RITA: Mary Jo Putney's 'The Rake and the Reformer' (and 'The Rake' Again)

Another week, another RITA Award-winner to analyze.

Today's book is Mary Jo Putney's The Rake and the Reformer, the winner of Best Regency Romance in 1990. I hadn't read this one before, which means it's harder to pick out the details of technique. One thing, however, leapt right out at me: these characters felt like adults.

It's hard, in the world of the Regency romance, to get characters that feel like grown-ups. Luckily, the trend of the youthful, untouched 18-year-old who enlivens the older, jaded man is fading into the background --  hearts, Madame Heyer godsavethequeen -- but it still lurks in a lot of the structure.

I'm not the only one who noticed this aspect of the book. The notorious Mrs. Giggles said as much in her review: "oh, those days when heroines don't behave like ten-year olds!" But it's a thing that is very hard to pinpoint and emulate, much as I would like to. How do you quantify such a thing? The impression must be made in a series of tiny moments, well-placed words, and vividly well-drawn scenes. It requires a prodigious imagination, an astonishing amount of work, or -- this is the most likely -- both. It is a great achievement.

Mrs. Giggles' review brought something else to light: there are two editions of this book. I've read the earliest -- the Signet edition depicted to the right there -- but La Giggles has obviously read the re-release, and has this criticism to offer: "Reggie doesn't act like a jerk. But isn't he supposed to be a jerk?. . . Reggie is portrayed too nicely and too sympathetically."

Um -- really?

Because about halfway through the book, Reggie -- our hero, who is a full-on alcoholic with blackouts and health troubles -- lapses from his planned sobriety, gets roaring drunk, and tries to rape our heroine, whom he's already on mutually-consented-to-kissing terms with. Some choice phrases he uses during this scene: "Coyness don't suit you, Allie. I know what you want, and be m-more than happy to give it to you . . . Don't you think I know why you're always twitching around me? Underneath that proper face you're as hot as they come, and we both know it." And Allie is horrified and ashamed and fearful but not so fearful that it prevents her from hitting him with any number of heavy objects and yelling and fighting him off. And remember, this is halfway through our romance.

Reading this scene, I felt it was pushing the envelope -- or else it was harkening back to the not-so-long-ago days of Sweet, Savage Love and that one romance novel I read where the heroine was raped by Wagner. (Yes, THE Wagner. It was strange.) And because it was scary, and dangerous, and unprovoked, and mean, it raised the stakes like they rarely get raised for rakes these days. Every frequent romance reader knows that the dangerous rake with the dastardly reputation is not really that bad, deep down. A heroine's reputation may be ruined in the course of the book by her association with the hero, but usually instances of actual, honest-to-goodness abuse are limited to emotional distance and a slight coolness soon shattered by the Sexy Sexy Times the hero and heroine insist on having at intervals convenient to the narrative.

Reggie, on the other hand, is actually, physically, emotionally dangerous. He may well be a terrible choice as a lover, and not simply because Allie's reputation may suffer. She has a strong incentive to not want to spend time with Reggie ever again, after this incident. Of course, they end up happily -- but Ms. Putney makes it a plausible ending, which Reggie has to earn and work toward. Which means, naturally, that this scene's location in the exact center of the novel is no coincidence, but rather a canny bit of planning on the author's part.

Yes, there are plenty of moments where Reggie is otherwise proved not as bad as reputation would have it, but it does matter that we have this particular scene played out with no other witnesses, just Allie and Reggie -- and the reader.

At least, the reader who gets the Signet edition. When romances are reissued, it is not uncommon for the author to also take the opportunity to rewrite them, just a little bit. A book is never really finished, not even for novice aspirants like myself. And these are people Ms. Putney spent a lot of time with when she created them, which the reissue allowed her to revisit and relearn. Mrs. Giggles' opinion that Reggie was too sympathetic either indicates that her standards of villainy are far more demanding than mine -- or else quite a bit of the book was revised when it was put out under the shortened title, The Rake.

What I want to know is this: did she change anything about the near-rape in the reissue? The cheap copy I found on the interwebs should tell me: further bulletins as events warrant.

E-reader Ads and Gender Bias: A Rebuttal

So lately -- on Shakespeare's birthday, in fact -- there was this Huffpo post by Jason Pinter, which then meandered through the blogosphere until it reached my habitual environs (NPR's delightful Monkey See Blog). The article alleges that there are not enough books for men because of a publishing mantra: men don't read. So there should be more books marketed for men. And I got very angry and had to kill some pixelated zombies in Castlevania until I calmed down a bit. The comments are pretty evenly split between the expected "Oh man you are totally right publishing is totally sexist to dudes" and "what are you talking about I'm a man I read/I know a man he reads." And, of course, absolutely everyone heaps scorn on the romance novel, as represented by Twilight, chick-lit, and Danielle Steele. Negative bonus points for Huffpo commenter RobinSeattle, who offered the following gem: "There is almost no piece of advertising on tv that doesn't make men look like knuckle dragging hapless boobs. Feminists are silent on this sort of sexism because they are largely a bunch of intellectually dishonest opportunists anyway." On RobinSeattle's profile: comments: 6243, friends: 2.

But that's not what I wanted to pinpoint here.

One of the things Pinter laments is the way e-readers are supposedly marketed primarily to women, and cites the ads for the Nook: . . . and the Kindle:

Pinter then offers this lovely sentiment:

Why would men buy an e-reader, considering the takeaway from these ads is you can a) learn about your pregnancy after falling for Mr. Darcy, or b) become Amelia Earhart or Holly Golightly?

Yeah, Amelia Earhart's alright -- for a girl. And no man in the history of men has ever found Holly Golightly interesting -- except, you know, the dude who created her. And who needs to learn about pregnancy? Nobody important, that's for sure.

I like to think that every time a male writer dismisses the attractions of Mr. Darcy, somewhere in the world a romance novel is born.

Luckily, according to Mr. Pinter, the iPad ad gets things right:

Cool, right? They catch your attention without alienating half the consumer population. Why can't we do that? Make a fun, cool campaign that doesn't cut your audience off at the knees?

It's funny he should mention knees, because here are the full lyrics for that particular (admittedly catchy) song:

Be Be the charming type Take off your gloves And show what they hide Please take my naked wrist With your hands and fingertips

And please, baby get on your knees Don’t bare bare bare your teeth

I’ll let you pry if you close your eyes

I’ll have an answer for your wives

There goes my love There goes my love There goes my love love love love love

There goes my love There goes my love There goes my love love love love love

oh

Why be the charming kind? Oh you’ll get yours when I get mine Oh no it’s not for me If you’re too good you won’t be free

Meanwhile, the full lyrics for the song in the Kindle ad (which Pinter dismisses as "twee") are:

Silver Moons and paper chains, Faded maps and shiny things. You're my favorite one-man show. A million different ways to go.

Will you fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Painted scenes, I'm up all night. Slaying monsters, flying kites. Speak to me in foreign tongues. Share your secrets one by one.

Will you fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Now I cant think what life was like Before I had you by my side. Cant say what I'd do without you, Knowing what its like to have you.

Hidden walk ways back in time. Endless stories, lovers cry. In my mind I've been set free. Will you take this Journey You and Me?

Will you Fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Fly me away with you, My Love.

Take me away with you, My Love.

In sum: the Kindle wants to keep you up all night with adventures, words, and monster-slaying. The iPad wants you naked and submissive. Which one sounds more like a satisfactory reading experience?

Here is a list of things momentarily featured in the iPad ad above: photo displays, a romantic suspense/mystery novel by Tami Hoag, the New York Times, the new Star Trek, Ted Kennedy's memoir, and some kind of dude-heavy outdoorsy document/blog called "The Powder Report," which the user is editing. Note how many of those things are not books.

A list of things that are featured in the Nook ad: Where the Wild Things Are, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Pride and Prejudice, What to Expect When You're Expecting, The Book Thief (which if you haven't read you should do so immediately, but have a hanky close to hand). Of course, all these are also coyly referenced in the first-person female voiceover -- which then gives way to a male voiceover, which says this: "Experience the only e-book reader from the bookstore you've grown up with. Nook, by Barnes and Noble. Browse and download over a million titles wirelessly, and take your story wherever you want it to go."

The Nook ad is, of course, personal. It is designed to be this (undoubtedly fictional, but thoroughly plausible) story of one woman's history with books. And the male voiceover at the end reinforces the fact that this is one particular story, and that you (whoever you are) have a story of your own, and somehow buying a Nook helps you tell it or relive it or something. (Also: putting The Book Thief right there in an e-reader commercial is kind of hilarious for several reasons.) There is a mix here of books by male authors (Sendak, Zusak) and female authors (Blume, Austen, Murkoff and Mazel).

Whereas the iPad ad does feature both male and female hands on that pretty, pretty touchscreen, the content displays one female author (Hoag), one male author (Kennedy), a newspaper (journalism being an industry notorious for its sexism), a movie written by, directed by, and starring mostly dudes (though at least they tried to clarify Uhura's job in this one, but come on, we know it's all about the Kirk-Spock bromance), somebody's kids, and snowboarders. Moreover, the only book opened in the iPad commercial is the Kennedy memoir -- the Hoag mystery only appears as some kind of ad or banner that the user's hand never touches.

By preferring the iPad ad to the Kindle and the Nook, Pinter is saying two things. One: despite his screed against the publishing industry's neglect of men, Pinter is more interested in shiny gadgets with a rock soundtrack than in something that uses actual books, and not just the latest trendy political read. (Partly this is because the iPad is meant as a media-consumption device rather than just an e-reader -- but don't get me started on that whole mess.)

And two: gender disparity in the material (so many dudes in that iPad!) looks like equality to Pinter if you see both men and women dealing with it, and something closer to actual equality (60/40 if you count Murkoff and Mazel as one author) looks like it's skewed because the ad's protagonist happens to be a woman. The same is true of the music above: Pinter likes the male vocalist's rock song despite the lyrics, which are questionable from an advertising standpoint (how does this song sell iPads aside from being catchy?), and dislikes the female vocalist's piano melody despite the appropriateness of the song's sentiment for the product being advertised. (Shades of the recent Tiger Beatdown guest post on dude music, anyone?)

Pinter does not expect to identify with a woman -- but he expects women to identify with men. Because men are the default. (White men. Straight white men. With short hair. And guns.) All this tends to take the wind out of the whole "I don't read because publishers make books look girly" argument, which essentially amounts to "Why don't they put some explosions on the cover so it won't threaten my masculinity to be seen holding it?" Men shouldn't have to imagine themselves in a woman's place -- because that's a woman's place.

RITA: Julie Garwood's The Bride

My first form-specific look at a past RITA award winner: The Bride, by Julie Garwood. First off, I must explain that this is one of the first romance novels I read growing up. And it is definitely the one I've reread most often: probably upwards of a hundred times, easily. There are scenes and sentences here that are now part of the physical makeup of my brain.

So learning that it was a RITA winner was a delight, but no surprise. What's more, the book holds up surprisingly well considering it's now old enough to order alcohol (should the book decide it wants a cocktail). But I'm not here to review the book -- I'm here to look at how it's written.

So:

In the forward to my copy, a reissue, Garwood explains that "experts" advised her to leave the humor out of her story: "I had tried my best to follow their advice for a couple of books, but with The Bride, I simply couldn't help myself . . . I finally gave in to the urge and wrote the story as I saw it."

Nor is this the only writers' rule that Garwood breaks in the book. How well do I remember the switches of POV (point-of-view, for you rookies out there) that drive not only the humor, but the developing romance. Like so, when our heroine Jamie learns at the last minute that she is to marry Scottish laird Alex Kincaid at the king's behest. We begin with our hero:

She still hadn't caught on. Alec sighed. "Change your gown, Jamie, if that's your inclination. I prefer white. Now go and do my bidding. The hour grows late and we must be on our way."

He'd deliberately lengthened his speech, giving her time to react to his announcement. He thought he was being most considerate.

She thought he was demented.

Jamie was, at first, too stunned to do more than stare in horror at the warlord. When she finally gained her voice, she shouted, "It will be a frigid day in heaven before I marry you, milord, a frigid day indeed."

"You've just described the Highlands in winter, lass. And you will marry me."

"Never."

Exactly one hour later, Lady Jamison was wed to Alec Kincaid.

According to the hundreds of writing how-to guides out there, this is wrong. Supposedly, to jump from one character's POV to another is confusing and leads to the reader gripping their head in pain and yelling AARGH and throwing the book against a wall and who will give you royalties then, hmm?

But I love and remember and admire the passage above, and every other similar passage in the book. Romances written entirely from one character's perspective (in the vein of a lot of the novels of Georgette Heyer godsavethequeen) aren't as appealing to modern readers. We like being in the hero's head; we like it when he's not some giant impenetrable mystery figure. We want him to be a person, with thoughts and worries and emotions, like the heroine is and has always been.

At some point, if you are writing a romance novel, you are going to have to switch POV. Mostly this happens between scenes, and the general rule is that once you start a scene in one character's POV you stick with that character until the scene break. But if you do it mid-scene, like Garwood, if the reader sees what the heroine above is thinking while the hero's thoughts are still echoing in the reader's -- oh, who am I kidding -- in her memory, you get a moment where it feels like there is a point of contact between the mind of the hero and the mind of the heroine. A moment where Alec's and Jamie's experiences seem to touch, unbeknownst to them, through the medium of the reader.

This is a powerful tool, and it is clear that the reason the how-to guides recommend against it is because such power could spin out of control in the hands of a novice writer. The POV switch is a tool to be used with restraint -- like garlic. Delicious, even occasionally necessary, but repellent when overdone.

The switches in The Bride are primarily used to jump between the hero and the heroine, but not exclusively. Secondary characters get a lot of play, too, which is a neat way of solving the perennial problem of the Infodump. By the time we get a few chapters in, we know how our main characters think about themselves, and about each other, and we also know how they seem to the other people around them. Handy for things like physical description and background info, but for the romance it's just as important to know that Jamie's view of herself as capable and talented is borne out by the opinions of several people around her, even when Alec himself hasn't been convinced yet.

In fact, because Garwood allows us to flit from one character's consciousness to another, she has the luxury of beginning from the POV of Jamie's father:

They said he killed his first wife.

Papa said maybe she needed killing. It was a most unfortunate remark for a father to make in front of his daughters, and Baron Jamison realized his blunder as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He was, of course, immediately made sorry for blurting out his unkind comment.

As a side note, beginning with a secondary character before proceeding to the hero/heroine is a technique frequently used by Jane Austen, most notably in Pride and Prejudice (Mrs. Bennet), Persuasion (Sir Walter Elliot). Garwood's opening technique has a sterling literary pedigree.

Lesson Learned: Rules are made to be broken.

Ready to Read the RITAs? Right!

In more than one bookstore, you can find lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners posted in the science fiction/fantasy sections. Displays of the recent Pulitzer winners are currently everywhere. Man Booker Awards, American Book Awards, National Book Awards -- these will all be noted on shelf cards or pointed out. The reason for this is simple: a good way to sell books is to convince people of a book's importance and quality. Winning a prestigious award is a shorthand for both -- plus, it makes the reader look sophisticated and intelligent when trying to hit on other humans. You know what I have never seen in an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore? A list or display of RITA award winners (formerly known as the Golden Medallion). It's the romance genre's most prestigious award -- which critics will argue is like frosting on a shit sandwich. And hitting on someone when you are holding a romance novel -- drenched fatally in pink and white, or else covered in cursive lettering, or else lounged upon by a scantily clad and heavily haired couple who may in fact be orgasming as you watch -- well, it just plain does not work. The prime cultural tone associated with romance novels is desperation, the antimatter to seduction.

Of course, this is absurd, as anyone familiar with the fine work done over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books can tell you. Romance readers are smart, and romance is no less powerful a genre than fantasy or science fiction or mystery. It has a craft, and a history, the same way any subset of literature does.

Many of you already know I've been trying my hand at writing romance, which has turned out -- surprise! -- to be hard. It's also amazing, and now that I've started I don't think I can ever stop. It has begun to rewire my brain: everything becomes a potential narrative, the start of a story I haven't learned how to tell yet. And I'm getting better -- but slowly. It is time to take a more organized approach.

Which brings me back to the RITA Awards.

From henceforth, I will be going through the list of RITA winners (focusing on the historical and regency categories, which were once the same but are now separate) and writing about each. This is not going to be merely a process of review -- there are plenty of very thorough and delightful review sites out there already (hello, Mrs. Giggles!). What I am going to be looking at, specifically, is the way the romance is written: the plot setup, the prose craftsmanship, things that leap out from a writing perspective. There will probably be many swearwords.

One of the reasons for this is a piece of writing advice I've been thinking about a lot lately: never switch from one character's POV to another. This makes good sense, mostly, because leapfrogging around from brain to brain tends to give unpolished prose a feeling of whiplash. But I keep remembering my favorite moments from Julie Garwood's The Bride, one of the earliest romances I read and in fact the first RITA winner for Best Single Title Historical. And many of those moments -- which are hilarious -- depend upon a deft switch from one character's perspective to another.

So sometimes the rules need to be broken, apparently. But we knew that. What other rules can I break, in useful ways? What rules are holding me back, or helping me tell a better story? I intend to learn from the best.

First up: The Bride by Julie Garwood (Best Single Title Historical, 1990).

After that: The Rake and the Reformer by Mary Jo Putney (Best Regency Romance, 1990).

Now Put Your Hands Up!

So lately there has been some discussion on the internet about Beyoncé, and whether or not "Single Ladies" is a feminist anthem or a pseudo-feminist anthem or just, you know, a really catchy number with some top-notch choreography and an alluring bionic hand.

A lot of this discussion -- both in the recent AV Club article and in The Sexist -- centers around the word "it" that you are instructed you ought to have put a ring on. From Amanda Hess:

Beyonce uses the dual “its” to objectify herself on two levels: first, as a sex object; second, as a wife. Beyonce asks her man to mark his territory by putting a “ring on it.”

According to the AV Club:

Beyoncé is just a passive “it” that can be claimed with a ring, and that even if the relationship is already bad, that ring has the talismanic power to guarantee a happy ending. Not to mention the idea that a ring will give the unnamed man in the story sole, permanent possession of “it,” since he’s basically just planting his flag in his claimed territory.

That's a lot of interpretive weight to put on a single flimsy pronoun. If we're going to really lay the hammer down grammar-wise -- oh, do let's! -- there are plenty of other things that support the idea that this song has a feminist slant. Beyoncé spends a lot of time telling her ex what he can and cannot do now that they're split: "Now you wanna trip . . . Don't pay him any attention . . . You can't be mad at me." Note that the ex is not allowed to actually trip -- he no longer has the right. He wants to trip; Beyoncé won't let him.

It does get a little weird in the bridge, with this line: "Say I'm the one you own." But there again is the imperative verb, and it is followed by a threat: "If you don't, you'll be alone." The ex's claim to own Beyoncé somehow does nothing to lessen her autonomy in her own mind. There's a little hint of BDSM play here, the verbal equivalent of being handcuffed to a headboard: Beyoncé wants to be a little owned. So play the game her way or she'll ditch your ass.

As for the new fling, he is an accessory like her lip gloss and designer jeans. Twice Beyoncé tells her ex, "Don't pay him any attention." She refuses to let this become a dude-versus-dude match, a competition between the ex and the new guy where Beyoncé is a property that can be earned. She always brings it back to the ex's failings in his relationship with her, before this new guy was ever around: "Cause you had your turn / And now you're gonna learn / What it really feels like to miss me."

One of my favorite moments in the video is when Beyoncé literally brushes off the new guy as unimportant:

The video really does make this all about Beyoncé. She is the entire world -- there is no one else here, no ex, no new guy, no set or props even. There is no dude here to enjoy her sexy dance -- the camera doesn't even care about the backup dancers (who are Beyoncé clones). And yeah, the video is sexy -- because hot damn, Beyoncé can move. Her body is powerful, strong, in constant motion. She displays her control of her body as much as she displays her body itself.

The editing style -- editing being the visual equivalent of grammar -- is part of what makes Beyoncé seem so powerful here. The takes are really long for the choppy ADD world of music videos, and there are plenty of tiny barely visible jump cuts that exist to make the takes seem even longer than they are. Mostly the stays moving, bobbing slightly forward and back and turning occasionally so that the viewer is constantly forced to reorient on the figure of Beyoncé, always near the center of the frame. When the camera does zoom in for close-ups, they focus exclusively on her face.

For contrast, let's look at two other megahits whose videos are polar opposites of "Single Ladies" (assuming things can have more than one polar opposite BEAR WITH ME HERE). The first: Britney Spears' 10-year-old (really? wow) "Oops! . . . I Did It Again" video.

Here are three stills:

This is so male-gazey that it creeps me out. Shut your face, astronaut man!

Viewed after "Single Ladies," it's like watching a train wreck -- quick cuts, shots of Britney lolling on a bed making orgasm-legs, slow-motion shots of just her body in red vinyl, extreme close-ups of various parts of Britney's body, the smiling astronaut and his NASA buddies for whom she's putting on a show. Britney doesn't so much dance as strike a series of poses. And there's at least three of her: dancing Britney (full shots), singing Britney (shot from the boobs up), and lounging Britney (flat on her back and shot from above). You never know where Britney "really" is and you don't know what Britney really wants -- which of course is the upshot of the song, after all.

An even more extreme example is provided by the opening thirty seconds of Kanye West's "Gold Digger": The lingerie-clad woman is reduced to a series of images of her parts: face, boobs, hair, ass, all overlapped at seizure-courting speed. (And then the parade of pin-ups begins.) As for Kanye, he doesn't even turn toward the camera until about halfway through the video. Makes me wanna do this the whole time:

You show him, bubblegum-tongue lady.

Misusing the Muse

One year in grade school I got crafty for Christmas and made beaded jewelry for all my friends. I worked for hours, threading a needle through  listening to Amy Grant's Home for Christmas on endless repeat. (I am well aware that this is somebody's exact definition of hell -- but I cannot get enough of that "Breath of Heaven," I tell you.) I remember snow falling -- which may or may not be accurate -- and I remember looking up Morse code so I could make the black beads in a black-and-yellow necklace spell out BEST FRIENDS FOREVER. Or something like that -- but I'm clear on the Morse code. Lately I've been getting back into it, and my techniques have gotten more sophisticated. I've learned some new stitches, got a wonderfully instructive book on color, and have a better eye for structure and design than when I was, you know, twelve.

Partly this is due to friend Gabby, who is significantly more talented at the beadery. For instance, she made me this beaded giant squid for my birthday:

I have named him Anaximander: Lord of Men.

Gabby also introduced me to a contest called Use the Muse from The Beader's Muse. You buy a kit and with it arrives a mystery bead that serves as the muse for creative inspiration. You can use as many beads of your own or as few from the kit as you like, as long as  you use the muse. And -- wonder of wonders! -- there are deadlines. I love deadlines, really I do. The urgency gives me momentum. Would Indiana Jones have run quite as fast without a giant smashy boulder behind him? No, he would not.

And now my kit and the muse (no, I'm not going to show you) have arrived in the mail. It has begun.

This contest features winners like this: So far my entry looks like this:

I am completely out of my league.

First Attempt at Feminist Deconstruction, Or: Never Thought I'd Say This, But Geri Spice Is Right.

So here I am, trying to enter the feminist debate. I have virtually no credentials, unless you count obvious and average lady-parts. Oh, and an inability to shut up when I am angry. So: I am a little miffed, today, by a piece in the Guardian that purports to explain "how the 'new feminism' went wrong." Let's state at the beginning that there is a lot of goodness in this essay -- specifically in how the sex industry and mass culture have created a new and sneaky kind of sexism that brands itself as empowering. This is a useful thing to remember, in a world where they make high heels for infants.

But (and I am going to quote at length) there are some moments that make me raise a dainty finger in the air and chirp, "Question?" Such as:

The young girl's penchant for pinky "girliness" reflects not a belief in essential femininity but an early brand awareness. Her belief that the pickers on the next level favour "girliness" is reinforced by everything she sees. Today's girly isn't passive, but sassy and self-defining.

Completely sold on the myth of "self-invention", today's woman believes herself in control of her life, from birth to the present day. There's no governing philosophy, just an urge to assert her will. She doesn't know what she's doing, but she's damn well doing it.

Heaven help those of us who live our lives without a governing philosophy. We just go around asserting our will all over the place. How will we know what our day means?!

I'm also not convinced that this idea of self-branding is all that new. Seems to me like Queen Elizabeth was all over this about five centuries ago. And it does imply a certain craftiness in our young women and girls that I find appealing. If we're borrowing the appearance of girliness as a strategy, it's a step up from the idea that we're doing it out of some unconscious attraction to pink and ruffles. There are worse things to be than "sassy and self-defining."

Because this is an essay about women and feminism, we have to start talking about sex -- and that means we have to start talking about strippers:

The Equality Illusion is full of grim statistics illustrating pay differentials and the point that poverty often has a "female face". As Banyard demonstrates, it isn't difficult proving that women are more oppressed than ever; the difficulty now is getting them to admit it.

Natasha Walter can't quite. Living Dolls does an excellent job of exposing the brutal reality behind the sex industry's increasingly sophisticated façade. It reads much more convincingly than The New Feminism; she's describing something real. Yet, when it comes to it, she still can't say that any of these things are wrong: "There is, of course, nothing intrinsically degrading or miserable about women pole dancing, stripping, having sex with large numbers of partners or consuming pornography. All these behaviours are potentially enjoyable, sexy and fun."

Yet even in her own portrayal, there clearly is something intrinsically degrading and miserable about pole dancing. It's not about sex, says one of her interviewees, but the illusion of power. Each man wants to believe the no-touching rule has been breached for his exclusive benefit. If women were liberated, pole dancing wouldn't exist. Why not condemn it outright?

Everybody say it with me now: When you outlaw pole dancing, only outlaws will dance with poles.

Natasha Walter is right not to vilify pole dancing, because pole dancing is not the issue here. Pole dancing does not keep women's wages lower than men's. Pole dancing does not tell women they are less human than men are. But pole dancing does happen amidst a cultural power dynamic that privileges the physical pleasure of men over the humanity of women. Pole dancing in the privacy of your own bedroom to please a committed partner is not the same as pole dancing for strangers because you have no other means of paying the rent and buying food. But again: this is not pole dancing's fault. It's just that pole dancing is more interesting to talk about than complex social issues we haven't resolved yet because we've only even been talking about them for a century, if that.

Which brings me to the best part of the essay:

In spite of what is now claimed, feminism has never been about empowerment through choice. You can't simply opt for power – power isn't a fridge or an elliptical training machine. Any strategy in this consumerist register is doomed to fail.

Now there is a point. Is power a limited resource? Is there only so much of it that can go around? And what kind of power are we talking about? The power to speak is not the same thing as the power to be heard or listened to, but they are not unrelated either. If you can't opt for power, how do you go about getting it? Do you earn it? Whose approval do you need? There is an unnamed authority lurking here, which makes me feel ill at ease with Charlotte Raven's thesis.

And feminism is not about empowerment through choice? News to me. In fact, I've been citing this as a major tenet of feminism for a decade now. Perhaps I am wrong? It would not be the first time. Are we back to the definition of feminism as believing that women are as fully human as men? Because doesn't that imply choice?

If awareness returned – if modern woman were no longer disassociating from her pain and victimhood – all her decisions would be different. The things that hurt us would never seem "potentially enjoyable". We wouldn't wear silly shoes, blog about our sex life, worry that our babies are upstaging us. Most importantly, we'd resist the temptation to caricature ourselves. We'd lose the Nigella-esque pinny, the Price-esque lash extensions; the Belle-esque pose of erotic empowerment would seem inhibiting. We'd recover our desire for the missionary position with the person lying next to us.

They can take my silly shoes when they pry them from my cold, dead feet.

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 8

It would be remiss of me to approach so near National Grammar Day without bringing up punctuation. Punctuation sometimes seems like the appendix of the body of grammar, because oftentimes you can eliminate it entirely and still make something worth reading (I'm looking at you, James Joyce). But in reality it's probably something more like the spleen or gallbladder: you can get by okay without it, but things tend to run more smoothly with it in place. I think what I like so much about this sentence from the Practical is its sheer hypocrisy: look how many parentheses are there!

The other fun thing about punctuation is that it has drastically, visibly changed over the language's evolution. For instance, Jane Austen's most famous sentence: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Note that comma after acknowledged -- nowadays we would leave that sucker out in the cold to die. But Jane Austen thought there should be a pause there, and so in the comma went, to signal a breath in the middle of what is otherwise a bit of a mini-marathon: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Butler is having none of this:Jane of course was writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Butler at the end of it. This century saw sweeping changes in not only the literacy rates but in the way reading was approached. Austen's time was still very rooted in oral culture. Letters were important, but were often read aloud to the family as a whole, and conversation was considered an art that required training and rules and delicacy. By the end of the century, however, writing (in the form of newspapers, magazines, and so on) had become the unquestionably central cultural medium. Butler, in his grouchy Victorianism, considers the rules of grammar and syntax a greater good than the actual behavior of words in a human mouth.

And, to fully illustrate the gap between language written and language spoken, here is Victor Borge's Phonetic Punctuation:

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 7

Alas! I have little time today. So I'll post on something brief: interjections! Anything can be an interjection if you punctuate it correctly. Airplane! See how that works?

And how lovely to discover that holla was a word in the Victorian lexicon! Though it had a completely different meaning, which puts it in company with other migratory words like gay and nice. Oh, language, with its twists and turns.

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 6

The three words I'm considering are as follows (and I quote): drink, drank, drunk. Early in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Prefect is warning Arthur Dent that hyperspace jumps are unpleasantly like being drunk. Arthur asks what is so unpleasant about being drunk -- Ford replies: "You ask a glass of water."

The joke hinges on the confusing nature of certain irregular English participles. A participle is the form of the verb that can be used as part of a compound verb, or as an adjective. The participle of the verb be is been, as in I have been confused. Most often the participle in English is identical to the past tense: I have walked to the store. But in certain cases, where the word has a long history and frequent usage -- verbs like be, do, get, eat, think, all the basic verbs human beings use all the time because human beings are almost always being, doing, getting, eating, or thinking something -- you get irregular participles.

And when you get irregular participles, you get confusion. I swim, but have I swam or have I swum?

Current grammatical common sense declares that drank is the past tense and drunk is the participle. Last night I drank some wine/Last night some wine was drunk by me. But drunk can also be used as an adjective as well as the past tense of the verb -- in fact, this problem has been confusing native and non-native English speakers for centuries now.

The Practical deals with this problem in an incredibly snobbish manner:

The Practical is an arch-suck-up, and only the writings of respected (white, male, usually dead) authors (who may be attempting to sound archaic on purpose) count. There is quite a list, as though Noble Butler wants to overwhelm you by sheer quantity of evidence:

Incidentally, my very favorite participle in English is quite rare and getting rarer. It is dolven, the past participle of delve. As in: This mine shaft was dolven in 1902.

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 5

For the first time in this experiment, I find myself relieved to agree with the Practical, and on no less a subject than the passive voice: The passive voice is often talked about, but rarely defended. This is a travesty. I am uncommonly fond of the passive voice, because it is important and useful. The difference between the example sentences above is a nuance, but one of the best things about language is its ability to convey very fine shades of distinction. Telling beginning writers/students to avoid the passive voice as though it is the writerly equivalent of a cravat or corset is leaving out a very useful technique. It is one of the many things that makes me grumpy when I read George Orwell.

Orwell's objection to the passive voice is that it allows the result to stand out more than the agent. So that instead of saying, "I screwed up," a politician might say, "Mistakes were made." And there is some truth to that. But there is also a case to be made for keeping the passive voice, even in political speech. For instance: the celebrated phrase: "all men are created equal." There's your passive voice right there. The Declaration of Independence is a far from passive document, and this phrase more than any other has become an axe to wield against anything resembling inequality (as opponents of gay marriage are in the process of finding out). And though it goes on to mention that men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, it is not the Creator or the question of his existence that is important in this passage. It is people. For this reason, it is stronger and clearer to say that men are created or are endowed, since through the passive voice it becomes an existential condition. Man is a creature with rights.

For contrast, imagine this sentiment in the active voice: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that God created all men equal, that the Creator endowed them with certain unalienable Rights. Man -- political, democratic, revolutionary man -- has all but disappeared from the text. He goes from the verb's subject to its object. And despite the presence of the word unalienable, it stands to reason that if God endows you with something, he could just as well un-endow you if he ever felt like it.

As is, strangely, the passive voice becomes the stronger voice, the voice that lets man take an active role in the creation of a new system of government.

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 4.

Time to talk participles! From the Practical: (As a side note, how often do you think this male-active/female-passive paired structure crops up in this text? Frequently! It can be a little infuriating.)

Finally -- finally! -- we get explicit confirmation that Noble Butler looks upon his grammar as an attempt to scientifically classify the words of the English language.

Note how he cites Bacon, even though Origin of Species had already done its bombshell work on scientific thinking at the time of Butler's publication. Butler is non-Darwinian in his approach to taxonomy. For instance, this sentence: "To allow words to dodge from one class to an other, is not only unphilosophical, but ridiculously absurd." Butler is trying to set down the rules for the proper behavior of English -- which, as we have seen, requires a thorough philosophy of the categorical differences between men and women, animals and plants, people and animals. This refusal of allowing words to migrate form -- as though the rules of language were all thought up at once in systematic fashion -- is the product of an insecure and tyrannical mind. Butler wants to control English as a language because then he can control the beings the words represent. Reality is to be subject to philosophy, and to the common sense of the educated white Victorian male. The idea that nouns could become verbs is as anathema as the idea that primates can become people.

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 3

One of the most surreal aspects of the Practical is its long passages of sample sentences. After a time, they begi to read like the finest surrealist literature. Take this paragraph, from the section on verbs: Our pastoral scene in the beginning (horse, stable, corn) gives way to an apparent family drama in the vein of William Faulkner (Robert's glance, smoke, knives, parched earth). There is a sudden and inexplicable threat from nature (a tiger!) which is just as inexplicably dispatched (the serpent crushes the tiger!). We are left with matters unresolved (the bird on the fence). The next paragraph:

The destructive violence of pagan Rome (Brutus, Mummius) gives way to the wonder of creation and the iron hand of George Washington. Birds and water in the next sentences seem to indicate the utopian ideals of the young American country on the morning of its birth, which is supported by the upright moral tone of the good man avoiding vice. The boy's stumble, the woman's sins, and the mud, however, indicate that this perfect project has become less than idyllic, even as the final sentence implies that those utopian ideals are still the goal (up the hill).

The strangest of all:

Again, the pastoral (mother, oxen) gives way to something darker (one man's debt and another's wealth). The turning wheel of the boy indicates the wheel of fate, a change in each character's position. Now it is the other man who is rich (possesses a large estate). The boy's fire is an omen of danger, of this John who has sinister plans that our narrator is prescient enough to uncover. Despite this knowledge, our narrator fails in his confrontation with John, and the last sentence on the price of the book -- the book you are holding in your hands as you read this, perhaps? -- indicates just how far he has fallen in the course of the narrative's unfolding.

Supposedly, of course, there is no connection between these sentences. They are grammatical exercises, meant to help the reader become comfortable with picking out the verb and its subject. But the fact that they are placed in paragraphs confuses the matter a little bit. If they were listed out, it would not feel so much like a story. But in paragraphs, you start to assume there must be an inherent connection between the scenes that unfold. Otherwise, how would you know where to put the paragraph breaks? Why not have just one long text block?

Somehow, this section on verbs gets near the heart of storytelling without realizing it. The Practical likes to think of itself as being clear and concise and rigid. Everything can be put into a box, classified and categorized and labeled to within an inch of its life. But then in the verb section, the reader is present with the following exercise:

Suddenly it is time for Victorian Mad Libs.

Verbs really are the heart of story. You can leave out almost any other part of speech -- adjectives and adverbs in particular, according to every piece of writing advice everywhere -- but you have to have the verbs, even if they're abstract and otherworldly things like think or worry or imagine. Even Victorian Mad Libs, with its collection of the world's most mundane nouns, can't protect itself from the potential of becoming either a stomach-emptying gore-fest (The dog exsanguinated on the grass) or a Proustian philosophical narrative (Time reverses swiftly) or anything else you like.

NGD Preparatory Academy, Vol. 2

In my last post I talked about grammatical gender, which is pretty straightforward even for us gender-impoverished Anglophones. Today, we enter the slightly more terrifying world of case. From the Practical:Put simply, case is the difference between the words I and me. I is in the nominative, which simply means it is the subject of a verb: I believe I can fly. Me is the objective case, which means it is the object of a verb: Fly me to the moon. To move from I --> me is to decline a noun, and declension is the complete list of forms a noun in a particular language can take.

We Anglophones are somewhat lucky that in modern English very few words are actually declined. At this point, you will be wondering why on earth I think this tiny and forgotten quirk of the language is interesting. Cases are boring, you are thinking. You are so completely wrong. Cases are the opposite of boring. They are terrifying.

What cases do* is encode the grammatical function of the word into the way it is spelled. Ancient Greek has four of them and uses them constantly. Latin, not to be outdone, has five. So the declension for the Latin word murus, which means wall, looks like this:

murus, muri, muro, murum, muro.

And in the plural:

muri, murorum, muris, muros, muris.

All these mean wall, but which one you use will depend on precisely what you are trying to say about this wall. But wait! you say. Some of those look the same! How do I know if the muri I see is a genitive singular or a nominative plural? The answer: you really don't. Context is usually helpful, but not always.

What this means: Latin will kick your ass if you look at it funny. It means that ambiguity is built right in, so each conversation or text is laced with grammatical minefields. And, my favorite part, it means that a lot of times you can take a sentence, shuffle the words around, and still make sense.

In fact, you can make a sentence that means two things at once, a sentence which contradicts itself in a clever way that you can never quite collapse into a singular idea. For instance, this first line from a poem of Catullus: Ille mi par esse deo videtur. Catullus is citing in Latin one of the most famous of Sappho's poems in Greek, and so readers in the know translate the line thus: He seems like a god to me.

But if you look at the words in strict order, you get this: He to me equal being to god seems. Note how to me and equal are close together, and how close to god is to seems. Because to me and to god are in the same case, there is no grammatical reason why this line cannot be translated as: He seems to god to be equal to me. Or even: He seems to be equal to me -- and I am a god. And if you try to resolve it by saying that me is not in the dative case (like god) but is an ablative (which would be identically spelled), then you get something else altogether: either He to my disadvantage seems equal to the gods, or He to god's disadvantage seems equal to me.

The word order in Sappho's poem is much clearer: It seems to me that he is equal to the gods. The plural gods prevents the line in Greek from the ambiguity of its Latin equivalent. Both Sappho's and Catullus' poems are about love triangles, about being so overwhelmed by the beloved that you can't even talk about her, but have to talk about the man sitting next to her at a party. Sappho's poem is a despairing sigh, but Catullus' tricksy word order embodies the struggle against the romantic rival within the grammatical structure of the line. Neither the love triangle nor the word order can be simplified or resolved.

A British study not too long ago found that Shakespeare's grammar tended to prod the human brain into a slightly more excited state, partly because it became a puzzle the brain constantly had to solve in a satisfying way. Latin poetry is like Shakespeare on steroids.

And this is just using two (or maybe three) of a modest five cases. Some languages have many more. Finnish, for instance, has fifteen of the things. For every Finnish word there are fifteen different ways to spell it, and another fifteen ways to spell the plural form. If you are inside the car, the auto, you are autossa. If you are getting out of the car, you are autosta. If you are sitting on top of the car, you are autolla, or falling off the top of the car, autolta. (The geographic specificity of many Finnish cases might explain why the Finns are so damn good at architecture. They're always thinking in terms of where something is.) The declension of the Finnish word kulta, which means either gold (the metal) or darling (the person), looks like this:

You'll notice the way the -lt- changes to -ll- sometimes for no apparent reason. This is something Finnish does just to mess with foreigners.

Be grateful, Anglophones, that all we have to think about most days is what the damn words mean.

* At least, this is what cases do in the Western languages that I have had the opportunity to study in depth. If anyone with a good working knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Thai, or anything else wants to chime in and correct me, I will be delighted.

National Grammar Day Preparatory Academy, Vol. 1

Did you know we have a National Grammar Day? It is true. It seems we have all manner of National Days lately, though I haven't yet tracked down which government office is ultimately responsible for the proliferation of Days. When I do, I fully intend to send them a card. The point is this: National Grammar Day is on March 4, and March 4 is fast approaching. Steps must be taken. Can we really expect to wallow happily in the mud of English usage for a mere twenty-four hours with no preparation? Of course not! Rash to even consider it!

With that in mind, every other day from now until National Grammar Day, I will be sharing my commentary upon tidbits from Noble Butler's A Practical and Critical Grammar of the English Language (1874). This book is dense, and coolly angry. Many footnotes take up more than half a page. It is obsessively taxonomical, and approaches English as though it were a rare and precious species of butterfly that must be thoroughly anaesthetized before being put on display in a quiet room somewhere out of direct sunlight with a shiny pin through its once-beating heart.

What fun!

Let us start with gender. Many of you are under the impression that we have no grammatical gender in English. According to the Practical, you are wrong:

I apparently have no gender, nor does my parent. Or, it seems, that sheep -- and maybe I'm the only one who finds the sequence parent-cousin-sheep-I-who a little bit hilarious. I am left wondering what the next word might be.

The Practical goes on to state that some classes of nouns "have no common gender, but only those which denote males and females." The example? Horse. Horse, it seems, is masculine, in contrast with mare. Apparently Noble Butler has never heard of either a stallion or a gelding. The Practical's advice for such nouns is either use both (brothers and sisters), circumlocute (children of the same parents), or:

Men get horses, and women get geese. Does that strike anyone else as a little unfair?

Lest you think I am reading unnecessary bias into this starchy Victorian tome, the following passage helpfully clarifies:

The upshot: speaking proper English requires having a full set of gender stereotypes in place before you even open your mouth.

Not Enough Swear Words

Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to say that my hard drive burned itself out today like a disco queen on laced cocaine. The love of my life was kind enough to loan me his computer until I can get mine resurrected or reincarnated, so at least I can keep writing and playing games on the internet -- oh, Prolific, my life's blood -- but even though very little is lost it still feels crushing and catastrophic.

I remember the first time I lost a story. It was summer, and I was about fifteen or so, and I had this whole huge fantasy teen romance based on Cinderella that I was very excited about and very carefully inscribing in a notebook. Invading kingdoms, false identities, magic wands -- it was intricate, I tell you, and I can't remember the half of it. And because I couldn't bear to leave it alone even for the space of a week, I took it with me on our yearly eastern Washington camping trip.

As part of this trip, we went to a water park in the middle of a wide stretch of desert, which wasn't quite as hedonistic as the indoor skiing area in Dubai but was as close as teenaged me was likely to get. When we returned to the car, I peeked in and thought it was strange that the backseat was covered with ice when it was so hot out. And then Mom started fretting and I realized that no, it wasn't ice -- it was the glass from the window of the car. Some very unsubtle criminal had busted in the window and taken -- well, I don't remember the details of what they took except that it included my backpack, a very expensive-looking hiker's pack they must have thought was full of God knows what. What it actually contained was my story notebook, the Everyman's Library edition of Jane Eyre, and about fifty Always brand ultra-thin feminine hygiene products with Flexi-wings (TM) that I earnestly hope they enjoyed.

And there I stood, feeling sick to my stomach, and not just because I now had to publicly announce why we needed to stop by a grocery store on the way back to camp.

The second time I lost stories, it was because a computer was stolen. By this time I was out of college and living in what may be charitably called a dump of a house in Seattle's University District. One of my housemates asked to borrow my computer to check his email when I went to bed, and I acquiesced. In the morning, I noticed it was not on the couch where he usually left it after such incidents, but I was running late to work and thought nothing of it. When it failed to reappear after a thorough search when I came home, I gave my housemate a call.

"Have you checked under the couch cushions?" he asked. As though a lost computer were the equivalent of paperclips and fuzz-covered mixed nuts. I told him no, yelled for a little while, and then called the police who were very polite when they showed up six hours later.

This was rougher than the first time: the stolen computer had contained all my undergraduate academic work as well as the just-for-fun things I'd managed to jot down along the way. (Three words: "Jane Austen's Medea.") I couldn't seem to stop crying. To this day I entertain paranoid fantasies that the girl this housemate was hooking up with at the time -- and who left for a study-abroad quarter in Berlin the very next day -- had been the one to steal it.

The third time was two years ago, when a software update automatically installed itself, froze the computer, and blitzed the hard drive when I attempted in my ignorance to reboot. Something about the fresh-faced superiority of the Apple Genius Bar can really bring the shame home like nobody's business, believe you me.

Today's computer death marks the fourth time I've lost things half-finished and tentative, and strangely it has made me both angry and energized. If fate decrees a fresh start, then damn it I'm going to fresh-start it like you've never seen it fresh-started before. I might try and rewrite the whole thing without even looking at the now-very-altered second draft of the story that's been giving me trouble. You think that's crazy? Probably -- but watch me!

See that, technology, you fickle and frustrating beast? You can slow me down, and make me cry, and make me swear in chains of curse words like the DNA of some vast and complicated chimera, but ultimately you cannot win. And if I still fail, at least I'll fail on my own terms.

The Park in Winter: A Photo Essay

Juanita Bay Park is a broad maze of wetlands and algae-shrouded boardwalks on the northeast side of Lake Washington. I used to stare longingly at the paths from the bus windows as the 255 lugged me toward graduate school and the slavery of being a teaching assistant. But time was a commodity more precious than blood, so I would sigh and return to whatever welcome or unwelcome book I was forcing myself through. It's been months since I graduated, and there have been many days with splendid weather, but even with a wide-open schedule it feels like time runs like sand through clenching fingers. All I'm left with is grit. Why is it so easy to do things when others compel us, and so hard to do things we dream for ourselves? Especially when they are a little out of the way, or rearrange the normal shape of a schedule? Finally, something in me rolled over and pointed to Thursday, February 4. This would be Juanita Bay Park Day (my inner monologue tends to rhyme and alliterate to an alarming extent). But the designated day dawned gray and lackluster, with the bored fuzzy sky that will defeat my poor little Canon digital every time. And then! At 3:00! I looked outside to see a break in the clouds had opened and pouring down from the heavens was the kind of golden, late-afternoon sunshine that's so thick you can almost taste it like honey upon the tongue.

It was gone by the time I arrived at the park, not fifteen minutes later.

There was still enough light for photographs, however, and the results have a bleakness about them that I find quite striking -- as though you could take Dust Bowl-era Dorothea Lange-type portraits of plant life in a wetland park. (But without the talent and scathing social commentary.) And the diffuse light helped me figure out the quirks of this camera a little bit more -- like the way the macro setting and the manual focus can be combined to get a texture I've been trying to achieve for months. And so I have to wonder: how much of the struggle to physically drag myself to the park, and the wrestling match between my equipment and the indifferent cloud cover of a dying day, came through in the photos that resulted? Would better weather have made me a lazier photographer? I suspect so.

Once spring gets a little more sprung, I'll head back and find out.

Monsters of the Brain

Preschool me wanted to be an archaeologist because it was the longest word I could spell and dinosaurs were awesome. They had long necks! Feathers! Sharp teeth! Scaly skin! These were huge real-life monsters, totally unlike the tame dogs, cats, birds, and insects that were the only animals I saw on a daily basis in my suburban neighborhood. They had fancy Latin names that meant wonderful things: thunder lizard, tyrant king, swift stealer, bird lookalike. I read every dinosaur book I could get my hands on.

I was not yet twelve when the alchemy of Jurassic Park turned the lead of my curiosity into pure 24-carat terror. Even I knew this was crazy: Veliciraptors are all dead, I told myself repeatedly. Velociraptors are all dead, everywhere. It did not help.

The mystery was only solved years later when I was cleaning my bedroom and came across a forgotten book from my childhood: How to Keep Dinosaurs. There were convincing illustrations of people with dinosaurs as pets, as vermin, as cattle, as transportation. The details were impressively realistic: when riding an ornithomimus, the walk and canter gaits are quite pleasant, but the trot is a bone-jarring nightmare. The riders wore those black felt dressage hats and jodhpurs. And yes, there were velociraptors in there.

I had read this book hundreds of times.

I'd been conned by my own brain.

All the time I was reading the nonfiction dinosaur books and then going back to this fictionalized dinosaur book. The contradictions had never been resolved: instead, I had kept two stories going in my head, the one where dinosaurs lived millions of years ago in prehistoric jungles, and the one where you kept a Triceratops in a paddock out back. This second story was a secret I'd kept from myself until one measly action flick gave it a poke and sent it scurrying into the light.

Fiction could mess with the world. I am still getting over the shock.

Dixitque Alicia fiat blog . . .

. . . et facta est blog. Which is to say: And Alicia said let a blog come forth, and indeed a blog came forth.

And so now you know the unsounded depths and vertiginous heights of my egotism.

But really I just cannot resist any excuse for a good Latin quotation.