OF A GOLDEN AGE

Hadley Freeman’s Guardian column this week answers the question “Can you get married without looking like a meringue?” At the end of a reasonable, helpful answer, Freeman shares a

rumour (untrue, as it turns out) about Vogue‘s Plum Sykes who, after her first wedding was cancelled, was supposed to have dyed her dress black and turned up to her sister’s nuptials in the aforementioned frock, looking like a glorious combination of Miss Havisham and Banquo at the feast. If you need me to explain why this is brilliant, go dress like a meringue.

(Miss Havisham is the creepy, spidery rich lady from Great Expectations, while Banquo is Macbeth‘s dead friend who comes back as a ghost.)

Cynthia Ozick’s novel The Puttermesser Papers is a lovely, strange, and descriptive account of a woman apart. I loved Puttermesser and picked up Ozick’s more recent novel Heir to the Glimmering World with trepidation.

There was no need, because it is just as descriptive and lush but with a wider array of characters to examine. Ozick falls in the category of “college fiction” in my mind because she isn’t what I’d call summer beach reading, and I’ve never run into anyone who’s read her outside the context of school or literary criticism. But what’s wonderful about her style is that the bones of the plot are easy to put down and pick back up, while actually reading her prose for a minute or an hour is equally rewarding. Her words fill your mind up.

The mentally ill matron of the German family, as described by the American nanny:

But I wondered still whether she was truly mad, or whether her madness had itself come into being on some scientific plan. World-upheaval had capsized and stupefied her. Then she must answer! Answer disorder with disorder, fracture with fracture; she must refuse and refuse. Once or twice, having refused, she recanted. She had refused her shoes — but now she wore them. She had refused the language of exile — but now she was in thrall to a narrative wherein mind was governance, and a nation was stable, and disorder and fracture were tamely domesticated. She did not protest the language of exile; she was immersed in it, captivated. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness will not recant.

I was pulling leftover pizza out of the work fridge when a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon rolled out and landed on my toes.

Here’s an interesting microcause for the day: Cure CVS Now, an organization hoping to unlock CVS’s condom cases across America or, as the organization accuses, only in neighborhoods with more people of color. Ouch. CCN suggests that CVS is stigmatizing condom use by making people ask to access them.

At the Walgreens in my diverse neighborhood plenty of things are locked up, including: fancy razorblades, deodorant, Sudafed of course, tooth whitening systems, and baby formula. How do you counter a company’s attempt to stop people from shoplifting the most frequently shoplifted items? Is that a matter of civil equality after all?

To be honest, I’d rather the 14- or 15-year-olds who want to be sexually active, or ANYONE who can’t afford birth control, just shoplift the damn condoms and not have unwanted babies. Hell, if people are stealing the condoms, maybe each CVS should spend a little money every month and buy a huge sack of condoms from Planned Parenthood or a local AIDS prevention organization or something, then sell them to customers for ten cents or a quarter.

Things you never think you’ll do: Espouse the good works of the United States Postal Service.

Sure, FedEx and UPS do fast-turnover deliveries and do them well for the most part, but they cost an unreasonable amount for your average Joe or Jane who doesn’t care about the time frame. Paying $15 to ship a couple of volumes of Time Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown that cost 50¢ each at East Dundee’s Community Thrift Store defeats the purpose of the gesture.

I shipped three parcels — 1.2 pounds to Beloit, Wisconsin; 4.3 pounds to Minneapolis, Minnesota; and 3.7 pounds to Fairbanks, Alaska (“Honey, you sure? That’s gonna take twelve business days!”) — for a grand total of $11.08. FedEx’s cheapest rates combine to over $50. Plus, the post office lady had some bodacious acrylic nails.

Moreover . . .
– The new Love stamp doesn’t make me hurl,
– The Simpsons are on their own stamp series, and
– The beautiful Abraham Lincoln stamp series is still available.

Good on you, USPS. I’m not holding my breath for this to continue.

Unnecessary side note: Did you know that some kinds of biodegradable packing peanuts are edible? This is not an endorsement, merely a trivium.

From the mediocre 2004 U2 single All Because of You:

I like the sound of my own voice
I didn’t give anyone else a choice

Don’t we know it, buddy.

Reed College, in need… — Reed now costs $50 thousand a year, has an endowment of more than $350 million, and will not be accepting students who need too much financial aid. This is need-sensitive as opposed to need-blind, which the New York Times stupidly describes this way:

… accepting students based purely on merit, without regard to wealth, and still meeting their financial need. Only the nation’s richest colleges do that.

My alma mater, Beloit College, was need-blind until some point in the last few years, with a student body similar in size to Reed’s and an endowment of, wait for it, about $100 million. I call bullshit on this Reed debacle. Moreover, Beloit sure as shit didn’t cost $50 large a year, and only around one third of students paid the ticket price of around $35 thousand — most were accepted on an assumed discounted tuition rate (myself included), with variable aid on top of that depending on academic performance and other application factors.

Reed is the Harvard of weirdy schools, and many Beloit students either longed to go to Reed or had friends who ended up there. The last thing weirdy schools need is to have even wealthier student bodies.

In her “Recommended” sidebar, Elana of Elana’s Pantry listed a Men’s Health article currently making the rounds:

Is This the Most Dangerous Food for Men?

Today it’s almost impossible to avoid soy without making all your own food from scratch, especially for vegetarians. The MH article highlights one man’s experiences with breast growth and sexual dysfunction because of his soy consumption, something that is not unique and will almost certainly increase with our dependency on soy. The raised estrogen level damages some men. I have a hard time imagining it doesn’t somehow impact women too, especially since estrogen raises the risk of breast cancer. Tamoxifen, a popular medication to prevent breast cancer in at-risk women, works by thwarting estrogen.

Elana avoids soy because of its estrogen-mimicking qualities. I do too: soy is a migraine trigger, and migraines and estrogen are inextricably linked:

The influence of estrogen on migraine is evident by a 3-fold greater prevalence among women compared with men, and by significant changes in migraine incidence with changes in female reproductive status.

And speaking of health controversy — Newsweek‘s cover story on Oprah is generating a lot of buzz, both good and bad. The article highlights Oprah’s dogged pursuit of health and wellness trends in what some people are saying is an unbalanced way, and especially rakes Suzanne Somers over the coals for her sort of fanatical reliance on nutritional and hormone supplements, among other strange unsanctioned medical technologies. Somers contests that she’s done her research.

After I glimpsed Pekar at the book fair (see previous post), I stood at attention for the next hour and a half knowing he’d eventually be back. The coordinator came back to ask if I wanted to be rotated, but of course I was waiting to see Harvey Pekar again. She said, “Oh, come upstairs and meet him!”

Pekar and his editor, Paul Buhle, were in the hospitality room and we talked for a few minutes before they had to go downstairs for their panel discussion. I also met Bucky Halker, a Wisconsin-born singer-songwriter and labor academic who reminds me of Jeff Bridges circa Fearless (tall, thin, runaway hair, piercing blue eyes) and serves on the Woody Guthrie Foundation board.

At past Printers Rows, Studs Terkel presented his own program, but at this first one since his death in October they invited Pekar and Buhle to discuss their recent graphication of portions of Terkel’s most famous book, Working. Really, Pekar and Terkel are cut of the same cloth: both are magnetic personalities (though Pekar has great social anxiety) who spend their lives discussing the overlooked “ordinary” people who populate most of the world. By holding these people’s stories up to the light, we can give them the attention they deserve — not by romanticizing, or making them unhealthily famous (Cough . . . Susan Boyle?), but by acknowledging that everyone plays a part.

Because of the draw of Studs Terkel (especially in Chicago) and Pekar’s elevated profile since 2003′s great movie adaptation of American Splendor, CSPAN’s Book TV broadcast the panel live. In this context I felt more self conscious as the loudest laugher. Whoops.

The only phrase from WordCamp that stuck with me was delivered by the blustery slow-talker Liz Strauss. On the whole she was ridiculous and awful. In particular, she said that as a blogger you have to tell your audience what you are about. Of course, she gave no real concrete example of what that meant, just let it float there as an aphorism without meaning. (She also encouraged the echo chamber effect and said that writers should dumb themselves down in order to let their readers contribute.)

But really, what is anyone about?

When I got to the lit fest, the coordinator stationed me at a locked door where I had to let attendees through to get to the elevators. On one side was this whole set of rooms with authors and press and booksellers and attendees, and on the other side were the dorms at the downtown University Center. Right now, those dorms hold athletes from all over the Americas for the 2009 Pan-American Weightlifting Championships.

They all had to take the same elevators. I saw Harvey Pekar step into the elevator, and a few seconds later a Cuban athlete working on a soft-serve cone got off another. C’est la vie!