America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
and one of my favourites - “Song”:
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love.
Long live the Beat Generation.
The word “feminist” is somewhat of a pejorative term in our world, instantly invoking images of excessively hairy women with breasts gone south from all that bra-burning and whatnot. To many, the “feminist” is just an angry, bitter and unattractive woman never ogled by the male race. A feminist is someone who believes in equality of rights, and as such, we - women - should all call ourselves feminist. Before The Beauty Myth , I had never read feminist literature, save a few articles in my law degree about the Feminist Perspective on Tort Law, for example. I have read half of the Female Eunuch , but that was years ago. The Beauty Myth really opened my eyes; not only to the field of Feminist Literature but to my own oppression, and the oppression of every other female on this planet. The Beauty Myth is a scathing book that critiques the beauty industry with its unattainable standards of what is beautiful as being the ultimate backlash to women breaking down the power structures during the first wave of feminism. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good beauty routine - I love makeup. I love using products that make me smell like a cocktail on a tropical island, and I enjoy controlling my hair growth. What I don’t enjoy, however, is watching friends that I love starve themselves to look as if they have been in a concentration camp to attain some warped feminine ideal promoted by the beauty and fashion industry.
“The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us…During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty…pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal…More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.”
The above, I feel, is true. Little girls nowadays list losing and maintaing a low weight as high on their list of objectives. It’s startling talking to nine year olds - stripped of their innocence and childhood, they are propelled into the world of waxing, tweezing, covering, enhancing, using a digitally airbrushed model as a benchmark of what a girl should look like. Where are the girls who want to sit on the High Court or be responsible for medical breakthroughs? Perhaps you may not agree with all that Wolf writes, but it is a compelling read that reveals some startling truths. If anything, it will make you feel less guilty about skipping your beauty routine at night when you’re too tired to make it to the bathroom. Don’t let The Beauty Myth get you down.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
I love the way she thinks a hot bath can cure anything. I love the way she muses that:
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the extra person in the room.
Basically I just love this book and read it over and over again. Because it’s simple yet beautiful. Because I have been fighting depression for years, and there’s no defeating it, and the Bell Jar understands what it feels like to try and live and yet be indifferent to it all. To want all the figs, and yet be satisfied with none of them.
I also love its characters. Henry, for example, is a multi-millionaire who has reclusive tendencies and is a complete genius. He always looks pristine: ‘He was without a jacket but otherwise immaculate for such an ungodly hour: trousers knife-pressed, his white shirt crisp with starch.’ Camilla’s look-alike is Helen of Troy, and she sounds smoking hot, with her ‘boyish haircut’ and ‘sleek little Astrakhan coat’. In another scene she is described as looking like she’d just got out of bed, ‘tousle-haired, no lipstick, wearing a gray wool sweater that came down past her wrists…Smoke drifted from her cigarette in wisps that were the colour of the sky outside…’.
If you want to read about amoral, cashed-up malcontents that love a bit of debauchery and homicide, this is your book.
‘Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death…’
The Leopard is about a fading monarchy, religion, beauty and decay. Not to mention Sicily. Read it with a glass of Prosecco in hand and let the language take you to a better place.
I love reading Eugenides. Middlesex is terribly funny and The Virgin Suicides so hauntingly beautiful. I am yet to read The Marriage Plot. A virgin suicide is something so intriguing, isn’t it? To give up on life before having been tainted by it. I spent three months writing findings for the Coroner last year and processed many suicides and was always taken by the young girls who would write diary entries full of dreams and yet take their life in violent, disturbing ways. The Virgin Suicides is a book I adore because, apart from the fact that it reminds me of Sofia Coppola’s soft-pastel, dreamy interpretation of the text, it is so damned well-written. You find yourself reading passages over and over, captivated by its amazing sentences. I love the descriptions of Trip Fontaine - “no boy was ever so cool and aloof” and especially of what is means to be a girl:
We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that her mother had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the “Kevins” out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing what colors went together. We knew that girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
William Eggleston, ‘Girl on Grass’
Her brother, Zooey (a most excellent name), finds her on the couch and seeks to help his younger sister. The Glass family is quite a remarkable clan. We learn that all seven children of the family grew up as geniuses; the bedroom door of the two eldest Glass brothers is covered in philosophical quotations. The novel (divided into two halves, one entitled Franny and the other Zooey) is really a long discussion between a brother and sister about spiritual and personal beliefs, and how to find peace. I find it a particularly enlightening read in a world that is so material and pretentious. Plus, Salinger’s writing is really very cool (there’s a reason this is a cult novel) and enjoyable to read.
“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”
This collection of short stories should come with a warning: do not read whilst single. I personally know someone who knows someone who engaged in a same-sex adventure after having read Nin: food for thought. But seriously, this stuff is hot. Not in the Mills and Boon cliche manner - in a sexy literary way. Nin spent time in Paris with none other than Henry Miller, where the two engaged in a passionate affair (can you imagine a more ideal couple?). Like Miller, Nin writes about sex with style. It’s not pornography - it’s high class eroticism, written with elegance. These stories are adventurous and will make you blush, no matter how modern you think you are. They’re all about sexual freedom, hedonism, pleasure, debauchery - best taken with fine dark chocolate, a good Bordeaux, Agent Provacateur lingerie and a lover by your side.
“You were never there,” continued the man, “you never go to cafés. The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.”
