Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - Posts
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Just when you thought it was safe to channel surf, it turns out HBO is making a movie out of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal of yesteryear. The title? The Special Relationship. Special, indeed. The casting is just plain odd. Dennis Quaid is Wild Bill. Hillary Clinton? Julianne Moore. Apparently, the film focuses less on Slick Willy's hijinks and more on the president's relationship with Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen), which devolved purportedly due to the sex scandal. Peter Morgan, who scored with Frost/Nixon, wrote the screenplay and is set to direct. Supposedly, Quaid beat out some actual A-listers for the role—Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins. I wonder if he truly eclipsed them or if the actors were steered away from taking the part of a man tasked with running the country who couldn't keep his hands off the help. Who'll play Lewinsky? Mia Kirshner? Megan Fox? Jessica Simpson? Nope. "Morgan has decided to use only archive footage of her culled from TV news bulletins and video of her closed-door testimony to Congress." Well, maybe the real Lewinsky will sell a few handbags out of it.
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An answer from Slate medical columnist Amanda Schaffer to my question about why the Pill is a prescription drug. Amanda supports, with caveats, Kerry's argument that oral contraceptives should be sold over the counter:
The downside risks of the pill (strokes, breast cancer) are pretty small, especially with newer formulations. And the upside of reducing ovarian cancer risk (as well as preventing unwanted pregnancy, of course), has led some researchers to argue for over-the-counter access; in fact, a meta-analysis in the Lancet from last year had an accompanying editorial making this case. The counterargument is that women who smoke or get migraines should not be on the pill, and a doctor's involvement might prevent that from happening. Plus, since women stay on oral contraceptives for long periods of time, it may be wise to have more medical oversight.
Amanda and I disagree with you, Kerry, that annual visits to the gynecologist are a waste of time. Breast exams, pelvic exams—that's trouble-catching time.
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Meghan, thank you for writing something about the death of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who killed himself earlier this week at the age of 47. I've been unsettled by this news all week but unable to think of anything to say besides: how horribly and irredeemably sad. To readers who grew up on the myth of Sylvia and Ted (and if readers have a tendency to mythologize Sylvia Plath, it's also because she mythologized herself, with maddening narcissism and consummate literary skill, in her poems and journals), Nicholas will always be the baby of Plath's brilliant final poems, the one whose "clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing." "I want to fill it with color and ducks/ The zoo of the new," she wrote in the poem "Child." Instead, her legacy to him was a lifelong struggle with depression, what the last lines of that poem call "this dark/ Ceiling without a star." "The pain you wake to is not your own," she assured her then-9-month-old in "Nick and the Candlestick." But, of course, it was: Our mother's pain is always our own. While there's no way of knowing whether Nicholas' depression was the result of nature, nurture, or both, it's difficult to imagine a more painful early childhood: Assia Wevill, the woman Ted Hughes left Plath for and who would raise Nicholas and his sister for six years after their mother died, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter in a grotesque copycat suicide/murder six years after Plath's death.
Like you, I found the New York Times' roundup of tributes to Plath surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous (including, for me, Elaine Showalter's, which argues for Plath's inclusion in the "they-died-too-young" literary pantheon alongside Keats without giving a sense of what her contribution to 20th-century poetry actually was). I've always thought that, had Plath lived, she might have become one of the great poets of motherhood. Her poems about pregnancy are delightful (and unexpectedly playful for a poet we associate with suicide and despair), and her description of the experience of childbirth in her journals, which you mentioned in a post some time back, is the least sentimentalized and most gripping I've ever read. The awful news of her son's death seals the deal: The poet who could have been the bard of maternity (among the most under-represented of all human experiences in literature) will now be remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of maternal depression.
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Condi Rice appeared on the Tonight Show last night as her first post-White House event (click here to watch), and the always affable Jay Leno asked her some semi-political questions. Leno inquired about George Bush's historical legacy ("History has a long arc, and what is popular today and today’s headlines are rarely the same as history’s judgments") and whether or not she'd be giving the Obama administration public advice ("We owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it"). Rice gave an utterly dignified and commendable interview for a general interest show. Of course, Leno's not pressing her on the torture meted out at Gitmo, but that's not really his job.
"I am so happy to get up in the morning, read the newspaper, and not think I have to do anything about what’s in it," Condi said last night. But as details of the torture tactics continue to emerge, reading the newspaper may not be so pleasurable, and history's judgment may not be so benign.
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I love studies that unravel the mysterious predilections of children. Especially when they remind us that young minds aren't mini versions of older ones. This new study, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, explains why when you tell your preschooler 10 times to put on his coat before he goes outside, he won't, and then he'll complain that he's cold. The previous assumption, the researchers said, was that kids were doing what adults do—listen, take in information, use it to plan—and just doing it badly. But this study suggests that they're doing something different. They listen, store what they hear, and then only use it after an experience (like being cold) triggers them to. Eureka. The problem isn't "in one ear, out the other." It's in one ear and stored up for later. Like a squirrel.
The finding even comes with advice for parents about how to hound their kids more effectively. From Science Daily, quoting lead researcher and psychology professor Yuko Munakata:
"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom.' "
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I imagine a lot of you saw that a few days ago, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide. Today, the New York Times has devoted a short commentary section to answering the question "Why the Plath Legacy Lives." To answer that question, they've wrangled short pieces from smart commentators like Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). Of them all, only Elaine Showalter begins to answer the question by really addressing Plath's work.
Certainly Plath's honesty about suicide helps create a mythology about her, but it's hardly the whole reason readers are drawn in. Plath made being a woman an equal subject for the imagination as being a man, and she did it (mostly) without being didactic or ideological, unlike many of her peers. Plath's poetry is astonishing for its musical insistence; she was inspired by nursery rhymes (which she was reading to her children) to explore hard, repetitive rhymes as a way of creating meaning. Her poems about motherhood, particularly "Morning Song," capture the ambivalence of the mind that has been tangled up in the bodily reality of motherhood. In that poem, she speaks of standing "cow-heavy" in her floral nightgown looking down at her child, whose "moth-breath" has tickled "the flat pink roses" of the wallpaper. And she records an impermissible thought:
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
I have written about Plath for Slate here and here, and for Poetry magazine here, and I continue to think that Ariel, her posthumous book of poems, is one of the most important books of English-language poetry of the 20th century.
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