Advice to those who go seeking their roots: Plan on transplanting.
Every year I spend the week before Passover in a one-room cabin in a remote corner of the Ozarks. It is always spring break, and we retire to this place to read, hike, play, sleep and generally recover from the pace of school and work. As I write, I doubt there is another Jew for a hundred miles around.
That fact lends a certain pleasure to any Jewish-related activity we pursue. Last year I sewed the tablecloths for our Seder. This year I planned to evaluate possible recipes for a starchy side dish to go with my ceremonial Passover pot roast. For this reason I made sure to pack my yellowing, near spineless paperback copy of “The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook,” originally published in 1955. Years ago I had slipped this relic from my mother’s bookcase into my possession as a piece of kitsch, a sample of the kind of thing my mother brought with her into her doomed marriage.
This book, which cost 95 cents at the time of its sixth printing in 1967, features on its cover a color photograph of a Sabbath meal spread on a blue cloth: silver candlesticks, gefilte fish topped with carrot pennies, grapes, challah, a roasted chicken and a kiddush cup full of wine. All of this, given our family, struck a note of pure irony because my mother is and always was tall, glamorous, beautiful and not inclined to slave sweatily over hot stoves for the sake of something to eat. She was not raised to be a behayma, churning through ingredients — flour, salt, egg, meat, cream — like they were elements of her body. Her body was Jean Nati and hair dye, razors and eyebrow tweezers. Our kitchen did not reek of the yeasty, buttery, beefy fumes of daily cookery. It smelled clean. As a matter of fact, my divorcie mother worked all day, and a live-in housekeeper prepared dinner according to instructions my mother taped to the side of the refrigerator. We ate frozen string beans and fried steaks, hot dog casserole and lamb chops with mint jelly from a jar.
So what am I trying to pull off here with Molly Goldberg? How and why did my approach to Molly slide from ironic to earnest? It began when I needed to produce and direct various Jewish moments in the life of my own family, the one I started with my husband (who, incidentally, is not Jewish). It began small in scale: I needed to make hammentaschen for Purim. That was the first time I pulled the book out as a resource, not as a gimmick. A few years later I needed a few other recipes, and this year I decided to experiment with several in a matter of days. I relied on Molly Goldberg to communicate to me the way to cook like the genuine article. But strange things happen when you search for the real thing in the pages of a book.
Right from the start of Molly’s introduction, I found a voice I knew well from literature, from TV, from “Fiddler on the Roof”:
“This is My Cookbook,” she writes. “So how did I come to write a cookbook? I had to protect myself, that’s how … When I cook for my family I don’t have trouble. But when someone, Mrs. Herman, for an instance, asks me, ‘How do you make this or how do you make that?’ do I know? Of course I know but can I tell her? Of course I can, but it’s easier to show her. So I have to say to her, ‘Come into my kitchen and I’ll make you up.’”
Molly Goldberg is the Ur-Jewish mother, the one we all recognize; her
voice launches many of the book’s recipes with a brief anecdote. Here’s what she says about potato latkes:
“Progress is a wonderful thing, and if you think that progress can’t
come to potato latkes you’re very much mistaken. In the old days when
Jake and I were first married, to make potato latkes was a long chore,
but what don’t you do for someone you love?”
Molly goes on to explain that now she uses an electric mixer and that
“before you know it a couple of hours of work is done in a minute. Progress!”
I also liked that Molly is honest about what often motivates a cook –
a love of eating matched by an equal love of praise and flattery. She
introduces her nut cake with these words:
“In the first place, when it cooks the aroma is more than delicious. In
the second place, when you eat it it’s a treat of the first order, and
in the third place the compliments are worth more than anything put
together. And oh, yes, to get a good flavor you should also buy nuts in
the shell and crack yourself.” (So much for time-saving progress.)
Reading these, I came to believe in Molly as a real person. She
had a husband named Jake, a daughter Rosie and some interesting
relations who sometimes concocted recipes on their own. Sometimes her
kids would not eat vegetables, at which times she’d cook them carrots in
honey. She cried when slicing onions.
Unfailingly, when searching for one small item to prepare, I’d end up
reading the book — no, poring over the book — like an archaeologist
poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls. It became a kind of lodestone for me:
If I cooked with enough butter, salt, sour cream and chicken fat, I
could land myself and my family in the warm, loving, safe world of Molly
Goldberg, whose children’s “sweetest memory” was of her challah.
Of course I love my mother and admire the way of life she modeled
for her daughters. But when I think back to our all-female household
– a mother and two sisters; live-in women servants from exotic islands who would boil bones for
their supper after cleaning up the leavings of ours; a neurotic and
racist she-dog — I can call up with ease
the feeling of panic and loneliness that haunted me every night before
falling asleep. It’s pretty sad when the closest thing you have to a
daily father figure is an obsequious and grinning Central Park West
doorman. But even he, a wide-smiling man named Carlos — who’d dash from the curb
to the door just so you wouldn’t have to break stride on your way home
from school — was a cheerful anodyne to our same-sex domicile. I remember being very sad the day the elevators went automatic and
there was one less man in my girlish life.
But I digress. Or do I? Is cooking like a shtetl Jew, for me, an act of penis-conjuring? If my
family had not broken up in 1970, would I give a hoot about nockerl in
1999?
At any rate, this year I browsed through the book and decided to try my
hand at potato kugel. Now the first thing you should know is that Jewish
cooking requires work and muscle; having forearms like Rod Laver helps
when beating dozens of egg whites. The kugel was tasty, although
extremely salty, which is excusable for Passover since we have to
remember the salty tears the Hebrews cried while enslaved. But just to
cover all the bases, I also tried the Potatoes Charlotte: not as good,
and even more dishes to wash. Indeed, after an hour-long preparation, it took me a half hour to wash up. And this for
a side dish.
Based on my experience, I would estimate that traditional Jewish
cookery requires a woman to spend about three and a half hours per
meal in the kitchen. Now factor in other housekeeping chores such as
cleaning, laundry and procuring ingredients. Where did they find the
time to overwhelm their children with love and affection and nosiness?
More to my point, if I was in fact engaged in a complex penis-conjuring
act, when would I ever find the time to settle down and enjoy the fruits
of my labor?
When I decided to write about this whole experience, I returned again
to my text, and lo and behold, the scales fell from my eyes. I turned
straight to the title page and read as if with new eyes:
“The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook,” by Gertrude Berg and Myra Waldo.
What did this mean? Evidently, these two frauds had done a little
conjuring of their own. Waldo I knew from the introduction. She was
the scientist who stood by Molly’s side and translated her homey
measurements — snips and dashes and nips — into standard amounts.
Waldo had even testified in an introduction of her own to the pleasure
she had working with Molly. “Our hope is that reading this book and
cooking the recipes will bring to you some of the warmth and hospitality
of Molly’s kitchen.”
I glanced at the copyright page: Just above the publishing dates was
the disclaimer familiar to any novel reader: “All characters in this
book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.” I was astonished, floored, flabbergasted
that it had taken me so long to realize the obvious truth. Molly
Goldberg was an invention, a literary construct, a well-worn cliché
created as an excuse to compile and unify a set of otherwise repulsive,
heart-clogging, fat-drenched recipes that no one in their right mind
ought ever to create, let alone serve to loved ones.
I had been duped by a slickly played confidence game devised by those
savvy tricksters, Myra Waldo Schwartz (whose legal surname mysteriously appears only in the copyright) and Gertrude Berg. I wonder if
they’re still alive — because if they are, I’d like to thank them publicly for getting me off
the hook. Now that I know that authenticity is in the eye of the
beholder, I doubt that I’ll ever again turn to Molly Goldberg for
guidance and inspiration. And as for my starchy Passover side dish, I
plan to serve lo mein; its long noodles will remind us of the long
years of servitude Hebrew women suffered as slaves in their kitchens.
The moment my daughter, then 6, finished reading “My Tooth Is
Loose,” I made a speech that I believed to be magnanimous, noble,
farsighted and wise.
“Now you can read,” I began. “Our written language is entirely
available to you. I will not tell you what you can and cannot read. The
words you will see are beyond my control. I only ask that when you
happen upon some piece of writing that you do not understand or have
questions about, you come to your daddy or me and let us help you with
it.”
Placid as usual in the face of sonorous, highfalutin’ drama, she agreed
to the terms as I spelled them out. I felt righteous and cool at the
same time, not an easily achieved sensation. And things went along swimmingly
for a long while. She didn’t have any questions, it seemed, about “My
Tooth Is Loose.” Nor about “Sleep Tight, Pete.” Nor (later on) about the
entire Black Stallion series. Nor about “National Velvet.” Nor about “The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Nor the Little House series, nor the Narnian
classics. “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils” were
big favorites, but they generated no questions. And there were no
consultations over “Watership Down,” which she read this past year during
second grade, except when she suggested that I read it again because “it
is a really good book.”
In fact, she presented me with exactly zero of the kinds of questions
and concerns I had been expecting all along. I’m not sure what I was
expecting, probably long conversations with her about justice and
loyalty in Prince Caspian. But she has proved to be a very private
reader. Mostly she emerges from a book looking thoughtful and
preoccupied. She’ll often suggest I read something she has recently
finished. And often I do, reading it more for getting a sense of who she
is than for its own sake.
My daughter is not drawn to junk books, or what I perceive to be junk
books. Until recently, she has never asked me to procure her a book
that I might — were I the censoring kind — be forced to censor. I had
been suspicious of the squeaky-clean Boxcar children, but after reading
one or two volumes I find them perfectly OK, and gladly add to her
collection whenever I can. My freedom-of-reading speech, in short, had
never really been put to the test. Until a couple of months ago.
I had dashed into a bookstore looking for a couple of novels to read
over spring vacation. There was no rhyme or reason to my selection. A
friend who moonlights as a salesperson suggested “Wicked” by Gregory
Maguire, a fictional biography of the Wicked Witch of the West. He said
a bunch of the employees had been recommending it enthusiastically. I
had my doubts, but made the purchase and left.
When my daughter saw this book her face lit up. I could see her craving
it, the way a different person might crave an ice cream sundae gliding
by on a waiter’s tray toward the patron at the next table. What was it
about? she wanted to know. I told her. Could she read it when I was
done? My speech of long ago turned to ashes in my mouth.
“I’ll have to see what it’s like,” I said.
“But you said you’d never tell me I couldn’t read something,” said the
girl with the elephant memory, who hadn’t once, in all these years, ever
tested the terms of our agreement. Now I was forced to eat the ashes.
“You’re right,” I said. “But this is written for grown-ups and I have to
read it first to see if it’s appropriate before I say yes.”
I read the book happily, found it thoroughly imagined, intelligent,
funny and well written. But there are parts, great parts, which are
both merrily and darkly raunchy. Other parts, too, for one reason or
another, are not appropriate for my 8-and-a-half-year-old child, even
assuming that she would probably read them uncomprehendingly. She saw me
happy in the book, and that made her even angrier. When I finished, she
asked me again.
“Please?”
“No.”
She became truly upset. It is hard to say which she was more angry about,
the fact that I had changed our reading policy or that she couldn’t
read that particular book.
“You can read it when you’re older,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll love it
when you’re older. But it is definitely not appropriate for you now.”
She was in a tearful stew, but accepted the verdict. As did I. The
truth is, I am the censoring kind.
- – - – - – - – - -
Now that I’ve admitted it, I confess there is no end to my censoring,
and in fact I’ve been censoring since the day she was born. Since before
she was born. But maybe screening is a better word for it. Or
filtering.
I’d be riding around in my car listening to Howard Stern, the growing
bulge before me pressing against the steering wheel. Suddenly I’d catch
myself and hastily but regretfully punch the button of the classical
music station. Only symphonies, cantatas, sonatas and minuets for the
developing ears of MY fetus. (Nothing unusual about this, I’m sure.)
Then she emerged, and I buried in the bottom of her bureau the bundles
of pink clothing and other fuzzy wrappings that came her way. No gender
stereotyping for MY liberated girl! (Doubtless I’m in good company here
too.)
Without a moment’s pause I changed the names of the characters in all
of her books so that the heroes became girls. This seemed a necessary
step to ensure that she become the main character of her own life.
Arthur, the rebel Teddy Bear who ran away from home, became Arlene. Mr.
Bear, the wise old forest creature to whom all of the timid female farm
animals defer when it comes time to help Danny select a birthday present
for his mother, had to become Mrs. Bear. Spot and the other unisex names
stayed the same, but the personal pronoun was always changed to she.
Needless to say, my husband
was sorely tried by the effort to keep up with such on-the-spot
editorializing, especially because this kind of vigilance was mostly
necessary at the bedtime book time, when it was a challenge for him
simply to remain conscious through the last page.
This kind of watchfulness over her consumption of cultural artifacts
has continued unabated over these years, and has spread from books and
clothing to everything else, including the way we spend our free time.
The seriousness of purpose with which I tossed aside the pink onesies
has evolved into a mode of living with our children that depends on
sustaining a constant adversarial relationship with our culture as a
whole. Our children are intimately familiar with what Baffler critic
Thomas Frank termed “the sweet shriek of outrage,” our ongoing protest
of the production of junk and unthinking consumption of junk.
We have allowed into our home small homeopathic doses of what passes
for children’s entertainment (“Barney,” “The Lion King”) and children’s
playthings (Barbie, Beanie Babies), but with the understanding that
these representatives are here as tokens of the outside world,
signifiers of our not being fundamental hard-ons or orthodox
throwbacks. Her initial experiences of these things have always been
with us by her side. Likewise for our two sons, who were born later on.
In fact, I consider that guarding our children’s availability to their
crushingly mercenary and largely moronic culture is one of the most
important things we do for them. Actually, I don’t really do anything on
their behalf that I don’t do on my own account. I do not buy into the
unthinking suburban “lifestyle” (read, buy-style) around me, so why should
I impose it on them?
Our daughter doesn’t know anything about the Spice Girls. She could not
sing you a single cold cereal jingle. Last night she asked me what
Godzilla was, some boys in her class having been joking about it all
week. It would never occur to me to take her to see “Titanic” (seen by a
sizable bunch of her classmates), and not because of the ship’s disaster,
which she knows all about in engineering detail, but because of the
romance. She’s too young to view Hollywood’s ticket-selling portrait of
love and longing. But is she sheltered? That
would depend on what you consider shelter.
Through literature, our daughter has encountered the Holocaust (after a
quiet debriefing by me before I gave her the relevant novels), slavery,
war, racism, malevolent discrimination and other kinds of savagery
among humans. She understands, for example, that McDonald’s baits its
burgers with bean bag toys to lure kid consumers; that cigarette makers add
an extra poison to their product that will make people have a harder
time quitting. She knows about envy, greed, righteousness and peaceful
conflict resolution. What she hasn’t encountered in literature has often
come up on its own in conversation. She likes to piece together the
motives for human behavior. Luckily so do her parents. She trusts us,
and we trust her. She’s considered quick-witted, resourceful, fiercely
fair and considerate. She is neither sarcastic nor ironical.
There will certainly come a time when she is on her own in the world
drawing her own conclusions. (In many ways that time has begun.) I like
to think that our steady sifting of the acceptable from the unacceptable
during her early years will serve her well as she begins to distill the
din for herself.
Here’s the conclusion: I overheard her reading to her (almost)
3-year-old brother the other day. She was reading a Magic Schoolbus
story. While these books are often factually informative, they do
feature a kind of sassy, sarcastic humor on the part of the students,
who tend to mock Ms. Frizzle (their zanily dressed, offbeat science
teacher) even as she’s taking them on a wild adventure for the sake of
gaining greater understanding of some scientific principle. Ms. Frizzle
is apparently oblivious to the jokes and insinuations made at her
expense, cheerfully focusing instead on the curriculum she has to
communicate and making it as enjoyable as she can. The story our
daughter was reading begins with the narrator calling Ms. Frizzle “the
strangest teacher in the school.” Our daughter, launching into the
narrative, began her story time with an act of editorializing: “Our class
had Ms. Frizzle,” she “read,” “the most interesting teacher in the
school.”
By this act our daughter was trying to make the words acceptable to her
personal sensibility in order to present an image to her brother that
she could vouch for. Ms. Frizzle isn’t strange; at least, that’s not the
truest or kindest way to interpret the extraordinary character of Ms.
Frizzle. Such unkindness was not worthy to be passed along. For a
literal-minded 8-year-old, one who is loath to remove even a single
treasured item from her overcrowded night stand, and is reluctant to
change even one ingredient in the pasta sauce she loves, it is a big
deal to change a printed word. Somehow, though, her instincts tell her
it’s OK. From experience she knows it’s OK: Magnanimity that leads
to acceptance of the unacceptable is not a desirable thing. Instead, the
sweet shriek of outrage is her privilege.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t. For those who do, the inclination to set up binary people-sorting systems is irresistible:
There are people who work best with music playing in the background and people who require silence. People who get lather all over their faces while brushing their teeth and people who keep the toothpaste in their mouths. People who have no appetite in the morning and people who wake up ravenous …
One might continue forever. But perhaps the only important binary classification to be made for all of humankind is this one: Is she/he a cat person or a dog person?
The attendant characteristics of each type are well-known, well-documented and well-satirized by comedians and comic-strip writers. It’s not necessary to belabor the canine traits admired by the dog person — loyal, direct, kind, faithful, utilitarian, helpful, team playerish, etc. — and the feline traits admired by the cat person — graceful, subtle, independent, intelligent, thoughtful, mysterious, etc. Ask someone whether they’re a cat person or a dog person and you know everything you need to know about that person. (The dog person won’t lie, and the cat person is too proud to lie about that.) What kinds of pets people actually own have no bearing on this theory; all that matters is what they say they are. Ask yourself, and you will know yourself.
Until, that is, it’s time to select the family pet and you are the parent. At this point so many other factors come into play that you may no longer have a sense that you are one kind of person or another. Living quarters may be too small for this beast, too large for that. Kids may have allergies to this or that kind of fur. Then there’s the care itself. Changing soiled cage bedding? Cleaning tanks? Taking walks twice a day? Straining to hear silent feet padding about the house? All of it seems overwhelming and undesirable, particularly if you have just emerged from the waking up at night and diapering phase. The last thing you want, even if you are a dog person, say, is another companion, another life form requiring your assistance in any way. But there are the kids. And pets are good for kids. So you try to come up with a pet in spite of yourself.
Once I thought of myself as a classic dog person. Direct, shoot-from-the-hip, tell-it-like-it-is, faithful, uncomplicated — that was me, or what I wanted to be: all dog. (Plus I was afraid of cats.) Then came a child who wanted a pet. Early on we had a rat. I had read they were educable. But the rat starting nipping our daughter and we returned it to the pet shop as snake food. Later we had fish, barely viewable through the algae build-up within the tank; they finally died of a food overdose. Then two gerbils, who one day just stopped moving and were declared dead a few days after that. Then came a series of interviews with breeders of pure-bred dogs. We failed all of the interviews. During the coldest days of 1996 we moved into a new house and started fresh. Pets were a thing of the past. We could live without interspecie relations.
In the spring after our move, as my husband was collapsing boxes in the garage, the neighborhood’s feral cat leaped out of a pile of bubble wrap. My husband backed away in fear and worry, cursing the likelihood of what he would call a rat situation. But as he peered down into the box, he saw nestled in the bubble wrap three tiny newborn kittens. Naturally, our children fell in love with one, the all-black one, and began lobbying us to take her in as a pet. (Our neighbor the cat-lover, who had been feeding the feral mother for some time, brought the litter to her screened-in porch for indoctrination as potential pets. The mother has remained wild.)
As summer approached, we had to make a decision. It seemed to hinge on what I felt. Was I going to remain obstinately a dog person and deny the kitten a place in our family, blaming my long-standing yet inconclusively diagnosed allergies? Was I going to remain a dog person yet allow the kitten in anyway? Or was I going to welcome the kitten and seek the cat person within? Meanwhile, our neighbor had invited another family to choose among the kittens, and our daughter was worrying over the possibility of their selecting the all-black one, the one she wanted with her whole heart. For an hour or two of an early summer evening, the dramatic tension was palpable. Finally, with my husband’s assurance that I would have no responsibility for the litter box, I allowed that adopting the kitten was fine by me.
Now I find that a cat is a perfect pet, indeed a perfect animal. Velvet is sweet-tempered, of course, and that makes a big difference. But it’s her cattiness that I admire most. She knows how to make herself comfortable and does so whenever she can. She lets you know she wants to be alone by leaving you alone. She plays with simple things like string and crinkly candy wrappers. She shows her affection freely by purring and cuddling. She travels well in a plain box lined with a towel. She eats what you set before her but is grateful to lick the interior of an emptied tuna can. She’s flexible. She displays personal dignity. In short, she sets a good example for the children.
If I am reading in a chair Velvet will jump onto my lap and fall asleep, her warm heavy weight nestling just the right way to make me feel at peace with the world. It’s kind of like the weight of a sleeping newborn, but without any of the angst that attaches to that experience. A cat won’t catch a chill. A cat won’t develop bad sleeping habits from being held through a nap. A cat won’t have an explosive bowel movement all over your arm. A sneeze won’t wake a cat, and even if it does, so what? A cat’s just there for the moment, warm and alive and taking a nap. It can always go back to sleep someplace else.
Before dashing out to the nearest shelter, however, any prospective cat owners ought to seek the counsel of an experienced and reasonably objective cat person. Our neighbor, for example, had assured us that Velvet was in fact as sweet and intelligent as our daughter had intuited. Other cat people who have visited are equally amazed at her good nature. A dyed-in-the-wool cat person may not care about traits like gentleness, disinclination to scratch, etc. To them, all cats are great in their own way. The rest of us ought to steer clear of the less-than-ideal representative.
And what of the borders between people, the definitive labels that keep straight who’s who? Do I now think of myself as a cat person? Have I crossed the line away from my decades-long association with and empathy for the dog people? The rompers, the panters, the so-glad-to-be-alive gang? Probably not. But perhaps, thanks to Velvet, I feel a little less a dog person, a little more complicated. I’m trying to make peace with mystery, to make room for grace. Pets make you own up in any number of ways, and I am happy and proud to be the owner of this particular cat. It’s very nice to feel a kind of thrill when I hold her up against my cheek, stroke her soft clean fur and hear her purr. If nothing else, cats are certainly sexier than dogs, and in this way they set a good example for a mother.
It is not easy to walk the path of spirituality when you are suspicious
of those who arrange the steppingstones. As the millennium draws to a close, spiritual instructors are many in number, and their voices can be
alarmingly banal. What follows is a simple, seven-step guide to coping
with two of the more popular recently published parenting books that
have targeted the spiritual side of raising children, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families” by Stephen R. Covey and “The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents” by Deepak Chopra.
1. Avoid staring at the picture of the author, especially if it
includes any members of his/her family, thereby inviting snide
observations on their apparent relationship.
2. Numb yourself to buzzwords like “synergy,” “proactive,” “learnings” and “book team,” and to the catchy phrases coined by the author to help you
do what he suggests. (Ex: “Use your pause button” or “make a deposit
in your Emotional Bank Account.”)
3. Do not count the number of times (at least seven in Covey’s book) an
author refers to “blowing it.” (Ex: “We all ‘blow it’ from time to
time.”)
4. Do not read the dust jacket blurbs; they’re manipulative and
distracting.
5. Do not read the author’s bio. Go in cold, not knowing what schools
he attended or what Fortune 500 companies he has counseled. None of this
should make any difference in your reading.
6. Do not think about who else reads these kinds of self-help books.
7. Finally, do not study the products and services hawked in the back
of the book or call any of the telephone numbers provided or seek in
any way to turn the book into something more accountable than food for
thought.
That said, there is not so much wrong with the substance of these books,
once you get past their dumbed-down, slicked-up packaging and the
marketing strategies propelling them to the bestseller lists. After
all, most people do live in families of one kind or another and most
families do not function in any kind of a healthy way. If you are not
the kind of parent to figure out what’s wrong and remedy your family’s
problem on your own, you might do a lot worse than to make use of either
of these books.
The books derive from earlier works of the authors — Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and Chopra’s “The
Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” — which used similar tools to fix
grown-up kinds of problems. Chopra writes, “After my book ‘The Seven
Spiritual Laws of Success’ was published, the response was immediate and
very beautiful: Thousands of people who read the book began to practice
in their daily lives the principles that Nature uses to create
everything in material existence. In time I received requests from many
of these people who happened to be parents … I wrote this new book to
answer these requests.”
Chopra’s little volume, with fonts that are delicately suggestive of Asia and dainty
graphics (some readers may even recognize the peaceful avian family
gracing the title pages as pheasant, partridge or grouse), actually
proposes something quite radical. “If a critical mass of our children
are raised to practice the Seven Spiritual Laws, our whole civilization
will be transformed,” he writes. “Every child needs as much mature love
as you can give. What makes love mature — and not just adult — is the
conscious spiritual intention behind it.”
With so many grown-ups blubbering about their inner children, it is
refreshing to see a self-help manual attempting to elicit the maturity
of a parent. Because so much of Chopra’s insight is based on ancient
Vedic scriptures and yogic texts and practices, his suggestions have a
heft that can bear the weight of contemplation in spite of his
simplified language and retreading of familiar parenting book material.
Most of the time. Here’s a nice passage:
“A child who was taught from the age of three or four ‘You are here for
a reason’ would face a very different future. Such a child would see the
search for meaning in life as a natural thing, the spiritual equivalent
of learning your ABCs. There would be no years of postponement, followed
by desperate inner turmoil. ‘Why am I here’ doesn’t have to be a
fearsome existential question.”
Here’s something less inspiring of confidence: “Acceptance is essential
because a lot of effort is wasted whenever you put up resistance.
Defenselessness is tied to acceptance, in that having to defend your
point of view creates conflict and chaos, which are both huge wastes of
energy.” One might argue that putting up resistance to certain
realities, say physical abuse and social injustice, is not a waste of
effort. Likewise, conflict and chaos seem to be playing a fairly
important role in human evolution.
In contrast to Chopra’s slim work stands Covey’s encyclopedic,
cross-referenced, plain-speakingly anecdotal, practicum manual. Make no
mistake, the 7 Habits are on a mission: Improve family performance. And why? Because “history
clearly affirms that family is the foundation of society. It is the
building block of every nation. It is the headwaters of the stream of
civilization. It is the glue by which everything is held together. And
family itself is a principle built deeply into every person,” Covey
declaims.
With Covey, you have to read through the whiff of a possibly
distasteful political sensibility. There’s talk of television as the
“open sewage pipe right into our home,” there’s a matter-of-fact ennobling of middle-class values and there’s considerable Godspeak,
which may disturb some readers. On the other hand, when you assemble the
practical suggestions Covey has to offer to improve the shared life of
the family, you may be surprised to find them useful. Under the corporate jargon, his idea of “improved family performance” is creating a family where relationships based on love and affection help children to become responsible, caring adults. Regularly make the
time to be with your children, Covey suggests, and bring to these
encounters what he terms “the four unique human gifts”: self-awareness,
conscience, imagination and independent will. Listen to them and
respect them, he says. Here’s how others have done it. Here’s how you
can do it. It works! Go for it!
The very point of the 7 Habits, and of Chopra’s Spiritual Laws, is to
help parents live up to the responsibility they assumed when they
reproduced in the first place. An average parent is likely to come away
from each book with at least a morsel or two of usable material. The
parent desperate for help may emerge from these books with much more.
Finally we have the reason women can’t break the glass ceiling and have it all: They’re too busy reading Sports Illustrated! According to SI’s director of publicity, Robin Shallow, the magazine’s 3 million subscribers include 450,000 women, an increase of 15 percent over the last five years. Those who aren’t reading SI are likely to be shooting hoops down the street or swimming loops around Manhattan. Forty-one million females — including 12 million women and 30 million school-age and college girls — regularly play sports, says Lucy S. Danziger, editor in chief of Condi Nast’s recently launched Sports for Women.
If these numbers shock you, you probably don’t know who Mia Hamm is, and your fast-twitch muscle fibers are probably in lousy shape, assuming you even know where (or what) they are. Also, you probably didn’t know that NBC’s coverage of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta was meant to draw in female viewers (“Honey, not tonight; Marie-Jose Perec is going for gold in the 200 meters”). Certainly, though, the numbers are very real to those running the show at Sports Illustrated’s WomenSport, Condi Nast’s Sports for Women and the other new mags aimed at the growing, affluent, highly advertising-attractive market of female sports fans.
Since 1972, when the passage of Title IX prohibited federally funded institutions from discriminating on the basis of sex, girls’ sports (particularly soccer and basketball) have attracted increasing numbers of participants. When you add these athletes to the armchair groupies who have evidently been following men’s basketball, football, baseball and hockey in the pages of Sports Illustrated, you too might be tempted to launch a women’s sports magazine.
To judge from the fast-paced, devil-take-the-hindmost tone of boundless possibility, eternal energy and celebratory playfulness that prevails in these mags, women are doing all kinds of things that seem completely crazy and probably are. But are kickboxing, paragliding and snowboarding any crazier than secretly slicing yourself with a razor blade or throwing up after a big dinner? Women, it seems, have always done nutty things: Intense physical play is simply a healthier kind of craziness than the self-destructive habits inflicted upon women by a mysogynist culture and economy.
Or is it? Some readers of these magazines might conclude that the sportiest of women are simply burying the life-denying impulses even deeper. Kristen Ulmer, featured in Sports for Women’s November issue, was nearly swept off the Grand Tetons in a 100-mile-an-hour avalanche during a ski run. Billed in the profile as an “adrenaline junkie,” Ulmer also likes to soar in the sky harnessed to a parachute, crawl up cliffs and chat with obscene callers. She takes on challenges, never gives up and fears only tedium. She’s happy, fulfilled and financially independent. All seems rosy — until the very end of the profile, where Kristen muses on the idea of life after sport: “At some point my body isn’t going to work as well,” she says, “and I’m going to have to find something … I’m really afraid of waking up one morning with a spongy butt. No way I can retire. I’d be lost, confused. I wouldn’t know who I was.”
Could it really be that part of what motivates Ulmer to scale craggy peaks and routinely endanger her life is the vision of herself with a spongy butt? Abhorrence of the mature female form is bad enough; worse is Ulmer’s confession that without sports she would be lost to herself, overboard and flailing in the doldrums of adulthood, her identity shrunk to a pip.
Call Ulmer the exception and consider long-distance runner Ann Trason, an older and more experienced athlete featured in WomenSport’s Fall 1997 issue. The fawning, rhetorically overblown profile makes for difficult reading, but maybe this is a fitting form for a subject who runs 18-hour races. Slogging through the pain is what long-distance running (and reading) is all about.
Don’t dismiss Trason as a “madwoman,” writes Kenny Moore, assuring readers Trason is, in fact, “as sane as a gloriously obsessed creature can be.” To appreciate this, he crows, you have to know about distance. “Distance burns through sentiment, through aesthetics. Distance burns through being healthy, pretty, admired, ridiculed or moved by anyone else’s example. Distance burns through betrayals, loves and hates. Distance burns until a runner is revealed in naked, raw relief. Distance humbles, but only, paradoxically, through a runner’s adamantine self-control.” If only distance could burn through purple prose.
Trason’s own body was consumed by distance: One race burned through the musculature of her left leg, leaving her running along with 90 percent of her hamstring detached from the head of the bone. Naturally, she not only finished the race, but under local anesthesia endured the surgery to investigate the limb and reattach the muscle, the better to converse with her surgeon during the operation.
In a sidebar entitled “Tough Mothers,” WomenSport offers a gestational timeline upon which are placed, month by month, nine women who have “competed and frequently excelled” in various sports during their pregnancies. Sure, pregnancy is normally a healthy state of the body. Moderate exercise can only make the average, uneventfully pregnant person feel good. But what is the average pregnant reader to think of jockey Mary Bacon, who rode a race during her eighth month? Publicly we cheer her gusto (“See what women can do given a chance”); in private we wonder what kind of desires she’s drawing on that would set her agallop at that particular moment in her life. A reader might well wonder if these are the right barriers to be crashing though.
In spite of the shared terrain, the sports magazines display individual personalities. Sports for Women editor Danziger claims to focus her magazine “on helping women lead an active life, not on quick life fixes,” and a fair number of articles present real athletes performing real sports. Other features give tips on performance. Columnist Martina Navratilova does her level-headed, straight-from-the-heart best to bestow a politically correct athlete’s credentials and blessings upon the enterprise. But Condé Nast’s layout is cluttered, squeezing editorial between and beside ads for liquor, cars, perfume, makeup, jeans and sports gear. Readers can look here for advice on what kind of jewelry looks best on a surfer’s sandy hand and which sports will improve specific parts of the body. Here also is a fashion spread on high school girls in their team uniforms. Elsewhere is a touch of erotica: a beach girl’s perfect butt, her slightly sandy bikini bottom creeping upwards. There’s even a lighthearted diary of a writer in search of Mr. (Wealthy) Right at a golf tournament. Good intentions notwithstanding, Sports for Women is compromised.
Sports Illustrated’s WomenSport works well as a fan’s resource and an overall introduction to the variety and scope of women’s sports today. The profile of U.S. women’s soccer star Mia Hamm, Richard Hoffer’s colorful look at women’s boxing and Johnette Howard’s profile of a double amputee female track star (she has no legs from the knees down) make for happy and uplifting sports niche reading. WomenSport can also tell the reader/sportswoman where to get a nifty bicycle saddle with a cutaway section that will alleviate the genital pressure many female bikers experience on saddles designed for men.
But WomenSport, edging as it does toward a full appreciation of what women do, seems a little too eager to present the feminine side of its women athletes. We’re told that runner Marie-Jose Perec has “breathtaking physical beauty; [and] the potential to mix crude, passionate athleticism and femininity even more stunningly than she already has …” We’re shown the amputee track star passionately embracing her boyfriend and told that she loves to model fashion. Even Christy Martin, the sensational female boxer, photographed mid-bout with blood all over her clothes and face, must be described (by her husband, of course) as “100 percent female: She wears high heels, fingernail polish, everything.” It’s one thing to quote a dopey guy who assumes that high heels plus fingernail polish equals femininity; it’s another to go the extra mile to ensure that readers understand Christy’s not too butch. Time will tell whether WomenSport, which floated the first two issues in order to test the magazine’s market viability, will remain in the fray.
About 100 pages slimmer and many times more readable than their ad-fat sister publications, Women’s Sports and Fitness and Women’s Cycling are sober alternatives. The writers and editors here are almost universally female and dedicated participants in the activities they cover. The letters-to-the-editor are signed by mothers pulling tots behind bikes and women who read the magazine while stepping on the Stairmaster at the gym. These are magazines we can show the 30 million girl athletes without embarrassment.
It’s not hard to locate the politics in women’s sports. As with any kind of politics, you have only to follow the dollars. Spend money on girls’ and women’s sports programs and the teams will blossom. Convince advertisers and corporate underwriters you’ve got readers and fans who will pay to watch the sports and, presto, a magazine and a national league is born.
Meanwhile, it is thrilling to see muscle-bound females put their bodies through a daredevilish array of activities hitherto practiced by men. Women auto racers and female chess grandmasters make good reading. But consider how these magnificent feats and their cultivation relate to the destiny of women and girls in the world at large. Hasn’t it been the spirit of unchecked competition that got us into this mess in the first place? Isn’t there some connection between win-lose games and corporate rapacity?
Not that our farseeing athletic friends don’t imagine progressive social consequence might attach to their feats. “There are lots of problems
in Algeria, material problems, political problems … I am going to make a lot of changes,” says champion Algerian runner Hassiba Boulmerka in Women’s Sports and Fitness. Record-breaking American auto racer Lyn St. James speaks to the same goal in the same magazine: “You have to live by the rules. You have to play by the rules. You have to win by the rules. Then, when you win enough, you can begin to change the rules.” It’s a nice idea, but it would be even nicer to think that changing the rules doesn’t require playing the game.
I cannot say, like Nerve magazine writer Fiona Giles, that I have “worshipped many dicks in my life.” Even if I had worshipped many dicks in my life, I do not think that I could say that I had. This is why we read a Web magazine like Nerve. I am glad there is a place for (mostly) good writers to realize a literary sexuality for the rest of us to appreciate.
Launched in June by editors Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field, the site views sex as “a truth-telling vehicle,” a literate place to explore our “smelly-fingered fascination with our shame and desire.” I like this agenda, for I am faithful to the notion that it is possible to make the smelliest subjects intellectually compelling, given good enough writing and sharp enough wit. But accomplishing this with respect to sex is no mean feat. It’s easier to write something sexy about eating an artichoke (“gently she fingered through the layers of petals, scraping soft vegetableflesh with the tips of her teeth”) than to render erotic the effect of a penis on a vulva.
Giles, who has edited a book called “Dick for a Day: What Would You Do if You Had One?” rises to the task when she describes cherishing “the moment I can slip my fingers inside boxers or briefs and discover the heated weight of a hardening cock in the palm of my hand.” In a fraction of a sentence, Giles has overturned the literary sexual order, defining herself as the pursuing subject, and her beloved as the willing object waxing desirous in the palm of her hand. This is poetic, straightforward writing about sex.
Nerve also offers erotica that deliberately shies from loin stirring, but is evocative nonetheless. Griscom’s maiden “Whelmed” column tries to come to terms with mediocre sex. “We don’t hear as much about the disappointments, the anticlimaxes, the misfires,” he writes. He continues by describing what a wilting penis really feels like, citing the “little compression on entry,” that creates “a challenge reminiscent of stuffing the spring back into a jack-in-the-box.”
Lisa Carver, in “Some of My Best Friends Are Sensualists,” halves the world into sexualists and sensualists. According to Carver, sexualists are interested in having orgasms, period. Sensualists pay attention to ambience, tricky technique and emotions. Carver’s Plain Jane voice plays this ancient theme with virtuosity:
“Sensualists do stuff with their fluids. Why?” she asks. “When giving a blow job, the obvious thing to do is swallow the semen — it’s neat, polite and efficient. I don’t smear it or drip it into the guy’s mouth, or any of those other things that I know sensual people are going around doing.” (“I can make myself come in two minutes,” Carver writes. “Why spend two hours?”)
Of course, were it not for sensualists, there would be no place for erotica. For photophiles, Nerve’s Skin department offers a variety of images. A photograph by Peter J. Gorman displays a naked, long-legged woman on a chair, her straggly dark hair streaming down over rubbery-looking breasts. The woman’s legs are splayed, the long slim fingers of her left hand point down from her navel, and the tip of her middle finger rests upon her clitoris. She stares frankly at the crotch-level camera. Our eye is captured by the severe lines of her long leg, her high-heeled sandal and those impossibly long fingers. The boring furnishings of “her” room (actually, she’s sitting in Gorman’s apartment) are blurred behind her. Who cares about time, desks, lamps and the other paraphernalia of life, the image seems to ask, when there’s a sexually wired female (whose “charged” desire is suggested by the crazy wiggles and lines of her twisted telephone and electrical cords) spread out in the foreground?
Personally, I’ve seen just about enough drag queen portraiture, studies of the immensity of the female form and rippling flesh below vaguely contemplative eyes. What’s more, calling forth photographic images on my computer screen takes so long to complete, and seems like such an affront to the medium, that I’d just as soon pass on the photos altogether.
It’s likewise a little risky to enter Threads, Nerve’s fiction department. I began a story by writer Dale Peck, but did not get very far. “You were a pushy bottom,” writes Peck in “S/M or Sunday Night, Monday Morning,” “and you brought my hands down roughly on your skin, and I began slapping you. You were thin even then, your flesh wasn’t tight, and I wondered if perhaps you had just lost a lot of weight. I hit you with your belt. I threw you against a tree. As you came a second time, I said, ‘Meet me here one week from tonight.’” If you found yourself wondering what kind of tree that guy got thrown against, so as to have some idea of the kind of bark that would have abraded the “beloved’s” baggy skin, perhaps this form of erotica isn’t for you, either.
Brainy types may enjoy Rick Moody’s recommendation from Nerve’s Ex Libris department, in which writers offer some of their favorite passages from canonical erotica. Moody presents “M” (Mr. M’s Story), by Michel de M’Uzan, originally published in the Polysexuality issue of Semiotext(e). Mr. M is a masochist, and the particulars of what was done to his body are horrific. But the dry, clinician’s tone of the narrator, who patiently unpacks and airs out Mr. M’s dirty laundry, is a marvel to read. We read with wonder as the dispassionate analyst unravels the complex, Machiavellian manipulations set in motion by the publicly respectable Mr. M., who had the skin of his back pierced into a row of thongs so that he could be suspended by ropes and dangled while undergoing rectal penetration.
Nerve makes bedfellows of low-, middle- and highbrow smut. Log on to read a treatise written by a Harvard professor on the sexual practices of bonobo apes. Log on to review a reprinted but still timely interview with Norman Mailer on ethics and pornography. Log on to read Quentin Crisp’s meditations concerning celibacy. I was surprised, though, given the free-ranging raunchy literariness of Nerve, to come across an oddly tame little piece by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders titled “The Dreaded ‘M’ Word.” “Rather than tell children that touching themselves is forbidden,” she writes (with co-author Barbara Kilgore), “parents may gently explain that this is best done in private.” What is this datedly therapeutic yet pedagogically sound bit of talk show advice doing in Nerve?
On the other hand, this is precisely what Nerve is setting out to do: expand the discourse in/of/around the sexual arena in order to make some sense of what people do with their bodies. Nerve says to its readers, Do what you want in private, but talk about it in public. The talk may or may not be cheap, but silence in these matters is always costly.
PHOTO ) PETER GORMAN FROM THE “SKIN” SECTION OF NERVE MAGAZINE
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
AN INTERVIEW WITH NERVE FOUNDERS
Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
If Nerve may be viewed as an attempt to reconcile the private mystery of sexuality with the urge toward confession and revelation (or at least to bring this tension to the table), how do you reconcile yourself personally to this tension? Is it a challenge for you to write about your penis, about humping, about masturbating, etc.?
Griscom: Well, of course it’s easier to write about these things than it is to tell them to a friend, even a good friend. I found it hard to even describe to a female friend recently what I wrote in my last column. I think this is why writing remains such a powerful medium in this era of high-bandwidth media: The nimble stream of letters can plumb regions the lens and microphone cannot reach (or, perhaps, would prefer not to).
One of the things that sets Nerve apart from other publications, I think, is our interest in exploring the embarrassing — even humiliating — moments of the sexual experience in addition to the moments of triumph. Since we ask this of our writers, Genevieve and I feel that we should be willing to expose ourselves to a degree as well. I think writing is about sharing the interior experience, and it’s particularly interesting when it’s difficult.
Is it hard to come up with quality content to keep the magazine going, given its themes and subjects? Do you solicit material, or is stuff flowing in from good writers who’ve been longing to write about sex?
Field: From the outset, we’ve wanted to approach writers who haven’t written about sex but who are known for being bold on the page — and we’ve been pleased to find that just about all the authors we speak to want to write about sex. We’ve received a lot of enthusiastic phone calls from writers who call up and say, in effect, “about time.”
Griscom: Many writers whom we have quietly admired for years have contributed, and we’re still kind of pinching our cheeks over that. We spent several months before publication doing nothing but drafting letters to writers, and that continues to consume a fair amount of our time. We now receive quite a few submissions and have less explaining to do when we approach writers. We are about to publish original articles, essays and fiction by Robert Owen Butler, Denis Johnson and Sallie Tisdale. Naomi Wolf, Dorothy Allison and Richard Klein are contributing this fall.
It’s a commonplace observation that women, in literature and life, are coming into their own as desiring subjects of sexual experience, and further, as subjects who shift willingly back and forth between their roles as subject and object. How do these ideas play out in Nerve?
Field: It’s quite true that women today have more sexual agency than ever before. Thus, we — as women first, readers and writers second — are increasingly bored with erotica and its tired recipes for arousal, and unwilling to conform to the collective male fantasy that pornography is constructed for. Writing about sex is now exciting territory for serious female writers, and I like to think that Nerve is giving us the push we need to forget about what we’ve been told women want, and write unapologetically about the realities of our desires. Right now it looks like more than 30 percent of our readers are female, which tells us we’re doing something right.
