everyone's a little bit racist

It seems the blogosphere has been embarrassingly slow on the uptake here, but just today I read an article in Pyschology Today that defends all of our favorite racist and sexist stereotypes, including:

Blonds are hotter than brunettes!

Muslims are natural suicide bombers!

Blue eyes are better than brown eyes!

Skinny women get more men!

Big boobs are best!

Despite its insistence that all these claims are totally backed up with like science and stuff, most of the studies the authors cite are only marginally related to the topic, and other claims just aren't backed up at all. (My composition class is working on their final papers, so I'm especially sensitive to this shit right now.) The article is entitled "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature," and as Kevin at Slant Truth 2.0 observes, labeling something "politically incorrect" is "almost always a way of saying, 'you won’t like what you read and any arguments against me are moot, not because I can back up my claims, but because you’re being politically correct.'”

Here's my favorite excerpt:

"Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing."

If you take the names Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa and rearrange the letters, it actually spells out Rudyard Kipling. (Not really.) Never mind that lighter pigments actually evolved because of a vitamin D3 deficiency.* Never mind that Scandinavian men developed blond hair, too. Never mind that Inuits, Eskimos, and other heavy-clothes-wearing dark-hair-having people still seem to have libidos. Never mind that my own blond hair darkened long before I got my first period. The fact that something sounds like it would make sense doesn't make it true.

But I'm just being your typical PC liberal, right? Well, hey, I can play this game, too. Here are my own just so stories - I mean, uh, evolutionary theories:

WHY JEWS HAVE BIG NOSES.
It was very windy in Polish shtetls, and Jews often couldn't smell Bubbe's cooking from outside the cottage. Jews whose noses were large could pick up the scent more easily, while Jews with smaller noses never knew when it was time for dinner, and thus perished in the snow.

WHY NERDS WEAR GLASSES.
Football players have better luck mating because women are attracted to men who wear helmets, as it seems to augment the size of the brain. Nerds' bodies try to compensate for this by creating a need for some type of head wear. Unfortunately, this is a dead-end evolutionary technique, as glasses only augment the size of the eyes, which makes nerds appear fearful and weak. This is why the nerd race is doomed to perish in the snow.

WHY WOMEN ARE BETTER COOKS BUT MEN ARE BETTER CHEFS.
This evolutionary fact stems from the days of hunter-gatherers, when men would bring food back to their waiting mates. Evolution trained women to make use of ingredients provided by men, while men were trained to recognize tasty dinners in their raw and unharvested forms. Thus, men are more suited to commercial cooking because they're able to experiment with new combinations of foods and cope with the stress of the outside world, whereas women are better at following preset instructions in the safety of the home.

WHY WHITE PEOPLE CAN'T DANCE.
Like blond hair, this stems from the fact that northern-dwelling tribes were forced to wear layers of heavy clothing, while southern-dwelling tribes had the freedom of bare skin. Because movement was restricted, white people gradually lost the ability to dance, while in Africa, dance flourished. However, white people made up for this deficiency by developing more complex musical instruments. This is why today, black people are better dancers, but white people are better piano players.

WHY LIBERALS RIDE IN LIMOUSINES.
This trait comes from liberals' simultaneous fear of and fascination with the poor. Over thousands of years, liberals have evolved various methods of observing poor people without being seen; one medieval German document mentions an apparatus similar to a duck blind. When the limousine was invented, liberals were naturally drawn to it because of it offered both mobility and secrecy (through tinted windows). However, this trait is starting to die out because of the conspicuousness of limousines, and evolution is starting to cater to liberals' needs by selecting liberals who can blend in with the poor by actually not having any money.

See? It's fun! You can be an evolutionary psychologist, too! Try it out! Together, we'll make the world a better, more enlightened place.

* It looks like the original study isn't online, but I think you can find it in Skin: A Natural History by Nina G. Jablonksy.

LBC Ephemera

Right now, Long Beach’s main defining characteristic is that it’s full of hipsters. Hipsters are everywhere - riding faux-vintage beach cruisers with kicked-up handlebars, buying huge sunglasses in the fourth street shops, showing off their pompadours and ballet flats in the coffeehouses. Look, I’ve got nothing against hipsterdom - I wear skinny jeans, listen to Cat Power, and write at Portfolio - but after a certain point, the saturation starts to fuck with me. The other day, as I was bringing my coffee to the counter to put sugar in it, I saw someone wearing a Dunn Edwards paint shirt. “Oh, how ironic,” I thought. “What, were they selling that in Repeat Boo-teek?” Then I noticed she was wearing a white cap to go with it. Right, because you just can’t wear a thrift store paint company shirt without a thrift store painter’s cap. Finally, as I got closer, I saw that her pants were covered with honest-to-god paint. And it all made sense: here was a person so devoted to pomo irony that she had made herself an entire costume to display to her cronies.

Then I realized she was a painter.

Hey, speaking of writing and hipsters - my agent has proclaimed my first novel ready to go out to publishers. We’re waiting until January to actually send it, so that editors aren’t thinking about the holidays instead of my work, but she said that if she sees an opening between now and then, an editor who seems eager to acquire, then she’ll jump on it. Exciting times, exciting times. I’ve gotten into a nice rhythm with my second novel, and am now about forty pages into the first draft. Space travel remains awesome. Two of my characters are particle physicists, so I’m reading Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages; Margaret Lazarus Dean wrote a novel about the Challenger explosion, so I read that, too. (Both books are excellent, and you should read them and adore them.)

Here’s one thing that annoys me, though:

Lazarus Dean has created an immensely believable heroine and delivers a fascinating and approachable look at that most intimidating of all endeavors: rocket science. If there’s any justice at all, her book will be read by women’s book clubs across the country. (from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, by way of the author’s blog)

I agree that it should be read by women’s book clubs; I think it should be read by teenage girls, too, since we don’t have enough literature about women in the sciences. But if there were really any justice, the book would be read by just as many men as women. Why is the default assumption still that women’s literature is of no interest to men? It’s the same logic that led the New York Times to publish an article about gender discrimination in the workplace in their fashion and style section. If it’s about women, the reasoning goes, we shouldn’t bother men with it, because obviously they won’t care and it’s more important to cater to their undoubtedly manly interests than to open their minds.

Ian McEwan writes a novel about a teenage girl, and it’s mainstream. Zadie Smith writes a novel about a middle-aged man, and it’s mainstream. The key to a gender-neutral literary novel is making sure that the author, the main character, or both, is male; otherwise, the story is as girly as lavender perfume.

I won’t deny that there are women’s lit novels that make it to the big leagues; however, I firmly believe that the distinction is doing much more harm than good.

Bah. But anyway, Dean’s novel is fabulous, and I just started The Secret History, which threatens to be fabulous, as well. Warped Passages is fabulous if you dig photon exchanges. It’s all so fabulous that it makes me more forgiving of the hipster bikes with handlebars higher than their riders’ ears.

Here's to J. M. Tyree

There’s a great article on The Smart Set about the supposed death of literature in the face of the Unstoppable Internet. A few highlights:

The technology boosters think of themselves as saviors of a hopelessly backward humanity, while grim-jawed Luddites are bracing themselves for an apocalyptic cultural collapse involving “the death of literature” rather than simply the death of print’s dominance. Both camps in the Print Wars rely on a similar and false sense of crisis. Human beings crave and adore absorption in narrative. The delivery mechanism for thinking entertainment can be pressed into clay, carved in stone, repeated from memory around a fire, incised on scrolls, illuminated, printed, typed, Xeroxed, acted out, filmed, animated, YouTubed, Second Lived, IMed, blogged, or beamed from Earth to Mars and back again on handheld screens. The problem for short fiction is that novels grab what’s left over after the movies, cable, and online media.

You’ve probably noticed, from previous posts, that I’m pretty unimpressed by the back-in-the-good-ol’-days arguments that seem to be popping up more and more frequently (unlike back in the good ol’ days, of course, when everyone was smarter and more tolerant). Lately, I’ve been suppressing the urge to respond to them because I don’t want to be known as that blogger. You know, that single issue blogger. That blogger who tears her hair out over a cause that, in the larger scheme of things, proves to be inconsequential. I was too weary to write about Melvin Jules Bukiet’s essay on why Alice Sebold deserves a public shaming because she wrote a book he didn’t like. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the article on my grad program that was published in the Atlantic. One of the things I dig about Tyree’s essay is that he gives the simpering hack MFA writer myth exactly as much attention as it deserves - almost none - and then moves on to a much more interesting question: the realities of fiction’s place in digital media. If the short story form is struggling - and not even the most optimistic writer will tell you that it isn’t - is there a more progressive way to address the problem than with elitist accusations and defeatist hand-wringing? The answer: yes! “‘The “death of print,’” he writes,

the “death of literature,” the “death of books,” and the death of reading culture — the death of irony, and now the death of the short story — nothing dies more quickly than the “death of” article…. The salvation or damnation promised for the apocalypse just hasn’t happened; the apocalypse itself continues not to happen. We’ve stumbled on, not forward or backward so much as blindly and haltingly, into a “digital future” that never measures up to the best or worst predictions.

He acknowledges that digital media is problematic - most online magazine don’t pay, and fiction, unlike nonfiction, hasn’t done a stellar job of adapting itself to a screen and scroll bar - but instead of simply claiming that the entire genre is doomed and washing his hands of it, he does what almost none of the critics are willing to attempt. He suggests what can be done about it.

One strategy that might work for the short fiction of the future — when printed books may be only one among many “platforms” available — is brevity. Both Esquire and Wired have created short story features based on very tight length requirements: Esquire.com’s Napkin Fiction Project hosted short stories that fit on a drinks napkin, while Wired limited its writers to just six words, as in Margaret Atwood’s piece — “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”…

Now, do I think that all online short fiction should henceforth be one paragraph or less? No. But I think this suggestion is sensible not only because I hate straining my eyes in front of a screen, but because in short fiction, the entertainment very often comes from appreciation of the form, not the plot or characters. Writers like Lydia Davis write stories that exist as riddles to be pondered, rather than gateways into escapist fancy. Take “Double Negative” from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

Longer fiction - full length short stories and novels - will still enjoy their place in print; however, digital media, rather than squelching narrative, provides a larger forum for previously under-explored forms of experimentation.

Tyree continues:

Another strategy that publishers could resurrect for digital media is Victorian-style serialization. Episodic structures with very brief chapters for browsing or downloading in bite sized chunks might work well online if they managed to retain the larger shape of a full-blown book. Charging for episodes or individual titles, as Stephen King once tried to do online with “The Plant,” is wrongheaded. An HBO style buffet, or annual subscriptions to an array of publishers, would work much better.

We’re already seeing a resurgence of literary serialization in the flourishing, in recent years, of smart TV. Although it has its flaws, I submit that The Sopranos is just as good as many contemporary literary novels. The idea that all television must be tailored for the most mediocre viewers is slowly, slowly dying; instead, viewers enjoy many intelligent, engaging serialized stories - The Sopranos, The West Wing, and Arrested Development, to name a few. (I’d put Battlestar Galactica on the second tier, since it has its cringeworthy moments.) Print media have begun to pick up on this trend; for example, Michael Chabon’s latest novel made its debut in 15 installments in the New York Times Magazine.

By far the most interesting proposal Tyree makes, though, is the blog novel:

The great American blog novel — yet to be written as far as I know — will not be a novel written on a blog but instead be the blog of a compelling fictional character, or a community of interacting invented literary personas, the online equivalent of the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, who invented poets from various schools with clashing manifestoes. This approach would take fiction back to one its sources in the 17th century, the “jest biography,” such as The Life of Long Meg of Westminster. Somebody wonderful has already done this in comic form with the “blog” of the Incredible Hulk.

As we’ve seen with Lonely Girl 16, an online journal can be a fascinating way to blend reality and fiction through serialized narrative. And what better forum than the Internet, with its enabling of cyborg personalities and anonymous roleplay, to explore the potential of narrative that blurs the line between real and imaginary?

I realize that it might seem strange that I lump people who don’t like MFA students in with people don’t like this kind of book or that kind of book in with people who argue that the Internet is endangering literature. The connection is that all these people fail to realize that literature evolves in a cyclical fashion. Trends that appear today can be traced back through centuries; MFA programs are reminiscent of mentorships, TV shows are echoes of Victorian serials. Literature adapts itself to new forms of distribution, but the most basic storytelling impulse always remains intact. To say that one form is better than another simply because it’s familiar proves nothing but that you haven’t read your history.

quick note

After over three months of radio silence, I'm signing on to say that I'm married. The wedding was awesome. My dress looked great, the ceremony went fine (even though I couldn’t break the glass on the first try), the food and cake was even better than I’d hoped, and Tom’s playlist turned everyone into dancin’ fools. I was stunned by how fun it is to be a bride. The only things you ever hear about are the stress, the drama, and the stereotypes, but dressing up and hosting a huge dinner party actually rocks, if you remember to nab some of the food and alchohol you’re serving.

Near the end of the ceremony, I looked down at Tom’s hand, saw the ring I’d put on him, and got choked up. I totally love that guy.

What else should I say? What do people want to know? Ask me questions. (I’ll post some pictures when I get them.)

becaue we're in wuv

I meant to write about this days ago, but I've been a bit overwhelmed, what with getting an MFA and moving across the country and all. Anyway, Tomemos sent me the best New York Times story ever. Why is it the best? Because it’s about US, and our super romantic wedding that’s going to be the most magical day of our lives even more than prom. The article focuses on wedding vendors, and how awesome and helpful they are:

Advice books warn brides not to reveal that they are shopping for a wedding, if possible, Ms. Mead said; vendors know that “if it’s wedding, you’re going to spend more.” So her suspicion is immediately aroused when the woman at East Coast Limousine asks, “Is it for a wedding?” when the question of a 22-passenger excursion in a long, white stretch limousine comes up. The wedding special is $720 for 3 ½ hours and includes an aisle runner, Champagne, bar and “horns” that play a recording of “Here Comes the Bride” when the car stops. Ever the experienced shopper, Ms. Mead asks how much the regular rental would be, if there were no wedding.

“A four-hour minimum is $576.” So you could spend $144 less and receive a half-hour more? Why not do that instead?

“You can’t,” the saleswoman replies. If it’s a wedding, you must do the wedding special. “If the bride and groom are in the car, you can’t do it. We’ve pulled in, and there is a woman in a wedding dress, and they can’t do it. The car had to leave.”

I’m both disgusted and gratified to learn that our suspicions are confirmed: vendors actually do have an official policy of charging more for weddings (as opposed to just a strong tendency). It’s particularly bad if you’re trying to buy flowers. There’s no way to walk into a flower shop and ask for four handheld bouquets without tipping them off that a marriage license is going to be signed, at which point the prices skyrocket. Not only that, but most florists will either push extra services on you or just flat out refuse to sell you anything without including a few six foot tall sprays of orchids in Grecian vases, five boutonnieres for each male guest and thirteen corsages for each female, rose petals sprinkled with crushed diamonds for the aisle, centerpieces bigger than the actual tables, and the mystical Golden Iris of Xanadu, which grants eternal life to whoever drinks of its sweet nectar, to set on top of the cake. After visiting several florists, I finally managed to find one who was willing to actually listen to what I wanted, but she’s still charging more for the bridal bouquet than she would for a regular one, even though it’s not going to be all that fancy.

I have considered, on and off, just getting loose flowers and putting the bouquets together myself, but that thought has conjured up too many images of sitting in Tom’s parents’ living room two hours before the ceremony, frantically trying to keep broken and wilting daisies from falling out of a loop of fishing line. (But, hey, if anyone out there is feeling crafty, let’s talk.) I realize, too, that holding flowers while you’re getting married is kind of an arbitrary tradition, but then, so are a lot of things - eating cake, for example, or dancing, or dressing up, or even having a ceremony at all. The easiest way to get married would be to stop by city hall and then get take-out on the way home, but we participate in rituals because they connect us to the past, and we adhere to traditions because they bring us pleasure.

I should also point out that it’s easy to scoff at wedding planning until you’re actually doing it. Part of the reason why such a ridiculous amount of money needs to be spent is simply because putting on a dinner party is expensive, and guest lists can get quite large. The bulk of the expense isn’t ice sculptures or fairy tale gowns; it’s food. You can cut this cost by having the reception in a restaurant, but then space becomes an issue and you may find yourself having to rent out the whole place, which cancels out the money you were hoping to save. Alternately, you can have it at someone’s house, but then space becomes an issue again, and you have to provide your own tables, linens, dishes, etc. There’s no way to do it cheaply while justifying distant guests’ plane tickets and hotel rooms. I’m a little tired of people telling me that if my family is spending more than a buck fifty a head on this thing, then we’re hopeless saps who’ll gobble up any bit of tripe the wedding industry offers us.

With that said, though… horns that play “here comes the bride?” Come on.

Also: another thing that makes weddings tough to plan is the idea (created, in part, by those loveable vendors) that guests must be treated like ambassadors from neighboring kingdoms or they’ll be appalled and offended. It is forbidden to ask your guests to carpool from the hotel to the ceremony; you must rent out a bus. (We’re asking ours to carpool.) It is forbidden to ask someone to take pictures with your camera during the ceremony or reception; you must hire a photographer. (Yeah, okay, we did that, but for other reasons.) Whatever happened to family and friends all pitching in and putting on a party together? Don’t they totally do that in Mexican villages and Polish shtetls? That’s what they did in Like Water For Chocolate and this Singer story I think I read. And what’s with this rap music? In my day, I wore an onion on my belt because it was the style at the time.

Anyway, my point is that bouquets are awesome but limousines are stupid. Why? Because I say so. It’s my special day.

…I mean our. Our special day.