Literary as hell.
It’s early October, and that means I’m bracing myself for when the whole nation suddenly turns pink and social media turns to talk of boobs.
Enough already.
I don’t want to “save the ta-tas,” and I don’t need to see some football team wearing pink gloves or socks for a day.
Here’s why.
Women are more than their breasts.
And before you call me a prude and tell me to relax (or take the stick out of my butt—yeah, I know how this goes), hear me out. Continue reading
Recently, while hanging out in Madison Square Park, I needed to pee. There was an APT (Automated Public Toilet) nearby. Unfortunately, it was out of order. No big deal – because of my privilege as a middle class, white person, I was able to use the toilet at a nearby bar instead.
I learned about APTs in In Lezlie Lowe’s new book, No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs. She writes about how crucial public toilets are, especially for those who can’t just walk into a privately-owned business bathroom, such as the homeless. The area around the broken public toilet in Madison Square Park smelled like urine, presumably because others had, lacking a place to go, urinated on the street instead.
Lezlie Lowe, a freelance journalist of over 15 years, has been covering public toilets for a long time. “I described public bathrooms as the itch I could never scratch,” Lowe said. She first became interested when her small children’s bathroom needs changed her relationship to her city. “But over time I kept on it,” Lowe said. “[Toilets are] the one thing I keep coming back to in my journalism practice. … There’s always great stories.”
Toilets also appealed to Lowe because she likes to write about the unnoticed parts of everyday life. “Public bathrooms were a good fit because you can’t find someone who doesn’t have some relationship with public bathrooms,” yet they’re frequently ignored or underappreciated in building design and public spaces.
We talked to Lezlie Lowe about toilets, feminism, and the process of working with a small press.
In this delightfully tongue-in-cheek volume, Lezlie Lowe gives us a deep look into human history from an unexpected angle: the elimination of waste. She covers just about every aspect of public toilets you can think of, centered around access – who gets to use them, and who doesn’t.
Access is especially bad for women, Lowe points out, because the overwhelmingly male designers do not take women’s biology into account. Just one of the frustrating facts Lowe delves into is the fact that biologically, women take longer to urinate and need to urinate more frequently on average than men; yet public toilets often have twice as much accommodation for men as for women.
Throughout the book, Lowe covers every population that public toilets fail – people with disabilities, inflammatory bowel disease, the LGBT community, people of color, and the homeless. The lowdown: public toilets fail us because they are mostly designed by young, straight, white, abled men. Continue reading
Jenny lived across the street and down three houses. Precocious, with white blonde hair in a bowl cut and a tendency to run around the neighborhood in her swimsuit, she was the first friend I had when we moved in.
My father was a fundamentalist evangelist and along with my mother, we had been traveling around the country in our big 1983 burgundy Buick, state to state, church to church, revivals, tent meetings and summer camps for the last seven and a half years. After years of pleading from my mother for a home of our own and empty promises from my father, he had finally found a church to pastor and we were going to “settle down.” The church was in a Phoenix suburb and had a small, struggling congregation that needed Jesus as much as they needed jobs and money to pay bills that were due last month. With little more than a pittance, a rental house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a front and backyard, as well as the long promised formal dining room, was found for us fifteen miles away in a largely Mormon part of town. As a homeschooled, only child whose friendships came on visiting preacher’s kid status and the backseat of the Buick that was the most permanent personal space I had, the move to a house in a neighborhood with an elementary school around the corner was new, exciting and often a culture shock.
Jenny’s family was what my mother called “rough around the edges”, but Jenny was friendly and curious and no cold shoulder from my mother seemed to discourage her interest in me. We walked the two blocks to school together in the mornings and rode our banana seat bikes around the neighborhood in the afternoons. Roughly the same age and in the same class at school, the thing that really cemented our friendship was a love of Barbie dolls. Barbie, Ken and her friends were my favorite, though they were generally given different monikers and often after various pastor’s wives or children I had liked best; small and compact, they were easy to pack up and play with in the backseat of the car. Barbie’s long hair, big breasts, tiny waist, plenty of dresses made out of my father’s old ties and tiny plastic high heels made her the perfect wife, mother and lover of Jesus in all the scenarios that I placed her. I was never aware that Barbie had a dream house or career aspirations. My Barbie had been baptized in the bathroom sink in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of her sins and cooked dinner for her family before going to church three times a week. Jenny’s Barbie dolls moved in different circles; they wore mini skirts, some cut their hair off and drove Corvettes. Regardless of our respective Barbie’s differences, Jenny and I loved to bring our haul together and spent countless hours in our imaginary worlds with them. Continue reading
Review by Shane Meyer
“Ice Storm,” one of twelve short stories in Laura Valeri’s collection The Dead Still Here, is a catalog of defeat and despair: two dead daughters (one a victim of cancer, the other of the Iraq War); their parents’ dried-up marriage (Ellie, a work-a-holic, and Duke, an alcoholic); physical and mental disfigurement by war (Duke’s brothers scarred by service in Vietnam and Korea); and the loss of religious faith or even a belief in “goodness.” 9/11 plays a role too. Duke, desperate to escape his toxic circumstances, chases a good feeling to his detriment. “Ice Storm” is a template for the bulk of the stories in the collection for its use of the themes of domestic relationships scarred by loss and the role of the dead in sealing fate.
Another theme is the failure of romantic love. In “Prophecy” the protagonist, Angela, can’t seem to shake her half-interested sex partner, Sean. She goes to a santera who tells her that she’s doomed to this fate. Valeri attributes the infallibility of the prediction to Angela’s unpopularity in high school, her unattractiveness and—despite her professional success—her unshakeable belief that she can woo Sean. In the end, she nearly succeeds but sees her hopes quickly and cruelly dashed: Continue reading
Review by Tess Tabak
Wednesday Martin paints a grim picture in Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong, and How the New Science Can Set Us Free. She posits that in much of the world, female sexuality has been hemmed in, due to a seemingly innocent cause: agriculture. As early hunter-gatherers, women roamed freely and the practice of multiple sex partners was common. But with the advent of the plough came the myths about female sexuality and gender roles we are taught today: that women are naturally domestic, frail, and monogamous.
The premise is one you might be familiar with – it’s been well-researched, as the NY Times noted. However, Martin infuses the subject with new energy, her own personal perspective, and a modern update, bringing recent developments like vaginal “rejuvenation” into the mix to show just how much gender roles have stayed the same. She discusses modern day adultery through the lens of two anonymous women she interviewed, Annika and Rebecca. One had an affair, and one didn’t, but both came to regret their choices for different reasons. Continue reading
He told her he knew how to do it. He told her he’d camped in the northern forest, year after year, always in mid-autumn, just him and his dog, a foxhound mix with the lungs of an Arabian stallion, who tore up and down the mountain trails, covering three or four times the distance he did, the ecstasy never once dimming in its soft brown eyes. Each time he brought along an extra sleeping bag for the dog even though the dog declined to get inside it when the nights dipped near freezing and would maybe sleep on top of it but generally preferred to curl up against him, right in the crook of his head and shoulder so that, as he tried to sleep, he heard and felt the deep breaths rumbling contentedly through the dog’s body.
He liked this part of the forest, he told her, because the shelters along the trails eliminated the need to carry a tent. The shelters were simple plank platforms with shake-shingle roofs, each with four bunk bed frames, all of it sitting on sturdy foundations built with boulders and mortar. The weathered lumber was incised and initialed, some inscriptions with dates going back forty years and some in languages from other continents.
After the dog died, he lost the will to return alone, but the memories stayed strong, the scarlet and golden mountains and forest whispers and the dog splashing through and slurping up the clear water of every brook they came across, a doggie paradise loop running endlessly in his head.
“It was paradise for you too,” she said. Continue reading
Review by E. Kirshe
Were you ever asked that old ice-breaker question: if you could have dinner with any five people, living or dead, who would it be? When Sabrina Nielson arrives to her 30th birthday dinner she finds her five picks sitting around the table. Though it’s more or less what I expected, Rebecca Serle’s take on this premise is very well executed and sensitively written.
The Dinner List is bittersweet with moments of levity and heartbreak throughout. It’s a one-night-only therapy session for Sabrina as she navigates her most important past relationships: Robert, the (now deceased) father who abandoned her; Jessica, her somewhat estranged best friend (and her traditional birthday dinner companion); and Tobias, the on-and-off-again boyfriend of basically a decade, for closure and healing. All of this is mediated by her old college professor Conrad, and also, Audrey Hepburn.
The Dinner List mainly digs into Sabrina’s relationship with Tobias, who she still regards as the great love of her life. Occasionally Serle serves up some funny moments, general relationship advice, and all with a bit of magical realism. The Dinner List pulls you through relationships, very human fatal flaws, and explains why those five people made Sabrina’s list- essentially answering who shapes a person’s life.
*
You feed these birds at night
the way every feather they use
comes from a quarry where the air
darkens with each landing –it’s Tuesday
and you still have not forgotten
their return for seeds, endlessly
weeping for a missing child
a brother, mother though their eyes
are unsure how to close
when listening for a name, a flower
a river –you fill your hand from a bag
as if at the bottom they could hear
an emptiness that is not a night
falling behind step by step on the ground
–how open it was, already grass.
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