Due to popular demand, I'm introducing a new vision to the LL couture: the I'm a librarian, bitch! line of fabulous t-shirtwear (and kitchenware). Visit my cafepress.com store for the details. I also have some variations to the LL thing that I'm experimenting with, so please be gentle...
I'll be makin' more items as fast as I can. In the meantime, please to enjoy a conference presentation title I forgot to add to my last blog entry:
Last week was an early beginning to a season I love and dread: library conferences. Like death, taxes and Christina Aguirela's latest body piercing, from now until September we librarians face the gauntlet of flat coffee, novel-sized Powerpoint handouts and ugly tussles over vendor freebies.
Some of the agony stems from librarians trying to tart up their presentations by giving them titles that upon close inspection, seem to be awkward plays on pop culture trends. As a professional, this endeavour should not be attempted unless the presentee has undergone decades of intense television viewing underscored by weekly meditation upon what I consider the bible of pop-culturedom: Entertainment Weekly.
My modest proposals:
I think I've been watching way too much Dave Chappelle....
What I'm Listening To: Reload by Tom Jones. It's the only thing that gets me over the stress of buying and selling a house at the same time....
So what about the New Yorker article was so distressing? It portrayed L'Engle in a way I desperately didn't want her to be: human. Raised by parents who were more concerned about each other rather than their children, Madeleine grew up to be a less-than-giving adult, using the experiences of people around her (especially her children) as fodder for her work, hurting them immensely. To top it off, the article states she sugar-coated her life, preferring to downplay the less-than-pleasant aspects of her life and the pain she caused to those around her.
In the scope of existence, there are worse sins in this world: she certainly didn't kill anyone, nor did intentionally set out in life to hurt people. But for all those decades, she did hold out a promise to the little girls out there who idolized her, a promise of understanding, a promise it seems she couldn't even keep for her own children. I can't help but feel betrayed.
I should have known better; I mean--aren't bios about our favorite writers being less than we imagined a hoary publishing cliché these days? We're used to reading about poets being Nazi sympathizers, or writers using someone else's work and representing it as their own. Our idols are routinely unmasked for entertainment's sake. But in that little corner of my heart where the chubby, hopeless ten-year old still lives, Madeleine was different.
So what do I do with this knowledge? Nothing, I guess. I will still read A Wrinkle in Time and will still see myself as Meg. I will rejoice when they all return home after their harrowing trip across time and space. And I will gain solace from the fact that like Meg, I managed to grow up just fine. But I will always be saddened by the fact that unlike Mrs. Whatsit, Madeleine L'Engle couldn't keep the promise, not even to herself.
While flipping through the latest issue of the New Yorker for the latest cartoons, I was stunned to see a profile on Madeleine L'Engle.
Madeleine L'Engle. Just like a lot of you, she saved my life. She's also one of the biggest reasons I became a librarian. But after reading the article, I was stunned for a different reason: I wished I'd never read the damn thing.
Why? It's a long story: at ten I was fat, geeky, frizzy-haired and miserable. I didn't have many friends, though that was mostly due to me--I preferred books to people at the time. People scared me to no end; I could barely talk to anyone outside of my family and even then I was choosy as to what I'd say. To top it off, my sister was so well-adjusted and so well-liked that I pretty much figured my best bet in life would be me living in the attic of my sister's house, peeking at the world through lace curtains (hey--I may have been maladjusted, but at least I was entertaining about it). Other than school, my only real contact with the outside world was my weekly visit to the base library. My dad was perversely proud my how many books I checked out each week, but I didn't have the nerve to tell him it was to put as much psychic space possible between reality and me.
But there was one book I studiously avoided: A Wrinkle in Time. I'm not sure why, though I recall a time I avoided all books that had a girl on the cover (I had an adversion to girly books at the time, however I defined it). After about a year, I was running out of unread books, leaving me with two choices: Wrinkle and Island of the Blue Dolphins. And since the girl on the Wrinkle cover was only in silhouette, I went with it.
I never did read Island; instead for the past thirty-odd years I have been entranced with the story about Meg and Charles Wallace Murry. I longed for a Mrs. Whatsit to guide me, to assure me that things would be fine. More importantly, Meg was me: ugly, smart and seemingly ill-prepared to exist in the world. And she prevailed. In the darkest times of my life, Wrinkle and the subsequent series, the Time Quartet , got me through. All due to Madeleine L'Engle. To know that there was someone out there who understood me, who understood what it was like to be an ungainly and smart girl, meant there was hope for me. So what did I do? I idealized her. And in return she fed me spiritually.
It was a comfortable relationship until the New Yorker arrived in my mailbox....
(stay tuned....)
Cintra Wilson recently launched a series on what Salon.com calls "entertainment's underappreciated greats". Judging the series so far, the criteria for underappreciated greatness seems to be an inexplicable erotic attraction to the subject as well as a compulsion to spew adjectives as if she were the spawn of Chuck Palahniuk and a riot grrl with Tourette's Syndrome.
But if Cintra can do it, so can I.
So who is my inexplicable erotic attraction?
Steve Landesberg. Or more accurately, Steve Landesberg circa the Barney Miller years.
But before I go on, I have to explain: I'm notorious (at least with my sister) for nursing crushes on odd celebrity objects. At ten I was obsessed with Rex Harrison (I had the My Fair Lady soundtrack perpetually checked out from the Kadena AFB library for two years). At twelve, while my sister and friends were salivating over Bobby Sherman and Donny Osmond, I was secretly lusting over Gene Barry during his Name of the Game hey-day (it was those double-breasted suits). Sure I tried to mask my proclivities by tacking up a few posters of Michael Cole, but it was no use. By high school, I moved on to the hard stuff: Gene Kelly and David Wayne.
Why Steve Landesberg? Because to a geeky seventeen-year old from the Pacific Rim, Steve Landesberg was sexy. New York City-intelligentsia sexy. The rumpled suit, the Gregory Peck-like voice and laconic banter that screamed Columbia doctoral candidate set my hormones aflame on a weekly basis. And to top it off, he was funny. Cooly funny, not Gallagher funny.
But the key for me was his exoticness--he was my version of jungle fever. He represented a fantasy, a Simon & Garfunkel/brownstone/coffeehouse-and-chunky-sweater dream. And for a girl raised on an island overrun by habu snakes and Bob Hope USO shows, he was crush catnip.
Next Time: L'Affaire with Laurence Harvey.