Sunday, April 12, 2009 - Posts
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The Obamas said they wanted a rescue dog. The kind you take home from a shelter so it won't be put to sleep. They ended up with a purebred Portuguese Water Dog courtesy of Sen. Ted Kennedy, which, according to the Washington Post, was not a "good fit" for the family it lived with previously, and has been schooled by Kennedy's dog trainers. The Post continues:
"As for the rescue pledge, the Obamas came up with a solution intended to lend a serious symbolic note: They're going to make a donation to the D.C. Humane Society."
Two lessons: 1) See how great cap and trade is? 2) Moving to Washington means that powerfully persuasive people take you on little jaunts away from your modest and principled intentions—jaunts that seem harmless, but exert a symbolic power of their own.
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If you've been on Facebook or Twitter today, you've probably heard the news about Amazon: A few days ago, according to author Mark Probst, the company began removing the sales rankings from many gay- and lesbian-themed books, making it slightly harder to find them on the site. When Probst wrote to Amazon to ask what was up, the company replied that it had a policy of monitoring "adult" content on the site. Here's the letter he reprinted on his blog (which you can find here):
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage
Now, to my mind, any censorship is bad censorship, so even if this action were limited to gay porn I'd be deeply bothered by it. But to make matters even more complicated, so far Amazon's little project has affected not only books that might be deemed to have full-on "adult" content but also literary novels, memoirs and books of poetry that portray gay sex. Among them? Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, Mark Wunderlich's Voluntary Servitude, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.
The very problem with this enterprise is implicit in the quotes that Ashlyn D puts around "adult." Amazon gets to define it however it pleases, and in that definition takes away the act of choice from its consumers. One wonders, too: Why is it so bad for books to be "adult" when the company still sells plenty of sex toys over in its marketplace sub-section? Also: Why bother doing this when it's still pretty easy to find most of these books on the site? (If you have more info about the Amazon decision, email me at morourkexx@gmail.com.)
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If yes, I want to hear from you. Questions from the latest installment of my recession series:
Have you uprooted yourself or your family because of the
recession—downsized to a smaller place, moved in with your folks, gone
to a different city? I'm interested in stories about the recession and
the American habit of picking up and going someplace new when the going
gets tough. Send them to me at doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be quoted anonymously, please let me know.
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A guest post from the Nation's Katha Pollitt, responding to a recent piece in Slate by Linda Hirshman.
Linda Hirshman seriously misrepresents both me and my book Learning to Drive. In brief:
1. Linda equates me with a battered woman who stays with her abuser. My actual situation, unambiguously described in the book: I discovered AFTER MY PARTNER LEFT ME that he had been unfaithful many times. Linda strongly implies I knew about this all along and stayed out of sick romanticism. In fact, I would never stay with a philanderer, much less an abuser. I have never been in an abusive relationship. Learning to Drive cannot rationally be used to explain why a battered woman would stay with a violent man. Because that is not the situation it describes.
2. She compares me with the excessively romantic (her view, Flaubert's is a little more complicated!) Emma Bovary, who killed herself (actually not for love, As Linda implies, but because of debt). My book is about getting over a subtly infantilizing, undermining relationship and painful breakup by becoming a more independent, self-aware and skeptical woman, a woman less prone to denial, which, again IN THE BOOK, is connected to other kinds of rose-colored glasses (about politics, alcoholic parent, motherhood, etc.).
3. She ignores the fact that Learning to Drive is not a flat-footed piece of journalism, it is a book of essays which use various literary strategies, like, um, humor, exaggeration, irony, whimsy, verbal play, and self-satire. Every single quote she uses she takes literally, when they are all comic, i.e., calling my philandering partner a "psychopath." Obviously, he wasn't really a psychopath, he was a garden-variety manipulative charmer. "Psychopath" expresses rage and frustration in an over-the-top way that is meant to suggest maybe there's something funny about finding oneself in this pickle. It's not a clinical diagnosis. Similarly, obviously, when I describe his hat and coat in a romantically exaggerated way I am aware that it is a romantic exaggeration.
It's English 101: There is space between the autobiographical narrator and the autobiographical subject. As in fiction, the writer knows more than the character. Emma Bovary didn't write Madame Bovary! I can understand why that would be too subtle for Linda, who sees everything in black and white and whose main aim in life seems to be proving herself the world's only true feminist.
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