TUMBLE DRY LOW • writing • reading •non-fiction

poetry • publications • reading
fiction • poetry • non-fiction

Writing With Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose--1983-2005. By Margaret Atwood
Entertaining and endlessly fascinating -- this book was pure pleasure to read, and it was a highlight of my day to delve into it each morning. There's such diversity of material here: entertaining essays about Atwood's travels to Europe as a young woman, essays about her first job waitressing or a few embarrassing moments on book tours, about her relationship to Dashiell Hammett's work, or her thoughts about science fiction via Ursula LeGuin. I felt like I was losing a friend when I returned this tome to the library. Some of my favorite essays were Atwood's book reviews -- it was like having the best read friend in the world who offers to tell you about her favorite books. Atwood only reviews books that she loves, and the reviews are a treat to read. She also has some great authoritative essays where she covers, for instance, about 200 years of female bad behavior. To have that authority-- to be widely-read enough to make overarching statements about 200 years of literature! I grew pretty envious at all the time Atwood must have to read (and also for the fact people pay her to go on Arctic cruises, during which she writes entertaining essays and reads books about Arctic exploration, in exchange for her delivering a few fascinating lectures). This book can also inspire some great reading lists--at the risk of sounding fanatic, I copied down most of the books she reviewed and plan to read a great deal of them.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. By Ariel Levy
It's always slightly guilt-inducing to read a book whose argument you whole-heartedly agree with--but it's also really fun! Ariel Levy here outlines what she thinks has happened to feminism, arguing that a new breed of "post-feminist" -- woman obsessed with strip teases, Girls Gone Wild, and casual sex—are not actually engaged in worthwhile empowerment or progress of any sort. As Susan Brownmiller, one of the founder’s of the Women’s Liberation Movement, says of these women, “You think you’re being brave, you think you’re being sexy, you think you’re transcending feminism. But that’s bullshit.” The first half of the book is fascinating, well-written, and well-argued -- Levy follows a crew of Girls Gone Wild around Miami, goes to interview the CEO of Playboy (a woman), and looks into Cake parties (also started by women under the pretense of female liberation, but actually, Levy points out, look a lot like Maxim parties or Girls Gone Wild). The chapters on teenagers and Sex in the City are a bit less interesting, perhaps because Levy is repeating her arguments and stating what’s more obvious (such as girl teenagers are having sex when they don't want to). Her support in the last two chapters – anecdotal interviews with what feels like not enough teenagers and women – seems more spare. However, I'd still love it if all my friends--in fact, all 20 and 30 something women -- read this book, and maybe, somehow collectively, young women can figure out another way to empowerment that doesn’t involve a bared midriff, thongs, and Sex in the City.

Color: Victoria Finlay
I would vote this the best book to read outloud to a companion while on a long road trip. It’s endlessly fascinating, filled with odd trivia and stories about colors. Half a travel journal, half a historical summary, you follow Victoria’s journey as she zips around the world, from Afghanistan to South America to India, search for the history of color. I was envious of her experiences she had. While a pleasure read aloud in small tidbits, this book was a bit too fragmented to fully enjoy when I sat down and tried to read it through all at once. Maybe it’s like a Reader’s Digest version of color – I felt like I was getting the summary, instead of the in-depth view. In my favorite chapters, such as blue (where she travels to Afghanistan), Finaly gives us a more focused narrative that is gripping, fascinating, and personal.

Jarhead: Anthony Swofford
I had read a very favorable review of this book in the New York Times, and finally had a chance to pick it up – I was disappointed to find it a rather unbearable book, at least for this woman reader. It was this odd mixture of self-conscious workshopped literary prose, and vulgar slang—of speaking of women as items to be slept with (well, using other terms than “slept with”), and then waxing poetic about the desert sand. I quickly tired of the narrator’s drunken and sexual exploits –once is all right, but to keep telling us that he got drunk, he slept with this woman, he got drunk, slept with another woman, and his friend slept with that woman, they beat up these guys—it’s not enough to fill a memoir. I understand that this book is supposed to give us insight into a soldier’s mind, but this particular soldier’s mind could be understood, I think, in a single chapter. In the middle of the book, we see the speaker with a gun in his mouth, contemplating suicide—and there’s something to be said about the unsuccessful and distanced tone of this memoir that made me not care whether or not he pulled the trigger.

The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales (Sheldon Cashdan)
A very readable book about how the author thinks children interpret fairy tales. My favorite parts were in Cashdan's good summaries of many unfamiliar tales...and there was also great pleasure in re-remembering the fairy tales I had read as a child, and learning new details about old stories. Everyone by this point knows that in the original versions of fairy tales, the Little Mermaid dies, and Cinderella's step sisters chop up their feet to fit into the glass slipper. But there were other details I had never heard. For instance--the original Little Red Ridinghood's striptease before she got into bed with the wolf who ate her. Or Rapunzel's pregnancy before the witch blinded her prince. Or the wicked stepmothers who were forced to wear red hot shoes and dance until they died.

Robert C. Allen: Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture
One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a while…very readable, written in a specific concrete way with fascinating footnotes and a bibliography that seemed to be an ideal reading list on the formation of sexuality in America. What a terrific idea for a book: Allen was the first, it seems, to want to approach burlesque in an academic cultural studies way, and he makes clear its limitations – we have few if any scripts of burlesque, and burlesque performers and attendees tended not to keep records or journals or diaries. So how to reconstruct the history of burlesque? He chooses to follow Lydia Thompson’s journey from England to the United States, and uses Lydia Thompson as a launching pad to describe the rise and fall of burlesque (and the resistance that burlesque met along the way), focusing on how the role of the burlesque woman changed from being a subversive speaking actress into a silent strip tease woman who knows the cooch dance. I’m always fascinating when learning about what a certain time period considers obscene (ballet and its tutus, for instance, when they were first introduced to the U.S.). This book never delved into the dark work of abstract theory, and when theory was brought into it, I always thought it was grounded enough to be make sense. Allen is a great and vivid writer who has a good sense for pacing, knows when to delve into a certain event and bring out historical details in all their glory, and is able to ride the line well between history and cultural studies. (1/05)

The Circus at the Edge of the Earth: Travels with the Great Wallenda Circus – Charles Wilkins
This title really drew me in…I love thinking of a circus performing at the edge of the world (in this case, northern Manitoba, Canada, which, not to be snide, doesn’t really seem completely like the edge of things). Wilkins is a journalist who traveled for a few months with the Wallanda circus across Canada – a good enough premise. And the first few pages seemed promising and atmospheric – a too empty tent, everyone cold, the audience huddled under blankets, the snow beginning. But then…I think this is a case where the author seems more fascinated with the stories that he’s telling and the people he’s talking about than the reader is. Which is an interesting phenomena to me, since writers can make anything interesting, the way grit on the sink accumulates, for instance. And if kitchen sink grit can be made worth a read, certainly characters in a circus should be made fascinating….there was one man in particular, Bobby, who Wilkins adored and he’d let Bobby talk and talk. But I found him overly headstrong, a bit selfish, boorish, offensive…I never really got to see the circus from this book – it’s smells, its details. Not much sensory description, but a lot of recounted dialogue, where the performers all talk about the frequency in which they experience near-fatal accidents. Under the Big Top by Bruce Feiler is a similar book, where Feiler travels with a circus for a year, but there was more tension in this book, and it seemed better organized (most chapters devoted to a different performer) – somehow Feiler really let the personalities of the circus folks shine through, by watching them interact, not just recounting their dialogue. (11/04)

E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture
What a great title for a book that gets bogged down in theory. The summary on the back of the book touts “The first book to consider the career of P.T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective”—and while I don’t know much about cultural studies, it seems to me to be a book that sparsely cites small details or occurrences, and then spends more time applying theory to interpret those details. I was especially disappointed in the footnotes—often there would be a tantalizing mention of some detail in the text (footnoted)—and I’d rush to the footnotes, expecting to be able to read the primary source or an elaboration, but instead it would be a simple citation—see “such and such” for more details. This book did really hammer home on Barnum’s presentation of race to his ticket-buyers….and I found the chapter on morality plays in the American Museum lecture room to be especially fascinating (okay, the first baby contests, and Jenny Lind were also interesting). However, it seemed most of the time 21st century ideas and terminology were being juxtaposed and used exclusively to interpret the 19th century, which doesn’t seem good historical practice (and besides, doesn’t make for the most fascinating reading either). (10/04)