culture. My parents had an enormous bookcase at one time, filled with a collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books that began in the late 1950′s and ended in the late 1990′s. The early books had a mix of authors, including pop culture authors of the day, but also included Steinbeck, Updike, Pearl Buck, etc. The later books were nothing but mysteries and thrillers.
When Oprah’s book club began and became so successful, I remember reading that book clubs in the past attempted to influence middlebrow culture with their recommendations, but that habit was dropped in the late 60′s / early 70′s because it was seen as ‘judgemental’. It’s very possible that the literary gate-keepers of the time simply had bad taste and their influence diminished. Oprah proved that people appreciate reading recommendations if they have confidence in who is doing the recommending. It’s a shame that Oprah’s taste in books stood alone.
Well, as goes the high-brow, so goes the middle-brow. When the wealthy wish to rub elbows with cultures like gangsta, etc., there is no high road to emulate.
Jules, thank you for pointing out the obvious. If we are to understand our kids, we need to ‘consume’ what they do. How else will we be able to discuss it with them?
I personally don’t feel the need to discuss it with them. I never read Hunger Games, my daughter strongly dislikes Twilight and the boys never read it, and I’ve read enough of Harry Potter not to have any major quarrels with it. But My kids consume much, much more literature than those books.
And we have enough discussions about all manner of things that I know one book is not going to do much damage if I haven’t supervised them well enough.
My 14 yo son has read every single scifi tome we have (and we have a lot), most of them the classics, plus all the man-meets-nature novels like The Perfect Storm, Into Thin Air, etc. My daughter has on her bookshelf- Littke Women, Jurassic Park, Where The Sidewalk Ends, To Kill A Mockingbird, Atonement, The Secret Garden, Anne Frank, The Bell Jar, Holes, Jane Eyre, CS Lews, The Joy Luck Club, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and everything ever written by Jane Austen, Three Cups of Tea, Fight Club, A Wrinkle in Time, plus some of my poetry anthologies that I didn’t know she stole from me.
I’m taking those back!
Now, I know many of these are not kid’s books, but she’s 18 now, so there was no way I was going to keep her from reading any of this. But I did raise them up on good literature- I’m one of those rare birds with an actual library instead of a media room. Once you know their foundation is secure, you don’t have to worry about what kind of rotten bricks they come across, they won’t use them in the building.
Ok, perhaps ‘need’ was the wrong word. I ‘enjoy’ discussing books with my kids.
I do, too- I just avoid the ones I don’t care to read. Fortunately, they read enough other things that I don’t have to. In particular, my son reads the news. Every day. He’s become such a little right-winger from reading what’s bookmarked on my ipad that I had to disconnect him from PJ Media and downgrade him to Fox. Though he still reads Instapundit fiendishly.
So I do see the value of discussing books if one feels they need to be discussed. In the case of PJ Media, I felt he had not developed the ability to look at things from all angles yet. I don’t want him to just parrot talking points. To carry on a serious discussion, he needs to know what the “other side” thinks. Sometimes they have valid points, but in any event it always pays to to know what they’re thinking.
I agree Dana, and I have a very well-read conservative son as well and I challenge him regularly to see all sides of issues. I recently introduced him to my Vonnegut books because he needed some light, entertaining reading.
Not sure about your son, but mine is rather angry about the state of our nation (he’s 17).
Oh yes, he’s very angry. Since he’s so, young (14) he thinks the country is going down the tubes, while I try to assure him that it’s temporary. Of course I’m not at all sure of that myself but no sense worrying him with it. I just focus on helping the kids develop the kinds of qualities that will help them no matter what the environment is like. What else can we do?
My daughter has just started reading Vonnegut, too- she’s 18 and in an honors program at college, and they assigned Cat’s Cradle. I think that it’s great for an older teen- the quirky, snarky nature of his writing is very appealing, especially at that age. I think I have a few others of his that I can send her. I also started reading it in high school (God Bless You Mr. Rosewater- I already had read the other book options and and my teacher was pulling her hair out so she gave me that. Do they make teachers who care like that anymore?).
Edit- well I went and searched the library- someone already snagged Slaughterhouse Five, I’m sure that’s the one I had left. That’s the downside (upside?) of have a real book library and well-read kids, I guess. But thanks for reminding me, now that’s another one I want back!
I, too, went through Vonnegut (and Brautigan) when I was my kids’ age and I’m thrilled that they’re enjoying them now. Who knew having teenagers would be so wonderful?
I read the Twilight series and had a long talk with my 14 year old daughter about how juvenile the love affair was in the book. I talked about unreasonable expectations. Girls need to hear these things from their mothers. Her father isn’t perfect but he is loved, every day of my life. AND, he doesn’t fall apart if I have my own life, too. Boundaries, the young girls need to learn about boundaries.
This is good parenting: check what your kids want to consume, determine if it is acceptable to you as a parent, and if so, discuss the concepts with your children afterward.
I read primarily young adult fiction because I don’t like the stuff they put into “adult” fiction these days–too much reliance on sexual situations and not enough on character or world development. Twilight is garbage on several levels, but I would rather my children read it and discuss it with me to learn its lessons than simply absorb it through the culture. I disagree with the “official” age rating on the Hunger Games books, although I think they’re fairly genius from a political science perspective; they have great opportunities to discuss war, morality, political structure, and economics with an older teen. I also thoroughly enjoyed Divergent (and its sequel Insurgent), and the Seven Realms quartet, both of which offer chances to discuss different political structures and individual decisions.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Plus 100 million adult American women whine and complain a lot. Or at least one ex-pat Canuck does.
If by expat Canuck you mean me, I still live in Canada.
Which explains a WHOLE lot.
Please stay in Canada. We all are much better off, the further you stay away.
I have noticed that Canada’s best is exported. Now I understand why you are still there.
Why the insults people? When did we turn into the daily kos? And do you really think the author was actually trying to give advice on how to write a best selling novel? There is more to reading comprehension than understanding the literal meaning of the words used—or do you think that Voltaire really did think it we live in the best of all possible worlds along with Dr. Pangloss?
Even worse. No wonder you reduce 300 million people to stereotypes. People will always read best-sellers others think beneath them. Many will respond with how they don’t fit the bill by pointing out how they read Plato in the original Greek and blah, blah, blah.
Anyone who thinks Jane Austen is “better” than Spider-Man should have their head examined for blind spots, cuz that’s a perceptual trap and a cultural conceit.
Good stuff is where you find it, not where you expect it to be.
“To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen” – Plotinus
Yeah, THAT Plotinus. The one from Fantastic Four #79, where they visit the Library of Alexandria so Kang the Conquerer won’t destroy the invention of maple syrup, thereby destroying Hockey Night in Canada.
Hahahahaha.
Sorry FailBurton but I’m afraid it sounds like you’re losing it. I think Katie brings out the worst in you. She’s not the white whale, you know. Give yourself a break. She has a lively take on our pop culture sewer and her stuff is no less defensible than yours but a lot more entertaining.
Re women and power(lessness): http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html
The Hunger Games is about the psychological effects of war on child soldiers. And Pride and Prejudice is about a poor family with too many daughters desperately whoring them out to unhappy marriages so they won’t all starve.
When Kathy has an actual political point to make she’s quite the polemicist, but when it comes to pop culture I can read better op-eds in Eye Weekly.
there not being that many Daniel Reams, any chance you’re in SE WV?
“Poor family”? “Whoring them out to unhappy marriages”? These are such obvious misstatements that your either haven’t read, or haven’t the capacity to appreciate, “Pride and Prejudice.” Either way, you really ought to stop exposing your ignorance on the topic. The bigger point is that grown-ups–male and female– read grown-up works, from Austen to Shakespeare to Dickens, Kipling, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, and so much more. The fact that you think it worth your time to denigrate Austen in favor of juvenalia speaks to a deficiency in your education.
The plot of P&P does in fact revolve around the institutional helplessness of females. Money talks.
The chick from Hunger Games is not a strong woman, great article here about it: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/04/the_hunger_games_is_sexist_fai.html
I believe that Alan Rickman was also Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies.
Rickman was brilliant as Snape.
I hate how people see “Twilight” and they read Twilight, they think it’s about them. (Or “Sci-fi” in the last piece about men).
Rather than getting defensive, ask yourself: do I fit the profile in this article?
If not, it’s not about you.
Try to get the main idea of what Kathy writes:
We all know that reading supermarket checkout magazines and watching Real Housewives skyrockets our envy, and increases our dissatisfaction with our own unglamorous lives.
….
Call it Galatians 6:7 or “garbage in, garbage out.”
We can’t escape that unrelenting Law of the Cosmos, no matter how fast we drive that SUV.
I know a married woman with kids who had lost a lot of weight (good for her) who developed an obsession with Twilight books and movies.
Listening to her talk one day, I thought, “Her husband should really wake up because if she’s not having an affair alraedy, whe will be soon.”
That was about a year ago. Sure enough, she no longer wears her wedding band and is practically shacked up with a new guy while her divorce goes through. I don’t know what’s happening with the kids, though.
I know that not everyone who reads Twilight will suffer a broken marriage, but it IS sympomatic of immature expectations for relationships and romance. Chances are there were pre-existing problems with that marriage, but maybe – just maybe – they would have been easier to work out if wifey didn’t expect hubby to act like a vampire from a romantic gothic horror novel written for teenagers.
Exactly, Suzanne. What I find very revealing is the number of men and women who’ve responded defensively to both of my articles, and from their subsequent self-desciption, it should have been cleaer that I wasn’t even talking about them.
Their hypersensitivity to my criticisms says a lot more about them than it ever could about me
If they’d just had shut it and remained anonymous losers you could have some sympathy, but now you have to hate them even worse…… XDDD……..
Then why did you write so sloppily it appears you were talking about them?
Real adult women do read The Hunger Games and Twilight.
And they are fine.
So are the books.
I think the real problem is that you write your crapola about a minority and write it as if it applies to everyone and that’s what most of the people here take issue over. Also that you don;t even have the basic understanding of the subject you comment on. Are you snowed in? Can’t you find anything actually uplifting and positive to do in your life?
You article was WAY too easy on the women IMHO, but I do find it amusing that all these highly intelligent people seem to think that you were literally opining on how The Hunger Games might have been made a “better” book with the “shoot the bad guy at the outset” line.
It’s your smug attitude that makes so many of us hate you. Real women and men can read whatever they want regardless of how you feel about it. Who are you to tell people that they aren’t “real women” or “real men” because they read or do things you disapprove of? Seriously, get over yourself. You’d walk a lot better without that stick up your anus and your nose so high in the air.
No it doesn’t. That’s a fool’s argument and a childish fantasy. Claiming knowledge of millions of people you’ve never met and don’t know says everything about what you WANT to believe as opposed to what is reasonable to believe.
you know if you wrote a piece where you explained well the main idea she had, you would do the job she failed to do.
Reading kathy is painful. It gnaws on my sense of optimism like hearing the thought processes of a low information Obamaphome voter. All the misanthropy of Mark Twain or Mencken, none of the humor or insight.
It is of marginally greater worth to laugh at her like reading Krugman or Frum.
Her tone is such I’m beginning to dislike her perspnally.
Mrs. Shaidle, I think I will ignote your clanging gong from now on.
In the vernacular of the day you are toxic.
See, I didn’t get that part. I love scandal sheets, but they never inspired envy in me. Quite the opposite, for most celebrities, in fact! And then there are some celebrities living good lives and raising children in good marriages, and you feel happy for them.
But I don’t think most of the readers would envy their generally train-wreck lives, or yearn to be “glamorous.”. I may be wrong, but I think most people generally feel happier about themselves and their own lives and families after reading the scandal sheets. I think that is their draw. That, and the clothes.
…it’s always delightful to hear the furniture splintering when our brilliant Ms Shaidle gets in a hypnotized mediocrity’s wheelhouse…
I think folks who have no kids ought to be more circumspect about criticizing moms and how they raise their kids. A lot of folks get off on telling parents what they are doing wrong. That old saying “those who can’t do, teach” isn’t actually an exhortation to preach about stuff you know nothing about. Listening to Kathy rant about pop culture remind me of listening to my dad rant about pop culture (when i was a kid). The sad thing is that i am pretty sure she is younger than me. I think she ought to conclude this one (and the last one) with ” and stay off my lawn!”.
I agree with this. I ran my kids around to extracurricular activities because they didn’t get P.E. in school. Besides dance and sports, I also ran them around to church activities, and to scouting events. I was even a Brownie leader. If you expect school to take care of their well-rounded, fulsome development, you’ll have fat kids who don’t believe in God.
P.S. Not to mention I wouldn’t dream of letting them hang around bus stops alone.
Actually, I suspect it’s Kathy herself who feels her envy skyrocketing with Real Housewives, and supermarket mags. I also suspect she’s dissatisfied with her own life, for whatever reason, and projects this dissatisfaction onto everybody else. (I’m not going to speculate about her weird attitude towards vampire fiction—NOt. EVEN. GOING. THERE.)
Anyway, all of you just shut up, stop criticizing Kathy, and read, and like, whatever she tells you to read and like! Men, women, real housewives, Vampires, all of you! Because that’s what real grown up men and women do! They let somebody else decide for them what they should like, and what they shouldn’t!So when they tell you to raise your cultural consumption bar, you should just listen to what they say! (Which, in Kathy’s case, I guess, would mean you should idolize Adam Carolla, The Die Hard movies and religiously read the weirdness that is Taki Magazine. Oh, yes, and obsess over stand up comedians. Chee, I wonder why nobody takes Conservatives, and Conservative pundits, seriously?
/Sarc. Of course.
And I write this as one who loves Jane Austen, and can’t stand the Twilight series.
And the last bit, about our SUV’s, and the “Unrelenting Law of the Cosmos” simply makes no sense. What do SUV’s have to do with Twilight, Jane Austen, “The Glamor of Evil” or even St. Ignatious? Is Kathy saying that the Cosmos will punish us if we read too many supermarket magazines, or read too much popular fiction? Is somebody—the Cosmos? The Tao? Jane Austen? Adam Carolla?—sitting up there in the Empyrean, taking note of everything we read, or watch, and mumbling something like, “Okay, you watched the Dark Shadows movie, and you read comic books sometimes—the unrelenting law’s gonna come down on you!” Is there anything else, besides Jane Austen, that the Cosmos will permit us to read? Is Edith Wharton okay? Mark Twain? What about Edgar Allen Poe?
What about detective stories? Or are they too closely related to popular fiction? Suppose you liked the Hunger Games, but not Twilight? Do you get points for that?
I suppose she’s trying to say that if we read too much garbage, we’ll end up badly (and, maybe, lose our SUV’s) but there’s a lot of garbage out there, not all of it chick-lit, or vampires or science fiction: Ayn Rand, most manly-man action novels, Christian romance novels (no vampires—lots of Amish) asnine celibrity memoirs and mind-numbingly stupid political screeds written by spokesholes from both the Right, and the Left.
You want garbage? Howzabout Noam Chomsky?
(Hmmm, I wonder why conservatives are frequently seen as jerks? Hmmmmm, it’s veeeeeeryyyyyy Mysterious. . . /Sarc.)
“Hmmm, I wonder why conservatives are frequently seen as jerks?”
Because they keep bumping into progressive intellectual titans such as ‘BettyBlue’. People who obsess over the ‘creative’ in “creative writing”. And who rigorously pattern themselves on Margaret Atwood and her squatters.
Cheers
Wow.
Can you quote even one thing that Betty Blue wrote above which indicates she’s a progressive?
You must be very comfortable in Shaidle’s shallow end of the pool.
and shallow is exactly the word.
Nobody has read Noam Chomsky, especially the people who claim to have read him. (the rest are like the line from “A Fish Called Wanda” – monkeys can read Neitzsche, they just don’t understand it).
I think its imperative to study popular culture (the more middle brow the better), to criticize it, and and try to shape it. Chomsky influences hundreds, but pop culture influences millions.
I would prefer KS picked on “Sex and the City” rather than Twilight. That piece of tripe has spawned millions of Carrie Bradshaw fantasies.
Even more subversive are movies like “Legally Blonde” which tells us it’s a good thing to transform a naturally charming young woman into a snarling, agressive lawyer.
Our culture has given a free pass to
You’re too hard on Legally Blonde. The naturally charming young woman stays quite charming and succeeds because of it, (plus her loyalty, smarts and ethics). For those of us ladies who didn’t want to give up our femininity when we went to work, it’s a classic. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and I have watched it.
And the one liners are absolutely priceless.
I loved Legally Blonde. The main character is smart, honest, loyal and gorgeous. One of my favorite movies.
I have used Legally Blonde to teach students how to write a college essay and to teach them that hard work can lead to success. What great about El is that she has a goal, works to attain it, and get results. She also know where her talents lie and exploits them to her advantage.
Kathy, God bless you and your no PC no bullshit writing style, but I have to put you in your place on the peanut allergy thing. This is a real medical condition with a blood test and skin test verification that can potentially cause death. Could you imagine living with a condition in which an ice cream cone scooped with a cross contaminated scooer could kill you? I empathize with you, I really do. Just months before my daughter had a reaction to peanut butter I had joked around and mocked some article about peanut allergy moms. Karma came and bit me in the ass. You don’t get to choose if it will happen to your kid. I understand that there are idiots out there who have food “intolerances” and play it up for God knows what reason. I can’t even concieve of a good reason for faking something like that, and if someone is faking it they would be putting my daughter at risk because people would not take her condition seriously. It is an extreme burden on our whole family. Every time we go to a restaurant, a picnic, a holiday dinner, even church; we have to worry if someone is going to feed her something that may kill her. Even people who take her condition seriously often don’t understand that it is not just peanut butter that she can’t eat, but anything that may have come in contact with peanuts. It is such a burden that we often avoid such situations altogether. I suggest you do a little research on immunological conditions. You should know they are real, don’t you also have an immunological condition?
Additionally, I am not a supporter of peanut free zones because there is no such thing as a peanut free zone because traces of nuts can potentially be in any food. I just don’t want anyone to feed my child anything ever without my permission. I fear a peanut free zone would create a false sense of security.
I say this as someone who has read more immunology textbooks than shit books like Twilight (however I do admit to reading the first book of the Hunger Games series, I found it too heavy on the heart to read any more).
“I found it too heavy on the heart to read any more).”
Then history is not for you. All that and far worse happen, and the good guys frequently lose.
Do you need a soft helmet, too?
Maybe I do. It was not just the brutality and gore that made it hard to read, but the hoplessness of the situation. Winning was still losing because they had no choice but to kill and there was no moral justification for the killing. The government had absolute tyrannical control of their lives and their consciousness. It was hopeless because there seemed to be no solution. The government had it rigged so there would always be a cost (usually to their own family members) if they resisted even in the smallest ways. At the end of the first book, Catniss had already lost in so many ways and it was not from life’s natural tragedies, it was absolutely forced on her by a tyrannical government.
And yes, learning history often makes my heart feel heavy. I feel pings of hopelessness when I think about the fact that a moral and just civilization is the exception rather than the rule and that most people don’t understand that tyranny is ever waiting for an opportunity to reign.
I hope you can believe I do feel for you. The cutting comments are born of frustration.
History also has 1776 in it.
And that success was a lot more complicated than shooting an arrow into the bad guy.
Contra Shaidle, Katniss’s situation is a lot more complicated than shooting an arrow into the bad guy.
We need to see Katniss’s complications and see that she understands the complications as well before she shoots an arrow into the bad guy; doing it any other way you end up like the guy the other day in the Wisconsin Capitol with a Molotov cocktail.
L, that’s exactly why it’s important to learn the lessons of history. We have a nation today full of deluded fools who assume that the last half-century of America represents the norm for all of human history. Further, they have no knowledge of economics and just basically don’t understand where wealth comes from. To them it’s all magic, and they assume that they can always vote for more magic. Yes, studying history may be depressing, but it also increases our appreciation for what we have now, and our determination to preserve it.
As for the food allergy thing: I believe you because I have a work associate who has a peanut allergy. However: we have a nation full of attention-seeking weenies these days, and some of them will cry “food allergy” just so that everyone else has to make special accommodations for them. There’s also the aggregation problem: the list of foods that seem to trigger allergies in some people has grown huge: nuts, milk, butter, soy, wheat, rice, shellfish, melons, corn… if everything on the list was banned, there’d be almost nothing left to eat. And there’s the further problem: food allergies of this sort were almost unheard of prior to about 1970. I was a school child in the 1960s, and I don’t recall ever having a classmate with a food allergy. So where is this all coming from? What’s changed? Has our pursuit of a perfectly sanitary environment resulted in our immune systems staging a rebellion? Few people seem to be asking that question. There’s way too many people who would rather be defined by their disabilities (so they can claim victim status) rather than work to overcome them.
Well Cousin Dave I would much rather my daughter did not have the allergy. It is a huge burden on our family. We do not gain any benefit from her “victim” status and I don’t support banning things. However, if she is forced by the law to attend a public school they damn well better keep my child safe. I will gladly homeschool her if after giving them a chance they put my daughter’s life in danger. All I want is for people to understand that my husband and I are the only people who can feed her. I do also sympathize with the crazy cut down the oak tree lady. This situation makes me neurotic. The damn squirrels bring walnuts on my porch and put them in our stroller. Ban the squirrels! Just kidding. Thankfully we recently found out from testing that she is not allergic to walnuts, however the manufactured ones often have traces of peanuts, it’s complicated and annoying and frustrating to have to read every damn label! We feel constantly
fearful and isolated. We try to bear her burden for her for now. I can’t imagine anyone going through this for shits and giggles. If the composite woman in the article sacrifices as much as we do for her daughter’s peanut allergy, then she is a pretty damn good mom. Do you like bakery fresh bread and cookies? Can’t have most of them. Going out for ice cream? Traveling and finding safe places to eat? Coffee hour at church? Family picnics? Thai food? All nightmares to us.
Why the insults Tom? What does it add to the conversation?
My response to reading The Hunger Games was to get a bow and some arrows, a couple of hay bales and some targets and practice with my children. We invited the neighbors down and elicited the response that if the world does go south, they’ll be hanging with us, since we would have meat.
I really, really, don’t think Kathy can get it.
This is bugging me, so I will spit this out and then move on. The writer of this post isn’t preaching to the converted, she is preaching to the choir. We get it. You don’t read VDH and not come away with more knowledge. There are 200+ comments on Klavan’s recent post and there is knowledge to be found in these as well. If we indulge in escapist writing, you can be very sure we know what we’re escaping from.
One of the moms at our school became mildly infamous when her then pre-school age child responded to a question of what her mommy does best with: She drinks wine and goes on Facebook. I don’t know what burdens that women bares, or how she copes with them. I don’t like seeing her mocked in public in any case.
If you really want to see mocking, go to YouTube and search for “drunk mom”.
These days, a number of moms have become world famous, because they got plastered when their kids had video cameras to record it.
My point is I don’t want to see anyone mocked for their failings. When Noah’s sons found him naked and drunk they (the good ones) backed into the room and covered him up. We all have failings and it’s the better part of grace to look away, not stop and point.
Thank you Katherine. Well said. This post shows that Ms. Shaidle is nothing more than an intellectual snob. Real women support each other, regardless.
I think the point between reading Twillight, (mediocre girl with supernatural alpha type obsessively in love with her), uploading a million pictures of duck faces or various stages of undress to social media, reading about the Kardashian’s (entitlement princess’s), and the endless streams of Katy Perry type “You go grrrl” type songs feeds a demand for narcissism.
If a segment of men were skewered for being emasculated and incompetent adults, then perhaps it’s fair play to acknowledge the “empowered” princesses.
I would add that the helicopter parent mentality feeds into this narcissism as well.
And narcissism unchecked can get pretty twisted.
I’m reading G.K. Chesterton and Henry Nouwen at the moment. Have also gone on a Patrick Leigh Fermor binge over the past year.
I’m not into chick lit or, God forbid, Can Lit.
This is better than Jane Austen’s book club.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InNnf4dI9AE
Forgive the extreme TMI, but screw waxing. What does it matter if 70s bush is in or out unless you are screwing a different guy every day. Who wants to rub their sandpaper together anyways?
You want romance? The scene where Col. Brandon watches Marianne play the piano (I’m a sucker for Alan Rickman!) or when Mr. Darcy sees Elizabeth at his estate (I’m also a sucker for Colin Firth!).
Yeah, I read Harry Potter (because I started in high school and just was curious) and I read Twilight because it was mindless (really mindless). But I’d rather read Austen or something substantial. I’d rather write something substantial. But you know you’d make a killing writing mindless prattle…
Sorry, Heinrichs, I’m no fan of Atwood, either. And where do I talk about creativity, or demand anybody rigously model themselves on anything? (Isn’t Kathy, actually, the one who doing that?) And why do you talk as if creativity, in writing, or anything else, is such a bad thing?
Did I strike a nerve, somehow? Oops, sorry! Cheers, and hootie-hoo!
But, grace, if modern men are all emasculated, nacissistic and fans of Star Trek, can women really be blamed for fantasizing about glittery vampires? Or Harry Potter? Or shall we just blame Geeks, Twilight fans and all young people in general for not living up to our standards? /Sarc.
It’s the same old B.S. that’s been spun ever since. . . ever since, well, all-wise pundits fretted that novels, especially French ones, and dancing the waltz, would district young women from marrying the men their parents chose for them, and put evil ideas in their heads. (And, no, the worst thing you can do for good literature is urge people to read it, because it’s supposedly virtuous, and won’t put narsty ideas in young folks’ minds! Ha! That raucous laughter you hear in the background comes from the late, great, Flannery O’Connor!)
Of course, I’d say any “Conservative” who uses insults directed at her opponents’ supposed use of SUV’s, and who pushes Helen Gurley Brown as a Conservative icon, is, um, well. . .
There’s no narcism in the Conservative movement! Nup, nup, nup! Just keep telling yourselves that! (But do stop all the breast-beating, and soul searching about why, why, WHY won’t the American people listen to us? You don’t really want to know the answer.)
Well Betty, I wouldn’t say Americans won’t listen to conservatives. More correct to say that liberals and stupid people won’t. But they are the types that read crap fiction about horny werewolves and vampires, they believe that putting up a ‘gun free zone’ sign will deter crime, and that they won’t ever have to pay their bills.
People that won’t listen to common sense usually get what they have coming to them as you will get yours. Enjoy it, because you will have earned it!
Don’t put words in my mouth. All modern men are not emasculated and not all modern women are narcissists. Nor am I into censorship. I’m not into normalizing or encouraging unhealthy behavior, period. That requires at least looking at a situation with a certain amount of awareness.
Dear Twilight Fans:
Please realize that because vampires have no blood pumping through them, they can never get an erection. Enjoy fantasizing about that.
Sincerely,
Logic
Hey Logic, you must be a 4 bit processor in brownout condition, experiencing off spec behavior…
…Or you’d know that these are fantasy stories where some kind of magic works, and if the writer needs the bloodsucker to have wood, they have it.
Can’t anybody play this game?
Please realize that because vampires have no blood pumping through them, they can never get an erection. Enjoy fantasizing about that.
Since vampires as described are physiologically improbable and therefore the next best thing to magic, their magical erections last forever and can also recite poetry.
The Hunger Games is not about child soldiers. It is the ultimate defense of the Second Amendment
The Hunger Games is not about child soldiers. It is the ultimate defense of the Second Amendment and why the citizenry should not only be allowed to be armed but rather encouraged. The theme is rank & file citizen slaves serving a corrupt and entitled ruling class (government). The Games are simply one of many means of reminding the citizenry who has the power. They have enough power to kill your kids, make you watch, and celibrate the fact.
Yes, there is definately more to the story than kids killing eachother. I have not watched the movie, is it from a spectator perspective? If that is the case then I could see how someone who watched the movie without reading the book could form an entirely different perception of the story. The book being from Katniss’ perspective focuses mostly on her moral dilemnas and the absolute hopelessness of her choices under absolute tyranny. The system is rigged so that no matter what choice she makes she loses. It is a deeply disturbing story. Kathy claims it is not a story for grown women to read, perhaps not for anyone then because it is might heavy for teenagers in my opinion.
Hunger Games is about glamourising a Hellenic neo-pagan failed state condition and shit about the second amendment……..
Violent rebellion against an autocratic, over centralized tyrannical government.
Sounds 2nd amendment related to me.
Romanticising a post-modern, post-industrial neo-tribal future? Alabamastan or Arkanstan, anyone? Meh…. I hope not…..
Precisely. I thought these exact words when Kathy compared the brilliantly written Hunger Games trilogy to the banal, narcississtic Twilight series. The first being a direct and dire warning of the consequences of allowing a tyrannical government to disarm and over-power its citizenry (completely relevant to the precipice we stand on today), and the last being immature, romantic drivel that encourages people to keep their heads buried in the sand. I did have to agree with Kathy on her stereotype of the American woman she described (dont we ALL know at least one? And didnt they vote for Obama?), but as someone said above, the article here at PJM is like preaching to the choir. Think the Huffington Post needs to pick it up…ahhhh, now there you may bag some game!
My that’s a high horse you have Betty.
“The SUV’s CD player blasts out another Katy Perry song — or is it last year’s American Idol? — about “loving yourself” and being a “hottie” or a “single lady” or something. Mom can’t make out all the words.”
You don’t actually listen to any Katy Perry, do you? You probably think there’s something deeply regrettable about Taylor Swift.
“And no, I’m not impressed by that Hunger Games girl. A genuinely “strong female character” would just aim her arrow at the Bad Guy and liberate the country.”
Yeah, just like Barack Obama really was assassinated on Jan 21′, 2009. Lady, you’re dumb.
“St. Ignatius talked about the same phenomenon hundreds of years ago. When convalescing from a battle wound, he passed the time reading the “trash” of his day: sagas of chivalrous knights and their (actually, they were usually other men’s) ladies. After the initial thrill wore off, Ignatius always felt somewhat sickly, dissatisfied and depressed, however. Reading these romantic, decadent stories left a bitter taste in his brain, as it were. (A creepy sensation he cured by switching to The Lives of the Saints.)”
Good for him, but no deep life lessons there at all. My grandmother was a screw at Alderson Penitentiary (tough lady) and perfectly down to earth. She loved Harlequin Romances, go figure. If the example you’re trying to make has so little universality, then get a different example, or try a different approach.
Maybe a better response to this:
“We all know that reading supermarket checkout magazines and watching Real Housewives skyrockets our envy, and increases our dissatisfaction with our own unglamorous lives.”
Isn’t to read something else, it’s to be inspired by that dis-satisfaction to do something else.
“Fast forward to today: surely we all know, deep down, that this ubiquitous, morbid, pagan “vampire” crap is symptomatic of some shameful social and sexual sickness, now in its second AIDS-era decade.”
No, for most people, it’s not. It keeps the godbotherers biting their nails though, doesn’t it? And that makes it all worth it.
“(As I’ve said too many times to count, there’s a reason Catholics renew their baptismal vows once a year and promise to reject “the glamor of evil,” an ancient phrase with an eerily modern resonance.)”
Mrs. Shaidle, the outward pretensions of popery are not less silly than a bone in the nose of a primitive, the belief Buddhists evidently have that theirs is simultaneously not a religion and that it does manage to improve anything in the world, or the performance theater of a foot washing baptist, or someone thinking a phylactery is really important in and of itself.
If it’s not done between you and God, it’s probably more for show.
Among all the writers at PJMedia, you above all others give me the impression you have all the self awareness of a dinner plate.
Can you raise your game?
Kathy says something like has a saying “Real people don’t talk that way.”
Real people– that is, average, working class, non-college educated people– have conversations using gross over-generalization without the typical disclaimers that college-educated put into their conversations (“I’m not talking about ALL Twilight readers”) and they manage to understand what is being said. Aristotle once said that an educated mind can contemplate a thought he disagrees with and reject it. I would add that an educated mind can read things like “Grown Women Don’t Read Twilight Books” and bear in mind all the typical disclaimers necessary to make sense of what is being said. Reading between the lines is the mark of an educated reader.
You know, when I understood the principle “if you don’t fit the profile, it’s not about you” it really helped my blood pressure.
Kathy manages to write outrageous items on a very regular basis, and receives lots of attention by doing so. Congratulations, Kathy!
Anyway, I am a very mature woman, and have been fascinated by reality TV, especially Hoarders and Toddlers and Tiaras. Amazing. (I only watch TV when on holiday). I loved the Twilight Trilogy, not so much the movies because they veer so much from The Books. And, I am currently enamoured with the Burma War and General Wm Slim, as well as the Drefuss Affair. I maintain a fairly adequate website centering on a small part of Argyll (knapdalepeople.com), and am currently obsessing over the MacMillan Clan. So, you see, I am quite confident in my intellectual credentials. But I can’t write a column like Kathy Shaidle does. I know, I’m not perky enough.
I’m bemused and a bit shocked that so many on PJM would spend time and money on this shallow ecsapist trash – and then post messages that in some cases seem to be an attempt to elevate this stuff into something meaningful. Very little of value has been produced since the low-brow morons took over the culture in the ’60s and seeking it out requires some effort, but helping to support the bottom-feeders by purchasing their vomit only encourages them to puke up more.
I’m bemused and a bit shocked that so many on PJM would spend time and money on this shallow trash – and then post messages that in some cases seem to be an attempt to elevate this stuff into something meaningful. Very little of value in any of the arts has been produced since the low-brow morons took over the culture in the ’60s and seeking it out requires effort, but helping to support the cultural bottom-feeders by purchasing their vomit only encourages them to puke up more.
I’m bemused and a bit shocked that so many on PJM would spend time and money on this shallow trash – and then post messages that in some cases seem to be an attempt to elevate this stuff into something meaningful. Very little of value in any of the arts has been produced since the low-brow morons took over the culture in the ’60s and seeking it out requires effort, but helping to support the cultural bottom-feeders by purchasing their vomit only encourages them to puke up more.
I’m bemused and a bit shocked that so many on PJM would spend time and money on this shallow trash – and then post messages that in some cases seem to be an attempt to elevate this stuff into something meaningful. Very little of value in any of the arts has been produced since the low-brow morons took over the culture in the ’60s and seeking it out requires effort, but helping to support the cultural bottom-feeders by purchasing their vomit only encourages them to puke up more.
I’m bemused and a bit shocked that so many on PJM would spend time and money on this shallow trash – and then post messages that in some cases seem to be an attempt to elevate this stuff into something meaningful.
And I laugh myself silly at the idea that you presume to define shallow trash, as if you are somehow above it all. These books are deeper than both you and Shaidle as they ask simple “what if” questions and explore possible answers. Having the intellectual curiosity to ask questions is a great deal deeper than the intellectually lazy presumption that you have answers. The entire genre of speculative fiction (you may know it as sci-fi) is based on “what if.” Given that sci-fi (what if) has inspired scientists and engineers to design and create the gee-whiz tech that we are surrounded by, real life seems pretty deep and meaningful enough to me.
You’re right about my being rather opinionated and dismissive of pretty much all popular culture. I used to give it a go when someone would recommend a current book or movie to me but I always wound up deeply disappointed and even a little depressed at what I think is a lack of beauty of language, really the JOY of language that you find in the older works. I confess that I’m an “old school” – how I hate the current sloppy over-use of that term! – art for art’s sake kind of person.
I feel for you. Unfortunately, with the way the education system is run now and these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if even the classics such as Shakespeare or other literature ended up butchered by professors teaching students. I know because I myself had to endure such an environment last semester with Chaucer, having to put up with a guy named Dr. Richard Palmer (how that guy even got a Ph.D in the study of Chaucer, I’ll never know), who constantly tries to find some excuse to insert some really hateful statements about the Catholic Church, saying the Church (I’d say “christians”, but Chaucer was before the Reformation, so Catholicism was the only religious group in the UK) was misogynistic (to the extent that he even implied that the Church followers frequently did stuff to women comparable to some Muslim’s honor killings, and claimed that Saint Augustine was somehow responsible for misogyny’s creation), anti-semitic jerks, and goes out of his way to praise the Second Wave Feminist Movement, inserting such “saintly” (quotes meaning sarcasm) phrases as “Women need men like Fish need Bicycles” into the lecture. Thanks to his class, as well as another professor, Matt Dolloff (who frequently tried to emphasize his radical liberal leaning [wanting to attend an Occupy meeting, for one thing], and also saying such bizzare things such as claiming that either Gregory Mendell or Thomas Acquainus said that “Nature is a Whore which must be raped”, and frequently stating standard prog lines, that my interest in any reading, never mind advanced literature, is effectively murdered, possibly permanently. If not permanently, it certainly is going to take a heck of a long time for me to regain any joy in reading.
Shakespeare has been re-interpreted to fit post-modern standards on stages around the world for decades. And have you checked out contemporary art recently? Fashionable art is nothing but juvenile political rants presented hidiously. When politics invade art, art dies.
Pride and Prejudice maybe but stay away from “Wuthering Heights” — that was the only thing I’ve ever read that I would describe as “disturbing” (apropos of nothing I suppose)
That’s probably why it’s hands down my favorite book, well, tied for first place with A Prayer for Owen Meany
I couldn’t put it down but I certainly cannot say that I “liked” it……quite a unique work.
Quite apart from Heathcliff’s extraordinary destructiveness, it’s a story of love that endures through all manner of shocks, separations and insults, even death. Who doesn’t want a love like that? Okay- I admit, the digging up of her bones is a little creepy.
I think Heathcliffe is the only “serious” character I’ve ever encountered who literally (almost tautologically I guess) has no redeming qualities whatever–he even manages to pervert the whole concept of “love” and in the process convert it into one of the purest forms of “evil” in all literature. Brilliant work but again, disturbing how many are victimized and brutalized as a result of that man’s “love.”
This is a funny article, because I’m an Austen fanatic (Georgette Heyer is a good substitute when you run out of Austen) who also really likes young adult dystopian future fiction.
Maybe I’m the strange one, because I can jump from Anna Karenina to Harry Potter without batting an eyelash.
I read all the Georgette Heyer (sp?) books and I’m as studly as a man can get—real witty stuff that!
I’m with you, Kathy. This kind of stuff doesn’t appeal to me, and it never has. But then, I possess an actual library (although thank God for Kindle and ibooks, because the shelves are all full). And was probably the youngest person at the Winchester Cathedral Evensong I attended last year. So I guess I’m pretty far out of the mainstream.
Regarding books- wit most of these, the characters are unsympathetic, I don’t learn anything, and the suspense is superficial. Plus they’re too easy to read. The last is actually important if I’m buying these- I’m a very, very fast reader and once checked out War and Peace just to have something to read for a while. I finally dropped out of my book club because of the novels they kept dragging in off of the bestsellers lists. There are just not that many great books- maybe once or twice a year you get something like “Unbroken”. When it was my turn to host I would almost always pick nonfiction- though there at the end I even tried to entice them with “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”. But it didn’t work- and these are women mostly with graduate degrees.
A lot of it is just my taste, though. I don’t want to be shocked or disturbed (although “Unbroken” was both of those, but it was true, so I wanted to read it because it had a point), I want a good story well-told. Preferably with a happy ending, though that’s not required if I feel like the book has some kind of take-home-lesson. But most of them don’t.
They’re like Cohen movies, that just end after dragging you through a bunch of mind-bending trauma. If in the end, I have to ask, “What was that for?” then I just don’t feel like wasting time on it. As I said to my husband, if I get something out of it personally, if I’m a better person (or just feel better) after I’m done, I’ll watch or read it. If not, I don’t care if it’s a great work of art by someone else’s standard.
I am a huge, huge fan of Netflix and Amazon Prime video, there is a deep well of great stuff often produced by the BBC (thanks, UK taxpayers) and of course, BBC radio.
I think it’s rubbed off on the kids pretty well as I wrote in a post above, they’re big Harry Potter fans (bigger Tolkien fans, though) and oddly enough, my youngest son (whose favorite past time is MineCraft) loves Russian composers so we’re going to see Swan Lake when it come to our cold and isolated little neck of the woods.
Of course, I do have Cold Play, Adele and Train among others on my ipod. I think all the good stuff isn’t necessarily in the past, but it just represents a much bigger reservoir to draw from.
“Fast forward to today: surely we all know, deep down, that this ubiquitous, morbid, pagan “vampire” crap is symptomatic of some shameful social and sexual sickness, now in its second AIDS-era decade.”
AMEN! I was just thinking about this the other day, how much I loved Anne Rice when I was FOURTEEN. Of coure I was also into drugs, Wicca,and bulimia. It astounds me that adults today read the modern equivalent.
Right now I am reading Atlas Shrugged. I am sorry I did not read it much earlier in life.
Well, there you have it. There isn’t enough time in the day- I uaually like to spend my time on something that’s not just entertaining (though I do watch a couple of current TV series). I’m currently reading Pierre Telhard de Chardin, and he’s someone I, too, wish I’d read much earlier in life.
I have been on sort of a mission the last year or so to read all of the things I “should have” read a long time ago (as long as they are moderately appealing.)Before that I tended to read modern fiction and I am sick to death of reading books that have great writing but no real ending. Like the author is too scared to make his book have a point, so it’s up to YOU as the reader to come up with a point. No! I want to be told a story and have some things to chew on after. The book I felt the most strongly this way about was called Gods Without Men- a really well-written novel that just left me angry and disappointed when I reached the non-ending. Cloud Atlas was the same for me.
Atlas Shrugged definitely has a point to it, which makes me like it in spite of the difficult writing style (which I did get used to at about page 300!)
yes, the “What was that for?” you mentioned above. Most modern fiction seems afflicted with it.
Sometimes I’ll also read newer novels and watch movies that don’t initially intrigue me IF it looks like they’re going to be part of the permanent culture. It did bother me that I didn’t know the first Rule of Fight Club, so I saw the movie.
With books, that threshold is much higher (since the time investment is much larger). With music, it’s very low. But occasionally I do feel pretty far out of touch, though at this point not so far out of touch that I feel compelled to read 50 Shades or Twilight. They, too, will pass.
Harry Potter- well, he’s got a theme park. Maybe I better get started on volumes 2-7.
Sigh. Have you ever been a female loitering at a bus-stop? Even a school bus stop? You can find the going rate for any sexual act, with the right car driving by. Right stop, that’s a lot of right cars.
My daughter will never, ever, ever wait at a bus-stop. It’s about like tethering a goat.
Kathy, when you have kids, talk. Until then, realize that the world with kids in it was populated by lust-filled, materialistic, base people who gave into all their urges. That’s not you. You are more likely to fall victim to the sin of contempt. That’s pride with tennis-shoes on.
And, fwiw, Twilight was written by a devout Mormon Sunday School teacher.
Even without the content of the article, that subtitle is worth a standing ovation.
And then she follows it by beginning a sentence with “So….”.
*sigh*
Kathy, sometimes you do good, entertaining, work. Enough with the “no true scotsman” stuff.
Besides, what’s so great about Jane Austen? Sure she invented the romantic comedy…over and over again…by recycling the same story.
Harlequin presents 110 new stories a month. JA’s got five.
How many pages does the Times devote to weddings? B/c you know, we only need one good one, ever, right?
Respectfully disagreeing on some points here. I don’t like Twilight or Hunger Games (I found Katniss’s character arc incredibly unsatisfying), but I do read paranormal fiction, and write it too. I’d say that a good paranormal occupies the same niche a lot of science fiction does–asking the question “what if we’re not alone?” The genre’s got a pretty bad rap since the most prominent examples tend to be . . . well . . . Twilightesque, but there are gems there if you’re willing to give ‘em the chance. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files springs to mind.
As for vampires/the undead as romantic leads? Yes, it’s a little weird and cliche as all get out. But handled competently, it still has potential for an interesting story–because what happens to a person when they can literally live forever? When everything, including the morals of a civilization, is transient? I admit I don’t write it myself, because I think it’s been overdone, but I’ve seen it handled pretty darn well.
I think the key here is not to make a diet of *only* one thing or t’other. Read about monsters if you like, but don’t let that be the only thing your brain consumes, or you could indeed wind up thinking an undead beastie is the perfect boyfriend. In fact, a lot of my paranormal plots spring from my other personal interests–the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the fairy tales of pre-Soviet Russia, and most recently, the 12th and 13th Dynasties of ancient Egypt.
In short, I do agree that there’s a lot of junk in the genre, but I don’t think that the genre itself is without merit.
Everyone take a breather and go read “The Feminization of American Culture” by Ann Douglass. http://www.amazon.com/The-Feminization-American-Culture-Douglas/dp/0374525587
And for the few losers who are merely walking, as opposed to running, to their local library to get a copy here is a quote from the introduction: “Indeed, this book, while focused upon written sources, might be described in one sense as a study of readers and of those who shared and shaped their taste.”
On the other hand, maybe those who aren’t interested are displaying the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 1:18.
valorizing new england prigs, is certainly a shaky intellectual ground. they were the most markedly non- heroic, vicious, somewhat totalitarian-leaning jerks in all of America. They’re the bunch that think blighting the south, and hamstringing the west, while merely patronising the middle makes for good national policies. The three most murderous groups on American soil have been Indians, jihadists, and new england utopianists. We killed off one group, are in the midst of killing the second group, and yet, somehow, are supposed to consider the third group a good idea?
Mormon plural wives- western- attended Seneca Falls. The people who ran Seneca Falls didn’t know what to do with them. The pope can visit animists in Africa and find a way to put feathers on his mitre, and wear hand-woven cloth. I’m thinking that’s more cosmopolitan than a hysterical new england blue-stocking.
calling people losers for not running to an academic library to read about one corner of the country is, likewise, doubtful debate skills.
picking the big gorilla to make your fencing partners feel globally inadequate is a bully’s tactic. there are twelve apostolic seats, and 3,500 years of torah/biblical tradition. there’s a really good chance that a respected member of the church deeply disagrees with your “of course…”
and yes, I don’t just disagree with you. I disagree with Kathy Shaidle in theory and in practice, on the life rhythm of American suburbs- where I happen to live, drive a mini-van, car-pool, and read vampire fiction. My husband and sons play video games, as do all their friends, and all their friends’ dads. I’m not hanging men out to dry. I think it’s a good, worthwhile culture sneered at by someone far, far away, who hasn’t got a clue.
>> . . . calling people losers for not running to an academic library to read about one corner of the country is, likewise, doubtful debate skills.
For the humorless, it was a joke.
>> blighting the south . . . new england utopianists
Revealing.
>> I’m not hanging men out to dry.
Me neither. We’re good people.
Civil War.
Abortion was a New York bohemian policy, mostly paid for by gov’t, in the south. Mississippi is the state shutting down abortion clinics. It’s safer to be a black infant in Mississippi, under Haley Barbour, than in New York, Newark, or Chicago.
Again, Civil War. Walter Russell Mead is getting upset about the passing of power from New Englanders. They have been murderous freaks, globally. Read ” The Fish who swallowed a Whale” for a New Orleans view of New England gentry.
Sodomy, mostly legislating against passing around communicable diseases- there weren’t gratuitous raids on gay clubs. The south kept the laws on the books until this millenium.
I’d put in Japanese internment camps. Californians didn’t cook that up.
That Civil War thing, again.
Tuskegee syphilis experiments. run in the south, on southerners, under direction of damn yankees.
John Holdren, current science czar, wrote books advocating spaying “appalachian americans”- not “massachusetts bay-americans.” The population density in Boston is way, way higher. The rate of moral squalor is, likewise, super-high. somehow, though, southerners are the icky ones.
Sherman. We hung Germans who did what he did.
Waco. The Branch Davidians had lived in peace with their fundamentalist Baptist neighbors for over half a century. How many years of a hard-left Democrat in charge did it take for them to die?
“bitter clingers”? guns and religion are what make regular people international actors. Right now, the only effective African transformations are coming from religious groups- evangelical, pentecostal, lutheran, baptist- bitter clingers, one and all. Obama himself collaborated with his Luo cousin to kill African Christians, to sieze power. Hillary apologizes for armed Muslim radicals destroying their own countrymen.
>> Sherman. We hung Germans who did what he did.
Nope. What Southern women hysterically claimed he did long after the fact, and what he did are two separate things. The men who fought him knew better and didn’t blame him. He was popular in Atlanta until Jeff Davis memoir came out and enshrined the view the Southerners ought to hate him. That view was the myth of Southern constitutionalism. See “Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism” by Neeley. It’s absurdity borne of ignorance. And the largest welfare project in US history was begun in the South to keep soldiers in the field.
>> Tuskegee syphilis experiments. run in the south, on southerners, under direction of damn yankees.
Yeah, and the South had a hand in the whole eugenics movement, which was nothing more than an attempt to biologicize social classes. Sound familiar? Who bought into that hook, line, and sinker from the start and helped enshrine that nonsense? Southerners, and with great gusto.
Your romantic view on the Civil War in a common one, but cynical and false. It isn’t the clean dividing line as you’d like to think. Your view owes far more to the Progressive era than you know. For example, see “The Legal Origins of the Modern American State” by William J. Novak. You think modern trends could have been stopped by Southern independence, but they wouldn’t have in even a southern nation if they’d won. The South was modernizing as fast as it could. The railroads gave free tickets to anyone wanting to go to a secession convention. Some things never change. You think the CW was some Tower of Babel moment, but that is pretty dumb on inspection though guys like you never meet up with anyone that knows much about history so you just keep confidently saying the same crap that has no basis in fact.
You wish to claim there is some magic moment where we could have avoided something and become the nation we’d all like –a reverse magic bullet– but that is pretty silly. No, the hard work of deciding the future will take people with a serious outlook, and that isn’t what your are espousing with your smug-knowingness of the roots of perfidy.
I don’t think the south could have won. I don’t think the south should have won.
I do think New England utopianists are homicidal freaks. The first amendment was to keep Massachusetts divines from hanging evangelizing Pennsylvania Quakers. Salem witch -hangings happened in New England, not in New Orleans, where we really do have witches.
Ann Coulter does a yeoman’s job of listing out how interfering and self-righteous and totally pin-headed and not- cosmopolitan the credentialed Northern crew is, if you need books cited.
Just because the South was wrong doesn’t make the North right. New England utopianists are not good people. Never have been, never will have a chance, particularly. Something about not having replacement rates on children.
The pure suckiness of damn Yankee soldiers wasn’t from a book- it was from my family. My mother heard it from her great-grandfather, who fought in that war. That’s not long ago and far away.
Wilson bought the eugenics movement. Wilson, pres of Princeton. Wilson, damn Yankee.
It was Sanger, in New York, it was Besant in England, and it was odd German types- Haeckel, and so on.
oh yeah- Washington, Southern slave-holder.
Jefferson- Southern slave-holder.
Adams- damn Yankee who signed Alien and Sedition acts.
FDR- japanese internment camps.
I assume grown women should not be reading comic books either. I wonder what she has to say about Lord of the Rings and other works of fiction.
‘Tunnel in the Sky’ a Heinlein ‘Juvenile’ posits a world in which
parents deliberately expose their teenagers to deadly danger.
The parent’s reasons, like those of Cordwainer Smith’s ‘Norstrilians’
seemed more than a little odd to my teenage self, but 50 years later,
having watched the slow downward course of a society attempting to
legislate heaven on earth, complete with stairway, I understand.
@ 16. batb: I’m reading G.K. Chesterton
Have you come across his ‘The Secret People’ ?
I get the damnedest feeling of premonition when I read it:
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
I agree with Kathy’s viewpoint. And just for the record, I’m female.
The venomous critics on here are missing her point. There’s a big difference between reading comic books and ‘Twilight’ novels as a past time and immersing themselves to the point where it influences their daily lives and decisions. That type of mindset usually doesn’t include the heavy lifting of political, historical, economic, and foreign policy realities. If you want to read something relevant, constructive, and educational, try the Constitution. Too many Americans are unfamiliar with the document that helped found this country. Read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Read Orwell’s 1984. Read FDR’s Folly by Jim Powell. Read Dinesh D’Souza’s analysis of Obama’s socialist philosophy.
(http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem.html) Watch his documentary: 2016: Obama’s America.
Those books, articles, and the film, describe the current White House regime.
She’s drawing the obvious correlation between people who take seriously the maudlin melodramatic ‘vampire’ novels which are just Harlequin Romances with an edge, and their voting habits. Which is why the SCOAMF got re-installed for a second term.
In defense of Harlequin, which I only read occasionally, anyway….
Romance,as a category, is the largest category of fiction. The partners meet, spar, negotiate, come to understanding, get married. They don’t friend-zone, hookup, space out. They spar. This is a useful set of skills.
The single most consequential financial choice a woman can make is who she marries. I’d say “middle and lower” but Ivan Boesky spent his wife’s fortune down, so I’m going to say all. The romance novel specializes in anatomizing a man’s prowess, and thereby, character. Just about anything can be romanticized- how he hangs his arm out his sportscar, trailing a cigarette, to mastering computer code. Bad characters get broken up with decisively, not immortalized in heavy-breathing, awful blog posts, or long, failed living togethers.
There are separate genres for cowboys, oil-field workers, ranch hands, and that’s just at the low-end of the cowboy genre. There’s the billionaire group- a small group, oddly enough. There’s real estate. There’s military romances, for every last single group of military guys, including crippled by an IED, burned, and PTSD. Women will find a way to love just about any decent character man, in these books.
Something like 40% of single young women can’t get men to marry them, even when they are carrying his child, possibly love him dearly, and want a life with him. I’d say romance novels have skills they could learn, if they didn’t scorn the genre.
Second, romance readers make love with their spouses at a higher rate, with more satisfaction for both partners, than non-readers. For men, this translates into less heart disease, less stroke, longer life, and better work prospects. That’s life, health and money b/c the wife is filling her mind with, per Kathy, “TRASH.”
So, better interpersonal skills, better negotiations, better marital satisfaction, more bank…tell me, is there a downside I’m missing?
I’ll confess- the only way I keep parts of American history in order is from Jude Deveraux novels. Janet Dailey did a set of books, one for each state, 35,000 words each- it’s how I know about the Indianapolis 500-(yeah, no tv at the time- I was virtuous, high-minded, in school.) Jude Deveraux followed a set of families from the first American settlers through modern times. The British had the Stamp Act, and it happened long ago, and was small enough, that the only way I remember it is from a silly masked cat in one of her books. A funny, sweet, romance. I still recommend it, if it’s on the shelf.
cheesy medieval romance/porn? you get the vinyards in england in your head. It’s hard to splutter on when someone tries to contradict global warming hooey and they mention vinyards in england. you already know about them, but just haven’t thought about it.
or medieval romance stuff, usually written by professor-types. accurate, or else the readers complain.
one sentence in a map-book can practically be a three-parter series. way more imaginatively useful than a single sentence.
Says ari . . .
>> Wilson bought the eugenics movement. Wilson, pres of Princeton. Wilson, damn Yankee. It was Sanger, in New York, it was Besant in England, and it was odd German types- Haeckel, and so on.
Really? The eugenics movement was in fact a series of distinct campaigns at the state level. Small groups of determined individuals brought legislation at the state level.
In the Deep South, women’s associations had a key role in rallying support for eugenic reform. The political and social influence of southern clubwomen in their communities helped implement eugenics across the region. Between 1915 ad 1920 women’s clubs in every state of the Deep South had a critical role in establishing public eugenic institutions.
As always you’re merely offloading the blame for the effects of wealth and modernity on the Yanks. The Southerners didn’t fare any better, and showed no serious or even special resistance to any of these bad ideas, and usually less. The social science that eugenics relied on was created to defend slavery. Ralph Ellison, the famous black author, made the same point in his “Shadow and Act”.
>> Just because the South was wrong doesn’t make the North right.
Yeah, and just because the North was wrong doesn’t make the South right. Southern intellectuals saw slavery as a bulwark against utopian movements. That was a great defense wasn’t it? But the real problem with your analysis is there is no distinctive culture apart from Lost Cause myth. Blacks and dissenters are carefully excluded from the narrative. There is no North/South dichotomy anywhere near strong enough to support even the framework in which you’re making these absurd claims. There were many Southern unionists, and many Northern democratic anti-war “copperheads”. All washed away in the tide of the mythical Lost Cause.
>> The pure suckiness of damn Yankee soldiers wasn’t from a book- it was from my family. My mother heard it from her great-grandfather, who fought in that war. That’s not long ago and far away.
And I’ve read it in Southern novels, tv, and countless movies through childhood up until now. It doesn’t make it true, and more than your families memories should be thought of as unbiased. Of course they aren’t. The Lost Cause narrative is a powerful one, as are most myths. Anyone who thinks that family memories aren’t politicized should read “Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State”. The joke is that Kentucky waited until after the war to secede. Memory and what happened get divorced oftentimes in quite demonstrable ways. And if you think Johnny Reb was a choirboy, and boy are you naive. They committed a great number of atrocities, and the idea that the Yanks were worse is naive. The South was always a very violent place, and they killed their own with regularity. See the brutality in “Victims: A True Story Of The Civil War” by Phillip Shaw Paludan. Confederate troops massacred Unionist mountaineers at Shelton Laurel, North Carolina by Confederate troops. One of many ghastly episodes that was life in the South. If only the North/South dichotomy you are preaching meant what you wish it did. Not even close.
I should know that the eugenics movement was mostly perpetrated at the state level. I’m from Indiana, and our fair state legislature passed a law in 1907 and was signed by the Governor that allowed for involuntary sterilization. Wilson took office in 1913. Do the math.
No distinct southern culture?????
Soldiers, in any war, kill people. It’s what they do. It’s their job. Their job is not to be a choir-boy. That’s not the concern, here.
Federal soldiers- that would be Northerners- invaded a section of the country- the south- that they had an intense disagreement with.
California had miners with property- rights claims. Philadelphia engineering companies had different legal structures, and different claims. California- the West- did not invade Philadelphia- the Northeast.
Indians had property claims. They killed people. We killed off most of them, and said good riddance. Jihadis are currently making ideological property claims- New York is supposed to go all caliphate style. We’d best kill as many of them as possible, since they had that idea about Constantinople. They took 700 years, countless waves of assaults, and we now call it Istanbul. We’re, what- 20 years in? So there’s 680 to go, unless we’re efficient? New England utopianists, have a nasty habit of trying to enforce their vision on the rest of the United States. I’m mostly getting crabby about this b/c of an elegaic piece by Walter Russell Mead, who is sad about this. He’s suggesting- new, improved, more- give us a gold star for trying- and I’m irritated.
Eugenics was “progressive.” One thing people say about the south is that it is “regressive.” I can’t really help it that the mayor’s wife wants to talk high-minded hooey about the local white-trash. I can quite nicely point out that eugenics, in America, started in the bohemian sections of New York- ably documented by Dinesh D’souza, and corroborated by “Bohemians” author I can’t remember- reading of which makes one want to take a shower with double-strength antibacterial soap.
And, second, they didn’t just talk to each other, they sent out speakers on the college lecture circuit. I don’t know many Mississippi State profs on a northern lecture circuit. Do you?
>> No distinct southern culture?????
This is where you could mention what was distinct about it? Southerners were Americans with the same values as Yanks. They never succeeded in establishing a basis for a unique culture that didn’t have to do with slavery.
Look, what the South had was an honor culture. You’ve never heard of that right? Honor cultures were the way of the old world, and if you think that better then you’re nuts. Here’s some reading for you.
-”Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South” by Bertram Wyatt Brown.
-”Honor and It’s Adversaries”, the 1st chapter of the book “Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South” by Edward L. Ayers
-”Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch”: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry.” by Elliott J. Gorn in The American Historical Review 90 (1): 18–43. (February 1985).
You want to present Northerners as agressive prosthelytizers of various things, and presumably present Southerners as those who didn’t do such things. It’s all bosh. The dichotomy is flawed. Do you think it is genetic? “Mississippi State profs on a northern lecture circuit”? So funny. No, Southern ideology was propagated from Northern universities. The Lost Cause mythology and the biological utopianism that went with it was preached very effectively from New York’s Columbia University by William Dunning, who was born in New Jersey.
Now some Southerners went to Hollywood and made movies. “Birth of a Nation” made Holllywood! The most successful film of its era, or any era really. Oh yeah, Southern folks just kept to themselves and minded their own unique culture while the Yanks made a hash of the world. What a bunch of crap. I’m out. Good luck in your reading Ari!
And don’t even get me started on Southern Agrarianism out of Vanderbilt, from the border state of Tennessee as if that mattered at all. You’re a romantic Ari. A Confederate Romantic. You should take Kathy’s advice and broaden yourself. You’re steeped in the views of the romantic novel Gone with the Wind.
right now, the most focused aid for africa is coming from evangelicals and fundamentalists in the deep south. these are likely the white people that the women’s clubs you mentioned were having hissy fits about.
the founder of hobby lobby, a pentecostal, is suing to keep o’care’s requirement to prescribe morning after pills- off his employee’s health insurance. all of his siblings are pentecostal preachers, or missionaries, or married to preachers and missionaries.
brazil- most of the middle class-were favela dwellers who were pastored by pentecostal missionaries. the main missionary society thought the pastors were slacking, by ministering to wealthy brazilians- they audited- the missionaries had settled in the favela, built a church, and pastored people from poverty to wealth.
Obama’s Chicago? would you say that the south side is more wealthy now, or worse? hey, let’s throw in all the black people in america, under the O.
He’s making ideological and, really, religious arguments, and he’s got an army to back him up. He’s not compromising, and he’s not good. Hillary, too. Prissy, ineffective, and, effectively homicidal.
The article that started all this starts by talking smack about, basically, southern and western, mostly Protestant free-thinking variations- suburban culture. I’m saying this culture that apparently doesn’t measure up to a foreigner’s bleak vision is a good, worthwhile culture. I don’t have to defend all of it- I’m just irritated that I have to defend any of it, in the first place. It’s been here, sorting itself out, since 1950. It’s a good world.
It’s a pre- Rousseau world, really. Grown men and teens and boys can play the same games, not because the men are immature, but because the boys see a path to a pretty good maturity. Video games, information management,financial management, sports, technology, military science- these are all industries or jobs in the south and the west. The girls- at age seven, they sound like their mothers- and can expect a similar life- some work, several kids, a nice husband, volunteer work.
It’s not the basket-case that the northeast is, at least from what I’ve read in newspapers and blogs. There are guns, dogs, fishing, video games, NASCAR, German beers, star wars videos…. the only women I know with tongue piercings had been married for a while– for her example of “it all falls apart.” their husbands look devoted and happy.
Ari, I’m fine with the South and Southerners. It is you who have made wildly distorted provincialistic statements that I’ve merely countered.
Red states are more generous than blue states, and the religious are more generous than the non-religious no matter where they live. You’re the one forcing regional narratives where they don’t fit, not me. I’m merely pointing out the absurdity of what you’ve said. Don’t force on me a view I don’t hold and haven’t advanced. I’m not that dumb.
I should have said “red states no matter where they are”. Utah isn’t in the Deep South last time I checked.
Nor Idaho, it and Utah being the top two states in donating to charity. Your regional narrative really is nothing more than romanticism.
Here’s the deal Ari, I’m fine with the South and Southerners. I’m most certainly not fine with Confederate Romantics. All Southerners are most certainly NOT Confederate Romantics. If you think they are or should be then you’re badly mistaken. If you interpret my opposition to Confederate Romanticism as opposition to the South or Southerners in any way you are way, way, way off-base. You’re in the grip of an ideology Ari. An ideology that infected the North, and Southern partisan historians were writing the textbooks that Yankee kids read in school within not much more than a generation or two after the Civil War. False ideology is the problem no matter what region you’re talking about. The South used propaganda quite aggressively and to great harm, both within the region and the country generally. And the defense of slavery spawned the most vicious social science nonsense in the nation, and tied into the false ideology of hereditarianism and biological utopianism that was sweeping the world, and the former is making a resurgence. Southerners are Americans, for better or worse. Your provincial narrative fails utterly. Southerners were as accepting of false ideology as anyone else. They were more conservative theologically, but that is a result of the extreme defensiveness in the culture brought about by the defense of slavery. Slavery “pickled” the South as a popular Southern writer has said about that. It wasn’t a bad thing from my perspective (a cultural and religious conservative), but the point is that it was a historical accident and not some inherent feature of Southern culture.
Hey, personally, I’m thrilled that my way racist grandmother had to ler my cousin’s wife in the front door.
I’m not romanticizing southern redneck-ness. I’m saying northeastern utopianists are murderous fucks.
south. southwest. west. that’s the part of the country that has distinctly different views, but doesn’t write nationally implemented laws, or send out armies, or weasel, or claim the high ground at all times. the original article talked smack about suburban people who live in those regions. county by county, those are not the people who sent O back to the White House.
I hope the author has read these novels before commenting on them… I don’t disagree with you, however, completely. I think you nailed Suburban working mother quite well. I have read both the series you mention in your article, and am currently reading the 50 Shades of Grey series. All of these are to me what they’re meant to be to others: a brief escape from reality, something I feel fictional novels are meant for or we’d read non-fiction. I happen to have read every Willa Cather novel, and most of her short stories and feel she is the best American author of the 20th century. I’ve read Jane Austen (and own every movie), and Wilkie Collins, and Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway, among many others. Reading a variety of literature, good or bad, is what makes a person well-rounded. It’s okay to keep up with popular fiction. It’s just a book. It doesn’t define who we are.
Ari, the only clear thing here is that you prefer murderers that can’t be classified in your bizarre scheme as north or northeastern. Your version of a hate crime perhaps. Me, I say dead is dead, and ideologies that cause it are just bad no matter their origin. I know, it’s crazy.
I think we’re on the same page, mostly.
It’s not a bizarre schema- Ms Esteemed Senator from New York, the current one, has a habit of being on the side of the powerful. She does this with some version self-righteousness. Were I villager in Africa, at any point in the last 20 years, for example, I’d be better off with a hard-nosed South African mercenary, than liberal tossing daisies.
I’m glad you’re conceding that the South has an honor culture, unlike the northeast. You see it as a problem, I see it as a good thing. Being attached to other cultures- like- all of Western Civilization- doesn’t really strike me as a problem. It strikes me as a description. My mom was reading Xenophon at ten, same as my kids. My dad gave me my own copy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at ten. I wanted a bicycle. He called it even. I’ve read, like, six pages of the thing, but I know it’s there for the browsing- I don’t have to get excited about it.
Or, say, the gun culture part. It’s exciting in the rest of the country. Here, it’s normal. I expect to find a 12 year old cuddled up with his new rifle on Christmas Day. It’s a cute picture, not a ‘duh,duh, DUHHHH….Crime Wave!’ moment.
Ms Shaidle seems to have a problem with suburban culture. I live here. I like it.
>> I’m glad you’re conceding that the South has an honor culture, unlike the northeast. You see it as a problem, I see it as a good thing.
The South no longer has an honor culture. All cultures are honor cultures to some extent. Today honor cultures are in the Middle East and that is why they kill their daughters when they “dishonor” the family. What an honor culture means is exactly the opposite from what our moms teach us now. It means we take our self-image from those around us. Don’t fight peer pressure. Honor cultures do NOT strive for justice, but rather order. Order. It is a necessarily a secular system of values and was directly at odds with the spiritual frame of reference of evangelical Christianity. There was a an evangelical infusion in the South, and it became a critique of honor within the South itself, but the economic and cultural force of slavery nonetheless perpetuated it and the churches split over the issue.
Sorry but (gasp!) the Puritans were right on this one. Honor cultures are at odds with Christian principles. Honor cultures were very brutal to the weak. Like I said, there never was a unique Southern culture that could be defended as good. They were proudly modern and modernizing, it is just that slavery and the social structure surrounding it kept it from moving away from an honor culture like the rest of the modern world did. If you want to check out an honor culture today try Pakistan.
you know, I’m really stuck back at this notion that I’m a southern romantic. My mom would be so happy, were it true. ” The Civil War wasn’t civil, honey. Damn Yankees….”
I said northerners invaded the south, killed people, burned stuff down, and we didn’t like it. I’m pretty sure that there are French books talking about what total jerks Germans are. Could be wrong, but I’m thinking I had to suffer through a bunch of lost generation writers who weren’t so happy about being on the other side of German soldiers.
You keep saying there isn’t a southern culture. since people make their bones writing about it, i’m going to say that Larry Schweikart, and the guy who wrote ‘albion’s seed’ and so on, are right, and you and I are maybe not on the same page?
Saying southerners are icky really doesn’t make them disappear. It helps to know what they were thinking, and why. I can’t really say my great-uncle was wrong- integrated schools did lead to mixed-race marriages. Where we differ is that he thought this was terrible, while I just say ” They are my neighbors.” I don’t have to have an opinion on the theory- the fact lives next door to me. Their kids go to school with my kids. It’s not a problem, it’s a kid sitting at the same table at lunch, on the bus, or playing sports together.
And, Puritans hung people. They hanged Quakers. They hung suspected witches. Notice how nobody gets surprised when Margaret Atwood stages a hanging in Harvard Square, in the Handmaid’s Tale? Last time I checked, Marie LaVeau died peacefully in her bed, of old age, in New Orleans. Her students still make life, ahh, colorful,in the cemeteries in New Orleans. That’s a cultural difference, ya think? Would you rather be “weak” in Salem, or New Orleans? For that matter, would you rather be a black fetus in Mississippi, right now, or New York? That’s pretty weak.
As for the North/ South break. Try this century: Rauschenbusch (sp?) with the social Gospel, versus The Fundamentals, which is the first set of published fundamentalist tracts. That’s the difference between the “do untos” and the ‘done untos.” When I was talking about pentecostals and evangelicals- that’s usually the “done untos.” The big change is that they’ve gotten wealthier and more educated, and, in consequence, more powerful and influential.
The religious breaks can be pretty hard. Baptists and Church of Christ and who knows what else- there isn’t a catechism. All sorts of weird can flourish, in ways that it can’t, in more organized faiths. My kids are going through confirmation. The pastor expects to get the last word. That’s why people leave, I think. They don’t get to say and stand by what they really think. I could be wrong. But, when people are saying ” yeah, the pastor’s job is harder b/c people read stuff, and get their own opinions….” its, shall we say, different? I was raised Baptist/ pentecostal. My husband was raised Church of Christ/ Mormon. The kids are Lutheran. They are like aliens from another planet, in so many ways.
As for culture- you want to assert that germany, belgium and france are culturally the same? they do share real estate. as far as I can tell, that’s your argument. I’m in Texas, so, no, I’m not emotional about the southern cause. there’s a texas flag ornament, not a confederate flag one. Texas imported indentured Germans, not Africans. Makes a difference.
Four books about Southern honor culture, and then they don’t have some pakistani version? really?
So, do I have to throw book titles around? Can I start with “The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians.” Which is a hat-trick- FDR gets counted as southern, based on his vacations.
I’d add “High Hearts” rita mae browne, just for the essay at the back.
Or, say, The Mystery of Capital, which has the bit about property law in California vs Washington, and how that played out over nearly a century. Guess what? california didn’t send troops east.
Virtuous battle-axes are supposed to not put their kids in extra-curriculars, not buy video-cams, or video-phones, get tats, they aren’t supposed to be married to guys playing video games, or read modern fiction. Come on. What sort of world is that? Modern suburban culture is a good place. It might not be high-minded, austere, unworldly, angry, reflexively shaking its cane at young people- “get off my lawn!” That’s where this started. I grew up in a suburb. It took long drives to other states to visit relatives who still had outhouses and hand-water pumps.
I have no idea what sort of suburbs are in the midwest- that’s where you are. what I know that’s funny about indiana is that, apparently, everyone is pleasant. That’s how Clinton picked Dayton for the Dayton Accords for solving the bosnian/serbian/ yugoslavian hoo-hah.
>> Saying southerners are icky really doesn’t make them disappear.
I don’t think that, have never thought that, and didn’t say that. I said Confederate Romantics are very misguided. They are all over the country and the world, but it seems you don’t know that.
>> As for culture- you want to assert that germany, belgium and france are culturally the same?
Um, no.
>> they do share real estate. as far as I can tell, that’s your argument.
Wow, no. If there were an opposite to my argument that might be it.
>> The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians.
It’s not a serious book. http://prq.sagepub.com/content/31/3/434.full.pdf Might as well read Gone with the Wind. It’s more entertaining and has complete sentences.
>> I’m in Texas, so, no, I’m not emotional about the southern cause.
The Confederate Romantic ideology is a . . . well, ideology. It travels very well as I’ve already said.
>> Texas imported indentured Germans, not Africans. Makes a difference.
One more in a long line of comments where you hint strongly that biology is at the root of these disagreements. Why don’t you just cut to the chase and give us your supporting arguments for hereditarianism? Maybe it’s all genetic? And no, Albions Seed can’t be twisted into proving the Sir Walter Scott (another romatic novel) version of history. Tracing racial and ethnic strains and tracing ideological strains are different matters, unless you think genetics determine belief. If you don’t you might want to stop implying you might.
Nice chatting but I gotta stop on this and pick up on some other things.
oh my goodness. you would be the worst shoe salesman, EVER!
We imported Germans! This means that anyone can be here that doesn’t want to be here. That means, we’ve got people kitted up in their native costume, visiting the grandparents’ home country. That costume can be a silk dashiki, or a silk dirndl. I’ve seen both. That means, people speak odd little dialects from two villages, they head home, and the communists have killed off everyone and burned the place to the ground- and that’s russian communists, or angolan communists.
It also means, since Texas is a low-transfer payment state, people get their act together, and then get rich. It doesn’t surprise me that the boat-person who works as a store clerk has a kid in law school, and a kid in med school, even though he speaks about five words of English, himself. The hispanic lawn-mowing guy across the street sends a kid to college, a kid to private school and a kid to a charter school.
And, Texas has oil. Oil is under salt domes, which is bitter ground- the poor farmers owned that dirt. Which meant that really poor people- black and white- both got crazy oil rich. Black, and white. And they were both scoundrelly. I don’t think Dallas, the show, is half as scoundrelly as in real life.
I haven’t said anything about saintly southerners. I’ve said ” It works. It’s a good place.” I have said smack about northeastern liberals. Ann Coulter does it better- she lives there. She’s an amazing polemicist. She writes books, since that seems to turn your crank.
I enjoy Coulter. I listen to Rush Limbaugh every day. Doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re talking about.
After reading through the article and the comments, the problem seems to come down to; do you understand the difference between fantasy and reality? Ms. Shaidle seems to think that many Americans do not, and on this point I agree. I find that preople who don’t know the difference get smacked by reality and either learn the difference or continue to get smacked. I also find that people who do know the difference between reality and fantasy don’t lose that knowledge by reading Twilight, or The Hunger Games, or Harlequin Romances, or Jane Austen. Most of us aren’t weak-minded fools, Ms. Shaidle. Your Olympian disdain doesn’t wear well. I can’t help thinking of a quotation from Charles Dickens, about one of the characters in David Copperfield who “…sets up an image of himself, and calls it The Divine Nature.”