The end of celebrity

From “The World Needs More Gwyneth Paltrow“

by Jonathan Naymark, laineygossip.com, May 3, 2013

The past few weeks have been busy for America’s most contentious celebrity: Gwyneth Paltrow. PEOPLE Magazine named her the world’s most beautiful woman, while readers of Star Magazine voted her as its most hated. Certainly the two aren’t mutually exclusive but they do speak to Paltrow’s divisiveness as a public figure. If anything, it seems sad that IN TOUCH readers decided that Paltrow was more reprehensible than Chris Brown, a man who violently beat the sh-t out of girlfriend Rihanna, as well as Jesse James, the jerk who cheated on America’s sweetheart, Sandra Bullock. Unlike either of these two misogynistic assholes, what has Gwyneth Paltrow done to any of us except wear a hideously coloured Pepto-Bismol pink dress to the Oscars? I ask you, who amongst men has never once been led astray by a personal relationship with Ralph Lauren?

But still, Gwyneth Paltrow gets a real bad rap – ironic, because Gwyneth Paltrow can actually rap. For proof of Paltrow’s linguistic talents – there’s a YouTube of her breaking into an impromptu, profanity laced version of the classic NWA song Straight Outta Compton. Not that it has helped her street cred – gossip columnist Ted Casablanca infamously nicknamed her Fishsticks Paltrow for being incredibly cold, much too thin and overly white-breaded.

I’ve never quite understood the exact reason why hating Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle newsletter GOOP has become a veritable side industry for bloggers and the media at large.

At its core I suspect that most people hate Gwyneth because she continues to stay unapologetically unapproachable even as she attempts to sell herself as a lifestyle guru. Watching her easily maneuver from a conversation about NWA to conversant Spanish isn’t something that most aspire to – it just seems widely out of reach.

I do understand the confusion of her persona – on one hand Gwyneth self identifies as “just like us”, saying, “I’m just a normal mother with the same struggles as any other mother who’s trying to do everything at once and trying to be a wife and maintain a relationship”, and yet on the other hand, she knows that she truly isn’t a middle American suburbanite with a Target Red card: “I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.”
Gwyneth taketh, but Gwyneth also giveth.

While Hollywood often fetishizes the girl next door, Paltrow, Steven Speilberg’s god-child and the daughter of director Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner, is the girl next door only if you happen to have grown up in a seaside Santa Monica mansion. With her multilingual talents, backyard pizza oven and best-friendships with Beyonce and Jay-Z, it’s as difficult to like Paltrow as it was to like the really nice, popular, rich girl you went to high school with – the one who invited you to sushi lunch just so she could lecture you the difference between sushi grade tuna and how her father took her to Japan in grade five. And yet as much as that girl was insufferable, you desperately wanted her attention.

Therefore the common problem of hating Gwyneth Paltrow, GOOP, or her two cookbooks, all of which are filled with photos of her cherubic and cloyingly named children (Apple and Moses), is that such mockery misses the point.
First of all, Gwyneth is impervious to your criticism. As you sit and stew about how obnoxious she is, Paltrow is happily serving organic spelt pizza, made in the aforementioned backyard wood-fired oven, to Jamie Oliver on a random Tuesday night while sipping Chablis that her friend, a Spanish sommelier, picked out specifically for her.

Secondly if you’ve taken the time to add up how much her spring wardrobe essentials cost ($450,000 as eNews did), you are not, nor will you ever be in Gwyneth Paltrow’s league. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that, “[The rich] are very different than you and me,” his reference point was old monied elites who didn’t question why their shirts were always monogrammed.Being out of touch is Gwyneth’s resting position. She can’t help it – she was born that way.

As G herself said, upon the launch of GOOP: “I have this incredible, blessed, sometimes difficult, very lucky, very unique life, and I’ve gotten to travel all over the place and to work and live in different cities. … So I started accruing all of this information to share it.” If anything, Gwyneth, and her bible GOOP are really just modern day versions of Christian moral uplift, or the 21st century digital version of how upper class women viewed charity in the early 20th century. Moral uplift and charity were typically how the elites provided guidance to the unwashed mashes. Like the temperance movement and other progressive causes, taken up by wealthy, white women in the early years of the 20th century, which exported values masquerading as charity, GOOP is simply a similar form of charitable uplift. Just as Andrew Carnegie built libraries as a way of disseminating education, Paltrow is sending e-newsletters helping us nourish our inner aspect. While Upton Sinclair fought for proper meat packaging, Gwyneth is helping us pick out French skin-care solutions and spreading her “proper” values one shake of fleur de sel at a time.

Certainly, this may mean that Paltrow is annoying; however, hating Gwyneth Paltrow is risky business. In reality, such criticisms misunderstand the very fundamentals of celebrity culture. Before the era of reality TV stars, before Snooki and even before Jessica Alba started hocking natural diapers on the Internet, celebrities, by definition, were otherworldly in their existence. And while many may find her hard to handle, Gwyneth Paltrow is a celebrity in the truest sense of the word. In fact, Paltrow may be the last celebrity in an era which is actively redefining just what celebrity means.

The proliferation of magazines like US Weekly and websites like Perez Hilton have worked to bring celebrities “closer” to the public. Combined with the feeding frenzy of the paparazzo, celebrities can no longer control their brand image. The constant need for content to feed social media, bloggers and old school media alike has slowly encroached on the dividing wall that once existed between a celebrity and their audience. Whereas once celebrities lived on a hill perched high above their adoring fans, celebrities today have become “just like us”, spotted in tracksuits pumping gas.

This desire to know infinitely more about the private lives of celebrities, coupled with the media’s fulfillment of these needs, has broken the essential tenet of what a celebrity once was. By having to continuously expose their lives in order to feed the fan (and therefore continue their own manifestation of celebrity) we have broken the illusion of celebrity.

The rise, if not the creation of contemporary celebrity culture, has much to do with the history of Hollywood itself.  The original Hollywood studio system that rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s was the product of Jewish immigrants who were quick to become the business minds of early Hollywood. Of the 8 major studios, 6 were founded by Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. Their contribution to the Hollywood aesthete was driven by business sense, creating films that reflected American values, but also their desire to divorce themselves from their religious and cultural past. As contemporary North American society has secularized itself from its puritanical forbearers –filmmakers (with the exception of wack-jobs like John Travolta and Kurt Cameron) followed suit; replacing the emotional and spiritual mores of religion with celebrity culture.

In Hollywood the cult of celebrity replaced the yoke of religion.

The concept of celebrity isn’t entirely foreign to civil society.  Before mass media celebrities existed, religious figures or monarchy were themselves pseudo-celebrities. Ironically both maintained power and standing by connection to religiosity. The divine right of king sustained the monarchy, while priests were famous simply because of their connection to God. Throughout its history, fame has been seemingly predicated by the very fact that “celebrities” were almost otherworldly.

However, the last decade has not been kind to this definition of celebrity and fame. The loss of control of the studio system coupled with the demands of modern media has meant that the celebrity is under siege. The illusion of celebrities to appear perfect no longer exists.

It is this illusion that Gwyneth is peddling via GOOP. What incenses the general public about Gwyneth Paltrow is exactly the reason that she is a celebrity – your life is not her life. Your spring wardrobe will not cost what hers did. But, most importantly, nor should it. Modern celebrities, like kings and high priests before them, are (or were) celebrities because they are somewhat unachievable. If we continue to break this one true rule of celebrity, we risk the destruction of the very fundamentals of celebrity culture.

Housewives… fit wives?

Historical declines in housework contribute to obesity in women

March 4, 2013, theheart.org, MICHAEL O’RIORDAN

Columbia, SC – A new study adds yet more evidence that the decline in physical activity is contributing to the increase in obesity in the US [1]. This study, however, is bound to cause some controversy, as researchers found the increase in obesity in women is tied to a reduction in the amount of housework they currently do compared with days gone by.

Published in PLoS One, the study showed that women are doing far less housework in 2010 than they were in 1965, and this has led to a net reduction in energy expenditure of 360 calories per day. In 1965, women cooked, cleaned, and did laundry, among other household work, an average of 26 hours per week, while in 2010 the amount of time spent doing the same work declined to 13 hours per week.

The researchers, led by Dr Edward Archer (University of South Carolina, Columbia), stress, however, that they are not advocating that women—or men—do more housework. Instead, the results should get individuals to think about how much energy they are expending throughout the day and also get policymakers to think about addressing the “calories-out” aspect of obesity and the energy equation.

“Our results show that we have engineered physical activity out of the workplace, out of the home, and out of our daily commute,” Archer told heartwire, “and this has severe and dramatic consequences for our health. We need to find a way of reintegrating that activity to make up for the decrement in calories expended.”

The study is an extension of a study conducted by Dr Timothy Church (Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, LA) in 2011, which showed a decline in daily physical activity in the workplace. The reduction in physical activity translated into a reduction in energy expenditure of approximately 140 calories in men and 110 to 120 calories in women. In men, the reduction in physical activity at work explained most of the variance in obesity over a 40-year period, but the correlation was less strong in women. Based on these data, Archer hypothesized that 40 to 50 years ago, most households were one-income homes, with women staying home doing housework.

With this in mind, researchers used data from the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) to get a better representation of time-specific activities of women in the past. They were able to obtain historical data on the amount of time spent doing unpaid housework and family care in 1965. The time allotted for housework declined from 25.7 hours per week in 1965 to 13.3 hours per week in 2010, with unemployed women reducing the amount of housework by 16.6 hours per week and employed women by 6.7 hours per week. Household management energy expenditure declined 42% for unemployed women, down from 6004 calories expended per week in 1965 to 3486 calories expended per week in 2010, a reduction of 2518 calories.

“We found that nonemployed women are spending about 360 calories less per day doing physical activity, and if we look at obesity as calories in and calories out, this is a huge number of calories,” Archer told heartwire. “It’s about 15% of their total daily energy expenditure. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars studying diet and nutrition, which is the energy in, but we spend almost no money on the energy-expenditure portion of the equation. The most modifiable factor in the energy-balance equation is physical activity.”

In the study, researchers also observed that the amount of time women spent watching television, and later using the computer, doubled from eight hours per week in 1965 to 16 hours per week in 2010.

Archer said that guidelines recommend 30 minutes per day of physical activity, which is enough to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, this will not have much of an effect on weight and body fat. Instead, the Institute of Medicine recommends at least an hour per day of moderate activity for weight maintenance. Treating obesity means at least 90 minutes or two hours of daily moderate exercise. To heartwire, Archer said that while patients complain that they do not have enough time for such programs, television is the biggest source of wasted time.

“The number-one recommendation is to turn off the television and replace that time with walking and lifting weights,” he said.

Parenthood à la français

French Bred

When it comes to baguette, wine and Parenting, do the French do it differently – or just better?

DEC 27, 2012  ·  BY HANNAH SUNG | PHOTOS BY LEDA & ST. JACQUES

As we arrive in Paris, the skyline is cloaked in grey that
matches the city’s cool temperament. My family’s look is less refined – dominated by a bright red stroller festooned with Technicolor toys.

Our plastic caravan arrives at L’Écritoire, a perfectly French bistro (and former haunt of Charles Baudelaire) on the Place de la Sorbonne. Young Parisians stroll by while a busker plays French folk tunes, strumming a guitar; a fountain burbles in the background. There’s not another child in sight.

I unravel the travel high chair, a strap-covered contraption that makes our son, Tokki, look like he’s about to go skydiving. And before even glancing at the menu, I unpack a roll of puffy rice cakes and a tube of purée. I consider myself always prepared, but according to Karen Le Billon’s rules, I’ve already racked up two strikes.

Last year saw a mini-boom in “momoirs” exalting a no-
nonsense French style of parenting. French Kids Eat Everything, by Vancouver academic Le Billon, and Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of the French, by Pamela Druckerman, focus on how well French children eat and behave. Tokki was a serene baby at birth, but has since perfected a shriek that’s between Mariah Carey’s high C and a dog whistle. So when my husband was invited to a film festival in France, I decided to go full-immersion. What self-respecting, macaron-eating, fleur-de-sel-sprinkling urbanite wouldn’t like to become un petit peu more French? Every first-time parent is looking for answers. The French seemed to have them.

Lesson 1
Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner

Tokki is not used to being in a bistro in Paris at the decidedly adult hour of 9 p.m. From his perch, strapped into his seat on the terrasse, he cranes his neck to make saucer eyes at a nearby foursome: chic adults who manage to sip wine, oblivious to the Parisian rive gauche. Laying out silicone baby spoons in triplicate, I feel a creep of self-consciousness rise within me. Never mind looking like tourists – looking like nervous parents is so much worse.

When our plates arrive I crack open Tokki’s food tube, but he purses his lips and shakes his head. He only has eyes for the steak. Since there’s no way I’m feeding him my husband’s medium-
rare meat, a chewy choking hazard that’s red in the middle, I break my burger open to examine it for pinkness. As I rack my brain for the rules about babies and blue cheese (which is softly melting into the bun), Tokki’s lightning-fast fingers, tiny and persistent, are already in my food.

I fashion a morsel of hamburger meat, running with jus, and offer it up: He examines it for a moment before pushing it into his wide-open mouth. Still saucer-eyed, he chomps furiously as I cool off a small pile of lightly crisp, golden fries – another first – which he scarfs as quickly as 10-month-old coordination allows. Is he even chewing? As I process the fact that grown-up food is evidently what he’s been waiting for his entire life, Tokki lunges for my salad.

At the end of the meal, the rice cakes and tube of purée sit untouched on our bistro table like a North American calling card. Across the pond, we tend to concentrate on the nutritive elements of food (the food I packed was organic), whereas the French focus on pleasure. Watching Tokki eagerly fill his chubby fists with my meal, I had to admit I’d never seen him devour a vegetable purée with such passion. I had survived my first French lesson.

Lesson 2
Oh, Behave!

The sun shines brightly on the heads of children riding ponies along the Jardin du Luxembourg’s gravel paths. Little boys and girls scurry around with sticks, angling to push their miniature sailboats back across the Grand Bassin. Unlike other playgrounds in Paris, this one is so tricked out it has a massive rope structure in the shape of the Eiffel Tower and a zip line.

We park Tokki’s stroller and step into the darkened Théâtre des Marionnettes to wait for the puppet show to begin. Children sit on long wooden benches surrounded by old portraits of French puppets beloved by generations. There’s a rustling behind us and Tokki turns to stare as a grandmother opens up a packaged cookie for her granddaughter’s goûter (snack). Offering one to me, I shake my head no politely, but the little girl protests. “Non. Il n’a pas le droit,” the grandmother says brusquely to her charge. French children either have le droit – the right – to do something or they don’t. Case closed.

Evidence of this strictness is everywhere, including Annecy, where centuries-old stone buildings seem to rise out of the canals filled with turquoise water. One rainy afternoon, Tokki and I take shelter in the town library as a kindergarten class files past us. I watch in awe as they neatly hang their purple pinafores on hooks. Two guardians mix among the class, neither shushing nor raising a voice. No one fights over a book. Why are these children so well-behaved?

We spend the next afternoon sprawled on the lawn of L’Impérial Palace overlooking Lac d’Annecy. Families cluster around peacocks in the open-air aviary, while little girls with shiny hair bat around badminton birdies in Sunday dresses. When a toddler starts to scream, I observe the cool, non-panicked French mother in action for the first time.

Marching the girl into an empty field in full view of everyone, the perfectly coiffed mother takes several paces before turning her back (arms crossed) while her daughter wails. This scene would have drawn everyone’s attention in our neighbourhood park in Toronto, but the French parents don’t seem to notice. After what feels like an eternity, the child is tenderly collected and they walk away hand in hand. I’m in awe: Had the mother been too harsh? Or did I want to be more like her?

French parents do not panic in the face of meltdowns, but I am not that French. On our last night in Annecy, in my desperation to feed the baby on schedule, we sat down at a coffee-and-sandwiches place. It was a sad scene for our last dinner, but they had a high chair and no wait. As Tokki’s fussing turned to shrieking, I became so stressed that I tersely parted ways with my husband and hoofed it back to our hotel – forgetting that he was about to find out whether he’d won a festival prize. He did.

That night I was filled with pride and then remorse. Why couldn’t I have calmly finished eating and given my husband a kiss for good luck? Looking back on my own childhood, I wonder if my Korean immigrant parents were secretly French. When I was growing up, they let me know who was in charge, and it most definitely was not me. In France and Korea, it seems, adults still rule supreme.

Lesson 3
Two’s company; three’s loud

The French don’t understand the way North American children can eclipse the very thing that brought them into existence: the couple. The night I forgot to wish my husband good luck, I learned of his big prize alone, hunched over a laptop in the dark. While Tokki slept spread-eagled in the centre of our queen-size hotel bed, my husband was in a ballroom at L’Impérial Palace, plucking canapés from an endless table staffed with waiters in dinner jackets, while thumping party music and laser lights added to the dizzy, cocktail-soaked revelry.

In the crowd of filmmakers was a European duo who had decided that their children weren’t going to keep them from enjoying the party. The French father pushed a snoring toddler in his stroller while the Dutch mother had their sleeping nine-month-old strapped to her back – the party swirling around them. When Isaac told me about them the next morning, I was full of admiration and bewilderment: Where did they get the nerve to keep their babies out past midnight?

Now that we’re home, I still prioritize the baby ahead of ourselves. Does this mean he will become a “child king,” as the French say with disdain? Is the idea of a well-mannered toddler who eats without a fuss a fantasy I should file alongside my dream French wardrobe and flawless accent? At the end of the day, my child is perfect to me just the way he is. He doesn’t need to be French, and I don’t think he minds that I’m not, either. Although I may keep trying.

New young-adulthood

Trendspotting: New Adult

by Sarah Wethern, yalsa.ala.org, February 21, 2013

 

Let’s face it, teens today can’t see their futures as easy. On top of their everyday pressures — struggling with new feelings for some peers, maintaining grades, exploring their own interests and increasing individuality — they also have to worry about the economy in ways teens just ten years ago didn’t have to. Back then, summer jobs were available, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles had more established jobs and secure futures. The economy changed all of that in a blink of an eye, and who can say if that level of prosperity will ever come back? Teens are growing up with more uncertainty than ever before.

That uncertainty is playing out through pop culture in many different ways. In the area of books, you might have heard the term “New Adult”. Liz Burns of A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy has a long list of definitions and links to other posts that can give you a rundown of this increasingly popular publishing trend. To quote Liz:

“So, it seems to me that “New Adult” has characters from 18 to 29. It’s people in a time period that is after the perceived safety and narrowness and  intimacy of high school — and by intimacy I mean, having a physical place where everyone goes and shares lunch times and has common experiences of classrooms and lunch times. I say perceived, because that’s not always true.”

Liz has an entire series of posts dedicated to New Adult if you are interested in pursuing this topic in more depth. But many books branded as New Adult portray young adults — I would hesitate to classify the characters as teens, even if some of them are eighteen or nineteen years old — and their struggles, but, based solely on the few NA titles I have read, they are most typically located in a college setting. Where are the reflections of experiences of those young adults who do not have the luxury or option of heading to college right after graduation? Or those who might not want to go to college? Where are the characters that haven’t grown up in some kind of middle class background? People of color are also being left out of the New Adult category.

This problem plays out in another pop culture arena, television. In the popular HBO show, Girls, college graduate Hannah Hovarth is finally facing adulthood after her parents stop paying for her rent and other needs. But what kind of adulthood can she have with few job prospects in a tight job market? There is no doubt that this show examines a type of young adulthood specific to a privileged background.

New Girl, Two Broke Girls, Girls, and Comedy Central’s Workaholics all showcase the sometimes aimless and protracted transition into adulthood that is being tackled by young people today.  Again, there are definite holes in whose stories are being told and explored. As much as I love pop culture, it is so easy to forget that what has become popular is often overshadowing the experiences of most people. Such is life viewed through media.

So how does this all relate back to teens? In many ways, these are the types of experiences teens may be facing soon. Having to live with parents for a lot longer, putting off that move to total independence in adulthood, struggling finding a job. These images on the screen and in the books that make their way into libraries share only a small and particular portion of the trials today’s teens are facing. But there’s no doubt that young adulthood is quite different in 2013 than it was in 2003 or 1993.

We’re only seeing the beginning of this emerging trend. The success of Girls is spawning new shows and yes, probably more books in the same vein. But they need to move beyond, much as I hate to say it, the middle class, white, early-twenty-something experience. Where can we find resources for authentic range of new young adult experiences? How can librarians better showcase those to the teens they are serving?

Comment by Liz B — February 21, 2013

First things first –thank you so much for linking to my series of posts about New Adult.

Second, there is a fascinating look at GIRLS versus Showtimes’ SHAMELESS at The Nation:http://www.thenation.com/article/172272/what-girls-and-shameless-teach-us-about-being-broke-and-being-poor# in terms of the socioeconomic status of Hannah versus Fiona, and I wonder, would Fiona’s narrative, in print, qualify for “New Adult” ? Why or why not?

Next, I’m really curious as to the actual readership of the books falling under New Adult (whether or not the pub/author calls it that). Basically, is this really “teen readers” or is it post-teen readers? Is this something to be working on with adult ref staff because the readers are, say, 21? Is it readers who love all the best about YA but are not themselves teens?

My bottom line: I don’t think NA is a good name; I don’t think it should be its own genre/bookshelf; but I do think it’s telling us what certain readers want in books, and for that reason, it’s good to pay attention.

*

What ‘Girls’ and ‘Shameless’ Teach Us About Being Broke, and Being Poor

by Nona Willis Aronowitz, The Nation, January 17, 2013

Lena Dunham as Hannah in Girls and Emmy Rossum as Fiona in Shameless.

 

Post-recession, we often blur the distinction between the downwardly mobile and the permanent underclass—especially when wringing our hands over what will become of millennials, many of whom entered the job market just as it was weakest. Here’s an easy way to tell them apart: both are struggling, but the former has a safety net. One has the luxury of moving back home or tapping their college networks for a break; the other faces diminished earning power, a dramatically more precarious job market, and sometimes homelessness—often without any help from parents.

Watching the season premieres of HBO’s Girls and Showtime’sShameless this past Sunday put the contrast in stark relief. The two main characters, Girls’s Hannah and Shameless’s Fiona, are both penniless twentysomething women finding their way through big cities, but they live in completely different worlds. Hannah’s infamous humiliation is that she relied on her professor parents for rent money for years; Fiona’s deadbeat folks have left her to raise her five siblings alone. Hannah struggles to find a job worthy of her college degree; Fiona juggles several gigs at a time, leaving no time to even finish high school. In other words: Hannah is broke. Fiona is poor. And never the twain shall meet?

Maybe not. The funny thing about Hannah and Fiona is that they have pretty much the same job. Hannah works at a coffee shop and Fiona is a cocktail waitress (though that’s just one of Fiona’s many gigs). In context of the modern economy, it’s not hard to picture the two rubbing shoulders. As the service sector grows and the opportunities for the middle-class shrink, young people of all classes find themselves making minimum wage together, and our class distinctions are getting more complicated as a result. Retail and food service are where the post-crash jobs are—the US economy is expected to create 18 million more service sector jobsby the end of the decade—so it’s no surprise that 16 percent of bartenders now have a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, the median net worth of householders under 35 fell 37 percent between 2005 and 2010. Youth unemployment is higher than the national average, but of the recent graduates currently employed, 43 percent of them are at jobs that don’t require a four-year college degree.

Still, none of this means we’re in a classless melting pot; each group’s expectations belie their upbringings. Hannah and her friends, all college grads, are indignant about their dwindling job prospects, while Fiona isn’t surprised that her dreams are deferred. Despite her smarts and work ethic, she’s been shoveling shit to put food on the table for years now, sometimes quite literally. In this Sunday’s season premiere, we find out Fiona has scored a job cleaning up sewage for $18 an hour, the holy grail in her working class neighborhood—but she gets laid off by the end of the episode. And unlike Hannah, Fiona is staring down a monster property tax bill and an endless grocery list. It’s still as hard as ever for the working class. While the “privileged poor” are getting a rude awakening, at least they have a buffer.

For the most part, both shows are stuck in the old model of strict class segregation. In Shameless’s universe, you’re either rich and smug or poor and righteous. Hannah mostly interacts with her own kind, and when her free-spirited friend Jessa suggests to her fellow nannies that they all join a union, it’s played for laughs rather than inspiration. But in the real world, the labor movement may indeed benefit from the class mixing that’s already going on. Last year, when I reported on a group of young, mostly educated, mostly white kids trying to organize the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s in the Twin Cities, I spoke with Macalester College professor Peter Rachleff. He compared the organizers to certain Occupy kids who are “entitled,” “aware of their rights,” and have a safety net in case they get fired. I met a young woman who was galvanized by the realization that her middle-class aspirations may end up being pipe dreams. “What are the real dreams that we can actually accomplish? Fucking building a union,” she told me.

Compare this mentality to that of the working class employees I spoke with at Walmart last month, when reporting forThe Nation on the workers who did not join the strikes, many of whom were terrified about retaliation or just happy to be making money at all. These workers are also hanging back from organizing at places like Burger King, Domino’s and Target.

I later discovered that the Jimmy John’s organizers had trouble convincing people like Fiona and the Walmart workers I met—workers with families and health problems and no backup plans—to join a union. But this is slowly changing as major unions like SEIU invest in these fights and workers reach their breaking point. Rachleff predicts that “as these jobs become less transient, people of all socioeconomic classes may be more vested in making it a better experience.” And as the recession’s fever pitch recedes into the past, a larger number of young people will come to terms that they’ll have these jobs for a while. Eventually, both groups may realize they have nothing to lose by working together.

All girls love princesses, if you ask Pippa

Pippa Middleton Meets Outspoken Little Girl Who ‘Hates Princesses’

Huffington Post, 10/26/2012

An outspoken little girl has put Pippa Middleton in her place, reminding the British socialite that not every 10-year-old girl likes pink and princesses.

According to Gawker, Middleton was hanging out with a bunch of children in London recently while promoting her new party planning book.

Captured on camera by the Telegraph, the younger sister of the Duchess of Cambridge is heard telling a 6-year-old “tomboy” that she will “love pink and love princesses” by the time she turns 10.

But a feisty little girl, adorned with a fiery set of devil horns, soon pipes up with a damning objection to that stereotype.

“I hate princesses,” the child announces matter-of-factly, adding that she prefers vampires.

We’re thinking this spunky little girl would do well joining forces with 8-year-old Olivia Steger and little Riley Maida, both of whom have vocally rallied against gender stereotypes in the past.

“Why do all the girls have to buy princesses? Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses. Some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses. So why does all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different color stuff?” Riley, then 4, asked her dad in a toy store last year.

YA: genre of women, genre without prestige?

A prestige-free zone: The reason why women writers dominate young-adult literature is the reason why many guys avoid it

by Laura Miller, Salon.com, August 14, 2012

The prototypical YA (Young Adult, i.e., early teen) novel “The Catcher in the Rye” may have been written by the late, reclusive and definitely male J.D. Salinger, but nowadays, YA — like Elvis on “Happy Days” — is a chick thing. So says Meghan Lewit in a recent post to the Atlantic’s website, and she has the numbers to prove it, sort of: A little over half of the titles in a reader poll of the 100 “best-ever teen novels” are by women. This counts as “dominance” because in almost every other poll of best-ever books (whatever the category), works by men greatly outnumber those by women.

Ask anyone in the book business if Lewit is right, and they’ll probably agree; with a few exceptions, the most successful and prominent contemporary YA writers are women. Furthermore, the cultural infrastructure supporting their books — from agents and editors to librarians, teachers and that formidable new force in the YA world, bloggers — is predominantly female. Some observers blame this state of affairs for the drop-off in boys’ reading habits as they reach their teens; it’s a system ill-suited to producing books that will interest boys, they argue. But if YA has indeed become a gynocracy, few ask why.

The answer, I believe, is prestige. YA is a prestige-free zone, or at least it has been for most of the decades of its existence as a self-identified genre. Perhaps this is changing, now that we’ve seen certain very popular YA series bestride the bestseller lists: Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games. Yet I don’t think the prestige of YA has changed all that much, not really. Unfortunately, I can’t prove it.

That’s the maddening problem with prestige: It can’t be measured. Immaterial and unquantifiable as it may be, it still lies behind many of the ongoing debates among book lovers. The pitched battle waged by genre fans against literary fiction is largely about the allocation of prestige. So is the campaign to highlight the gender imbalances in literary journalism. Even Jonathan Franzen vs. Oprah, a face-off that’s beginning to fade from the collective memory, was ultimately about prestige.

Prestige is a poorly articulated and barely understood phenomena. It’s also a powerfully motivating one. Prestige is what Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult were complaining about when they launched a thousand commentaries by griping about Franzen’s press coverage on Twitter. It’s what the diligent and tenacious VIDA (Women in the Literary Arts) is attempting to calculate when, every year, it counts up the book reviews and bylines in a dozen or so highbrow journals to determine how well women writers are represented. And it’s what Nathaniel Hawthorne was bitching about when he wrote to his British publisher in 1855, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

Actually, Hawthorne was bitching about sales, to which is prestige is — usually — inversely proportional. A novel like Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” for example, was treated as if it had a certain amount of gravitas when it was first published in 2002. It received a respectful review from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times (“What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time”). A little less than a year and millions of copies sold later, “The Lovely Bones” was the subject of a blistering takedown by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books, condemned for being “sentimental” and peddling “feel-good emotional redemption.”

When prestige is at stake, the words in play will be “literature,” “great” and “serious.” Disputes can get ugly, but there’s also a surprising amount of consensus. While it’s impossible to demonstrate in any concrete terms that one writer enjoys more prestige than another, anyone sufficiently familiar with literary culture will concur that, say, Don DeLillo outranks, say, Richard Ford in this department. That’s the case even though both men write in roughly the same genre and Ford has won the Pulitzer Prize while DeLillo has not.

Prestige is most definitely a hierarchy, but its criteria are elusive. In recent years, Cormac McCarthy’s fiction has become increasingly commercial — dipping into supposedly unserious genres like post-apocalyptic science fiction (“The Road”) and crime thriller (“No Country for Old Men”) — but his prestige has only multiplied, perhaps because he conducts himself with a crusty, mediaphobic dignity. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, has bled prestige since he transformed himself from a persecuted cultural dissident to the scene-making (now ex-) husband of a reality TV star. Participate in celebrity culture, especially if you appear to enjoy it, and your P quotient will take a big hit.

Counting reviews or prizes is as close as critics of the current prestige economy can get to quantifying who’s got how much of it. Yet, at least as important is simply the way people talk about a writer. Do young writers cite him or her as an influence in reverent tones? Do college students conspicuously tote a dog-eared copy of his or her masterpiece around or conspicuously display it to impress visiting dates? Do his or her titles often appear on best-of lists? Are they held up as a gold standard in reviews and essays about other books? Does anyone kvetch when the Library of America comes out with a collection of his or her writings? Do other authors feel that their own work has been elevated simply because they have the same editor or publisher? Do book people become slightly awestruck when the author in question enters a room?

I know, a lot of this may sound silly, but it matters to many authors, who as a rule do not get into this line of work for the money. Those who do manage to make good money from their books are often dismayed to learn that every point they gain in popularity is a point lost in prestige, a treacherous bit of math performed behind the scenes by persons unknown. Some writers (justly) point out that the immaterial rewards of reputation seem to be disproportionately distributed to the old, the white and the male. It’s also true that a preoccupation with deciding which books are truly “great” (or not) and with sorting authors into a pecking order of literary importance does seem particularly prevalent among men.

YA fiction has blossomed outside the literary world’s prestige economy. There are prizes and other honors within the children’s book community, but they’re nearly invisible outside of it. While working on a story about “The Hunger Games,” I was astonished to learn that otherwise well-informed people had never even heard of the series, although it had spent over a year at the top of the bestseller list and vast numbers of adolescents were obsessed with it. If you’re craving glory, if you want to be hailed as a genius or the voice of a generation or a literary titan, if you want other writers to defer to you and journalists to hang on your every word, then look elsewhere. When your intended audience is kids, you have a shot at the most enthusiastic and devoted readers in the world, but you can’t delude yourself that you’ll ever land a Pulitzer, let alone the Nobel Prize.

The relatively low status payoff in YA fiction applies to its readers as well. Many grown men recall segueing briskly from middle-grade kids’ books to adult fiction in their teens, skipping the YA section entirely. They were, they say, keen to move on to the “real” books. No surprise, then, that fewer of them are inspired to write for a genre that they never particularly wanted to read and that, like teaching and librarianship, has traditionally offered little recognition.

But YA’s relegation to prestige limbo has also liberated the many authors who find themselves exasperated, bored or intimidated by adult literature’s greatness sweepstakes. In prestige limbo, success and respect are not mutually exclusive. Setting out to provide your readers with pleasure, even the old-fashioned kind, is not automatically viewed as pandering. Your readers will not care if you got a MacArthur grant or what James Wood said about your book or whether it was well reviewed in the New York Times — or, for that matter, whether it was reviewed at all.

It turns out that a lot of adults like to read fiction written under those conditions, too. The best YA provides a holiday from the self-importance and intellectual anxiety that plague and often deform the world of adult literature. Occasionally, YA has transformed its humble practitioners into very wealthy women (and men), and without a doubt it can profoundly shape the minds and selves of its young readers. That’s enough for some people, even without the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Why Do Female Authors Dominate Young-Adult Fiction?

The Atlantic, Meghan Lewit, August 7, 2012

Summer is a time for taking stock, for relaxing and recharging, and for intense Internet debate about whether Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, or Holden Caulfield reign supreme in the universe of teen fiction. NPR Books just released the results of its reader poll of the 100 Best-Ever Teen novels, with new classicsHarry Potter and The Hunger Games topping the list. After painstakingly considering my own nominees, I was struck by the dominance of female authors on my short list, including: Harper Lee, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Suzanne Collins, J.K. Rowling, S.E. Hinton, Betty Smith, and Madeleine L’Engle.

I’m not alone in my regard for the great female storytellers of teen fiction. Nearly all of these authors appear on the NPR list. More than 75,000 votes were cast to cull the list of 235 finalists to the top 100. Also notable: Of those 235 titles, 147 (or 63 percent) were written by women—a parity that would seem like a minor miracle in some other genres. Female authors took the top three slots, and an approximately equal share of the top 100. As a comparison, you’d have to scroll all the way to number 20 on last summer’s Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy list to find a woman’s name (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).

Although NPR Books called on an expert panel to weigh in on tricky questions of young-adult eligibility, the demographic breakdown of the finalist list was almost entirely driven by reader votes, according to Joe Matazzoni, NPR’s senior supervising producer for Arts & Life.

“I think it speaks to readers’ interests and it speaks to the nature of this field that it happened to come out that way,” said Matazzoni, who also noted that the choices seemed to represent both the target teen demographic, as well as the adult readers that have fervently embraced YA lit. “It’s an impressive show of enthusiasm.”

If the results of the NPR poll are a reflection of the reading populace, the YA world is a place of relative harmony compared to the battle of the sexes being waged in adult fiction. After chick-lit purveyors Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult raised the call about the disparity between books by male authors and books by female authors being reviewed in theNew York Times Book Review, Ruth Franklin at The New Republic did her own analysis of the literary glass ceiling. The results are dismaying: after reviewing catalogs from 13 large and small publishing houses (and eliminating genre titles unlikely to be reviewed), she found that only one came close to gender parity, while the majority had 25 percent or fewer titles written by women.

Meanwhile, to the consternation of some men in the field, the YA genre tends to favor female authors and audiences. And at least commercially, teen fiction is crushing almost everyone else. Three of the biggest book-to-movie franchises of the last decade (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games) are YA series penned by women. According to an annual report by the Association of American Publishers, Children’s/YA ranked as the fastest growing category in publishing in 2011. While teen titles may never reach the upper echelons of critical adulation bestowed on the latest Jonathan Franzen novel, the phenomenal popularity makes it increasingly difficult to marginalize the genre.

Plenty of theories have been floated to explain YA’s surge, particularly among adult readers. Some attribute it to ingenious marketing or to the childlike simplicity of the plots, suggesting that the craze is a distressing symptom of a reading public congenitally adverse to nuance. Matazzoni proposes that for adult readers, nostalgia plays an important role: “Readers have fond memories of being curled up with a book, in the summertime especially. Memories are what we believe people are tapping into, and the opportunity to share the books they love.”

He has a point. Even as teen fiction has become increasingly complex and dystopian, the genre comfortingly harkens to a time when reading was an act of pure joy and escapism. I’ve read a lot of wonderful books in my lifetime, but I don’t know that I’ve loved any of the novels I’ve read as an adult with the intensity that I loved the stories of adolescence–nor found such a wealth of female protagonists in their pages. YA lit offers heroines to suit every mercurial mood and developmental stage, from spunky, disaster-prone Anne Shirley to dreamy, bookish Francie Nolan and the modern ass-kicking incarnation of Katniss Everdeen.

And perhaps, therein lies the true appeal of young adult literature: The stories and the genre itself represent a world of limitless potential. As a young reader, I didn’t comprehend that the opportunity to disappear into the lives and adventures of strong-willed young women represented a kind of feminist victory. I was blissfully unconcerned with the gender of my favorite authors, or what reviewers might think of my beloved fictional worlds. So profound was my naïveté, I didn’t even realize that novels written by women were supposed to have hot pink covers bedazzled with shopping bags and high heels.

This isn’t to suggest that teen fiction is a literary utopia. The preponderance of white, straight characters is certainly troubling. Judy Blume books have been banned over the years for tackling incendiary topics like menstruation. It hardly seems like an accident that some female authors including S.E. Hinton and J.K. Rowling write under the gender-neutral guise of their initials. But perhaps because of its current extreme trendiness, the genre seems to have transcended some of the critical and gender snobbery plaguing adult lit–as a frequent rider of public transportation, I can say anecdotally that you’re far more likely to see an adult male reading The Hunger Games than any book with a teacup on its cover.

The best young-adult books provide a portal to characters and perspectives that simply aren’t as readily available on the adult reading lists, and the passionate support for beloved titles and authors of both genders indicates that the need for these stories aren’t going anywhere. Any grown-ups who haven’t yet figured this out should get a clue.

Disney love: exceptional, powerful, transformative, magical… and hetero

Disney elevates heterosexuality to powerful, magical heights: G-rated films are teaching children about the wonder of love, but only heterosexual love

A new analysis of top grossing G-rated children’s films from 1990-2005 determined that heterosexuality is not only the norm in such films, but that it is also depicted as being exceptional, powerful, transformative and magical. 

In the world of Disney, falling in heterosexual love can break a spell, save Christmas, change laws, stop wars and even, in the case of The Little Mermaid, cause an individual to give up her personal identity.

While such dramatic plot twists may keep kids glued to television and movie theater screens, they send a memorable message to impressionable young viewers that heterosexual love is not only the norm, but that it is also exceptional, powerful, transformative and magical, concludes a new analysis of top-grossing G-rated children’s films.

The findings, published in a paper in the latest issue of Gender & Society, challenge the notion that such movies are without sexual content. The determinations could even help to explain why multiple prior ethnographic studies suggest children understand the normativity of heterosexuality by the time they enter elementary school, relegating homosexuality to the abnormal, unusual and unexpected, necessitating explanation.

According to co-authors Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak, “The media are an important avenue of children’s sexual socialization because young children are immersed in media-rich worlds.”

“Once upon a time” in fairy tales and top-grossing G-rated children’s films appears to reflect 19th century and earlier conventionalized ideals about attractiveness and sexuality, studies suggest.

The University of Michigan sociologists point to other studies that show thirty percent of children under the age of three, and forty-three percent of four-to six-year-olds, have a television in their bedrooms, with many also owning a VCR/DVD player.

For the new study, Martin and Kazyak analyzed all G-rated movies released, or rereleased, between 1990 and 2005 that grossed more than $100 million in the United States (see Supplemental Materials). Three trained research assistants extracted story lines, images, scenes, songs and dialogue that addressed anything about sexuality, including depictions of bodies, kissing, jokes, romance, weddings, dating, love, where babies come from, and pregnancy. The text describing this material was inductively coded using a qualitative software program.

The analysis found the films “depict a rich and pervasive heterosexual landscape,” despite the assumption that children’s media are free of sexual content. The movies repeatedly mark relationships between opposite sex lead characters as special and magical.

“Characters in love are surrounded by music, flowers, candles, magic, fire, balloons, fancy dresses, dim lights, dancing and elaborate dinners,” the researchers observed. “Fireflies, butterflies, sunsets, wind and the beauty and power of nature often provide the setting for—and a link to the naturalness of—hetero-romantic love.”

The analysis of the films further determined heterosexuality is construed through depictions of overtly feminized women and masculine males, with the male characters spending much of their time longingly gazing at the former. Toys and other products tied to the films later reinforce the images.

Such heavily gendered depictions and glorified portrayals of heterosexual relationships appear to maintain old ideals presented in 19th century Brothers Grimm fairy tales, many of which inspired Disney films.

In a separate, earlier study, Western Illinois University’s Lori Baker-Sperry and University of Central Florida’s Liz Grauerholz explored the extent to which “feminine beauty” is highlighted in fairy tales. They discovered attention to female attractiveness has likely become more prevalent over the past century, with beauty in fairy tales most often associated with “being white, economically privileged and virtuous.”

“We suggest that this emphasis on a feminine beauty ideal may operate as a normative social control for girls and women,” the researchers added.

Together, the two studies indicate children are frequently exposed to powerful, influential media messages concerning both attractiveness and sexuality.

President Obama may have declared June to be Gay Pride Month, but entertainment for children therefore continues to perpetuate a less inclusive message, leaving those outside its confines with little to build their own dreams of happily ever after.

As Martin and Kazyak conclude, “Both ordinary and exceptional constructions of heterosexuality work to normalize its status because it becomes difficult to imagine anything other than this form of social relationship or anyone outside of these bonds.”

See: www.jezebel.com/5302581/researchers-disney-movies-elevate-heterosexuality

A.S. Byatt, on the tale of Scheherazade

Narrate or Die: Why Scheherazade keeps on talking

by A.S. Byatt, the New York Times magazine

The best story ever told? Perhaps the story of the two brothers, both kings, who found that their wives were unfaithful, took bloody vengeance, and set out into the world to travel until they found someone less fortunate than they were. They encountered a demon who kept a woman in a glass chest with four locks; she came out while he slept and showed them 98 rings she had collected from chance lovers and insisted on having sex with the princes to make it a round 100. The princes decided that the demon was more unfortunate than they were and returned to their kingdoms. There the elder brother, Shahrayar, still angry over his wife’s betrayal, instituted a reign of terror, marrying a virgin each day and handing her to his vizier for execution at dawn. The vizier’s daughter Shahrazad, a woman both wise and learned, beseeched her father to give her to the king. On the wedding night, the bride asked that her younger sister, Dinarzad, might sleep under the bed, so that when the king had “finished with Shahrazad,” the younger girl, as the sisters had agreed, might ask Shahrazad to tell a story to while away the time until dawn. When dawn came, the story was not finished, and the curious king stayed execution for a night. Shahrazad continued to tell tales, which gave rise to other tales, all of which were unfinished at dawn. The king’s narrative curiosity kept Shahrazad alive, day after day. She narrated a stay of execution, a space in which she bore three children. And in the end, the king removed the sentence of death, and they lived happily ever after.

This story has everything a tale should have. Sex, death, treachery, vengeance, magic, humor, warmth, wit, surprise and a happy ending. Though it appears to be a story against women, it actually marks the creation of one of the strongest and cleverest heroines in world literature. Shahrazad, who has been better known in the West as Scheherazade, triumphs because she is endlessly inventive and keeps her head. The stories in “The Thousand and One Nights” (interchangeably known as “The Arabian Nights”) are stories about storytelling without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

Storytelling in general, and “The Thousand and One Nights” in particular, consoles us for endings with endless new beginnings. I have just finished my own telling of the frame story with the European fairy-tale ending, “they lived happily ever after,” which is a consolatory false eternity, for no one does, except in the endless repetitions of storytelling. Stories keep part of us alive after the end of our story, and there is something very moving about Scheherazade entering on the happiness ever after, not at her wedding, but after 1,001 tales and three children.

Great stories, and great story collections, are shape shifters. “The Thousand and One Nights,” with its roots in Persia and India, has probably been circulating in one form or another since the ninth century. It first appeared in Europe in the French translation of Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. He used a 14th-century Syrian text but adapted and rewrote and added for French taste — it is possible that both Aladdin and Ali Baba as we read them originate with the Frenchman. Subsequent translators took liberties, or used their imaginations. Richard Burton invented a curious Victorian-medieval style. Joseph Charles Mardrus, in 1899, according to Robert Irwin, whose “Companion to the Arabian Nights” is gripping and indispensable, “reshaped the ‘Nights’ in such a manner that the stories appear to have been written by Oscar Wilde or Stephane Mallarme.”

Eastern and Western literature contain other related collections of interlinked tales — Katha Sarit Sagara” (“The Ocean of Story”), Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” whose frame story has its characters defying the Black Death by retreating to the country and telling tales. Out of such works came 19th-century Gothic fantasy and the intricate, paranoid nightmare plottings of such story webs as “The Crying of Lot 49″ and Lawrence Norfolk’s “Lemprier’s Dictionary.” Collections of tales talk to one another and borrow from one another; motifs glide from culture to culture, century to century. If the origin of stories is the human ability to remember the past, speculate about beginnings and imagine the ending, it doesn’t follow that the search for any “pure” or undisputed origin for any story will lead to definiteness.

Scheherazade’s tales have lived on, like germ cells, in many literatures. Dickens, who became the master of serial narration and endless beginnings, comforted his lonely and miserable childhood with “The Arabian Nights,” living in their world and learning their craft. In British Romantic poetry, “The Arabian Nights” stood for the wonderful against the mundane, the imaginative against the prosaically and reductively rational. Coleridge said his mind had been “habituated to the vast” by his early reading of “Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii.” He used the tale of the angry and vengeful Djinn whose invisible child had been killed by a thrown date stone as an example of pure chance or fate. Wordsworth, in the fifth book of his “Prelude,” describes his childhood treasure as “a little yellow, canvas-covered book,/ A slender abstract of the Arabian tales,” and the “promise scarcely earthly” of his discovery that there were four large volumes of the work.

Various Western writers have been tempted to write the 1,002d tale. Edgar Allan Poe’s Scheherazade makes the mistake of telling her aging husband about modern marvels like steamships, radio and the telegraph. He finds these true tales so incredible that he concludes that she has lost her touch and has her strangled after all. Poe is a combative and irreverent Yankee at the Persian court. Joseph Roth’s Scheherazade resides in the decadent days of the Austrian Empire, while John Barth, in his “Dunyazadiad,” appears in person as a balding, bespectacled genie who tells the nervous Scheherazade the tales she will tell because he has read them in the future and she is his heroine — thus creating another false eternity, a circular time loop, in which storytellers hand on stories of storytellers.

Then there are the modern Oriental fabulists, Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie, both threatened with death for storytelling. Mahfouz’s “Arabian Nights and Days” is a collection of magical tales with a political edge and a spiritual depth. His stories rework “The Thousand and One Nights”: his Shahriyar slowly learns about justice and mercy, the Angel of Death is a bric-a-brac merchant and genies play tricks with fate. Salman Rushdie’s narratives are intertwined with the storytelling of the “Nights.” “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” pits a resourceful child, Haroun, against the evil Khattam-Shud, who wants to drain the ocean of the streams of story, which are alive, and replace it with silence and darkness. Rushdie’s tale, like Scheherazade’s, equates storytelling with life, but his characters and wit owe as much to Western fantasies — Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz” — as they do to “The Thousand and One Nights.” Another cross-fertilization, another conversation.

Rushdie’s sea of stories is “the biggest library in the universe.” Jorge Luis Borges, to whom libraries, labyrinths and books were all images of infinity, wrote in “The Garden of Forking Paths” of “that night which is at the middle of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to repeat her stories over again. . . . ” This circular tale fascinated Italo Calvino. It also inspired him, for his “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” is the endless tale of a lost reader who starts a book only to find that the rest is missing; when he replaces the book, he finds that it has a new beginning. This novel contains a novelist — as Borges’s tale contains Scheherazade within Scheherazade — who wants to write a book that will contain only the pure pleasure of anticipation of the beginning, “a book that is only an incipit,” a book with no ending, perhaps like “The Arabian Nights.”

Marcel Proust saw himself as Scheherazade, in relation to both sex and death. At the end of the almost endless novel, “Remembrance of Things Past,” he writes a triumphant meditation on the presence of death, which has in fact driven him to create his great and comprehensive book, the book of his life. At one point he even personifies this presence of death as “le sultan Sheriar,” who might or might not put a dawn end to his nocturnal writing. Malcolm Bowie, in “Proust Among the Stars,” comments that “the big book of death-defying stories” with which Proust’s novel compares itself is not Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” in which death appears as a “horrifying initial trigger to tale-telling,” but the “Nights,” where stories are life. “Narrate or die,” for Proust’s narrator as for Scheherazade, is the imperative. “By mere sentences placed end on end, one’s sentence is commuted for a while, and the end is postponed.”

The Judeo-Christian culture is founded on a linear narrative in time. It moves forward from creation through history, to redemption in the Christian case, and looks forward to the promised end, when time and death will cease to be. The great novels of Western culture, from “Don Quixote” to “War and Peace,” from “Moby Dick” to “Dr. Faustus,” were constructed in the shadow of this story. People are excited by millennial events as images of beginnings and endings. There is a difference between these great, portentous histories and small tales that are handed down like gifts for delight and contemplation.

Storytellers like Calvino and Scheherazade can offer readers and listeners an infinity of incipits, an illusion of inexhaustibility. Calvino’s imaginary novelist sits and stares at a cartoon of Snoopy, sitting at a typewriter, with the caption “It was a dark and stormy night,” the beginning of a circular shaggy-dog story. Both cartoons and soap operas are versions of Scheherazade’s tale telling, worlds in which death and endings are put off indefinitely — and age too, in the case of Charlie Brown.

High modernism escaped time with epiphanic visions of timeless moments, imagined infinities that have always seemed to me strained, for they fail to offer any counter to fear and death. But the small artifices of elegant, well-made tales and the vulgar satisfaction of narrative curiosity do stand against death. The romantic novelist Georgette Heyer kept few fan letters, but I saw two: one from a man who had laughed at one of her comic fops on the trolley going to a life-threatening operation, and one from a Polish woman who had kept her fellow prisoners alive during the war by reciting, night after night, a Heyer novel she knew by heart.

During the bombardment of Sarajevo in 1994, a group of theater workers in Amsterdam commissioned tales, from different European writers, to be read aloud, simultaneously, in theaters in Sarajevo itself and all over Europe, every Friday until the fighting ended. This project pitted storytelling against destruction, imaginative life against real death. It may not have saved lives, but it was a form of living energy. It looked back to “The Thousand and One Nights” and forward to the millennium. It was called Scheherazade 2001.

In which time periods did the Disney princesses “live”?

Reinterpreting Disney Princess Costumes Through a Historical Lens

by Caroline Stanley, flavorwire.com, July 18, 2011

If you grew up watching Disney movies, then you can probably picture the evening gown that Cinderella wore to Prince Charming’s ball or what Jasmine was wearing when she took that magic carpet ride with Aladdin. What you probably never considered was whether or not these signature ensembles were historically accurate. LA-based illustrator Claire Hummel, an artist for Microsoft Game Studios Publishing, decided to do some research on the subject, and the resulting images, while not necessarily the stuff of childhood memories, provide an interesting glimpse into the history of fashion…

“Oh, Pocahontas. Really not one of my favorite Disney films, but it posed an interesting challenge. Note that this is the Disney character, not the historical figure, so while I tried to make the outfit accurate to 17th century Powhatan clothing she is, most definitely, not a 12-year-old. It’s my happy middle ground when drawing a historical version of an inaccurate portrayal of a historical person. That’s a mouthful.

“My one big cheat on this was her necklace — the shell necklace should in theory be a deep purple (turquoise is a much more Southwestern commodity), but you lose so much of the Pocahontas visual identity without the splash of teal around her neck.”

“I went with the mid-1860s for Cinderella’s dress, the transitory period where the cage crinoline takes on a more elliptical shape and moves towards the back. Not that it accounts for Lady Tremaine’s sweet 1890s getup, but it’s also not unheard of to see it worn alongside Anastasia and Drizella’s early bustle dresses. It’s also worth noting that it was made by a fairy godmother, so it make sense that her tastes would be a little behind the times.”

“Let’s be frank — Aladdin is hardly an exercise in historical accuracy… It took some effort to track down some midriff-baring outfits but BY GEORGE I DID, thank you Persian fashion plates. I now know what sirwal are called (besides Hammer pants), and that Persian women wore some pretty sweet little jackets that I wish I owned.”

“Snow White‘s time period is pretty easy to pinpoint in 16th-century Germany. Not that the film is accurate, but the clues are there — I took a wide swath from about 1500 to 1530 to come up with something that still maintained the spirit of the original design.”

“The Little Mermaid is hard to place from a time period standpoint — Grimsby’s wearing a Georgian getup, Ariel’s pink dress with the slashed sleeves subscribes to several eras from the Renaissance to the 1840s, Eric is… Eric.

“I went with Ariel’s wedding dress as a starting point since those gigantic leg-o-mutton sleeves (so embarrassingly popular in ’80s wedding fashion) were a great starting point for an 1890s evening gown. It’s also not unfeasible that Eric’s cropped tailcoat could be from the same era, so I’m sticking with my choice.”

“Beauty and the Beast has always hovered hesitantly in the late 18th century (especially in the earlier concept art), so I redid Belle’s gold dress to match 1770s French court fashion.”

“So Prince Phillip does specifically and emphatically say ‘this is the 14th century!’ at some point during the film, but Phillip’s an idiot (a handsome, handsome idiot) and I, never afraid to ignore source material, ignored him.

“Oddly enough Phillip’s clothing is a better point of reference than Aurora’s (since the hourglass, off-the-shoulder cut of her dress is straight out of the 1950′s), and there are far more examples of his get-up from the 1460s onward than in the 14th century. I went with my gut and ended up with something around 1485 — a little later than one might expect, but it’s such a (beautifully) stylized film that all bets are off.”

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See also:

ESTIMATED TIME PERIODS AND LOCATIONS OF THE DISNEY PRINCESSES

Grim Tales

The Gruesome Origins of 5 Popular Fairy Tales

By Stuart Layt, February 28, 2008

The thing about fairy tales… is that they weren’t always for kids. Back when these stories were first told around campfires and in taverns in some medieval village there were very few kids present. These were racy, violent parables to distract peasants after a hard day’s dirt farming, and some of them made Hostel look like, well, kid’s stuff.

#5. Little Red Riding Hood: Inter-Species Sex Play, Cannibalism

The Version You Know

Mention the words “fairy tale” to someone–if they don’t think of gingerbread houses, or possibly a certain bar they know, they think of this story. Little Red on her way to grandmother’s house meets the Big Bad Wolf and stupidly tells him where she’s going. So he gets there first, eats Grandma, puts on her dress and waits for Red.

She gets there, they do the back-and-forth about what big teeth he has, and he eats her. Then, a passing woodsman comes and cuts Red and Grandma out of the wolf, saving the day.

What Got Changed

Most modern versions of fairy tales come from two sources: The Grimm Brothers from Germany, and Frenchman Charles Perrault, the collector of the “Mother Goose” tales. The big change they made to this one was the ending. That woodsman showing up seemed a little like a third act re-write of a movie due to bad test screenings, didn’t it? Where the hell did the woodsman come from?

Well, the woodsman was a later addition to the tale. In the early versions of the story, Red and her Grandmother are dead. The. Goddamn. End. Also, in most versions the woodsman cuts the pair out of the wolf’s belly, where they’re mostly none the worse for wear despite being eaten, which implies to us the wolf in that story world eats like some sort of python, by unhinging its jaw and swallowing prey whole. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

Much earlier versions also liked to spice up the sexuality angle of the story, by having Red outwit the wolf by performing a striptease for him while he’s lying in bed dressed as her Grandmother, and then running away while he’s “distracted” (Note to any young girls out there: if you are ever abducted and menaced by someone, DO NOT DO THIS).

Wait, it gets worse. This is the most horrifying bit that got filtered out before the tale reached both the Grimm’s and Perrault (and in fact, only made it into a few written texts). In this version, the Wolf dissects Grandmother, then invites Red in for a meal of her flesh, presumably with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti. Then he eats her, too.

Story’s over! Sweet dreams, little Sally!

#4. Snow White: Prince Pedophile, More Cannibalism

The Version You Know

Well, you’ve all seen the movie, you know how this goes. Evil step-mom hates that her daughter is prettier than her so she tells one of her men to take out to the woods and kill her, and bring back her heart as proof. He can’t follow through, so he tells her to run away and never return.

Snow White flees, and she falls in with seven friendly dwarves. The step-mom finds out and sneaks her a poison apple. Snow goes into a coma until a handsome prince rescues her and they live happily ever after.

What Got Changed

In the Disney film the wicked step-mother winds up dead (she falls off a cliff). So that’s pretty hardcore we guess. It’s got nothing on the Grimm version, though, where the step-mother is tortured by being forced to wear red-hot iron shoes, and made to dance until she falls down dead (you can picture the puppet thing from Saw spelling this out for her over a closed-circuit monitor).

The issue of Snow’s actual age is a point of contention as well. The Grimm’s explicitly refer to her as being seven years old when the story starts, and while there’s no firm indication of how much time has passed, it’s no more than a couple of years. So unless that’s an eight-year-old Prince Charming who comes along and rescues Snow, we’re backing away from this one before we become the subject of an NBC reality show.

The biggest change, and the bloodiest, is step-mom’s … unusual eating habits. Namely, when she asks her man to bring back the heart of Snow White, she isn’t just after proof the girl is dead. She wants to eat it. Depending on the version of the story, the Queen asks for Snow’s liver, lungs, intestines and pretty much every other major internal organ, up to and including one gruesome version where she asks for a bottle of Snow’s blood stoppered with her toe.

And if you think the fairy tales were gruesome back then, you should have seen the merchandising tie-ins.

#3. Rumpelstiltskin: Dismemberment, Dead Toddlers

The Version You Know

There’s never been a Disney version of this one, but you’ve probably heard it before. A miller has a beautiful daughter who he claims can spin straw into gold. A passing noble decides to call the miller on his shit and takes the girl and locks her in a tower and tells her to get spinning, presumably hoping to cause a collapse in the precious metals market.

Fortunately she’s helped by a little gnome who shows up and offers to help in exchange for a small trinket. This goes on three nights, and by the third night the girl is promising the little man her first born child in return for his help. On the third morning, the king decides to marry this pretty girl who can produce gold out of dry grass.

They inevitably have a son, and the little gnome shows up demanding him. Being nothing if not fair, he’ll give the girl three days to guess his name. If she can, she keeps the kid. She tries everything but comes up short, until a passing woodsman overhears the gnome bragging about how he’s so clever no one will guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. He immediately tells the queen, who springs it on Rumpelstiltskin, who’s so pissed off he throws a tantrum and runs away, presumably to ply his poorly thought-out scam in another town.

What Got Changed

In the Grimm brothers’ version, taken from the oral tradition, the little man is so pissed off he stamps the floor in his little hissy fit, and gets stuck. And then, like some insane version of a Will Ferrell skit, he pulls so hard to free himself that he tears himself in half. Now, if our names were Rumpelstiltskin and some dizzy miller’s daughter had just told the whole damn room, we’d be pissed too, but we don’t think we’d get dismemberment-angry.

Not to mention, in the really early versions of the tale, Rumpelstiltskin launches himself at the girl in a rage and gets stuck … um … in her lady parts. Seriously. The palace guards all have to come and pull him out, which must have made for some awkward looks afterwards.

Also, in a depressingly large number of versions, the child is killed anyway, either by Rumpelstiltskin himself, or the guards, or someone. They weren’t big on happy endings in the Dark Ages. Plague will do that.

#2. Sleeping Beauty: Coma Sex

The Version You Know

Sleeping Beauty is the story of a young Princess who is cursed by an evil witch so that she will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her 15 birthday. The old woman does this because she wasn’t invited to the party celebrating the girl’s birth, where other good fairies/wise women are bestowing gifts upon her. Fortunately, one still hasn’t given her a gift, and so tempers the curse–the Princess won’t die, she’ll just fall asleep for 100 years. We guess she did what she could, but still, a pretty major downer for the party.

Of course the King orders all spindles burned, plunging the kingdom into a fashion nightmare, but with the inevitability of fairy tale logic bearing down on her, the princess manages to find the one working spindle in the kingdom, and pricks her finger on her 15 birthday. She falls asleep for 100 years, until a dashing young Prince comes along in timely fashion and kisses her, breaking the spell. Everyone lives happily ever after.

What Got Changed

The first major departure in this from the version we know today is when the Princess pricks her finger on her 15 birthday. In earlier versions the Princess instead gets a piece of flax caught under her fingernail which pricks her and puts her to sleep. This might seem like a small difference but it becomes important when you consider the other major, and unsettling, change to the story.

Previous versions of the tale have the Prince who finds Sleeping Beauty think she’s so damn beautiful he just goes ahead and has his way with her right then and there. Yes, while she’s still comatose.

If that’s not disturbing enough, the rohypnol-style coupling leads to a pregnancy, and the Princess gives birth to twins, all while asleep. One of the babies, seeking momma’s milk, sucks on her finger and dislodges the flax, waking her, at which point we imagine she had a few questions.

#1. Cinderella: Mutilation, Sex, More Mutilation

The Version You Know

When they talk about “Fairy Tale Endings,” they’re almost certainly referring to this story. Or possibly some sort of football game. This is the dream of every little girl (and some little boys) that one day they too can rise up from the dirt and become a pretty pretty princess. You all know it; the step-mother and step-sisters who hate the beautiful Cinderella, and make her work all day, until one day a Fairy Godmother shows up and gives Cinderella pretty clothes and a pumpkin coach and sends her to the ball where she falls in love with the Prince.

But at the stroke of midnight it all ends, and she runs home, leaving only her glass slipper behind. The prince searches the land, finds Cinderella, the shoe fits, and they live happily ever after.

What Got Changed

This one goes way, way back, having been told across cultures for thousands of years before being made into numerous Hollywood movies. The identity of the Fairy Godmother changes often, and in fact she only showed up in Perrault’s version, along with the pumpkin coach and the mice attendants which were all used in the Disney version. There’s even a Chinese version of the story from around 850 AD, where “Yeh-Hsien” is given gold, pearls, dresses and food by a giant talking fish.

A famous difference in many versions of the story is the “glass slipper.” Authorities on fairy tales (who you tend not to see at parties) disagree about whether Perrault’s slipper was made of glass or fur, as the words in French (verre and vair respectively) are pronounced almost the same. It’s kind of important, because if the Prince was wandering the land looking for a lady with the perfect “fur slipper” … well, it doesn’t take Freud to figure that one out, and suddenly the Prince doesn’t look so noble.

One thing Perrault left out that the Grimm’s delighted in putting back in was the violence. The sisters, desperate to fit into the slipper, mutilate their own feet, cutting off the toes and heels all described in exquisite Germanic detail. When the Prince eventually realizes Cinderella is the one for him, birds peck out the sisters’ and mother’s eyes for their wickedness.

You can probably understand why Disney went with Perrault’s version for an adaptation.