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I finished New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series this week. Like most people, I think it's not quite as good as Twilight, but it has a lot going for it. Some thoughts:

1. Stephenie Meyer is not the world's great stylist, but she does have a few nice lines in New Moon. One of my favorites was "I was a lost moon." This is how Bella describes her life after Edward leaves, and it's a good image----a moon that is used to revolving around another planet, suddenly having its planet disappear and having no center, no course.

2. Edward leaves Forks after the first or second chapter of the book. The next chapters are nothing except a chapter title that is the name of the month. October. Blank page. November. Blank page. I've never seen this before in a novel, and it's kind of brilliant. Eloquent, actually.

3. By the first couple of chapters, there are two scenes that are powerful. One is the scene where Bella sees her grandmother in a dream. Can't give details without spoiling, but it's a haunting and memorable scene. The other is when Edward leaves, which feels devastating. You really feel this pain, and those couple of empty chapters that follow are a really smart way to convey Bella's numbness and to give the reader . . . I don't know, let's call it "narrative time" to absorb what's happened.

4. I like the themes Meyer weaves into the story. One is the question of what to accept in life. Edward is gone, but there is a good man (Jacob) who loves her. If she accepted Jacob into her life, is that settling? Is it realistic? Is passionate love better than mature love, or vice versa? Her treatment of this issue is not simplistic. It reminded me of Terence Malick's movie about Pocahontas, The New World. She has a passionate connection with John Smith (played by Colin Farrell), but when he leaves she is slowly courted by another settler (played by Christian Bale).

5. Also, after reading Meyer's stand-alone sci-fi novel The Host, I see more clearly her interest in the possibilities for building bridges between cultures, races, individuals of different values. She often presents two cultures that are naturally opposed or hostile to one another, and then shows how, slowly, painstakingly, bridges can be built, through personal contact or previously unrecognized common goals.

By the by, Deb found this nice interview of Stephenie Meyer online.

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I'm a big fan of Carolyn Hax, the advice columnist for the Washington Post. And someone asked her about healthy relationships today, how they can tell if their romantic relationship is solid or not, and she had this succint reply---"Ask yourself this: Is there something you're afraid to say out loud to your mate?"

That's simple but brilliant.
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The success of chick flicks like Sex and the City and Twilight last year was a boon for many reasons. It should mean a green light for other films geared toward women, but also it's led to some soul-searching about women and film in general. Columns like Lisa Schwarzbaum's ("Why I Love [and Hate] Chick Flicks") are an attempt to come to terms with our mixed feelings about our own representation in film-and our own aesthetic tastes.
But my feeling is that women are only halfway there getting a grip on these things. The very fact that we need to justify our tastes, to defend "our" genre, and most of all to publicly declare our rejection of its excesses betrays a fear of mockery that men rarely worry about.
So I write an open letter to all my comadres in film-love about how to stop worrying and start to love the chick flick, by embracing three potent principles.
PRINCIPLE 1: WE DON'T HAVE TO APOLOGIZE.
A few years back, some researchers experimented with telling an identical joke to two test groups. Group A was told the joke with the classic beginning "A guy walks into a bar . . ." Group B was told the same joke, with only one difference: "A woman walks into a bar . . ." At the end of the joke, Group A laughed and chuckled. Group B merely looked puzzled. What, they asked, did being a woman have to do with it?

In our culture, it's still true that the male is the "default," the norm against which deviations are highlighted. The very fact that women so often declare their discomfort with even the term "chick flick" shows our sensitivity to the way these films hold us up to hostile comparative scrutiny. We don't want to seem vain or superficial, and we cringe at the silliness of our film counterparts, who are shopping for scarves and missing job interviews while their male brothers are off fighting the Nazis and building mafia empires.

My friend, if you've never seen a woman sing into a hairbrush or jump up and down in unison with her friends, take heart. Most men have never been in a gang shootout or participated in grave international intrigue. Male genres are often complete and utter fantasy. And yet it's hard to imagine a male critic writing an article parsing his love of action movies. Critics like Stephen Hunter fairly bask in what they identify as male aesthetics: violence, war, big bangs, and car chases ("a testosterone-packed thrill ride!") They glory in the best of these movies, and feel no need to distance themselves from the worst. Watch and learn.

Of course, acceptance of our cinematic fantasies will be easier for women if we follow Principle 2.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNDERSTAND, WAY DEEP DOWN, THAT WHAT GOES ON IN THE HEAD OF A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL IS JUST AS COMPLEX AND IMPORTANT AS WHAT GOES ON IN THE HEAD OF A 45-YEAR-OLD MAN.
Quick: Who is the more complex character: Anton Chigurh, or Bella Swan? If your first instinct is to laugh at the mere notion that Twilight's teen heroine could be considered as significant a character as No Country For Old Men's sadistic killer, I beg you to reconsider. What do we know about Anton Chigurh? What does he actually do in the film? Is there really much more to him than a certain cool self-possession and a memorably creepy haircut?
In our annual showering of awards on the Javier Bardems, Gene Hackmans, Robert DeNiros, and Sean Penns, we've somehow come to believe that this is not only what great acting looks like but what significant lives look like: middle-aged, taciturn, tough, and male. But half the population is female, and every single woman started as a girl. The interior life of girls represents, very simply, our lives, not so long ago. And it consists of every good thing that we still value and some that we rue: the joy of hopscotch, the yearning for love, the fun of friendship, the dream of a perfect wedding, the fear of ending up alone, the crippling brokenness of abuse. And these themes, swirling in the head of a 13-year-old (or 55-year-old) are just as vivid, just as much the very stuff of life, as the middle-aged man's will to power, obsession with sex, jaded aging, and need for redemption.

And you don't need to be a victim of incest or domestic abuse to have a significant story to tell. This will be easier to understand if we embrace Principle 3.

PRINCIPLE 3: THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE.
Let me be clear. I love typically male movie genres, like most women I know. Movies about war take us deep into an experience that is harrowing and essential. Movies about violence impress on us the fragility of life and the awesomeness of power that can destroy it. Movies about action make us feel alive and vital. And the Javier Bardems, the Sean Penns? They are great actors.

But the be-all and end-all of life, I believe, hasn't changed since St. Paul wrote, "Now abide hope, faith, and love, but the greatest of these is love." Love may be represented in movies with weddings, sighs, and yearning looks, but make no mistake: It is the central need of our inner existence. It is the difference between happiness on this earth, and loneliness. Between joy and pain. Between dying surrounded by family and friends who are singing you on your way, or ending life alone. When Carrie is in Mexico after her aborted wedding to Big in Sex in the City, she is devastated, and you feel it. Because something huge has been lost. When Bella looks into Edward's eyes after he tells her that becoming a vampire would rob her of everything, she says, "I don't care." Because the intimacy she feels with him is life's greatest gift. And when Edward Ferrars comes back to Eleanor at the end of Sense and Sensibility to announce he isn't married after all, she breaks down with emotion. Because a life of endurance has, in that moment, been transformed into a life of happiness.

My hope is that the chick-flick revolution is just starting, and that success will breed more projects and bigger budgets. If so, there will be not only more good films geared toward women but more bad ones as well. If so, we need to undo the suspicion that chick flicks are either bad because of their genre, or good despite of it. We need to love the chick flick, and the chick inside too.

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I tend to be more forgiving of the Oscars than most, but last night's ceremony was the worst I can remember. Hugh Jackman's cutesy song-and-dance number, the endless montages, the expanded introductions (now we have FIVE presenters for the acting categories instead of one), the lack of humor, the lackluster fashion. As I summarized to a friend:

Dresses: BLAH
Jackman: UGH
Ceremony: AWFUL
Awards: BORING
Length: INTERMINABLE

I cannot remember a single gown from last night. All I know is there were an awful lot of them that were phlegm-colored. Not even bright white. Somewhere between the color of old rain puddles and ash. Actually, now I'm remembering one: Meryl Streep looked fabulous in her glowy taupe dress, not-too-severe-and-not-too-poufy updo, and her perfect makeup.

Hugh Jackman was not funny. And he's not THAT great a dancer or singer to make the cheesy song-and-dance worth it. Sophia Loren looked pissed to be praising Meryl Streep, and Meryl looked embarrassed for her . . . like they both know that Meryl Streep is wayyyy out of Sophia Loren's league, and Sophia had to resort to her busty dress and hand-on-hip tude to make up for it.

I did enjoy the success of Slumdog Millionaire, and I was glad that Sean Penn won Best Actor. Though I'm happy for the success of The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke just hasn't earned that honor yet. Let's revisit in five years and see if the comeback has held.

But watching the Oscars was still fun because of the wry company of my beloved Cubes. They were the lucky recipients of Oscar gift bags, including such primo swag as a gossip magazine, breath mints, and a tampon. Never say I never gave you anything, Cubes!

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I'm uninspired by the Oscars this year. In fact, I'm more motivated by who I don't want to win (anyone/thing Benjamin Button related) than who I do (Heath Ledger, Viola Davis). If the Golden Globes and Bafta are any indication, Slumdog Millionaire should take Best Picture, which would be a nice change from the biopics and dour choices of recent years.
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My colleague Catherine was a meeting with the Lexington acquisitions staff, and they mentioned their training manual, which they call "Yoda."

"Like the Jedi knight," asked Catherine?

Stares of disbelief: "Jedi MASTER," they corrected her in unison.

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This is rather self-congratulatory, but a little self-love every once in a while isn't the worst thing in the world.

From Slate's review of Alan Wolfe's new book:

"As Wolfe argues himself in this engaging new book, The Future of Liberalism, liberalism is more than a temperament; it is also a political tradition with substantive commitments—a body of ideas—and it has, as well, a dedication to fair procedures, impartially administered, legitimated by the consent of the people. Temperament, substance, procedure can all be liberal, and understanding liberalism requires a grasp of all three and of the connections among them. Wolfe's distinctive claim, however, is that the key to liberalism is a set of dispositions, or habits of mind—seven of them, in fact, each of which gets its own chapter.

Four of these dispositions will be quite familiar: "a sympathy for equality," "an inclination to deliberate," "a commitment to tolerance," and "an appreciation of openness." We're used to the portrayal: liberals as talky, tolerant, open-minded, egalitarians. It's not surprising, then, that these types are at home in the garrulous world of the academy—or that bossy preachers, convinced they have the one true story, do not care for them much. But Wolfe's sketch of the liberal adds three unfamiliar elements to the picture: "a disposition to grow," "a preference for realism," and "a taste for governance.""

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Watched a fantastic movie last night: Blame It On Fidel. (I hate the title; it's awkward and misleading.) It's actually a French movie (by Julie Gavras) about a girl whose life changes when her well-off parents become social activists. It's got comic moments within the framework of a modest domestic drama. And the girl (Nina Kervel-Bey) who plays the main character . . . wow. It's crazy to think someone that young can be such a great actor.

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Now that I'm on Good Reads, Facebook, and our new book club blog, I'm coming up short on content. I've got a couple of mini-essays on my mind, but no time to work on them, what with my compulsive Word Challenge playing on Facebook. But here's what we did this weekend.

Friday night is all about Battlestar Galactica. We're down to the last episodes of the series, and I can't even go out to the movies on Fridays because I don't even want to Tivo and watch later. So Friday: BSG.

Saturday we finally turned our attention to the enormous amount of mud that Rocky has dragged in over the last two weeks. Massive vacuuming and washing of blankets and throws. Saturday night we had a delish dinner Chez Finastice and one of the best desserts I've ever had, a thick, sturdy bread pudding topped with warmed fruit compote. BRAVA, Deb. This followed by Lord of the Rings Monopoly, which I was thrilled to find Jay could not only tolerate but enjoy. Now there are TWO board games we can play together!

Sunday was laundry and some reading, and today I visited Julie, who is recovering (well) from surgery. I've also attempted to sort out the dramatis personae in our book club book, The Savage Detectives. And of COURSE we thought long and deeply about the legacy of our American presidents.
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This isn't the most brilliant article, but it's a nice tie-in to the kinds of things I've been thinking about lately: mainly femininity and culture.

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Courtesy of Deborah Justice

Nadiring: Going through a temporary depression, either psychological or hormonal, that has you metaphorically kicking your Keds into the dirt, hanging your head low, and mumbling words of discouragement to yourself. (Known antidotes: beagle, chocolate, amusing and loving friends.)
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The city of Birmingham in England has outlawed the apostrophe.

Meera Selva's coverage of the story for Yahoo is pretty amusing:

LONDON – On the streets of Birmingham, the queen's English is now the queens English.

England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.

But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.

It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as "St. Pauls Square" or "Acocks Green."

This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passers-by that "Kings Heath" was once owned by the monarchy.

"Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed," he said. "More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it."

But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.

"They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. "It's always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."

Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain's sometime confusing streets by entering a postal code rather than a street address.

She said that if someone preferred to use a street name — with or without an apostrophe — punctuation wouldn't be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination.

A test by The Associated Press backed this up. In a search for London street St. Mary's Road, the name popped up before the apostrophe had to be entered.

There is no national body responsible for regulating place names in Britain. Its main mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which provides data for emergency services, takes its information from local governments and each one is free to decide how it uses punctuation.

"If councils decide to add or drop an apostrophe to a place name, we just update our data," said Ordnance Survey spokesman Paul Beauchamp. "We've never heard of any confusion arising from their existence."

To sticklers, a missing or misplaced apostrophe can be a major offense.

British grammarians have railed for decades against storekeepers' signs advertising the sale of "apple's and pear's," or pubs offering "chip's and pea's."

In her best-selling book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice," insisting it should be "Two Weeks' Notice."

"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended," she wrote.

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I love that Truss calls those who can't be bothered to understand the apostrophe "spineless."
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I really loved this movie. It was like Sin City in its visual style (stunning) but lacked that movie's incessant, nauseating violence. It's nonetheless a sharp police thriller (and features the voice of Daniel Craig in the lead role).

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This is taken straight from SoMyMom's blog, chosen as an Editor's Pick at Salon.com (http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=89111). But it's very me.

After posting about a probable "Sex and the City" sequel (a tip from the ever-newsworthy Popeater), a strange feeling came over me. Anxiety. Guilt, even. For every compatriot that would be excited for this revivial of nursing home-bound cougars, just as many feminist and men readers will roll their eyes and file me as a particular type.

Backlash to such overplayed pop culture can be vehement. Take one review of last year's "Sex and the City" movie from Ain't it Cool News:

"Imagine, if you will, a Rob Schneider movie, a Ben Stiller movie and an Adam Sandler movie teaming up and slipping Rohypnol to the BRATZ movie, pulling a train on her sorry, barely legal ass, then leaving the unfortunate spawn of that unholy union in the LA sun for 40 years until it rotted and leathered to the point that it was attractive only to gay men and other women. That’s the Sex and the City movie."

This from the same guy who thought teenage raunch fest "Sex Drive" was "hilarious." (Who would watch such a movie?)

And who invented the concept of guilty pleasures? Is it a natural-born predator of capitalism?

For guilty pleasures are inevitably rooted in mass culture: John Mayer. Carmen Electra (dusty ol' skank). Bestselling self-help novels. Maroon 5. "90210." "Titanic." I cringe even as I write these.

Meanwhile, underground bands, movies and novels are always cool, even if sub-par, as they often are.

Further: Guilty pleasures can only unsully their status by devolving into relative obscurity. At which point they're up for being cool again. Think about it: Steve Martin. B-movies. Fanny packs. Tab. Rick Astley. Kurt Cobain.

So how can we unsully the sullied sooner? Dispel hot commodity hatred in this Obama era of unity and progressiveness?

Not sure. Maybe share your guilties to shed the stigma?

But please note: If one more person tells me how much I need to read "Eat, Pray, Love," I'm gonna throw the [Michael Pollan] book at them.

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My friend Julie just received a most extraordinary Valentine's Day present from her husband Kevin. See for yourself at:


http://www.juliesgift.com/Home_Page.html
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So Stephen King thinks Stephenie Meyer (author of Twilight) "can't write worth a darn. She's not very good." And the renowned tween girl expert goes on to say that "she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly sexual. . . . A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that's a shorthand for all the feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet."

Oh, go fug yourself, Stephen. First of all, she can write worth a darn. Several million darns, as a matter of fact. She's not brilliant, but then neither are you. She's good. Above average. JUST LIKE YOU.

I remember picking up Scott Smith's The Ruins after King raved about it in his Entertainment Weekly column. And I remember thinking after I read it, "Hmm. That was merely good. Enjoyable in a very, very pedestrian way." Could his fireworks over Scott Smith's writing have anything to do with the fact that he likes thriller, and doesn't like teenage girl romances?

Once again, Dear Reader, I smell the ugly rat of sexism at work. People just don't realize how very narrow their own preferences are---and how constantly they mistake those preferences for quality. Not to go all godlike and omniscient on you, but I assure you: Scott Smith is no better a writer than Stephenie Meyer. There's a prejudice against the genre that is coloring critical opinion against Meyer, and it has something to do with Twilight being written for girls and women. Thrillers and action movies (think Bourne Supremacy, think Ronin) are often touted as great, sometimes exactly because of their genre (think phrases like "testosterone-fueled" and "energy-filled action fest"). Not so with female genres: the movie is either good despite the genre, or silly because of it.

I used to take a more chill attitude toward this. After all, women can enjoy male-genre movies, so we have the best of both worlds. If men experience both an interior and societal taboo against liking female-genre movies, then that's their loss. But this year, with the incredible---and, to movie execs and critics, flabbergasting---success of Sex in the City and Twilight, it became apparent how much great art women are denied because of these prejudices.

And if I hear one more man talk about how Twilight represents "safe sexuality" for girls, I will puke. All sexuality in art is safe sexuality. And teenage girls are not particularly known for "feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet" (if ya know what I mean; there's plenty of dealing going on). Can you imagine any critic saying such a thing about boys? Really, imagine reading:

"Maxim is exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly sexual. . . . A lot of the physical side of it is understated, and for boys, that's a shorthand for all the feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet."

I've noted in the past that war and action movies fill a similar fantasy role for boys and men, if fantasy is what you want to call it. Their love of movies like 300, Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers is so analogous to women's love of romantic movies, yet men consider these movies to be primal, brutally realistic, and relevant. I'm talking about men who have never come close to the bottom of a foxhole, and who would probably scream like an infant if they did. But these dramatizations of violence, strength, and bravery connect deeply with us, and deserve the honor they get. I only wish we could expand that circle of honor to include art that connects deeply with women.
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House of Heroes

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Here's the video for my favorite song of 2008, "In the Valley of the Dying Sun" by House of Heroes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_T1Z4MvTEQ&feature=related

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