Clerksville Again

I have returned from San Diego, where even the bad weather is still better than what 99 percent of the country has. I was mistaken for a stewardess, neary hit by a car, and spent entirely too much money shopping at Horton Plaza. All in all, it was good. I didn't have my laptop, so most of the generous outpouring of advice will have to be put aside for use the next time I am in town. The fleabag hotel was very noisy, but otherwise much better than most places I stay when I travel abroad, so it was not the problem it might have been.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be writers

The author of the short story that became the amazing film Secretary is essentially broke. I don't know what's sadder: her plight, or that a famous chick-lit writer wasn't aware that critical acclaim is no good substitute for sales. (h/t Bookslut)

Law Prof Blogging

I would find the recent 40% increase in law prof bloggers more impressive if nearly ten percent of it could not be attributed to the establishment of one blog, on which not all professors post regularly.

HLS Students Shore Up Their Egos After Being Rejected From YLS

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, I note that HLS students, by a narrow margin, ranked Harvard as the nation's best law school. Best at what was not made plain. I'd be interested in breaking down this data by undergraduate institution. There's nothing more bitter than a Yale undergraduate rejected by his alma mater and forced to migrate to Cambridge for law school.

Back to the Beach

As I mentioned previously, I'm going to be in San Diego from Wednesday night through Friday morning. I'm staying downtown near the gaslight district in what may be the worst fleabag hotel in America, judging from the Yahoo Travel reviews. If anyone knows of fun things to do in the evenings near this part of San Diego, I'm open to suggestions. If you all remain silent I will end up laying in my nasty room rereading A Song of Ice and Fire in preparation for A Feast For Crows, and that could be done anywhere.

Best web marketing feature ever.

Anthropologie's Shop By Size feature is the best idea to hit online shopping since the 1-Click Order. How many times have you surfed through a surfeit of hideous fashion don'ts to find a discounted yet adorable garment, checked out the high-resolution photo, examined the available colors, and then added it to your shopping bag, only to be cruelly taunted with a declaration that it's not available in your size? Okay, maybe that's just me.

Being Parental

I thought this was a really interesting post on childishness in romantic relationships. I don't have any personal experience with this, but I can relate to the challenge of trying to break bad models of interaction.

Online Defamation Flap

Wow. Who comes out looking good from this mess? Nobody.

More here and here.

Addendum: am I the only legally trained person for whom reading "debates" about legal issues between engineers and humanities professors is like the screech of fingernails on a chalkboard?

Your Favorite Movie Sucks

I have idiosyncratic taste in film, as anyone who's had to listen to me sing the praises of Nate & Hayes will attest. But ever so often, I appall someone not with my odd ideas of the good but with my failure to appreciate movies they think are great. A short and incomplete list of movies I can't stand:

Braveheart: Sappy love story, nasty torture, and pasty white behinds. Yelling "freeeedom" is not a deeply moving political statement. I prefer Rob Roy.

Life is Beautiful: Roberto Benigni's performance is a travesty, although the scene where he rides in on the painted horse is very well composed.

Forrest Gump: glorification of stupidity and Boomer nostalgia elevated to toxic levels. Ugh.

Notorious: I've tried to watch it twice, and both times it's bored me to sleep.

Grease: I hate almost all musicals, and 1970s musicals associated with John Travolta especially.

The Producers: this is not funny. I saw a theatrical production of it and that wasn't funny either. Well, maybe the sequence with the showgirls wearing giant sausage headdresses, but I don't think that's in the movie.

Magnolia: would have been great with half the characters. And if we had drawn and quartered Julianne Moore's character for being such an insufferable psycho hose beast.

Almost Famous: Cameron Crowe should not be allowed near a film set for the rest of his natural life. After the reviews for Elizabethtown, this may become a reality. Kate Hudson may be thought pretty by some, but she cannot act and looks like a space alien mated with a kewpie doll. The sole redeeming features in this movie are Frances McDormand, who is always good, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is a living god (when are the Clerksville theaters going to get Capote, blast it all?).

2001: I think you have to be on drugs to appreciate it in its entirety. I don't have ADD, but this movie makes me think I do.

Saving Private Ryan: I have enough residual Objectivist tendencies to find this movie's sense of life appalling. It forces the viewer to identify chiefly with a coward. It has the hobbit-like Matt Damon. The framing device is ham-handed in the extreme. And then there's Tom Hanks. I hate Tom Hanks. I did like Philadelphia, but that may only be because he died.

You are welcome to excoriate me or to add your own Two Minutes Movie Hate in the comments.

UPDATE: Thanks to Timothy Sandefur for the link. I never saw The English Patient, but I had an Elaine-like reaction to the book.

The comments section is yielding plenty of examples of terrible movies most people lionize: The Green Mile (awkwardly obvious Christian allegory), Sideways (although it does have a better depiction of explosive female violence than either volume of Kill Bill), and Shakespeare in Love (sorry, cd, but Joseph Fiennes has a gerbil's face and I can't stand Fishstick Paltrow as a romantic lead). SiL has some great supporting players, though, and I admit grudgingly that Springtime for Hitler can be a funny song.

Can Garner Save Us?

Death in the Afternoon finds legal writing frustrating. (h/t Mansfield Fox) I'm not much for the stuff myself. The legal writing class at HLS only required a couple of memos and one brief (and a collage). My summer firm job didn't demand much in the way of writing either. I've done more writing in the last two months than three years of HLS classes required, if you leave out the 3L paper, which was more of the academic writing genre than the legal writing one. I need to break out the Garner and buckle down.

Unrelatedly: JMPP notes that Amazon is selling everything Star Trek for $2,499.99.

Weekend Text-Only Cat Blog

I spent the greater part of this weekend in an epic battle with the Headache from the Black Lagoon, and what little remains of it will almost certainly be consumed by some work I brought home, but there's always time for cat torture.

Snape and Lily are remarkably hydrophilic felines; Lily practically tries to get in the shower with you (she likes to lick the water off the tiles) and Snape has been getting regular baths since I brought him home, since he has puffy fur and a penchant for getting messier than a conventional tongue bath can handle. All the same, they seem to feel like baths require some token effort at escape, lest they lose some kitty pride. Fortunately, they seem to draw the line at using claws and don't hold a grudge for long: thus the slightly damp but purring tom currently impeding my memo writing.

On another note entirely: The Time Traveler's Wife bites. I should have known when I saw the "Today Show Book Club" logo that I'd be underwhelmed. On to Philip Roth.

Remember, remember

It's Guy Fawkes Day. This movie was supposed to have been released today, but it was shelved. Alas.

Unrelated poem with the title "Remember." A better C. Rossetti sonnet. Art by Dante G. Rossetti.

Swearing

I am not entirely certain about how this swearing-in thing for the bar will work (assuming that I passed, which I won't find out for another 13 days). The bar provides a list of people who can swear you in, but no other information. It says "officials in the state of California"; does this mean I will have to make a second trip to Cali (since I am going there next week for an interview) to take the oath? Is there any way I can avoid this expense?

Unrelatedly, all you haters of Texas-style BBQ should read this.

I hadn't imagined that barbecue this good existed. Have you been to southern France, trying obscure Michelin two-fork restaurants? The simplest dishes, such as roast chicken, or cassoulet, blow you away and you swear never to eat again in the outrageously priced starred restaurants? This was a comparable experience. ...

All other barbecue will now taste worse.

50 Book Challenge #60: Inside Job

Connie Willis treads a fine line between the cooler prose style of a LeGuin or an Atwood and the wackier and more rollicking style of an Ellison. Her books often deal with time travel (see, e.g., Doomsday Book, an excellent bit of historical fiction with time travel that omits silly boinking interludes).

Inside Job has only a slight element of the fantastic. Set in modern Los Angeles, it centers around Rob, a professional skeptic and his former-starlet assistant, who typically spend their days debunking charlatans in the name of science and truth. They are faced with what appears to be the ghost of H.L. Mencken and the choice between acknowledging a real spirit manifestation or furthering the broader goal of discrediting irrational nonsense. Willis's solution to the dilemma was neat but to my mind ultimately unsatisfying. For a scientific type, Rob was remarkably incurious about the implications of a real spirit, beyond its effect on his mission as a skeptic.

Estrogen = Hot?

I confess to being a bit embarrassed not to be able to figure this out, but if female attractiveness varies along a spectrum in tandem with estrogen levels, what's the effect of artificial hormones from birth control pills? Do pill takers have the same face all month, and if so is it the sexy fertile face or the unsexy infertile face? Of course, according to the article you could just wear makeup and have the cyclical differences disappear.

More here.

50 Book Challenge #59: Outlander

First of all, anyone who tells you this is historical fiction or SF/fantasy is lying. I read this book because I heard it was a borderline case, and because historical fiction with a hint of romance can be quite delightful (have I mentioned yet that I have a crush on Richard III?). But there's a lot of boinking in Outlander, enough to put it firmly in romance novel territory, although to be fair it's decorously written.

My quibble (aside from the one-time use of "least common denominator" by an 18th C. highlander, which may or may not be anachronistic but was at least awkward) was the sudden, unbelievable decision by Claire to abandon attempts at return to her own time and stay with her new husband. I'm sure furry Scots are quite appealing to some, but after waiting for her own husband's return from war for years, her choice seemed abrupt and even out of character.

Whedonfest!

Good.

Better.

Best.

Ovary Blog

I am the number one Google hit for "Ovary Blog." On that note, some reproductive health links:

- According to the New England Journal of Medicine, there's apparently no scientific evidence that emergency contraception interferes with implantation in humans. That's news to me, but it makes these people looks even worse.

- Who Gets Abortions? A comprehensive report is available here (summary; link to PDF here).

- Is abortion bad for women's mental health? A recent study says no. (Previous post on similar studies here.)

Mo to the D'oh

I already posted once about Maureen Dowd's latest lament on her single status, but now that my flare of disgust at Dowd's temerity in comparing herself to the incandescent Dorothy Parker has faded, I can take aim at the more substantive weaknesses of the piece, albeit in ranty fashion. (However, I will note that Ms. Parker was lonelier and less successful at love than Dowd, but she neither had the 1960s to blame nor allowed her heartache to get in the way of putting out incisive and witty writing. Dowd, by contrast, is a historically illiterate bore.)

Dowd's piece is superficially appealing, especially to the sort of highly educated single woman who's likely to read the New York Times for advice about her love life. It lays out a persuasive story that allows the reader to bask in the knowledge that she's been inexorably borne along the currents of twentieth century sexual revolution. None of the romantic disappointments we suffer are our own fault; even if we have become complacent in our enjoyment of the partial successes of women's liberation and failed to require more from men than acknowledgment of our legal equality, we are not to blame. No, Maureen Dowd, noted evolutionary psychologist, swoops in to save us with the knowledge that men's stubborn refusal to engage in relationships with their mental, social, and professional equals is hard wired. Something in the genes makes them gravitate toward non-threatening pink collar types who will never threaten their financial or intellectual supremacy, who will fulfill their fantasies of manly dominance by taking part in the economic equivalent of foot binding. What is a modern girl (note the infantilizing terminology) to do?

Beneficiary of the efforts of scruffy, unladylike feminists she derides with all the venom of an Ann Coulter, Dowd laments her failure to connect with antediluvian men who find her success and power threatening instead of celebrating her opportunities and scorning those who would find her sexier if she were weak. Unable to tear herself away from her high status job, but apparently unwilling to expand her dating circle beyond an incestuous Manhattan crowd (there's no talk here of dating down; Dowd ferociously embraces the gender stereotypes whose inverse numbers keep her alone and unwanted), she yearns for a simpler time, when somehow our culture was rife with crackling, sexy images of romances between equals even though men and women weren't equal at all.

Once she's singled out the sexual revolution as the reason she can't find a man, Dowd assembles a catalog of examples of retrogression as proof that we must shift inexorably back toward a less equal state of affairs, lest romantic love go the way of the men's platform shoe. She digs up a few sneaky New York women who admit to manipulating their men into thinking that they are the ones doing the chasing. There's also a brief attack on going Dutch; apparently equal pay for equal work can stay, but men should still pick up the dinner tab. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic: women who make good salaries pretending to only have a bit of pin money so their dates can feel like good providers. "Paying is like opening a car door. It's nice." But what do these women do that's nice for their men? Is the mere act of gracing a man with your feminine presence supposed to be worth all this cash? If the reciprocal niceness involves puffing up the male ego with simulated weakness, all of these tricksy, false femmes may be in for a shock when they settle down in Stepford with Mr. Right.

Instead of challenging the dominant social paradigms like those nasty bra-burners who didn't wear makeup, Dowd argues for preservation and reinstitution of the "dating ritual," even if that means women perform an elaborate, deceitful Kabuki dance in order to procure a mate. Any impediment to romantic bliss (men's tendency to wed younger, nonthreatening women, a failure to commit) is viewed as inescapable biological destiny, not a socially constructed interlocking set of roles.

Dowd's evidence is impressive at first glance; she puts forth several examples of phenomena in support of her thesis that strong, smart women must degrade themselves for love. Unfortunately, many of these references are drastically oversimplified or have been comprehensively debunked. The British IQ study she cites looked at women of the WWII generation, if I recall; bluestockings do rather better these days. Similarly, her use of the recent article on Yale women becoming homemakers should be amusing to anyone who witnessed the vicious online dissection of its weaknesses. To claim that women are changing their names in greater numbers because they want to appeal to men with a taste for subjugation is interesting, but correlation does not prove causation.

It's hard to take Dowd seriously when she castigates young women for all being pretty in the same way and not caring about women's rights, but wants us to embrace the cultural trappings of yesteryear and the lying romantic strategies that our grandmothers used to trap a man into marriage. Does she really think we can put on the masks of the old power structure with no effects on the propensity of women to submit to male authority? Maybe Dowd can play roles with ease (she seems to advocate it in day-to-day male/female relations), but I fear that not everyone can, and that fewer still will distinguish between feigned male supremacy in romance and actual male supremacy in other spheres.

I'm sorry that Maureen Dowd hasn't yet found a man, but she's just another in a long line of doom-sayers. Isn't the old news chestnut, "if it bleeds, it leads?" Certainly the death of romance and the demise of hope for an entire generation of female readers will sell papers. Dowd's disjointed lament is the most-emailed article on the NY Times's website today. But extrapolating the experience of one self important and (if I may say) rather personally unappealing woman onto an entire class of American women is probably a bit much. (Women of a certain age must typically choose to maximize the appearance of one of two features: ass or face. Dowd has chosen ass.)

Like Dowd, I like being pretty. But I don't hate myself enough to pretend to be helpless, impoverished, and weak to get men to fall for me. All you get from that is a man who only wants you as long as he has someone to lord over. Love shouldn't keep you small.

"If all the girls at Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."

Dorothy Parker would have thrown a drink at Maureen Dowd. Perhaps not, though -- what a waste of a good drink.

More here.