Only standing naked under floodlights in the middle of a football stadium would feel more exposing than publishing a novel. In those first crucial weeks after the release date, the author is poised in nail-biting suspense, waiting to see if their creative baby will sink or swim. With sales data notoriously slow to arrive, how can you tell that your novel is not quite setting the world on fire?
The realisation usually comes slowly. First there is the conspicuous absence of reviews, publicity spots and invitations to literary festivals. Then there is the all-too-swift removal of your title from the glamorous New Release section of the bookstore, and its relegation to the densely packed Australian fiction shelves in the bowels of the shop. Lastly and most humiliatingly, you see that the single copy of your book has been turned perpendicular to the wall, now only visible by its spine. At this point you know your novel has lived its short, inglorious life and there will be only a few more spluttering sales before it passes into the annals of the entirely ignored.
Ray is now in her 50s, and to commemorate the moment she has, of course, come out with a cookbook — but it's also part memoir. It's called Rachael Ray 50: Memories and Meals From a Sweet and Savory Life.
"I wanted, as a woman who's 50 and has a lot of jobs that I'm grateful for, I wanted to reflect that the American dream is still alive, that if you work very hard, opportunity will come your way," she says. "That you can be 50 and over and female in this country and still be relevant."
The first word in Western literature, according to the classicist Mary Beard, is “wrath,” which opens the “Iliad,” written in the eighth century B.C.
“Wrath” might also be the first word of the literature of the past decade. Novels and plays throughout history have starred women who insist on doing it their way — savage, intemperate women, beautifully indifferent to opinion: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hedda Gabler, Sula Peace.
I was attending my first doll convention as an employee of Doll Reader magazine, and meeting Simmons, an uber-collector with his own line of figurines, was one of the job’s rites of passage.
I was 24 and self-important, impatient for my “real” career to begin. I didn’t want to be excited about doing anything at a doll magazine. I needed the paycheck, but I considered the job beneath me.
Yet Richard Simmons was kind and joyful, and so were the other people I encountered that day at the doll fair. Maybe, it dawned on me … maybe I was seeing this job, and my life, all wrong.
Regarding distinctions of “good” and “bad,” we have not really moved much past David Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” which two and a half centuries ago told us that “good” art was what a consensus of the thoughtful and experienced said it was. You developed the ability to discern it by thoughtfully comparing one work with another. To this argument, his twenty-first century readers would merely add emphasis to a fact Hume thought too obvious to dwell upon: It takes some amount of privilege to take part in the conversation that he describes. A person needs literacy and free time, for starters, but also the ability to look “authoritative” (however “authoritative” looks at the moment), or the extra cleverness and luck and persistence that allow one to get by without looking that way.
For this reason Hume strikes us—correctly—as a snob. But the process he illuminates is at work to some degree among fans of any human activity. Children ranking soccer players, and arguing over their rankings, engage in it too. The same with forms of artistic activity Hume would not have recognized. Read a hundred romance novels, and you’ll have some opinions about who writes the best ones and what you mean by “best.” Discuss those opinions with others, and you’ll hear certain names again and again (Georgette Heyer; Jennifer Crusie). Before science fiction became respectable—indeed, inescapable—any fan could still tell you that Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, and before them Stanley Weinbaum, wrote circles around Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. This is just how any social human activity works. We participate, we compare, we start to notice our favorites, we start to articulate what makes them favorites. And because each of us is not a member of a species of one, some of those criteria overlap. Exclusive and oppressive social structures distort this process, but they do not constitute it.
I was driving down Sunset for almost a mile or more before I realized I was driving down Sunset when sometime around the same time I realized I wasn’t supposed to be driving down Sunset but driving up Sunset, so after another mile of mostly staring down Sunset for somewhere to make a U turn, until I realized the hangover may have been hiding under the leftover high from last night while I wondered why the hell Sunset Boulevard wasn’t called Sunrise Boulevard in the morning, I turned left onto a side street then left again and again then turned right off of another side street to start driving up Sunset, though even with the sun in my eyes it didn’t feel like Sunday morning then as much as I felt like I was still stuck in mourning the night before while I tried to remember where it was I fell between the life and the death of the party.
East through Westwood toward West Hollywood where I would end up as far west as one can in West Hollywood before one isn’t, but where, after another U turn on Sunset, I picked up Adam outside of the drive-in where we were supposed to meet up at ten after ten if we weren’t both late. I wondered why it was still called a drive-in when one either had to valet or try for parking down some side street off Sunset to go to the drive-in, the drive-in that 50 years ago was a drive-in and now only a diner and drive-in only in name. It was still the diner I would have been sitting in with a cup of coffee if I were a handful of minutes earlier and with the same name of the drive-in I would have been dining in and still in the car if I were 50 years earlier, when the drive-in was more than a name held together, as if suspended somewhere in the space between a and the, with a proper noun and an s apostrophied between it and its drive-in like some possessive God.
After stripping the branches of berries
the robin held a handful of seeds
in her stomach: the robin carried a tree