Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? (and other natter)

Two more days to bid on books!
The Silent Auction for charity has only two more days to go! The signed first editions are at $50 (a total steal!) and the animal mysteries are up to $40. Bid, bid, bid!

Edward II
Thank you to everyone who liked Edward II in 15 minutes. I had no idea that parodying an obscure play would be so popular. (Y'all are only encouraging me to do the same for Two Noble Kinsmen, I'm warning you...)

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is
The love affair with the atomic watch is rapidly cooling off. It didn't adjust itself when I took it into a new time zone, and now one of the pins holding the wristband together - always loose and pulling out - has completely disappeared while I had it in my fair basket. So the atomic wristwatch has become a clunky pocket watch... and as I slowly get used to having bare wrists, I wonder if I want to just up and get a pocket watch once and for all.

(Mind you, this started out as a perfectly reasonable Amazon and ebay search, which has devloved into going "Oooo, shiney!" over a bunch of antique Elgin watches that appear to have been the digitals of their day.)

Of Chicks and Lit

Men. Hanging onto (or bettering) your place in the pecking order. Family. Fulfilling social expectations vs your own dreams. Love. Reputation.

How do these themes end up being so fantastic when they're handled by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Edith Wharton, and so damned annoying when they're being flung around by modern authors? I want to like chick lit. Books like Trading Up, Lipstick Jungle, Admissions and the ilk keep catching my eye. But then I pick up the latest in buzzworded bestsellers (The Jane Austen Book Club, The Devil Wore Prada, Elegance) and it's usually a matter of minutes before I'm clawing at my eyes.

Even when I do like the book, it seems so much weaker than its older counterparts. I enjoyed The Right Address for example, but that skinny little story of a non-Manhattanite trying to break into the ranks of New York society is but a footnote to The Custom of the Country. (Much less Rebecca, which it is extremely loosely based on.)

Part of it, I think, is changing social expectations. It's one thing for Mrs. Bennet to fluster about her daughters being married off; that made a direct impact on their ability to survive. Whereas the women who fluster through more modern novels fluster about marriage for reasons I can't fathom. They seem to see men as designer shoes; a must-have accessory and an item checked off the life list. (This being a major reason why, when I read modern chick lit, I try to get one of the work or family focused plots. I'm sorry, "I'm 29 and I don't got no may-un!" just doesn't rank up there with "when Daddy dies, I starve without a husband" as motivation for matrimony.)

But part of it is also changing social expectations for women ourselves. I was idly googling "chick lit book club" and hit this horrific example which lists a "chick's" best friends as including "Jimmy Choo" and her sworn enemies as "Mary Wollstonecraft, and Stella (who refuses to share her famous groove)."

The old chick lit of centuries gone by was pretty female-positive. Think about it. Liza Bennet and Elinor Dashwood might have been constrained by social station and poverty, but they still kept their heads and their senses of self-worth and never gave up control over their own fates. Undine Spragg (who is basically Carrie Meeber with a brain and ambition - Sister Carrie and The Custom of the Country are essentially the same book, except one woman is stupid and passive and one is intellgent and active) mows down her opposition like a tank in a Worth evening gown.

None of these women would whine about not being handed someone else's groove, or consider a feminist a "sworn enemy." All of them would be quick and withering if presented with someone billing their club as being "where all the cool girls are." Indeed, Margaret Dashwood is presented as being quite foolish for pinning her hopes on nothing but love, while Lydia Bennet's light manhunting left the reader with no doubt that it was the STUPIDEST thing anyone could ever do.

So when did ticking "rock, ring, white dress" take precedence over assessing "I can live with this person for the rest of my life; we are sympatico"? When did designers - MALE designers yet! - become better friends to women than intelligent women?

ETA - If I can put my hands on the "Emma Principle," I think I'll be able to put a name to my angst over modern chick lit. Emma is a novel that is so chick it practically cheeps and pecks - the heroine does *nothing* in the book except fuss over what people think of her and play matchmaker. And yet there's something charming and readable and rereadable about it, and about The Matchmaker/Hello Dolly, its literary daughter. What is that certain something that is missing from its modern descendants?

(Well, there's humor instead of bitchiness for one thing, and an utter disregard for current fashion in favor of discussing human character. Hmmmm...)