Book Review: Dear Committee Members, Kindly Go Fuck Yourselves

Dear Readers,

I hope this missive finds you in "fighting form," rather than in the usual post-holiday sunburnt torpor, and eagerly awaiting my recommendation for your final summer read. (Ha!)  I acquiesce to the clamouring demand for my venerable opinion and with suitably false humility suggest via this LOR that you slurp up "Dear Committee Members" by Julie Schumacher as your last beach treat of the season.  It will go down as easily and quickly as a popsicle melting in the August heat.  You will find its taste more tart than sweet—definitely a tangy lime rather than a syrupy strawberry—with a bitter finish akin to licking the drips from your hand and finding they taste like acrid sunscreen and salty sweat.

This tidy tome comprises a representative sample of a year's worth of correspondence (entirely one-sided) from a tenured professor of creative writing and English at the not-subtly-but-nonetheless-aptly named Payne University, a second-tier school in the Midwest that is tottering on the threshold of tumbling into the third tier, despite its best efforts to attract students by the addition of yoga studios, climbing walls, and rampant grade inflation.

It seems trite to call our prolific letter writer curmudgeonly but the term is a perfect fit.  He is inopportunely implored to write LORs for students, faculty, and staff when they apply for jobs, grad school admissions, scholarships, and myriad other opportunities to advance their careers or avoid homelessness.  His charming quirk is that rather than say no when he cannot in good conscious write a positive recommendation, he simply writes a sardonic one.  This practice occasionally backfires on him, such as when he is eager to get rid of his department's rude and unhelpful IT specialist but his honest LORs preclude the fellow being hired away.

Not limiting himself to a cheerfully blunt assessment of his subject's shortcomings, he adds fulsome commentary on the potential employer, the job, and the remuneration offered.  When he has exhausted those topics, he launches into scathing indictments of the state of the humanities.  For anyone even tangentially affiliated with academia today, his withering denunciations will resonate.

"Sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet's surface."

On sending a student to mental health services: "Please offer her something more lasting and substantial than guided breathing or twenty minutes with a golden retriever."

Larded onto a LOR for a former student who wishes to enter a seminary: "Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved as many foundering souls as a belief in god."

"Mr. Napp demonstrates all the winsome ebullience one expects these days from a young person more inclined to socialise with machines."

"Deny him this fellowship and he will undoubtedly turn his hand to something more lucrative, probably hawking illegal substances between the athletic facilities and the Pizza Barn."

"May the bump in salary allow her to avoid scurvy by adding fruit to her diet once a week."

The key to our professor's caustic snark is tenure.  He is able to say with impunity what others can only think privately or whinge about whilst nursing a beer with friends between adjunct gigs.

The one weakness in the book is its reliance on the professor's misbegotten love life as fodder for much of its humour and poignancy.  If his divorces, dalliances, and affairs had been less predictable, his epistolary musings may have been less cringe-inducing.  But the plight of the self-absorbed writer who dissolves into middle-aged bitterness and self-pity when he realises the limits of his talents has been done to death.  Of course women leave him once they see the man behind the curtain and his flagellations appear self-serving and passive-aggressive.  His attempts to make nice with his exes in an it's-all-water-under-the-bridge manner are undercut by the obvious insincerity of his apologies.

But the pleasures of the cutting sarcasm and shameless snark in his correspondence more than compensate for any shortcomings.

I will leave you with this excerpt from his response to a request to serve as department chair:

"…the upper echelons of the administration justifiably detest me; because my colleagues view me as a cantankerous pariah; and because, given my stance on several university-wide issues, I would consider the position a significant ethical and even spiritual compromise."

Acerbically,
Your Anonymous Blogger Who Doesn't Have Tenure

Book Review: Much Ado About Spanking

Sex with Shakespeare

By Jillian Keenan (New York: Harper Collins, 2016)

"What you blush to tell….is the most important part of the whole matter."  Ars Amatoria

"If love be rough with you, be rough with love." Romeo & Juliet

Full disclosure: I checked this book out of the library because of its title.  I figured, it could be awful but, with that title, I had to give it a chance.

It got off to a bad start: I was annoyed by the author's trigger warning -- until I read her snarky send-up of the concept.

The book starts, implausibly, in Oman, where the author is taking a gap year from Stanford to find herself, although, at first, she thinks she is there to escape herself.  Until she finds herself face-to-face with a goat, as one does, and thinks: "If I were going to walk by myself, at night, into the middle of the desert, wearing cartoon duck pajamas and an abaya, just to scream the name of one of Shakespeare's least lovable male characters, it might as well be on the same day that I tried to find spanking porn in an Islamic public Internet café. Go big or go home, right?" (pp. 6-7)

Keenan is an insightful and observant scholar of Shakespeare, with a unique take on his work.  She captures the evergreen appeal of the Bard: the sensuality in the rhythm of his words.  "Wordplay is sex play" (p. 77) is my mantra, which could explain why I like Shakespeare.  But this book isn't really about Shakespeare; it's about coming to terms with having a fetish.

The term "fetish" is often used loosely to mean anything you like, even in a non-sexual way.  For example, I like magazines and subscribe to an obscene number of them, so I joke that I have a "magazine fetish".  But a true fetish is something its victim cannot get off without.  It is not a part of their sexuality; it displaces their sexuality, and Keenan worried it might disrupt intimacy in other ways, too: "My fetish makes gender irrelevant.  It makes conventional physical attractiveness irrelevant.  It makes even sex irrelevant.  Does it make love irrelevant, too?" (p. 276)  She does a stark and sobering job of explaining how a fetish is not a choice, it is an obsession.  There is nothing casual about a fetish and it is extremely limiting.  Fetishes are generally a turn-off for those who do not share them.  The Internet has enabled the author to find fellow fetishists, and willing partners to indulge her kink, but absent the Internet she could have been suicidally-depressed or celibate.  It sounds funny that she needs to be spanked, but it isn't humorous to her.  I am guilty of using the term "fetish" as loosely as anyone but I am grateful not to have any true fetishes, nor would I wish one on anyone.

Keenan's fetish troubled her because of its anti-feminist connotations and connections to domestic violence.  The book chronicles her coming to terms, and finding partners, including, eventually, a husband, who indulge her kink.  Fetishes are not usually reciprocal; she had no use for a partner who also liked being spanked.  She needed to find people who liked to spank and who were otherwise suitable partners.  It's hard enough to find someone compatible without the added complication of a fetish.  She could not be happy with a great guy who was perfect in every way but took no pleasure in applying her hairbrush to her behind, nor with a jerk who was great with a paddle.

Keenan never fully psychoanalyses where her fetish originates.  She avoids pointing the finger at her volatile, physically and emotionally abusive mother.  ("I had understood ever since I was nine….that I wasn't entitled to anything." p. 200)  She poignantly opines that we learn how to love from observing our parents – something she was unable to do.  She seeks love in the normal way that is simply part of human nature ("Love is dangerous, but I think that's how love has to be sometimes.  Love is a miracle." p. 152), but she needs her kink catered to because it is "the only thing that could free me from the confines of my neurotic, self-conscious, insecure mind and release me into my body" (p. 77).  If I could apply a little amateur psychoanalysis to her, I'd note that people who are into BDSM often have something in their past that has caused them to disconnect to survive.  They have difficulty with feelings because they have become so good at blocking them out for self-protection.  Pain is the one thing that breaks through.  This is why people cut themselves.  (If you've seen the movie Secretary you know that the main character is scarred from cutting herself.)  "Pain is not the opposite of pleasure.  The opposite of pleasure is numbness." (p. 102)  BDSM is self-medication; it's a coping strategy.

I used to write an advice column in the persona of a dominatrix.  It was just a lark but I received genuine pleas for advice from people like Keenan, who wanted to hurt themselves or who wanted other people to hurt them.  I made myself despised in the BDSM world because, whilst these people wanted to know how to find someone who would tie them up & carve knife art into their backs, I advised them to seek therapy to deal with the underlying issues.  The mentality in the BDSM world is that you can't control what turns you on; it's formed in early childhood and it's fixed and immutable by adulthood, and therapy doesn't always work so it's as healthy a coping mechanism as any.  I don't agree that it's always healthy.  I'm open to being proven wrong, and I don't see anything unhealthy about indulging in the lighter end of the BDSM spectrum with your partner if it appeals to both of you (I've applied my hand to someone's ass on a few occasions – it makes a satisfying sound when you do it right), but I don't think self-medicating with hardcore BDSM is any healthier than using drugs or alcohol for the same purpose.

This book is about the author's journey to acceptance of her fetish, and how Shakespeare helped.  She starts off with the obvious point that we can't view Shakespeare's plays through the lens of modern sensibilities.  Demetrius telling Helena she is foolish to risk her honour by meeting him alone is a rape threat; Oberon giving Titania the potion to make her fall for Bottom ("of course that's his name" p. 23) is tantamount to using a date rape drug.  (Just imagine applying this same exercise to opera – Tristan and Isolde would fill a book on its own.)

Keenan sees a solution to the problem of consent in Shakespeare: What if the characters are kinky?  What if Helena isn't pathetic and self-debasing, but a sexual masochist?  What if, given their lack of power, Shakespeare's women are topping from the bottom – e.g., What if Kate's shrewishness is a deliberate protection from her father marrying her off against her will?  "Characters," she notes, "are like clouds: we all see different animals hidden in them." (p. 21)

Using Shakespeare as a medium to work through her issues was a brilliant move.  She stumbled on it after a few false starts: "When beginning to explore a divergent sexual identity, do not turn to French cinema." (p. 38)  Good advice.  But why no Much Ado amongst the featured plays?  You could hardly pick a more appropriate one for expounding on honour, shaming, and issues of dominance/submission between the sexes.  Beatrice, to no-one's surprise, is my favourite Shakespearean character and the delicious wordplay of her sparring with Benedick is perfect for this.

As I said, I am grateful not to suffer the limitations of any fetish (no, ice cream doesn't count).  The closest I came to observing one was back when City Boy and I attended play parties.  We were monogamous, so we went for the voyeurism and exhibitionism, not to interact with anyone.  But I dressed as a dom and one night a young Australian man asked if he could lick my boots.  I consented, and quickly regretted it.  He knelt at my feet and licked with a cringe-inducing self-debasement, paying special attention to the soles.  Considering this was NYC, and I'd taken the subway there, I found this nauseating.  He did this for a long time, clearly getting off on it, whilst I remained transfixed in fascinated horror.  City Boy, missing my obvious disgust, accused me of enjoying it but I would have had no qualms about admitting it if I had.  Owning up to enjoying a dominant role is generally easier than admitting to submissive tendencies; except in extreme form, it doesn't carry the same baggage, as Keenan discovered.  I don't have a submissive bone in my body but, had I any submissive tendencies, I'd face the same feminist barriers to admitting them as the author and I doubt I'd have her courage to go public.

There are few things less appealing than other people's fetishes but, if "Sex with Shakespeare" is any guide, that does not necessarily apply to books about fetishes.  I recommend this one to Shakespearean scholars and to anyone exploring their sexuality.  Even if you don't have a specific fetish like Keenan, it takes a great deal of vulnerability, of courage to risk rejection and ridicule, to share what turns you on.  You can't achieve true intimacy without vulnerability so some people simply live without it.  The author stood up to her fears -- or, should I say, bent over – it stung a bit and raised a few welts of self-doubt, but she wound up rosy-cheeked and happy in the end. 

Book Review: Year of No Sugar by Eve Schaub

Eve Schaub and I have a lot in common. We are both 40-something writers who have adopted Vermont as our physical and spiritual home.  Seduced by the New England small town and rural aesthetic, we know our way around a farmers' market and can wax rhapsodic on the virtues of local, seasonal, and organic everything.  We were both lapsed vegetarians, albeit for me only briefly, a transformation in attitude occasioned by the availability in areas like ours of locally and humanely raised meat. For vacation we'd both go back to Tuscany before we'd go anywhere else. Finally, and most relevant here, we both became aghast at the insane amounts of sugar in American food and attempted to wrest some control of the volume of sugar in our diets from multinational corporations and well-meaning bake sale vendors.

For Ms Schaub, her sugar epiphany was catalysed by a video on the evils of sugar. Whilst far from being ignorant about healthy eating, she experienced a dawning horror at the amount of sugar her family, particularly her two daughters, was mindlessly consuming despite her avoidance of fast food and obviously empty calories such as soda.  Avoiding sugar entirely seemed impossible but, not being one to shy away from a challenge, that is exactly what she set out to do, for an entire year, with her family joining her.

Predictably, there were tears from her children, but her husband, leery of radical diets from having grown up with a father who experimented with bizarre dietary extremes, was surprisingly game. Her book chronicles the setting and enforcing of the no-sugar rules for the year, which budgeted for monthly treats, a "birthday party rule" that allowed the girls to make their own choices about what to eat when they were away from home and their peers were eating sugar, and a personal exception for each family member – the one form of sugar they could not live without for a year. The difficulties of shopping, dining out, eating at someone else's house, negotiating holidays like Halloween and Xmas, are all described with unvarnished candour.

They made mistakes, especially in the first few months, not realising, for example, that balsamic vinegar contained sugar.  I think my favourite mistake was when they bought their daughters some strawberries and plain yoghurt for an afternoon snack in Florence only to discover the yoghurt was actually whipped cream. I bet the girls were in heaven. Some recipes adapted to be made with dextrose (an allowed form of sugar in her experiment) were a success but others failed to gel, literally. As an appendix, Ms Schaub lists recipes that are sugar-free as well as recipes for their monthly sugary treat.  The latter I found a bit odd as recipes with copious amounts of sugar are, to put it mildy, not difficult to find and somewhat at odds with the tenor of the book.  But I understand that readers might be curious about them, considering how evocatively she describes their monthly sugar mirage, and how carefully they selected their most beloved family recipes as treats.

Another thing Ms Schaub does not sugarcoat (sorry—I was going to have to use it at some point, so best we get it out of the way) is her children's reactions.  But it is clear that neither girl will have cause to look back on it as the Year from Hell.  The number of exceptions, the sweet but sugar-free treats made from dextrose and fruit, and their opportunity to eat sugar at school if they so chose, hardly made it a literal year without sugar.  The scary thing, as Ms Schaub notes, is how much less this still notable amount of sugar was compared to a typical year, let alone a typical American child's diet.  Remember, these were kids who had a mom that bakes bread and who had never set foot in a fast food restaurant, so their sugar consumption was already far below the norm. The most striking point, which the author emphasises repeatedly, is that the girls adjusted in many respects more easily than the adults because they had less time on earth to become addicted to sugar.  At five, the youngest was the quickest of the entire family to adapt, and by the end of the year the palates of the entire family had changed to such an extent that they willingly chose to eat less sugar even when it was allowed. 

In addition to the gradual alteration of their palates, another point the book makes is how the process of avoiding sugar in 21^st century America exacts a mental toll due to the vigilance necessary to police the sugar content in every morsel that drops into our shopping carts or passes our lips.  As consumers in America, we have more nutritional privilege, more choice, than people virtually anywhere else on the planet, but that illusion of choice evaporates when faced with an entire aisle of cereals or sauces all of which contain some form of sugar.  Skipping dessert, as Ms Schaub explains trenchantly, does not cut it. Go to a cookout steeling yourself to resist the s'mores and find that the buns, dogs, condiments, side dishes, even the chips, all contain hidden sugar – and the only drinks without real sugar contain poisonous artificial sweetener, which is worse.  Any event of significance, from major holidays to ostensibly healthy occasions like a 10K fundraising run, is accompanied by vast amounts of sugar.  Avoiding it requires superhuman will power or complete social isolation.  During her family's year of no sugar, they employed both of those tactics, along with the aforementioned judicious exceptions to make holidays and birthdays bearable.

I have taken a far more moderate approach to the sugar problem–there was never any possibility of me having the will power to give up sugar entirely, let alone when on holiday in Florence, surrounded by gelato–but I experience this same frustration and horror at sugar, sugar everywhere.  When I picked up the book, I knew exactly how the author was going to react when she started looking for the hidden sugar in everything because I have been there, and continue to rage impotently against the purveyors of sugar.  I, too, peruse labels and cook and bake from scratch. That is simply a necessity. I wish I did not have to. It would be nice to stop for an ice cream with friends or enjoy a cookie in a coffeehouse that did not contain ten times the amount of sugar necessary.  Also, as Ms Schaub notes, making everything is time-consuming. I prefer baked goods and ice cream with much less sugar than in purchased varieties but it is not practical to always bake or make my own ice cream.

But the more prepared foods you eat, the more sugar you ingest, and any food, whether it contains sugar or not, is more satisfying when it is homemade.  The ultimate lesson of her book is not just about avoiding sugar for health reasons but about appreciating food. Mindless eating is invariably less healthy than cooking local, seasonal, organic, fresh ingredients from scratch. Kids, she notes at the end of her missive, are inherently aware of this. They will take homemade bread over store-bought cake. Children know, she concludes, what is special. That sense is something we have lost in the world of corporate food where sugar is used as a drug to stimulate unhealthy consumption and addiction. It is less will power than an appreciation for real food that may save us.