Day 22 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.
Kim is reading The Sun, issue 411, March 2010, as am I, because it arrived in the mail this past week.
The Sun is a wonderful print magazine published by Sy Safransky in Chapel Hill, NC, that has no advertisements* and relies entirely on your subscriptions for its survival, so please consider reading and subscribing! I got hooked on The Sun when Kim sent me a gift subscription one year for Christmas. (Plus, I should say I am also now hooked on Kim's blog, Hummus Anonymous!)
She drew my attention to the first poem in this month's issue, "Enlightenment is a Bitch," by Dane Cervine, a writer, guitar player, and Tarot reader in Santa Cruz County, CA, by saying she wished she had written it!! It is indeed a delightful, wise, and funny poem. It resonates for me alongside Molly Peacock's poem, "Why I Am Not a Buddhist," and a moment in Clay's Quilt by Silas House, when the drunken Anneth insists that everybody wake up and look at the moon!
I know Kim was just reading Clay's Quilt because we are in the same book group, and because she just turned it back in at the library on Saturday (via the Jewel book drop-off), and I was able to check it out on Monday, thanks to the nice woman at the circulation desk who went down to the carts in the basement to retrieve it for me. I love living in a small town! So now, finally, I am reading Clay's Quilt, a week before we discuss it. (Note to self: remember the hush puppies!)
Rumi had his friend Shams. I have my friend Kim, having parallel reading experiences with me and enlightening me to the joys of hummus! Ah, life is good.
I should pause to say that Kim and I don't have exactly the same kind of relationship as Rumi and Shams may have had, and that I will be back soon with a blog entry on gay lit, about which I know next to nothing, but, fortunately, I have the comments of a friend to share with you.
In the same issue of The Sun is the poem "Turning Fifty," by Paul Hostovsky, one of my favorite poets from my days as a poetry editor! This poem, too, is wise and delightful. Seek it out. How can you resist a man whose contributor bio reads, "On his daily commute he reads Braille with his right hand while steering with his left." Although I am a little scared about this...preferring hands-free devices, no texting or cell phones while driving, etc. Plus, is the right hand supposed to know what the left hand is doing? At any rate, I love the poems of Paul Hostovsky.
And while we are at this enlightenment business, Douglas is reading Be Here Now by Ram Dass.
The Ram Dass book no doubt connects to some aspects of the interview with Tim Farrington in this same issue of The Sun. D. Patrick Miller has conducted the interview in the article "Till Morning Comes: Tim Farrington on Creativity, Depression, and The Dark Night of the Soul," and, if you are a regular follower of my blog since its inception--that is, if you are Kim--you may recall my recent mention of The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, who wrote it in prison. It is a poem, and a love poem at that, followed by the saint's own explication, pertinent to nuns, monks, and all spiritual seekers. I read it in the excellent translation by Mirabai Starr. (Amazon calls her Mirabel, but she's Mirabai.)
St. John of the Cross, Tim Farrington, and Dane Cervine all seem to agree that "enlightenment is a bitch" in its "dark night" or depression stage, which is, as Farrington says, a sort of fever that heats the body to heal it. Farrington also notes, as might Ram Dass, that the "stages" are not really progressive or linear but simultaneous.
Have I mentioned that I don't really believe in linear time? If you are Kim, you know I have!
*But The Sun is advertising a Job Opening for a digital-media director on p. 3 and at their website! So if you are digital and in need of a job, hey, go there!
So, what print magazines do you read regularly? News magazines, literary magazines, general interest magazines, special interest magazines...and why?!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Plum Lovin' the Mystery of Romance
Day 21 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.
Kim is reading the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, as the books come out in paperback. Kim points out that these are a combination of mystery and chick lit, and maybe she will tell us more about why she enjoys this series!
We get a lot of requests for Evanovich at the bookstore. We don't carry romances, but we do have mysteries, lots of them, contemporary and vintage, hardback and paperback, and Evanovich is now at Babbitt's, or in and out quickly, in the mystery section, or sometimes on the little New Arrivals in Fiction shelf right by the front door.
Or, for something completely different, you can read Thomas Hardy. Will it be Return of the Native or Jude the Obscure? A man was asking for our recommendations yesterday, but our sales manager who is also a Hardy scholar is not there on Mondays, so I said I thought Jane Smiley recommended Jude the Obscure, but I was wrong. What I was misremembering, from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, was indeed crucial, but it was this: "When critics greeted Jude the Obscure with scathing rejection, Thomas Hardy shut down his novelist persona completely and went on as a poet, but in a different and more robust vein than he had written in as a novelist." So, in search of excitement in reading, we might turn to robust poetry.
I read a lot of Hardy when I was younger, so young that I cannot remember much, except for Tess of the d'Urbervilles, also read in school, and made into movies. Oddly, this brings me back to chick lit and its robust women of self-determination, sort of the opposite of the Tess plot and the fate of loving and generous women who dared to have sex when Hardy was writing novels. Sigh...
Kim is reading the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, as the books come out in paperback. Kim points out that these are a combination of mystery and chick lit, and maybe she will tell us more about why she enjoys this series!
We get a lot of requests for Evanovich at the bookstore. We don't carry romances, but we do have mysteries, lots of them, contemporary and vintage, hardback and paperback, and Evanovich is now at Babbitt's, or in and out quickly, in the mystery section, or sometimes on the little New Arrivals in Fiction shelf right by the front door.
Or, for something completely different, you can read Thomas Hardy. Will it be Return of the Native or Jude the Obscure? A man was asking for our recommendations yesterday, but our sales manager who is also a Hardy scholar is not there on Mondays, so I said I thought Jane Smiley recommended Jude the Obscure, but I was wrong. What I was misremembering, from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, was indeed crucial, but it was this: "When critics greeted Jude the Obscure with scathing rejection, Thomas Hardy shut down his novelist persona completely and went on as a poet, but in a different and more robust vein than he had written in as a novelist." So, in search of excitement in reading, we might turn to robust poetry.
I read a lot of Hardy when I was younger, so young that I cannot remember much, except for Tess of the d'Urbervilles, also read in school, and made into movies. Oddly, this brings me back to chick lit and its robust women of self-determination, sort of the opposite of the Tess plot and the fate of loving and generous women who dared to have sex when Hardy was writing novels. Sigh...
Monday, March 1, 2010
Falling Man
Day 20 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project. March 1. I am hoping March will come in and go out like a lamb.
Anna is reading Falling Man by Don DeLillo because she recently watched 10 straight hours of video on the 9/11 event. She was doing this in part because she was ready to learn about it, after being overwhelmed when it first happened, and in part because she was writing poems with political/historical themes. She will read her own poem about a falling man at the McLean County Museum of History tomorrow, Tuesday, March 2, at 7:30 p.m. Because the whole thing chokes her up, she will take a short break from Falling Man until the poetry reading is over, so she is not overcome by emotion during the event.
In the last two blog entries, I got a little worried about Jonathan Safran Foer, but he can probably take care of himself. He has also written about the 9/11 event, in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I don’t know whether to recommend it to Anna, so I will read it myself first, but I have some trepidation about reading it and/or the DeLillo book...
When I worked as a poetry editor, we got a slew of poems, almost immediately, about 9/11, and there was a lot of stuff zinging across the Internet, too. W.H. Auden’s poem "September 1, 1939," from a different era, went around, but also plenty of raw stuff, email exchanges, collage poetry. I had the icky feeling a lot of it was exploitation poetry, not really that person’s story to tell, a roiling of rage and grief, mixed with self-importance about what, now, was the only thing worth writing about, or worth reading, and which would, incidentally, get that poet her/his brief fiery 15 minutes of fame.
So I am hoping the DeLillo and Foer books are not exploiting that terrible event, but exploring it. Telling the truth about it in ways that don’t…what?—do further damage.
Bruce Weigl, a poet who managed the impossible in a poem called "The Impossible" (which I leave you to seek out on your own, as it is too shocking for many readers--it is in his book What Saves Us)--that is, to tenderly transform something horrific into something...impossibly beautiful, closes the poem with his ars poetica: “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” Some critic told Weigl he ought to have said it the other way around: "Say it beautifully and you make it clear...," but it was not beautiful, what had happened to him, then, and what he witnessed, later, during the Vietnam War, which ruined him and made him a writer. “When one is traumatized,” says Weigl, “the world recedes, and when the trauma stops, the world gradually returns, only things are different.”
Things are different. It would be awful to pretend they are not.
I hope Foer and DeLillo are saying it clearly. Without pretense, without exploitation. Revealing the beautiful, horrific, deep, ugly, tender truths.
Anna is reading Falling Man by Don DeLillo because she recently watched 10 straight hours of video on the 9/11 event. She was doing this in part because she was ready to learn about it, after being overwhelmed when it first happened, and in part because she was writing poems with political/historical themes. She will read her own poem about a falling man at the McLean County Museum of History tomorrow, Tuesday, March 2, at 7:30 p.m. Because the whole thing chokes her up, she will take a short break from Falling Man until the poetry reading is over, so she is not overcome by emotion during the event.
In the last two blog entries, I got a little worried about Jonathan Safran Foer, but he can probably take care of himself. He has also written about the 9/11 event, in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I don’t know whether to recommend it to Anna, so I will read it myself first, but I have some trepidation about reading it and/or the DeLillo book...
When I worked as a poetry editor, we got a slew of poems, almost immediately, about 9/11, and there was a lot of stuff zinging across the Internet, too. W.H. Auden’s poem "September 1, 1939," from a different era, went around, but also plenty of raw stuff, email exchanges, collage poetry. I had the icky feeling a lot of it was exploitation poetry, not really that person’s story to tell, a roiling of rage and grief, mixed with self-importance about what, now, was the only thing worth writing about, or worth reading, and which would, incidentally, get that poet her/his brief fiery 15 minutes of fame.
So I am hoping the DeLillo and Foer books are not exploiting that terrible event, but exploring it. Telling the truth about it in ways that don’t…what?—do further damage.
Bruce Weigl, a poet who managed the impossible in a poem called "The Impossible" (which I leave you to seek out on your own, as it is too shocking for many readers--it is in his book What Saves Us)--that is, to tenderly transform something horrific into something...impossibly beautiful, closes the poem with his ars poetica: “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” Some critic told Weigl he ought to have said it the other way around: "Say it beautifully and you make it clear...," but it was not beautiful, what had happened to him, then, and what he witnessed, later, during the Vietnam War, which ruined him and made him a writer. “When one is traumatized,” says Weigl, “the world recedes, and when the trauma stops, the world gradually returns, only things are different.”
Things are different. It would be awful to pretend they are not.
I hope Foer and DeLillo are saying it clearly. Without pretense, without exploitation. Revealing the beautiful, horrific, deep, ugly, tender truths.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Lad Lit & Traveling Pants
Day 19 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.
Julie, who tried to comment yesterday, informs me that the Brits have a more polite term than "dick lit," and one it might be easier to click on at Google--"lad lit." (Julie, I checked email and junk mail, and, alas, your comment is lost in cyberspace.) She also sends us to Jennifer Weiner, a writer of this so-called "chick lit" for illumination on that topic. (I am sending you to the Wikipedia article on her, which summarizes the debate, and offers links to various follow-up articles. Weiner has a blog, where you can seek out more of her opinions on the "chick lit" debate. I am fascinated by the "pecking order" issues here, and also think of Mean Girls and Tina Fey and comic justice, etc.)
NobleSavage sends us to a wonderful article by Katie Roiphe in the New York Times, "The Naked and the Conflicted." And this reminded me why I was reading all that Updike, Bellow, Roth, and then Irving, etc.--because my parents were. Updike was their man, their generation, and I was reading to learn how to live in their world, how to grow up, etc., and there was a heck of a lot I didn't understand in life and, of course, in those books!
This relates to aka Simone's comment, too, about having a better reading experience with writers or main characters of her own generation. My niece enjoyed the Traveling Pants books, but I, no doubt, would not read very far into one of those books...at my age.
Roife quotes Philip Roth in a scene from The Counterlife that came all too vividly back to me: “The sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen.” Whatever I thought at the time, I am old enough now to find this hilarious, and to connect it to all sorts of things I have seen or read since--which includes the "scary" bathtub scene from the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin* and, oddly enough, that completely woman-centered book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which I confess to owning in two editions, the first (in paperback) and the recently re-issued (purchased via my phone bill from Working Assets Long Distance a few years back). That also advocates vegetables as a route to female pleasure. Sigh... Is there such a thing as zucchini lit yet?
*And while we are at it, I may as well confess to having been a virgin till my wedding night, thanks to reading way too much "literary" fiction in which young girls were "ruined" by having sex before marriage. (Perhaps there were other reasons as well. But I'm 53 and looking back, and this seems likely to me. I find it both poignant and funny. And it was not sex but marriage that "ruined" me. I'm OK now.) I confess to this because this is the kind of personal writing that makes it so easy for women who say such things to be dismissed! And yet if male writers say such things or have their characters confess to such things, or act from odd inner compulsions, it's still OK. (Or maybe it isn't. See the death of lad lit below.)
And here I will further pause and say that please understand I am not dismissing any writers or readers in exploring these or other labels that turn up in the world of reading. People read a variety of things for a variety of reasons, and I want to hear more about what these reasons are. If SarahJane chooses, as she says in her comment, not to read Jonathan Safran Foer because some guy at Amazon put him on a "dick lit" list, and I repeated it here, that's her choice, and OK by me, but also a shame, and I'm sorry. I don't want to lose a reader for Foer, and I loved Everything Is Illuminated. It's funny around a heartbroken core, and you've got to do something with that kind of heartbreak. Foer makes history live again in ways that break my own heart, as I read, and teach me how to live with greater compassion and greater conviction to do no harm, moment by moment.
And that, I continue to find, is why I read. It helps me live, it gives me the courage to be as kind as I can possibly be, and I am not always kind, and not always thoughtful, so I keep reading, and, sometimes, it gives me the courage to say no to some things that must not happen in this world because they do terrible harm, and to do what I can about that. My life is small, my reading is larger than I am. Maybe I will grow large enough to do a little kindness in the world.
(That's my annoying confession. I have friends who, dismissively, call me Pollyanna. And others who, kindly, see me as a sort of Amelie! Dix-cinq!)
OK, but it turns out that Lad Lit, the politer name for Dick Lit, actually refers to a more confessional sort of literature written by men, about men, but probably for readers of any kind. Nick Hornby is indeed on the "lad lit" list, and is also credited, in the link above, as its "daddy." (By the way, the only Hornby I've read is How to be Good, which has a female main character. And I'm not sure I learned how to be good from it! I learned that the phrase is laden, and our human motives complicated, etc., which rings true to me.) So Lad Lit may well be different from Dick Lit, and, getting back to the Roiphe article, which I recommend, it explores issues of male identity. Roiphe's selected quotations emphasize the ambivalence men may feel these days about "male identity," if there is such a thing, and about sex. Roiphe quotes a Benjamin Kunkel character saying, “Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.”
Roiphe is contrasting this with the vigor and joy of the penis in novels by a previous generation of men writers, men that some feminists have tossed away, and there is a pertinent trashcan in her essay, and I am saddened to think than some men have to feel this way about that body part or about what they might write. I don't want the writers of dick lit or lad lit dismissed, or to dismiss themselves, just as I don't want women writers, of "chick lit," or "literary" fiction, or "confessional" lit, or whatever we happen to call any of it, to be dismissed, simply because they are female or write about women and their personal matters. Where did I recently read a woman writer saying, "Women know that the personal is the political," as if that argument was long done, and this was fully accepted? I'm not sure it is, and I don't think this chick lit vs. lad lit conversation is done, either.
Even though some articles tell me that "lad lit" is dead, that it died in 2004, etc.
Lad lit might not be dead, if people are still writing it and reading it. But David Foster Wallace is dead. People are still reading him. And to acknowledge the icky marketing aspect of all this--that "chick lit" and "dick lit" and "lad lit" are labels for the convenience of book marketing, book reviewing, and bookstore organization. etc.--I will confess that our first editions of Wallace suddenly became hot commodities upon his death.
But our weekend manager, Tim, put a notice on the door as soon as he got the news. A passerby took a picture of it with his phone, and within the hour a reporter from Chicago called the store to interview Tim, who had been one of Wallace's students at ISU. Babbitt's was Wallace's favorite bookstore, which he apparently said somewhere once in print, according to my boss, the owner. My niece (a different niece, not the Traveling Pants niece) was saddened both by Wallace's death, in itself, but also because she was registered for his course the following semester at her college in California, and now she wouldn't learn what he had to say about writing. And that's my little Amelie moment of rest-in-peace.
Julie, who tried to comment yesterday, informs me that the Brits have a more polite term than "dick lit," and one it might be easier to click on at Google--"lad lit." (Julie, I checked email and junk mail, and, alas, your comment is lost in cyberspace.) She also sends us to Jennifer Weiner, a writer of this so-called "chick lit" for illumination on that topic. (I am sending you to the Wikipedia article on her, which summarizes the debate, and offers links to various follow-up articles. Weiner has a blog, where you can seek out more of her opinions on the "chick lit" debate. I am fascinated by the "pecking order" issues here, and also think of Mean Girls and Tina Fey and comic justice, etc.)
NobleSavage sends us to a wonderful article by Katie Roiphe in the New York Times, "The Naked and the Conflicted." And this reminded me why I was reading all that Updike, Bellow, Roth, and then Irving, etc.--because my parents were. Updike was their man, their generation, and I was reading to learn how to live in their world, how to grow up, etc., and there was a heck of a lot I didn't understand in life and, of course, in those books!
This relates to aka Simone's comment, too, about having a better reading experience with writers or main characters of her own generation. My niece enjoyed the Traveling Pants books, but I, no doubt, would not read very far into one of those books...at my age.
Roife quotes Philip Roth in a scene from The Counterlife that came all too vividly back to me: “The sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen.” Whatever I thought at the time, I am old enough now to find this hilarious, and to connect it to all sorts of things I have seen or read since--which includes the "scary" bathtub scene from the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin* and, oddly enough, that completely woman-centered book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which I confess to owning in two editions, the first (in paperback) and the recently re-issued (purchased via my phone bill from Working Assets Long Distance a few years back). That also advocates vegetables as a route to female pleasure. Sigh... Is there such a thing as zucchini lit yet?
*And while we are at it, I may as well confess to having been a virgin till my wedding night, thanks to reading way too much "literary" fiction in which young girls were "ruined" by having sex before marriage. (Perhaps there were other reasons as well. But I'm 53 and looking back, and this seems likely to me. I find it both poignant and funny. And it was not sex but marriage that "ruined" me. I'm OK now.) I confess to this because this is the kind of personal writing that makes it so easy for women who say such things to be dismissed! And yet if male writers say such things or have their characters confess to such things, or act from odd inner compulsions, it's still OK. (Or maybe it isn't. See the death of lad lit below.)
And here I will further pause and say that please understand I am not dismissing any writers or readers in exploring these or other labels that turn up in the world of reading. People read a variety of things for a variety of reasons, and I want to hear more about what these reasons are. If SarahJane chooses, as she says in her comment, not to read Jonathan Safran Foer because some guy at Amazon put him on a "dick lit" list, and I repeated it here, that's her choice, and OK by me, but also a shame, and I'm sorry. I don't want to lose a reader for Foer, and I loved Everything Is Illuminated. It's funny around a heartbroken core, and you've got to do something with that kind of heartbreak. Foer makes history live again in ways that break my own heart, as I read, and teach me how to live with greater compassion and greater conviction to do no harm, moment by moment.
And that, I continue to find, is why I read. It helps me live, it gives me the courage to be as kind as I can possibly be, and I am not always kind, and not always thoughtful, so I keep reading, and, sometimes, it gives me the courage to say no to some things that must not happen in this world because they do terrible harm, and to do what I can about that. My life is small, my reading is larger than I am. Maybe I will grow large enough to do a little kindness in the world.
(That's my annoying confession. I have friends who, dismissively, call me Pollyanna. And others who, kindly, see me as a sort of Amelie! Dix-cinq!)
OK, but it turns out that Lad Lit, the politer name for Dick Lit, actually refers to a more confessional sort of literature written by men, about men, but probably for readers of any kind. Nick Hornby is indeed on the "lad lit" list, and is also credited, in the link above, as its "daddy." (By the way, the only Hornby I've read is How to be Good, which has a female main character. And I'm not sure I learned how to be good from it! I learned that the phrase is laden, and our human motives complicated, etc., which rings true to me.) So Lad Lit may well be different from Dick Lit, and, getting back to the Roiphe article, which I recommend, it explores issues of male identity. Roiphe's selected quotations emphasize the ambivalence men may feel these days about "male identity," if there is such a thing, and about sex. Roiphe quotes a Benjamin Kunkel character saying, “Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.”
Roiphe is contrasting this with the vigor and joy of the penis in novels by a previous generation of men writers, men that some feminists have tossed away, and there is a pertinent trashcan in her essay, and I am saddened to think than some men have to feel this way about that body part or about what they might write. I don't want the writers of dick lit or lad lit dismissed, or to dismiss themselves, just as I don't want women writers, of "chick lit," or "literary" fiction, or "confessional" lit, or whatever we happen to call any of it, to be dismissed, simply because they are female or write about women and their personal matters. Where did I recently read a woman writer saying, "Women know that the personal is the political," as if that argument was long done, and this was fully accepted? I'm not sure it is, and I don't think this chick lit vs. lad lit conversation is done, either.
Even though some articles tell me that "lad lit" is dead, that it died in 2004, etc.
Lad lit might not be dead, if people are still writing it and reading it. But David Foster Wallace is dead. People are still reading him. And to acknowledge the icky marketing aspect of all this--that "chick lit" and "dick lit" and "lad lit" are labels for the convenience of book marketing, book reviewing, and bookstore organization. etc.--I will confess that our first editions of Wallace suddenly became hot commodities upon his death.
But our weekend manager, Tim, put a notice on the door as soon as he got the news. A passerby took a picture of it with his phone, and within the hour a reporter from Chicago called the store to interview Tim, who had been one of Wallace's students at ISU. Babbitt's was Wallace's favorite bookstore, which he apparently said somewhere once in print, according to my boss, the owner. My niece (a different niece, not the Traveling Pants niece) was saddened both by Wallace's death, in itself, but also because she was registered for his course the following semester at her college in California, and now she wouldn't learn what he had to say about writing. And that's my little Amelie moment of rest-in-peace.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Chick Lit & Dick Lit
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.
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