Either sex or a conversation -- ideally both.

[extemporally]

Quickly, three sentences' worth of whining: Livejournal I am so tired :(((( this subject is kicking my ass, even though in terms of pagecount the reading lists are puny, but I keep reading and my attention keeps sliding away, goddamnit, with the result that I feel both incredibly frustrated and incredibly lazy. Also, the bank won't give me a cashpoint card, and recent events in my ~personal life~ are transpiring to make me feel both incredibly giddy and also small and scared at weird moments, it's weird.

BUT things are... surprisingly okay! On Saturday I get both oddishly and kickingrad, and we're going to hang out together and you can't say better than that, and I am surrounded by some of the most incredibly nice (and funny, and interesting, and understanding) people in the world, and you really really can't say better than that, eh?

Also, I'm about halfway through My So-Called Life and argh, what a brilliant show, I LOVE IT SO. Tiny Claire Danes! Sarcastic voiceovers! The opening sequence! The part at the end of the first episode where --

RAYANNE. We had a time! Didn't we have a time?

ANGELA. Yes. We had a time.

And then she beams, and the camera pans, and oh my god, I'm not making any sense now, but <333 oh, my heart. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Also, I went on the Wikipedia article for it and apparently Winnie Holzman [who created the show] said, "When I realized that Claire truly did not want to do it any more, it was hard for me to want to do it. The joy in writing the show was that everyone was behind it and wanted to do it. And I love her." FOR SOME REASON IT IS MAKING ME ALMOST TEARY. Already I've press-ganged one of my friends into watching the first episode. :DDDD

Anyway. Books I've read! That were not for school!

Cat On A Hot Tin-Roof, by Tennessee Williams.

I read this before I got on the plane back to England, so I don't have any quotes or any really specific things I wanted to talk about, but OH MAN, TENNESSEE WILIAMS. ♥ if anything, I appreciate him for the way in which he uses language so exuberantly and angrily, it's hard to explain. I think the afterword in the edition I read got it down pat when they described it as "lyrically obscene", yes, that's pretty much it, the way he uses certain words (mendacity!!!) over and over again, till it forms a kind of rhythm in the play. (Although I also have to say that I also had some Issues with the commentary -- Margaret as the saviour of the family? C'mon.)

I also think it's pretty obvious that this play was a product of its time (?), McCarthyism etc, I kind of wish I hadn't speed-read my way through it now, or gotten time to reread it, or SOMETHING, because I feel like there are so many things about this play to be observed! And all I have now is, "This was a good play. They were all kind of assholes, like in A Streetcar Named Desire, but I didn't mind it as much."

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz.

This was a HUGELY enjoyable read. On the front cover it's been described as an "engaging blend of solid academic research with a pop culture sensibility". Mm, yeah - like, my main bugbear with the book is it didn't go as deep into the issues I wanted to read about as it could have, like gender and race and class and consumerism, but on the other hand, if it had, I don't know that it would have kept my attention as well as it did? (Given that I read half of this book in between breaks studying, and couldn't put it down when it was time to go back to work -- you know. Pretty well.)

Like!

But if the flapper faithfully represented millions of young women in the Jazz Age, she was also a character type, fully contrived by the nation's first "merchants of cool." These artists, advertisers, writers, designers, film starlets, and media gurus fashioned her sense of style, her taste in clothing and music, the brand of cigarettes she smoked, and the kind of liquor she drank - even the shape of her body and the placement of her curves. Their power over the nation's increasingly centralized print and motion picture media, and their mastery of new developments in group psychology and the behavioral sciences, lent them unusual sway over millions of young women who were eager to assert their autonomy but still looked to cultural authorities for cues about consumption and body image. Like so many successor movements in the twentieth century, the flapper phenomenon emphasized individuality, even as it expressed itself in conformity.

WHAM BAM THESIS STATEMENT. I liked this! I was kind of struggling to express the same idea after watching Goodbye Lenin!, the way treatment of gender sort of makes an appearance pre- and post-reunification of Germany, the way conditions had changed but for better or for worse you couldn't say.

Or here:

In the old days, courting took place at home. There simply wasn't anywhere else to go. In effect, the Victorian system of romance, centred as it was around the front parlor or porch, put women in the driver's seat: They did the inviting, they set the hour and day of the visit, and they called the limits. Dating was something completely different. It revolved around a new public leisure culture that cost money; it therefore placed men, who had more money, in greater control. The result was a complex interplay among commerce, sexuality, and love.

And:

"Personal liberty is a Democratic ideal," argued a 1920s marriage manual. "It is a woman's right to have children or not, just as she chooses." Americans had gone to war to make the world "safe for Democracy." Now, many seemed to believe that the essence of democracy wasn't just self-governance, but free choice in every realm of life.

And also!

Flapperdom was every bit as much an expression of class aspirations as it was a statement of personal freedom.

And of course, there are those anecdotes that seriously brought home the whole zeitgeist of the 20s -- I think Zeitz called it the "hilarious glory"? And that is as good a description of it as any! --

But Long's job was to prowl the streets, not to cloister herself in the magazine's offices. Her lifestyle was outrageous and frivolous, and she knew it. "I shall not write about restaurants," she began one column, "because I haven't been to any and I am tired about writing about eating anyway. I shall write about drinking, because it is high time that somebody approached this subject in a specific, constructive way."

!!! okay so I'll admit it -- I went through pages and pages of, Idk, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald and Lois Long and reams of other people doing outrageous stuff in the full knowledge that these were all Very Cool People who did things that were cool and were way cooler than I could ever aspire to be, which creates... some distance, to say the least? (I was brought up to disapprove of wrecking hotel rooms, I'm sorry!) But, oh man, "it is high time that somebody approached this subject in a specific, constructive way." Who says that? Who even says that?

I would have liked for this book to be about a hundred pages longer. After a while, I think it was quite clear that Zeitz liked dipping (or fully immersing himself...?) into the broader context of the 20s a lot, and that's cool, because I liked it when he did that too, but I think he also cut out some bits:

All the while, a powerful combination of mass disenfranchisement in the South (courtesy of poll taxes, literacy tests, and state-sanctioned violence) and gerrymandering in the North (small towns often sent the same number of legislators to the state capital as did large cities) made it exceedingly difficult for ordinary people to exercise meaningful political sovereignty.

Then he uses that as a bridge to argue that people came to embrace economic sovereignty and value it over the political. Like, HEY WAIT WHAT? Because slow down, Zeitz, I want to hear more about this stuff!!! Tell us more!

Or this bit:

By the late 1920s, the flapper craze had extended well past the white, middle-class neighborhoods where it began. Even if the media imagery was lily white, young black women, no less than their white peers, aspired to flapperdom. On campus at Spelman College, an all-black women's institution in Georgia, they donned imitation Chanel dresses, bobbed their hair, applied lipstick and eye shadow, and dangled strings of fake pearls from their necks.

Wait, "even if"? I think you could more accurately say "because", I mean -- very unfortunate blind spot there, given that Zeitz (correctly, I think) mentioned that flapperdom was very much an expression of class aspirations, it is rather obvious that the same link could have been made with race, the idea of superior white womanhood being reinforced through the flapper.

Although he did mention Lois Long's racism and the general flapper appropriation of the Charleston:

Reporting on one of her nighttime excursions to Harlem, she made the preposterous observation that "most of the Negro girls entertaining along Lenox Avenue would do well, either to take Charleston lessons from one of the five thousand flowers of American womanhood adorning our [downtown] choruses, or to invent a new dance." Never mind that African Americans had pioneered the Charleston.

I mean, the whole idea of white mainstream approbation being needed to legitimise the Charleston as a dance form, and also appropriation, argh, it makes me so angry :( but! That is neither here nor there, but anyway, I liked this book! I mean, my only real problem was that it should have been longer (and was maybe a bit superficially written at times? And also just plain poorly written in spots - Mik was totally right, oh my god, stop saying "It was a story that began in" already), so, you know. Clearly I enjoyed it enough to have wanted it to be longer!

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby