What will my very eager mother just serve us now?

With absolute disregard for the importance--and the permanence--of mnemonic devices, the International Astronomer's Union has taken away Pickles. I mean Pluto.

There goes everything I can remember from the 4th grade.

Now That's What I'm Talking About

I stand corrected. Deadwood does surprise. Or, I should say, Al Swearengen, masterfully portrayed by Ian McShane, surprises.

I finally got around to watching episode 10, "A Constant Throb." Most of this season we've seen Swearengen, usually Deadwood's main bully, being bullied and beaten by George Hearst. And as complicated as such matters get, Swearengen just hasn't been able to figure out how to solve the puzzle of Hearst. He's seemed, as the season has progressed, to become more and more powerless.

In "A Constant Throb," Hearst sends Barrett, his main enforcer, over to the Gem to deliver Swearengen a message. This meeting plays out the way Hearst would like--Barrett swaggers with his power over Al. Swearengen still seems muddled, like he's trying to figure out exactly how to handle this situation, but is still far from reaching any sort of decision. As Barrett stands to leave Al's office, he says to Swearengen, "You don't seem halfway like such a halfway bad fucking person."

The absolute beauty of this line is how thoroughly convincing McShane's performance has been in every episode leading up to this moment. The evolution of the confused, frayed Swearengen has played out to the point where, until the second Swearengen's knee makes contact with Barrett's crotch, beginning one of the show's most brutal shit-kickings to date, I'm ready to agree with Barrett's estimation. But no, Swearengen is a surprising character--thanks to both good writing and to McShane's stand out performance.

I'm still tired of the Jane & Joanie love connection, but I can't be bothered to care as much about that anymore. Sure, they're predictable. But as long as Swearengen's around, Deadwood is pure fucking magic.

If She Wears Pants, She Must Kiss Girls

HBO's Deadwood is one of the finest shows you'll find on TV right now--possibly one of the finest shows ever made. But in the case of Calamity Jane, the writers appear to be taking the easy way out. In a manner of speaking.

Calamity Jane is, without a doubt, one of my favorite characters on the show. She's almost always drunk and dirty, and her mouth is among the foulest. She cares about Wild Bill Hickok, nurses the cocksuckers who suffer from small pox in Season 1, and generally does things of good fucking will. When she's not on a bender, of course.

Margot Mifflin, in a Salon.com review of a 2005 biography about Calamity Jane, writes, "Like so many pop culture icons, [Calamity Jane] lived fast, died young and was quickly canonized, yet her fictional self so quickly preempted the real one that it's almost impossible to say her legend is anything but fiction." Any internet search of Calamity Jane will give you a mishmash of facts about her life; few of those facts seem to be certain. And so her character is a gold mine for the writers of Deadwood.

Many of Deadwood's characters are based upon real people--if not upon an actual person who once lived in Deadwood, then upon an actual type of person would have lived in Deadwood. And a few of the characters based on real people get a bum rap. The rascally E.B. Farnum, for example, who no one in the HBO town seems to take seriously? In real life, Farnum was a husband, the father of three children (all of whom lived in Deadwood with him), and a much better businessman and councilman than the HBO show would have us believe. But because Farnum makes such an excellent foil for Swearingen, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.

But I'm not willing to suspend my disbelief with the turn Calamity Jane's character took in the recent episode "Unauthorized Cinnamon." In this episode, Jane finally kisses Joanie Stubbs. I write finally because when this happened, I let out a sigh of disgust, prompting B to say, "Like you didn't see that coming?"

That I saw it coming was precisely the problem. Here's the deal: in all of the bios I've read online about Calamity Jane, none have asserted that she was a lesbian. They've mentioned her claims to an affair with Wild Bill Hickok, her possible crush on Charlie Utter, that she was (at times) a prostitute, that she had, later in life, a daughter. All of these are, more or less, hetero-normative activities, correct? Right.

But Jane, you see, doesn't (and in real life, didn't always) act lady-like. She wears pants, sleeps in the street and drinks so much that she pisses herself (although the book review on Salon.com claims that Jane mostly wore dresses). She lives on the frontier and she likes guns. She talks nothing like a lady--even the prostitutes of Deadwood speak in a (relatively) more refined language than Jane. So what do we do with the woman who does hetero-normative things but who doesn't outwardly present as hetero-normative? If we're the writers of Deadwood, we take the easy way out with her character. We make her the lesbian, because our idea (or the idea that a broader audience would have) of the way a lesbian performs her sexuality is as follows: she acts like a man.

The choice of portraying Jane as a lesbian is not surprising, and the reason I've fallen in love with Deadwood is that, more often than not, the show surprises. Which is why I'm wondering why the writers didn't pair Jane up with Charlie Utter, or some other male character. Why not really play around with the options history presents? Sure, a little girl-on-girl action can be good times, but why not a little man-and-woman-taking-the-pants-and-cowboy-hats-off-one-another action? Why not challenge the audience's desire to pigeonhole the pant-wearin woman? Even better--why not let Jane have it all--give her a love scene with Charlie Utter, and then give her one with Joanie. If you're going to make fiction out of history, why not just go full fucking tilt and make of these cocksuckers complicated characters?

Making Jane a lesbian is too easy, and I think it speaks to our struggle as a society to accept sexuality (and also, in many ways, gender roles) as anything other than a black-or-white, either-or concept. Jane can't have any kind of combination plate in HBO's Deadwood, because at this point in history, neither can we.

Non-fiction and the Peace Corps Problem

I've finally gotten around to reading the essay that won The Missouri Review's Annual Editors' Prize. Since I'd also entered the contest, I admittedly read the essay with a more critical eye. Do I wish I'd won this contest? Yes. (The prize was $3,000. You wish you'd won, too.) Do I think that Erica Bleeg's essay "Obedience" deserved to win? Absolutely.

Bleeg's essay paints a startling portrait of a moment in time. She describes her training as a Peace Corps volunteer in the country of Benin. We're introduced to her first host family, the landscape of the country and of the city of Cotonou (where Bleeg is being trained), as well as to information about the history and culture of Benin. Bleeg does an excellent job of re-creating the sense of strangeness she encountered as a American in a foreign land: "All around us, humidity drenched the hours in a rich haze such that everything in view seemed temporary, like a mirage, while at the same time my awareness of every action as a means to stay alive became much keener" (95). Every sentence is meticulously constructed and rich in detail; Bleeg knows well how to take her time in telling a good story.

But. I can't help but put the essay down and think, Great. Another privileged, well-intentioned white girl goes to Africa and is confounded by the role of women there, and finds herself implicated in the process. And then she writes about it.

Perhaps I'm jealous because I haven't produced any writing from my AmeriCorps experiences, or because I haven't been published, or because I didn't attend as prestigious of a graduate writing program as Bleeg. (Though, to be fair, a woman from my program won TMR's Editors' Prize just a few years ago. Her essay was also about an experience she had in the Peace Corps.)

But I think I really am tired of reading this same essay. Because I haven't yet found a writer that really addresses, head-on, what I think is the most compelling issue to be found in such essays: white guilt. Or maybe not white guilt, but the kind of guilt that sends us out into the world to do this work, and then return and wear it as some kind of badge of honor. Because I don't believe in this work as being altruistic. Although, with very few exceptions, I simply don't believe in altruism. We do good things because we want something--an object, a feeling, a currency, a favor--in return. I joined AmeriCorps because I wanted to gain job experience without actually finding a real job, and because I wanted to move and AmeriCorps pays volunteers to relocate. Sure, I wanted to help the community as well. But would I have been as eager to help without the incentives of a few lines for my resume and a little money for my education?

To be fair, Bleeg touches on this issue in several places. She writes, "Having just arrived from a country torn by racial hatred and rife with racial epithets, whenever I heard [the term Beninois used to refer to white people], what I saw in my mirror eye, looking back at me, was a White Exploiter" (94). But what, I want to know, does she think of being a white exploiter? Or, does she even think she's white exploiter? How does she view the presence of the Peace Corps in countries such as Benin? What are the unique problems faced by volunteers who have so much history bearing down upon them?

Bleeg, though, attempts to immediately divert her readers' attention from such questions--she writes that she isn't sure if her presence helps, but that "there was nothing we could do to erase who we were" (94). Right enough, but if you've gone over to Africa as a white, American volunteer, isn't it your responsibility to begin teasing out and speculating upon some answers to those really large questions? Other readers may want to move on to the next sentence, but I want Bleeg to stop and explain.

But Bleeg also makes clear that her motive for joining the Peace Corps wasn't to tease out racial tensions and the impact of hundreds of years of exploitation. She tells us early on that she wanted to go to Africa because of what she knew of the poverty there. Television images of Africa--particularly of women--linger in Bleeg's memories of childhood. "It was women I wanted to understand. I wanted to help where possible; I wanted to deepen my life with hard labor, and I believed African women could show me how" (92).

Ok, I'll start by being snarky: no one wants to deepen their lives with hard labor. Go to any demanding job--find someone in construction, find someone working long hours in a field, find a fisherman or woman--go find someone in one of those jobs, and ask them: would they like a break? It is only those who can afford to be idle that romanticize hard labor.

My point: this sentence is a landmine in Bleeg's essay. She's so careful--her pages of prose about history and geography are, I think, a carefully traced path around other sentences like "I had grown up in a corporate family"(93). I wonder: how corporate? And I think that question is important. A woman traveling to Benin from an upper class family, for example, will have a wider gulf of differences to navigate than, say, someone traveling there from a poverty-stricken family. But, to keep our attention on the story she wants to tell (which is, ultimately, a story about her own inaction), Bleeg keeps details about her life to a minimum.

In the end, I think Bleeg wrote the wrong essay. She wrote the essay we've been taught to write since grade school: the "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" essay. She wrote the essay well, to be sure. But I can't help but wonder who much better it would have been if she'd written the essay "Who I Am And Why I Went On This Summer Vacation."

Accountability

Five knitting projects I must finish before I can buy any more yarn from stores.*

Mohair scarf for J: http://www.mielkesfarm.com/oldshale.htm

Purses for my two step-nieces: http://www.groovy-mom.com/crafty/patterns/painlesspurse.shtml

Hat for B: http://alison.knitsmiths.us/pattern_beginners_hat.html

Sampler purse (for shits & giggles & to use up random yarn): http://www.philosopherswool.com/Pages/SamplerPurse.htm

*I can, though, buy yarn from yard sales. There is, after all, an exception to every rule.

I'm Loving It

America's battle with the bulge is proving to be a good time for all involved, including marketers. A few recent ads seem to be asking the question How can we convince them we serve healthy foods, but get them to keep eating the high-fat stuff?

This morning I saw yet another commercial for yet another buffet style restaurant here in Texas. This buffet restaurant, though, is trying to change its tune. "We have healthy selections!" promises the voice-over as the camera pans various serving dishes of fruits and vegetables. "And as a reward for eating so healthy," the voice over continues, "treat yourself to some of our fried chicken!"

Right. Because fried foods are only a little bad for you. It's like reaching for a cookie, only different.

This advertisement is almost as funny to me as a poster I recently saw in a major fast-food restaurant. The poster encouraged me to have some dessert and tantalized me with a variety of offerings: ice cream (cone, sundae, or mixed with candy or cookies), apple pie, cookies, yogurt parfait. Most striking was not the offerings themselves, however, but their arrangement in the photograph: the yogurt parfait was in the middle, surrounded by cookies and ice cream and various sugary offerings. It looked like a big mouth of sugar was about to swallow the yogurt whole. I feared for the parfait.

You might argue that the eye is drawn to the center of the photograph, and thus the parfait, and it may well be. But answer this question for yourselves: "It's time for dessert! You can have ice cream or cookies or pie or a sundae or some candy mixed in ice cream or a yogurt parfait! Whatcha want?" Sign me up for anything but the parfait.

I'm not saying it's in any of these companies best interest to actually change their ways--I can't imagine fast food restaurants actually making money serving only tofu burgers and carrot sticks. Nor am I saying that I don't occasionally enjoy me some fried food and ice cream (either together or separate). But how can we expect people to make different, better choices--choices that will vastly improve their well-being and quality of life--when those choices aren't really being offered?