The Hot Ethan & Other Hot Stuff

Day 104 (in the shade) of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Paulette only has 100 more pages to go in the Edith Wharton biography by Hermione Lee. (I am still only 133 pages into it...but maybe I will take it to the beach.) This is when I always recommend Summer, which Wharton liked to call "the hot Ethan." And we don't mean Ethan Hawke. We mean Ethan Frome.

But Paulette's hot summer reading will include romances.

Donna's summer reading will include some Mary Kay Andrews books recommended by her daughter: The Fixer Upper and Savannah Blues. The former looks like a fun read, and the latter like a cozy mystery with romance, and both are probably some kind of chick lit! (Everybody loves chick lit!) Donna just finished Blue Dahlia, but I don't know if it's the romance by Nora Roberts or the screenplay by Raymond Chandler. Probably the romance. She also loves, and often re-reads, The Shell Seekers, by Rosamunde Pilcher. Which Susan also loves!

Susan is reading Patterns of Childhood by "the wonderful, poetic Christa Wolf," also known as A Model Childhood, a novel about growing up in Nazi Germany, and just finished Cousin Bette, by Balzac, who was so hot he scandalized Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn in The Music Man, by Meredith Willson.

An actress in New York, Susan is also reading a lot of plays. And coming up on her summer reading list: the last two Steig Larsson novels.

Kevin, an actor in New York, thinks he may ignore the "three TOMES sitting beside my bed that probably total over three thousand pages to be read" and instead buy "the latest 'the girl that...' book by the dead Swedish author."

Wait! An actress in New York who likes Stieg Larsson and an actor in New York who likes Stieg Larsson. Should I try to set them up?

Because, back at Facebook, Dawn reports:

I'm currently devouring an utterly delectable coming-of-age novel called THE HIGHEST TIDE by Jim Lynch, and slowly savoring TWENTY POEMS TO NOURISH YOUR SOUL by Judith Valente and Charles Reynard (which I understand to be one of the fruits of your successful, if inadvertent, matchmaking effort--nicely done)!

Yes, yes, I accidentally rubbed some poets together, and they caught fire. Hello, Dolly!

What Do Women Read?

Day 77 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project. Regular readers of this blog know that:

1) Women read the same things men read…
2) ...except there is “chick lit” and “dick lit” (or, if you are British or more polite, “lad lit”);
3) I ask this question in the context of just having attended a women’s retreat and asked various women what they are reading, and…
4) I will surely give equal time to men and ask, “What Do Men Read?” tomorrow…or the next day, in this same rhetorical, for-the-sake-of-a-blog-title way.

To return to Mary Beth and Pam, who do a lot of reading:

Mary Beth, who loves politics and current events, recently read Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, both journalists, about, as the subtitle states, Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, from the insiders’ point of view. The authors revealed the gritty truth about all the candidates, and, according to Mary Beth, the only one who came out smelling like a rose was Michelle Obama. Mary Beth said the reasoned, objective, and humorous approach did not prepare her for the emotional ending, and she found herself in tears on the last page.

Pam had recently read The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway, a novel based on the real cellist, Vedron Smailovic, who risked his life in wartime to play an adagio day after day in memory of the dead. Art as quiet heroism, and more cause for tears.

Pam is now reading a gentle memoir called Growing Up in Holmen [Wisconsin], by Arlan Helgeson, a local retired dean and history professor, because:

1) he is the age of her parents, and it’s like learning about them;
2) he is local and handy, and she wants her book group to read the book and then go over and talk to him;
3) she was able to borrow a friend’s copy of a hard-to-find book…!

And Mary Beth is now reading a novel recommended by a friend. The Whistling Season, by Ivan Doig, is set in Montana toward the end of its one-room schoolhouse era. Mary Beth says it was slow going at first, but now she is really into it and likes its simplicity and authenticity.

So, as always, what are you reading?

Girl, Please! (A return to chick & dick lit)

Day 32 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Tom, who was reading Misfortune, the Wesley Stace book about a boy raised as a girl in the 19th century, tried to comment on this blog earlier, sent his thoughts to me another way, and I saved his comments on chick lit and dick lit for later.

Later is now:

"Hmmm, here's one gay male perspective. I would have thought Chick Lit would have fallen in the same general category as Chick Flicks, which by my definition are not necessarily by or even about women, but of a certain genre deemed too 'feminine' to appeal to men. My partner and I are always at odds when it comes to films because he tends to like gore and slasher/suspense films (guy flicks), while I am more drawn to more serious, 'thoughty' films, along with romantic comedies and romance in general (chick flicks).

"It tends to be the same with books, he likes true crime and I like books, mostly by women authors (including mysteries by women authors with female detectives), that have a more thoughtful bent to them and are more language oriented. I'd have referred to my taste as more chick lit oriented, but that wouldn't fall under your definition. I hadn't thought of either chick lit or chick flicks as having been necessarily lighter or funnier, but literature that would by a stereotypically male definition, would appeal more to women.

"By the same token, I'd refer to Hemingway and even Stephen King as dick lit because both authors are so prodigiously 'male' in their attitudes that I don't connect to them at all. Which is not to say I'm not male or relate to male authors or subjects, just that I don't relate in any way to that kind of machismo.

"And where do strongly gay male visions like Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris fall? Chick or dick? Or somewhere in between. This has been a very enlightening discussion. Thanks for sharing. "

I've got to say that Burroughs and Sedaris are very popular on the Selected New Arrivals shelf by the door at Babbitt's, and all the recent buyers have been women!

Rupaul offers a way to look at being human in this Woman Made Gallery Call for Art:

"We are all born naked, the rest is just drag."

Woman Made, as its name will tell you, is a gallery dedicated to exhibiting and promoting work by women artists to help correct a historical imbalance in their representation in the world, but for some theme-based group shows it calls for art from men as well. This is an all gender call, and defines gender this way:

"Gender is a performance, an act that is perpetuated and maintained by societal norms and expectations, but how, and to what extent does it define us? 'Girl, Please!' seeks to push and transcend the definition of gender while also exploring its relation to individual character amongst collective expectations. Bearing in mind Rupaul's statement, drag in this case is not disco, but rather an illustration of feminity and masculinity in shades of grey."

If you are an artist interested in this theme and in submitting work to this show, click the Woman Made link above to learn more about how.

If you want to return to the chick lit/dick lit dicussion or pursue these other ideas on what we mean by "gender," feel free to comment.

Interesting that Tom mentions Hemingway, one of those boys dressed as a girl for a time in childhood, which was fairly common practice, I understand, as one of those 'male' writers.

Chick Lit & Dick Lit

Day 18 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project.

I think Phyllis called this a beach book! Time is a River by Mary Alice Monroe. She read it for a book group and enjoyed it. And Monroe has written several woman-centered books, including The Beach House, so maybe they are all beach books! But are they “chick lit”?

What is it that gets called “chick lit,” and is this primarily a fond term or a pejorative one? Is it a mostly a marketing tag, identifying its hoped-for and most likely audience, etc.? Is it feminist or anti-feminist? Or is it detached from the idea of labels as suggestive of any kind of evaluative determination, and primarily, instead, about fun?

As in, “Girls just want to have fun!” (Cyndi Lauper in your head now?) (By coincidence, I saw Baby Mama again last night, so she's in my head.)

Does chick lit have to contain shopping in general and shoes in specific?

Of course, the answers to all my questions of definition can easily be found in Wikipedia, or, with further research, in numerous articles by teachers, critics, and scholars of chick lit:

Chick lit has a self-determining female protagonist who is able to solve her problems with gumption and humor. Chick lit is indeed marketed to female readers, etc. Early chick lit writers, before the term was a term, are among the greats—Jane Austen, for example, herself ever popular among female readers. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding descends quite consciously and comically from Pride and Prejudice. Et cetera.

I ask partly because the other day I was pondering that thing that happens when a man is intimate or personal or sensitive in his writing, and the world goes, “Oh, he’s so brave!” etc., and a woman is intimate, etc. in her writing, and the world goes, “Poo, she’s so confessional!”

He talks about masturbation. “Bold!”

She talks about her period. “Yuck.”

He talks about his penis. “What else is there to talk about?”

She mentions her vagina. “Guffaw.”

And so on. And I think this is still happening.

So I wondered, “If there is such a thing as ‘chick lit,’ why isn’t there ‘dick lit’?”

And, of course, there is. Turns out I have read plenty of it: Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, various books by Nick Hornby. Probably Lamb and so on by Christopher Moore. That’s, by extrapolation, according to some men who have posted lists at Amazon or thereabouts.

I have to tell you I was afraid to Google “dick lit” and then afraid to click anything with a dick in it. At Wikipedia, I only got an article about Moby Dick, which is not funny enough to be dick lit, and I didn’t click very far among lists and blogs, but I got the gist of it.

Dick lit is essentially chick lit for men.

(And you can check this out at Urban Dictionary. Where the younger male audience is specified, but the examples point to the older male audience for virile adventure fiction. Of course, I realize now, from handling a lot of pulp fiction and men's romance at Babbitt's, that there was plenty of dick lit before there was this term, as with chick lit.)

So if it has a sense of humor and is written by a man, it’s dick lit, and if it has a sense of humor and is written by a woman, it’s chick lit, as long as it has a self-determining protagonist who is male or female. (Next, we may get Pat lit.) At least there is indeed equal time for reproductive parts out there in popular literature.

So I ask you, is there anything you’ve read that you’d like to label chick lit or dick lit?

Who has read some “chick lit,” and why? For fun, for book groups, for a college class. And what are we/you looking for in that kind of book? Fun? A good story? Romance? Someone to identify with? Self-determination?

Have any men among us read anything that someone else calls “chick lit”? And would you be embarrassed to be caught reading it? If so, why?

I was embarrassed to click dick lit, but I was not embarrassed to read Hornby, Foer, or Moore. Is John Irving dick lit? Is Saul Bellow intellectual dick lit? What about Philip Roth? I’m pretty sure Portnoy’s Complaint is dick lit.