Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts

I Do but I Don't: Walking Down the Aisle without Losing Your Mind Review

I Do but I Don't: Walking Down the Aisle without Losing Your Mind
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I Do but I Don't: Walking Down the Aisle without Losing Your Mind ReviewI was sucked into this book by the modest cover, and title, and a quick skim of the first chapters....which indicated this was going to be a book about a feminist new age bride, who quickly realizes the whole Bridal Industrial Complex about to suck money from her and her family, and who responds by having a simple, down-to-earth, meaningful wedding.
Well, that's not THIS book.
Ms.Wicoff is a spoiled, pretentious Texas debutante who claim to being "a feminist' are laughable. All she and her homemaker mom can think about is her upcoming wedding, and how to make it largest and fussiest and most expensive one on earth. In fairness, Kami was apparently harassed continually by her mom from her mid-twenties on to get her rich, investment banker boyfriend to propose....to the point that she has to throw hissy fits and public tantrums until Mr. Perfect coughs up the Perfect 2 Carat Emerald Cut Platinum ring (I don't think I give anything away here, because she mentions it constantly....how big it is, how other women envy it, how she can barely stand to wear it, etc.)
The first couple chapters I thought had some real interest going, because it appeared that Ms. Wicoff was actively questioning her own desperation at wanting a 'real proposal" (i.e., from the man, down on one knee, etc.) and her complete inability to simply ask herself if he wanted to marry her. But she never goes beyond simply describing her extreme angst about getting 'asked' (desperate at the tender age of 27!), and her laughable "research" consists of her asking her girlfriends what they think (they are all desperate to be asked too, with the desperation increasing with age). This pretty much made me want to hid my head in shame and desolation that THIS is what has become of the dream of feminism and women's independence -- that baby boomer feminists have given birth to a generation of women who have every access to work and education and big dreams and yet they are more desperate and marriage obsessed that the corniest 50s housewife.
Interestingly, Ms. Wicoff appears never to have held a job (she's in graduate school at the time of her nuptials), and doesn't even briefly mention a career interest except she'd like to do 'freelance writing', something she expects will be subsidized by her new husband's investmant banking career, along with the maids and nannies she also mentions that she expects. (He's really, really wealthy -- did I mention that? because Kamy Wicoff does on nearly every page.) Furthermore, her bio on the book jacket describes her only as 'a contributor to [...].com", although Salon's archive contains no listings at all for her.
Other reviewers have done a good job of describing the rest of the book -- Ms. Wicoff's alternatingly hip, post-modern, ironic contempt for rings and fancy dresses, only to find that she goes and does every single solitary thing she criticizes as overly expensive or ridiculous, right down to a wildly overpriced Vera Wang original dress. Her "wedding for 200" is a premium affair, with every person man-hauled across country to attend luxurious event on a remote ranch in the Colorado mountains, just the logistics of which are coma-inducing, and the cost almost incalculable. This is the stuff of celebrity wedding, although I am not aware of Ms. Wicoff being any sort of celebrity -- she's just a rich girl who has snagged a very rich boy.
This whole, deeply offensive thing has the over all effect you get when you visit some self-aborbed, newly-married couple whose whole home is dotted with pictures and platters and keepsakes from the wedding, and then they force you to set through their wedding videos and look at their photo albums! Fascinating for them, hideously boring for you. And in the end, you are left with a nagging feeling that they just want to show off, "see what I have that you cannot possibly afford'.
I remember my grandmother, who used to say (usually after seeing some ridiculous movie star wedding covered on TV) that the lavishness of a wedding is in direct inverse correlation to the liklihood that the marriage itself will succeed long-term. And she was a very wise woman. A marriage is a lifetime of hardwork and compromise and not being the center of attention -- a WEDDING is a party that lasts one day. Anyone who makes it the pinnacle of their life, fritters away their parent's retirement money on it, brags and shows off to total strangers, and still can't get over her Emerald Cut Ring or her Vera Wang dress SIX YEARS after the event, and is still writing about it (and not, apparently, writing or working at any other endeavour) needs to get a life! and soon!
In conclusion: as a boomer generation feminist, this makes my skin crawl in shame, for both Kami and especially her mother.I Do but I Don't: Walking Down the Aisle without Losing Your Mind Overview

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Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Bantam Classics) Review

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Bantam Classics)
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Bantam Classics) ReviewI was looking for another edition of TESS and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the "average customer rating" was only three stars. So I'm taking a moment to correct the balance.
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES must be as close to a perfect novel as anyone has written in English. It is a genuine tragedy with a girl/woman as tragic hero. It is about life on earth in a way that transcends mere sociology. It has the grandeur of Milton but concerns itself with the lives of mortal beings on earth, as much with sex as with dirt, blood, milk, dung, animal and vegetative energies. It concerns itself with only essential things the way the Bible does. It is almost a dark rendering of the Beatitudes.
The story is built with such care and such genius that every incident, every paragraph, reverberates throughout the whole structure. Surely Hardy had an angel on his shoulder when he conceived and composed this work. Yet it was considered so immoral in its time that he had to bowdlerize his own creation in order to get it published, at first. Victorian readers were not prepared for the truth of the lives of ordinary women, or for a great many truths about themselves that Hardy presents.
The use of British history as a hall of mirrors and the jawdropping detail of the landscape of "Wessex" make it the Great English Novel in the way we sometimes refer to MOBY DICK as the Great American Novel, though the works don't otherwise bear comparison. Melville's great white whale is a far punier creation.
Hardy's style is like no one else's. It is not snappy, as Dickens can be. It is not fluid and elegant, like George Eliot's. It can feel labored and awkward and more archaic than either. It has no journalistic flavor, but is painfully pure and deliberate and dense, echoing Homer or the language of the Old Testament rather than anything we think of as "modern." Don't start with TESS but with FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, another very beautiful book, where Hardy is at his loosest and wittiest. Once you have the key to his style, then pick up a good edition of TESS with notes, e.g. Penguin, so you get the full richness of all the literary allusions. Hardy's lowly shepherds and farmhands move and breathe in a very ancient literary atmosphere. The effect is not pretentious but timeless.
There is wisdom, poetry and majesty here. Tess stumbling through the dark and taking her last rest at Stonehenge will send chills up your spine like no other reading experience. I wonder if anyone can know why there are novels, why we care about them, or what they are capable of, without reading this one.Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Bantam Classics) Overview

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Roads of the Heart: A Novel Review

Roads of the Heart: A Novel
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Roads of the Heart: A Novel ReviewChristopher Tilghman's "Roads of the Heart" is one of the best books I have read in a long time. The tightly written novel describes a family's patriarch who, weeks from his death, manages to re-connect a geographically and emotionally dispersed family when he allows his love for them to trump decades of disregard.
I stumbled upon the book in a local store and read it in a couple of sittings. I cannot understand why it has not been more widely reviewed and critically acclaimed. I want to encourage Tighlman to keep at his important writing; to maybe find a new agent; and to encourage his publisher to get the word out about the works of a most skilled writer.
I want more.Roads of the Heart: A Novel Overview

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