B List: Between Books
C List: Gloria Steinem--Marilyn.....................................117/182
When I started working on this month's update I had just finished 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I have enjoyed all of Jules Verne's tales of masculine adventure during this strangely anomic period I have been going through. He had a true storyteller's gift, as well as a gusto for the idea of inventions and scientific breakthroughs that seem more appealing and less off-putting in its attitude and triumphalism than I find in contemporary champions of technological progress, though this is doubtful. I'm sure if I had lived in the 1860s I would found every new innovation as terrifying and threatening as I do the ones today. But having finished this run of books by Jules Verne I will miss him until he comes up again, if I live that long.
The C entry is a half-coffee table size book of photographs of Marilyn Monroe published in 1986 with an accompanying text. Amazingly my library retains a copy of it in their basement storage, but for how much longer will anyone keep this sort of thing around? Who besides me would ever take this book out again? This kind of book is like taking a holiday from my usual reading. I have never been particularly fascinated by Marilyn Monroe, who was a very sad person and does not appear to have been particularly bright, although she was so unsophisticated compared to almost everyone in the modern media world that her manner of expressing herself was at least unique at times. (for example, from an interview excerpt. Marilyn is discussing one of her more intellectual ex-lovers: "'You cry too easily,' he'd say. 'That's because your mind isn't developed. Compared to your breasts it's embryonic.' I couldn't contradict him because I had to look up that word in a dictionary.") If nothing else this book reinforces the idea that it's a benefit to children to have their parents around even if the parents are mediocre or in some instances decidedly below average. Lots of men had sex with Marilyn Monroe. There isn't much of a record of her turning anyone down who applied any amount of aggression, which in those days of course everyone did under the delusion that it was healthy masculine behavior. She did refuse to meet, or at least avoided having to meet, Norman Mailer when he expressed an interest in meeting her. He famously developed a bit of an obsession with her that lasted well after her death. It is suggested in the text that short-lived husband and onetime American hero Joe DiMaggio gave her bruises on several occasions during their brief marriage, which is disappointing. Needless to say many of the successful men especially at this time were by today's standards near perpetual sexual harassment machines, and proud of the virility it revealed. It's no wonder some of the older men who have recently been punished for what was once expected behavior (Mailer ridiculed rival Arthur Miller's failure to make a pass at Monroe when they first met in 1950 in a play about her that he later wrote) don't seem to think they have done anything especially wrong.
Gloria Steinem is of course a famous feminist and, yes, that informs her writing, though compared to more contemporary feminists, she seems, if not exactly mild, more restrained in her vision and far less inclined to take a contemptuous attitude towards (men?). She seems very much to be concerned with things like women's being able to achieve respect (when deserved) in male-dominated fields. The idea that women would ever threaten to become numerically a majority in a number of these fields, as seems to be happening in today's younger cohorts, does not seem to have been something that was on her radar as having any likelihood as late as the 1980s.
"The Road From Colonus" looks like it is about an old guy dying. Not a subject dear to my heart these days.
Also during this month I read a book of stories for the C List called 20th Century Ghosts by a writer named Joe Hill, who is actually Stephen King's son. Both because of this and because the book was advertised as vaguely horror-y, I was not too excited about reading it, but I have to say I liked it quite a lot. Much better than anything by his father, actually, whose books I have never been able to get into. While the stories do turn on horror or supernatural effects, the overall tone is literary and nostalgic, with the grotesqueries insinuating themselves into an ordinary story that has an interest of its own rather than overwhelming it. The stories here were first published between 1999 and 2005. They all are set in the kinds of New England or upstate New York faded towns and small cities such as the one where I live, and take place among a (somewhat scarily) already fading world of video store employees. movie theaters, tenured academics with "heartbreaking dreams of someday having a poem published in the New Yorker"), low circulation magazines that print fiction, and the like. I was very impressed and even moved by it, which doesn't happen with me very often.
I have some other poignant anecdotes I wanted to write about, but maybe I will save them for another post. I have to get this out tonight.
"The Road From Colonus" looks like it is about an old guy dying. Not a subject dear to my heart these days.
Also during this month I read a book of stories for the C List called 20th Century Ghosts by a writer named Joe Hill, who is actually Stephen King's son. Both because of this and because the book was advertised as vaguely horror-y, I was not too excited about reading it, but I have to say I liked it quite a lot. Much better than anything by his father, actually, whose books I have never been able to get into. While the stories do turn on horror or supernatural effects, the overall tone is literary and nostalgic, with the grotesqueries insinuating themselves into an ordinary story that has an interest of its own rather than overwhelming it. The stories here were first published between 1999 and 2005. They all are set in the kinds of New England or upstate New York faded towns and small cities such as the one where I live, and take place among a (somewhat scarily) already fading world of video store employees. movie theaters, tenured academics with "heartbreaking dreams of someday having a poem published in the New Yorker"), low circulation magazines that print fiction, and the like. I was very impressed and even moved by it, which doesn't happen with me very often.
I have some other poignant anecdotes I wanted to write about, but maybe I will save them for another post. I have to get this out tonight.
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