03.26.12: culture blotter {the hunger games}

i picked up a paperback copy of the hunger games at the jetblue terminal at JFK in early december; i tried to buy the sequels six hours later when joe and i touched down in phoenix, but the concessions at sky harbor had already shut down for the night (this is why you lost the war, phoenix), so i talked my mother in law into driving me to walmart* for them a few days later. catching fire and mockingjay are not, in the final analysis, worth a trip to walmart, but the hunger games could be; suzanne collins's writing is every bit as propulsive as stephenie "true love waits" meyer's, but collins uses a variety of adjectives, and her heroine's more than capable of taking care of herself. moreover, her adolescents' interactions have an authentically emotional crackle and snap that harry potter and friends never quite generate as they get older and lumpier, if you ask me; j.k. rowling nailed tween-harry's feelings in her first few books, but his teenage years with ron and hermione read like frodo and sam's wanderings in mordor circa the return of the king scotch-taped into a few episodes of saved by the bell.

but i digress. the hunger games is a winning, entertaining young adult book, and it had the potential to be an outstanding movie. several of the casting choices were brilliant (jennifer lawrence as katniss, stanley tucci as caesar flickerman, elizabeth banks as effie trinket, donald sutherland as president snow, lenny kravitz and his gold eyeliner as cinna), the pre-release marketing campaign was gorgeous (the capitol couture e-zine, with content from design houses like mcqueen and prada, is the most satisfying online tie-in since noel's website circa felicity**), and early footage was so promising!

it was not an outstanding movie, not by a long shot. jennifer lawrence was a fine katniss, and i think folks who argue that she looks too healthy to be a starved district 12 tribute can pipe down and netflix a bunch of off-putting skeletal-christian-bale movies, if that's what they're into (katniss is a hunter and is supposed to be in good shape, at least until the games start); the real trouble with the role is that her character's stoicism works in the novels because they're narrated in the first person and we get her vivid interior monologue.*** lawrence killed as a strong, silent type in winter's bone, but that film traded in shades of minimalism; it hurts me a little to say this, but i think the hunger games needed some substantial voice-overs. the audience needed to know how desperate katniss was in the flashbacks when peeta threw her the burned bread; lawrence did what she could with a look, but we needed the backstory of how his gesture gave her hope. that scene was choreographed badly, as were the few katniss shares with gale; we're supposed to get a lifetime of partnership and communion in that first hunting scene (to inform the awkwardness of gale's viewership later on), but it's hardly clear that he's essentially family. the sad-trombone cuts between gale at home in district 12 and peeta and katniss in the love cave were funny-awkward, not, er, awkward-awkward.

speaking of funny-awkward, can we talk for a moment about how peeta goes all pan's labyrinth on himself after hurting his leg so that katniss nearly steps on his face when she finds him near the river? that was true to the book, and it was a nice detail - peeta's a baker's son and a cake-icin' machine, so he was a quick study at camouflage during the pre-games training - but shouldn't he have been halfway underneath something? did the makeup team really take a good look at that tree-face and pronounce it badass? paint me skeptical; our theater laughed.

but enough about my hunger games; how did it strike you?

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you seen "lana del rey's 'hunger games'"? go ahead, i'll wait.

02 have you seen battle royale (the 2000 japanese movie to which, as umpteen critics have noted, suzanne collins's books bear striking similarities)?

03 did you read any of the suzanne collins books? if so, how many?

04 do you think the movie would have benefited from more exposition - or, as i've argued, more narration?

05 should the violence in the arena have been more explicit? did the fact that the tributes' bodies remained in place (instead of being whisked away as they are in the books) serve a dramatic purpose?

06 would you have stepped on peeta's face?

07 did anyone dress up at your screening? if you were to costume yourself as a hunger games character, which one would you pick (and what would you wear)?

08 should the filmmakers have gone for broke with the mutant dogs and given them the fallen tributes' eyes?

09 will you see the next movie?

*walmart in their town has an LDS book section. i hid some things there.

**please note, however, that i am not one of the felicity people. i have my pride.

***"Dystopian fiction," laura miller writes in "fresh hell," the new yorker essay that convinced me to pick up hunger games in the first place, "may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader."

03.21.12: how it happened {part II}

o, egg mcmuffins. to say that they were my favorite thing about mcdonald's would misrepresent things a bit; let's say that they're healthier than most other menu items and a rare break from meat on an otherwise vegetarian-unfriendly menu.* they were the one thing i liked about driving someone to the airport (or having to go to the airport) for a crack-of-dawn flight. i have a fond memory of walking through belfast's deserted city centre to buy a bag of them for joe and me early one morning on our honeymoon. that was a weird honeymoon.

i have a gloomier memory of the last egg mcmuffin i had (or tried to have), a few years later, at the train station in philadelphia. was it at the beginning of the food-documentary craze? had i recently read fast food nation? i know that in that plastic booth at that moment, lurid, recently-absorbed details of standard factory-farming practices like debeaking (a procedure in which a heated mechanical blade removes a laying hen's beak so that, in theory, she can't peck neighboring birds and can be confined in a smaller space) came back to me, and the feeling of nonspecific angst most of us already associate with fast-food restaurants was suddenly keen and quite particular. it was common knowledge (this was a few years ago) that factory farms produced mcdonald's egg supply, and i knew what factory farmers did to laying hens; that is, i knew what had been done to the hen that produced the egg i intended to eat. as when i realized i had to stop buying leather, i knew at once (and once and for all) that i was done.

or was i? i stopped eating egg mcmuffins, obviously, and i stopped purchasing eggs which weren't clearly labeled "cage free," "free range," "vegetarian," "humanely raised," and/or "organic" - or all of those. a few months ago, my office had me research a brief nutritional piece on what those labels actually mean. surprise: they're trade descriptions, which means that the USDA doesn't regulate them. at all. if they choose to do so, farmers can apply to organizations such as the nonprofit humane farm animal care to be "certified humane" (you can read what those standards mean for different types of animals here). as for the others - that's where jonathan safran foer and eating animals come in.

The USDA doesn't even have a definition of free-range for laying hens and instead relies on producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims. Very often, the eggs of factory-farmed chickens—chickens packed against one another in vast barren barns—are labeled free-range. ("Cage-free" is regulated but means no more or less than what it says—they are literally not in cages.) One can reliably assume that most "free-range" (or "cage-free") laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once "spent." I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.

(jonathan safran foer, eating animals)

You won't get buildings with 3,000 ["cage-free"] laying hens—it's 30,000, 50,000, or 60,000. That being said, there are people who actually quantify how much space cage-free hens have, and I think it's something like 110 square inches as opposed to 67 for those in a cage, so that's a lot more space, but draw yourself a rectangle of 110 square inches—it's not what people have in mind when they spend more of their money to buy this product. Cage-free and free-range eggs are the fastest-growing sector of the food industry right now, which says something so amazing about Americans.

[Interviewer] People want to feel good about the product they're buying.

Right. They don't taste better, and they're not better for us. People all across the country are spending more of their money on something simply because they think it's the right thing to do, and they are being taken advantage of, and that should make everybody very angry.

(JSF, in a conversation with the atlantic's jeffrey goldberg)

lifestyle modification II: eggs and dairy products should only be purchased from demonstrably humane sources.

when joe and i got back from california last week, there were almost no animal products in the fridge. we bought humanely-produced, locally-sourced groceries from a cheesemonger at the local public market: eggs, a pint of cream, and a quart of milk. they were all of exceptional quality, and they cost about fifteen bucks.

In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500%; new cars climbed more than 1,400%; but the price of milk is up only 350%, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Taking inflation in account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history.

because of the way our government subsidizes corporate agribusinesses, and because of our consistent demand for their products, providing one's family with animal protein means either spending a substantial amount of money or accepting the institutionalized mistreatment of animals—and it often means both.

as you've probably gathered, my decisions about animal welfare are much more emotional than they are logical. truth be told, most of them have been very easy; i wasn't that interested in meat to begin with, there are plenty of replacements for leather out there, and no one's forcing me into mcdonald's. my relationship with ostensibly non-lethal forms of animal protein is much more complicated: i'll buy the straight stuff from the good guys, sure, but what about products which count them as ingredients? what about dining out? what do i feed our cats?

jonathan safran foer is a polarizing guy, to put it mildly, but you don't have to love him or his analogies (...michiko) to agree with eating animals's premise.

[W]e know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless—it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.

watch this space.

*even mcdonald's hash browns and fries (still!) contain "natural beef flavor."

03.20.12

03.14.12: how it happened {part I}

when i worked at a nonprofit animal hospital, fur-industry exposé videos made the rounds like pornography. to this day i'm not sure why we circulated them among ourselves; most of us had eschewed animal products for years already (i've been a strict vegetarian since i was 14), some of us protested in front of the neiman marcus in san francisco's union square, and none of us wanted anything to do with fur. there's something to be said for becoming better-informed and for keeping one's righteous indignation at a fever pitch, sure, but i wonder if i should have tried harder to make joe watch one with me. i never even thought about looping in other family or friends.

i stopped buying new leather a year or two ago. since then i've picked up a few pairs of used leather shoes on ebay; i wasn't contributing directly to the demand for new leather, i reasoned, and i wasn't buying up the flimsy faux stuff which enters the market with a foul petrochemical belch. better, right? i also started saving up for a fancy-ass, new-to-me purse (as the one i've been carrying every day for the last four years has started degrading with gusto): as of this winter, for every kilometer i've run, i've added a dollar to a big old matzo-ball soup jar which lives on a shelf in my closet.

sprained ankle notwithstanding, i've been running quite a bit, and a custom ebay alert informed me this past weekend that a gal in poland would sell me her gently-used, authenticated bag for a price my jar could handle. here is one of the many points in this narrative at which i probably sound like a dipshit: i opened a new browser window and called up google images of lambs (the fancy-ass bag in question is made of pebbled lambskin). morrissey skittered through my head: a death for no reason / and death for no reason is murder. oh, hell. i couldn't buy a lamb's skin, no matter why or how long ago it died.

lifestyle modification I: no more purchasing leather, period. i'll use the pieces i still have, repair them as i can until they fall apart, and replace them with non-leather products.

in my four-hundred-and-fifty-first conversation with joe about whether or not the polish gal and i had a deal, i was wandering the corridors of how to carry used leather without telegraphing the idea that i condoned it all. joe noted that i was attempting to convince him of something with which i myself didn't seem especially comfortable. i tried to argue around that for another half hour, realized i had to let go, and felt...free.

Suddenly [Kafka] began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore." It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality—which was something almost completely foreign to him—he brought them out.

(max brod, from franz kafka)

i came across that excerpt, on kafka's visit to a berlin aquarium, in jonathan safran foer's eating animals, a book i avoided for years and finally picked up a few weeks ago. it's kicked up dust in my chest as well; that's the next story.

03.01.12: culture blotter {the whitney biennial}



union protesters picketed the whitney's VIP reception to express their displeasure over the 2012 biennial's ties to sotheby's. their props - giant duct-taped hats shaped like padlocks, a man-sized auctioneer's mallet with which they flailed at the douche-queue, a scabby-dwarfing fat cat - were unusually well-constructed, and i thought for fifteen minutes or so that they were an installation.

"i never eat or drink anything at these events," joe said with disdain. i addressed a few shards of fancy cheese on his behalf.

02.22.12

we had another party this weekend! pretty soon parties are going to be breaking out at our apartment all the time, and not just the kind at which joe and i make a casserole dish of seven-layer dip and eat it for dinner (though who am i kidding, those parties are amazing). we were more like the host venue for this one, as it was our friend stewart's birthday, and putting together birthday events in new york when one is boston-based (as stewart is) calls for teammates. so i carried in great chunks of ice like an arctic ant, hung a little orange paper lantern from our rhinoceros head made of pants, and waited for clever and dashing people to show up, meet all of our neighbors in the elevator,* and play sexy music for us. technically it was a round of sonic proselytization, defined as

basically, everyone sits around in a comfortable, mood-lit room with a good stereo and takes turns playing songs at each other. people generally tend to go for their more obscure titles in order to show off, but you don't necessarily have to be married to that concept; i played a frickin' REM song one time. whatever you feel like sharing.

or, earlier, as

bring your favorite music and force it on others. all fashions, styles, genres welcome.

[...]

system: go around room. each plays one song. everyone listens.

joe played songs from 1979, i went off on a tangent about walter johnson (at which point stewart pulled out a bunch of walter johnson postcards he and eva had found on the street in williamsburg; brooklyn is helpful like that), greg from the internet made an adapter for 7" records out of cardboard apartment detritus. the mysterious-liqueur inventory got more significant as the evening wore on. steve hassled people who ventured into apartment tent.







{above: the sonic proselytization track log}

i'm not convinced that certain periods of our adult lives are superior to others, but i do think that, as a general proposition, parties have gotten better as we've gotten older. have we set aside childish things? is it that the gimmick tracks have spun out of our circle of friends over the years, leaving us with greatest hits? in this case i think it's that stewart is made of magic.

*one of whom announced to them that she's promised her daughter she'll shave her hair into a mohawk? i, in turn, only know three of the people on our floor by name - two if olya's husband isn't called jeff.

02.14.12: oscarizer {once more into the breach}

ACADEMY AWARD PREDICTIONS AND EXPOSITORY HAIKU

to be amended as i cram a few last nominee-viewings into the next two weeks. pluses (+) indicate films i've already seen; brackets are predictions.

best actor

demián bichir - a better life
george clooney - the descendants +
jean dujardin - the artist +
gary oldman - tinker tailor soldier spy +
{brad pitt - moneyball} +

from where i'm sitting,
brad pitt as tyler durden
should've been oscared.

dujardin's a peach
as a silent film star, but
his shot's with best pic.

clooney's role was flat,
oldman's too understated
for hollywood's taste.

brad's perfectly cast,
and finally grew into
his face.* the nod's his.


best actress

glenn close - albert nobbs
viola davis - the help
rooney mara - the girl with the dragon tattoo +
meryl streep - the iron lady
{michelle williams - my week with marilyn} +

i didn't adore
michelle williams as MM,
but she transfixed me.

hollywood loves her,
and she's got the golden globe;
this one's in the bag.


best supporting actor

kenneth branagh - my week with marilyn +
jonah hill - moneyball +
nick nolte - warrior
{christopher plummer - beginners}
max von sydow - extremely loud & incredibly close

i brake for branagh's
shakespearean characters.
olivier? meh.

moneyball's oscar,
if an actor scoops one up,
is "papa" brad pitt's.

as for the others?
i like christopher plummer.
gravitas, bitches.


best supporting actress

bérénice bejo - the artist +
jessica chastain - the help
melissa mccarthy - bridesmaids
janet mcteer - albert nobbs
{octavia spencer - the help}

bookies say spencer -
but then, they okay visors
without irony.

clooney's film daughter,
shailene woodley, should be here;
sans her, i concur.


best director

michel hazanavicius - the artist +
alexander payne - the descendants +
martin scorsese - hugo +
woody allen - midnight in paris
{terrence malick - the tree of life} +

hugo: sweet, spotty.
the descendants was a mess.
zzz, woody allen.

was the tree of life's
distribution wide enough?
it had dinosaurs.

hazanavicius
splits the film-nostalgia vote.
TEAM DINOMALICK


best picture

{the artist} +
the descendants +
extremely loud & incredibly close
the help
hugo +
midnight in paris
moneyball +
the tree of life +
war horse


it's sweet, it's french, it's -
i adore the dog, okay?
the artist takes it.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how many of the best picture nominees have you seen? which would get your vote?

02 do i have to see the help?

03 is matthew lillard plausible romantic competition for george clooney?

04 when it's time to discard 3D glasses, do you hide them on your person?

05 do you find rooney mara as lisbeth salander attractive?

06 d'you think it made sense for her to pierce her nipple for the role?

07 will you watch the academy awards this year?

*as sars put it.

02.10.12: mystery train {name that tune edition}

let's be honest: most subway performers are nuisances. i want to read and/or spy on people when i'm on the train, and it's ever so much more difficult when feet are flying about my head and/or i'm trying to ignore a loud, off-key song about the jesus (breakdancing crackhead barbershop quartets, i'm looking at you). buskers on the platform, now - those folks make my day. solemn midtown saxophonist taking mancini's "pink panther theme" like a slinky on a long flight of stairs? go on. erhu player treating chinatown to the opening notes of "raspberry beret"? we have yet to meet, but the idea of you lights up my life. here's a variation on the game in which i ask you to match readers with their books: can you pick out the song this fellow's playing? (i'm not at all sure that it's difficult, but joe claimed otherwise.)

02.06.12: cloudberries

01.27.12: the dirty dozen {mystery train,* round IV}

that last matched batch of books and their train-ridin' readers went down as decisively as i did when i sprained my ankle two weeks ago; well done, everyone! thanks to the latter plunge, since last we convened to speculate about the subway system and its denizens, purpy and i have spent a lot of time on both trains and buses; while i would love to present you with a sub-challenge of bus riders and their books, we all know the bus is full of text-scorning ruffians. you should see them eat, though!

this passel, on the other hand, continues to savor the printed word. would the dueling eugenides-readers (for whom i've decided to bump the batch to thirteen, since with the repeat there are only twelve books) make a good crime-fighting duo? if so, which one would take their motorcycle's sidecar? which text was one mystery reader underlining with such gusto? where was the man with the waxed moustache going? am i among these people in a fabulous disguise?** so many questions; as yet, so few answers. as before, if you correctly pair a book with its reader, i'll update the lists.

{the peeps}

01 F, early 20s, long, loose, dark hair, gray-blue puffer coat with high cloud collar, big, caramel-brown leather purse in lap, black messenger bag and brown paper bag at feet, crocheted black tights, heavy dark-brown harness boots, ditched book and switched to oriental trading company catalog after six stops, switched to lucky after two more, B train [city of glass, paul auster - MDF recalls my auster-hatred]

02 M, early 40s, short, gelled hair, rectangular, wire-rimmed reading glasses, narrow, square jaw, frowning, red-and-white plaid shirt, beat-up indiana jones-ish leather coat, ipod and big black messenger bag in lap, green chinos, brown desert boots, F train

03 M, 60s, wild white hair, two-tone reading glasses, short down-filled north face jacket with sex and the city crew patch on left shoulder, faded black jeans, black swiss army backpack hanging from left knee, tan work boots, F train [shell game, carol o'connell - MDF spots the first of the murdering kind]

04 M, late 30s, intentional stubble, slight flip in bangs, black wool overcoat, blue and white microstriped dress shirt worn open-necked over white tee, french cuffs with black monkey's-fist cufflinks, grey slacks, shiny black slip-ons, ratty grey gym bag worn cross-body, B train [republic, lost: how money corrupts congress—and a plan to stop it, lawrence lessig - rob knows his purposeful menswear]

05 F, early 40s, shoulder-length, curly black hair, charcoal grey wool coat with button-down epaulets, lavender scarf, grey pencil skirt, sizeable diamond engagement ring and wedding band, shoulder bag made of beige seatbelts, flat black boots, holding orange library card, A train [well-offed in vermont, amy patricia meade - MDF pegs the second killer as well]

06 M, 30s, grey knit cap, faint stubble, navy zippered members only jacket over grey-green hoodie, japanese denim jeans, monochrome black chuck taylors, grey-and-navy gym bag in lap, wearing grey flip-up smoking mittens, L train

07 M, late 30s, stubble and grizzly goatee, grey folded-up knit cap, black anorak with white-lined hood, dirty jeans, grey airwalks with red stripes, massive black messenger bag over shoulder and in lap, ankles crossed and tucked under seat, R train

08 F, 20s, round face, long, loose, side-parted brown hair, purple-and-green missioni zigzag scarf, big brown purse with gold straps and a little green purse tucked inside, horizontally-quilted black puffer coat, flared-leg jeans, pointy-toed black oxfords, holding book up with both hands right in front of her face, F train

09 M, 30s, full red beard and waxed, upturned moustache, denim driving cap, thick white plastic glasses, dark jeans, blue plaid shirt under open khaki trench, heavy gold chain, blue slip-on vans, tall blue-on-blue doctor's satchel between knees, M train

10 M, 30s, caesar haircut with long bangs, thin face with high cheekbones, heavy black sock-hop-era wool coat over hoodie, jeans, grey and black running shoes, huge khaki-and-acid-green messenger bag on lap, B train [the marriage plot, jeffrey eugenides - MDF - was it the bangs?]

11 F, 20s, wavy hair in model-on-a-go-see updo, brooke shields eyebrows, red lipstick, red ski patrol parka with white reflective stripe, grey heather leggings, black motorcycle boots, black leather bucket bag with little brass feet, B train

12 M, 30s, black wire-rimmed glasses, short, dark, curly hair, incipient neck beard, oversized black nylon hoodie, worn unzipped, dark jeans, dark brown leather moccasins, gripping train pole with the crook of his arm, large plastic zabar's bag at feet, B train

13 F, 50s, curly, shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair, black wire-rimmed reading glasses, long, black wool coat, massive black new york public radio tote bag hanging over knees, teal leather purse in lap, book full of notes and passages underlined in red pencil, F train [mrs. dalloway, virginia woolf - MDF, unafraid]

{the books}

republic, lost: how money corrupts congress—and a plan to stop it, lawrence lessig
juliet, naked, nick hornby
word freak: heartbreak, triumph, genius, and obsession in the world of competitive scrabble players, stefan fatsis
the marriage plot, jeffrey eugenides
a tree grows in brooklyn, betty smith
the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby, tom wolfe
city of glass, paul auster
getting things done: the art of stress-free productivity, david allen
shell game, carol o'connell
mrs. dalloway, virginia woolf
the marriage plot, jeffrey eugenides
super sad true love story, gary shteyngart
well-offed in vermont, amy patricia meade

*tip of the hat, as always, to coverspy.

**at one point this week i was trying to nab the guy sitting next to me (a dodgy proposition, as they can usually see what you're writing); i couldn't catch the outside of his book and didn't recognize the text, though, so i gave up and started reading my own. when he closed it and got up to leave, i realized we were both holding copies of pulphead; then a black hole opened up in the seat-molding betwixt us and swallowed the entire train.

01.26.12

from nick paumgarten's "the ring and the bar," a new yorker profile of the irrepressible bob bozic, former heavyweight boxer and longtime "destination bartender" at fanelli's in soho:

Bozic occasionally makes women cry. (And when he does he tells them to go to his favorite bookstore in the Village and pick up a paperback, his treat—"Red Cavalry and Other Stories," by Isaac Babel, or "The Bridge on the Drina," by Ivo Andric.)

if a man made me cry and sent me out to buy a book of his choosing, i'd cancel his genitals between two boxed sets of the twilight saga.

01.24.12

THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 8

SURVIVOR: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)*
CHALLENGER: louisa may alcott (harriet reisen)

louisa may alcott enthusiasts are a spooky bunch. little women was a pleasant enough childhood read, but the little women (and little men, and jo's boys, and so on) scene is an intense one: like anne of green gables fangirls and little house on the prairie reenactors, the alcott admirers i've met tend to brag about growing up without television and, like, refer to their hair as their glory. while there's nothing formally terrible about either of those tendencies, i'd rather not get trapped in an elevator with someone who exhibited them.

it would be superconvenient re: THUNDERTOME structure if, having read harriet reisen's painstakingly-researched alcott biography, i now felt differently about little women women, or was at least able to tell you that alcott herself wasn't spooky at all. i'm fairly sure i don't, is the thing, and she...is?

by all accounts, growing up alcott was pretty miserable. louisa's father, bronson, a transcendentalist who ran with nineteenth-century luminaries like emerson, thoreau, and hawthorne in massachusetts, had little interest in conventional living arrangements or employment (or, eventually, property**). principles like bronson's are well and good for single, unmoored fellows whose bones are finished growing, but they're pretty lousy for dependent wives and little girls; louisa's long-suffering mother, abby, scrambled to pay the family's crippling debts with help from her relatives (including, at a frighteningly young age, louisa herself; she was her family's principal breadwinner from her late teens until her death), and all of the family starved and froze when he decided they would both adhere to his strict vegetarian principles and subsist on what they could grow and forage at the various utopian communities he attempted to establish (and from which they were perpetually in danger of being evicted).

"but he was a dreamer," you say, "and we should treasure and indulge and nurture our dreamers!" he was also an insufferably self-important pedagogue who, in his attempts at educational reform at various experimental schools in boston and elsewhere, "invited students to defy him and then punished them by public shunning—making visible what it meant to lose god's love" and handed down "lordly dismissal[s] of any views but his own."

papa alcott was a piece of work, is what i'm saying, and in some ways his is the central personality in reisen's book; abby orbited bronson, the girls orbited their parents (whose gravity was immense - abby would read and comment in louisa's diary), and the alcotts' financial responsibilities tethered louisa's writing to the commercial realities of her day.

to say that reisen (also a writer-producer of an alcott documentary) is wildly sympathetic to her subject is, if possible, a huge understatement; in the preface to her biography, she explains that she herself is an alcott addict, and that her hope

[...] is that readers of this book will be inspired to track down the dozen or more of Louisa May Alcott's works whose titles are known but whose whereabouts are not, to bring them forth from obscure periodicals in the backs of old library shelves, attic trunks, even from inside the walls of old houses, as pages of Louisa's Fruitlands diaries were, so they may be published and read as widely as their most recent predecessors have been. If they do, I may never have to run out of new work from the prodigious pen of Louisa May Alcott.

damn, louisa; your biographer so ardent! i'm tempted to admire alcott's devotion to her family for reisen's sake - the latter is a graceful, deft, compelling storyteller, and the story she tells of louisa's refused marriage proposals and truncated trips abroad is nearly heartbreaking - but the truth is that, quoth louisa, "i'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe." behind the pen name a.m. barnard, she wrote pulp fiction about "spies and transvestites and drug takers" - but she didn't seem to have much interest in the world beyond the family hearth (her brief and disastrous stint as a nurse during the civil war notwithstanding). she sure could fictionalize that hearth and make it sound toxic idyllic, though! what a woman!

i'm aware that louisa may alcott inspired hordes of girls who went on to become accomplished writers. i'm aware that i am in all seriousness a terrible person for disliking her; i console myself, gentle readers, with the thought that if you've been reading kidchamp for long, you knew that already. reisen i like very much (i'd have loved to have taken one of her film classes at stanford), and if she'd managed to work a viking ex machina in at the end of her biography in lieu of louisa's crippling headaches and doping, i'd have considered letting her kilos of research pile-drive bengtsson's fanciful man-book. in its absence, i can but say that i'd happily read another reisen bio, and that i wish her well.

VICTOR: red orm & friends (the long ships), of course, with a sickening squelch. would a book about creepy martyrdom even want to win?***

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 with whom would you like to be trapped in an elevator?

02 would you rather be trapped in an elevator with kanye west, anthony bourdain, or kirk cameron? death is not an option.

03 at what age is it reasonable for a child to make his or her own decisions about, say, whether or not he or she is a vegetarian?

04 having at that from the other direction: must a parent edit his personal philosophy for the sake of his children? how much?

05 ladies, did you once see yourself as jo march?

06 biography-readers, do you choose your texts for their subjects or their authors?

07 to what tale would you like to append a viking ex machina?

*previous battle here.

**louisa's uncle sam in a letter to emerson about the alcotts: "it is very important that...my sister [abby] and her family might have a shelter...without implicating [bronson] in the sin of living upon soil appropriated to his exclusive use [...] not that I think the plan practicable....but he is so sincere, so devout, so full of faith, that i long to have him try his experiment to his own entire satisfaction."

***"from 1888 until 1950 there was no full-length biography of louisa may alcott, not surprising given her utter lack of critical cachet," reisen writes. "her readers never knew or cared." i'm reminded of a passage of john jeremiah sullivan's, read last night as i waited for the long-suffering m14 bus to take me and my sprained ankle down grand street:

Llewis taught me something. At high school in Jamaica, he said, when your team lost, it was traditional to chant, on your way out of the grounds, "We feel no way! We feel no way!" Meaning essentially, we're not sweating it, we didn't really give a shit anyway.