A Business Matter

Like the blog but have a hankering for plot, character, and deeper analysis? You can pre-order Practically Perfect in Every Way through Brain, Child now. It's the only place to order a signed copy. (Personally? I like signed copies of books, although I understand that there are people who think, "Yes. I know how to write in cursive, too.")

Click here and you get a signed copy of the book when it comes out in May, plus a free issue of Brain, Child (a single copy or an issue added to your subscription--it's up to you).

Click here and you get a signed copy of the book when it comes out in May, plus a one-year subscription to Brain, Child for a low, low price.

Best of all? It's paper, y'all!

Tuesday Tidbits, Wednesday Wandomness

. Stop. It's survey time.

Two companies have banded together to solve a little puzzle: Content Connections and eWomenPublishingNetwork say that women buy 70 percent of all nonfiction, yet the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, over the past year, has held less than fifteen percent women authors. (Less if you disqualify Ann Coulter on grounds of being inhuman). I quote:

The "Women and Books 2007 National Study" will help:
--Publishers focus on the unique preferences, needs, and behavior of female book buyers.
--Booksellers better understand how and why women buy and recommend books.
--More women adopt a successful strategy for becoming published authors

I'm mighty curious to see what they turn up.

Go ahead and take the survey here. They'll announce the results at Book Expo America, May 31-June 3 this year, and participants are promised their own copy of the report.

. So, I read in the current Newsweek that Thomas Jefferson may have had some Jewish ancestry. I live in Charlottesville, home of Jefferson's Monticello and the University of Virginia; they are indeed mitzvahs to our tourism industry. But I never quite understood the people who are really into ancestry. I'd always suspected them of wanting to be Special in an irrefutable, undemocratic kind of way.

I'd also been thinking about Jill Niemarks's piece on Edge.org, about the epigenome, the place where genes and environment mix. According to her, the epigenome might hold some of the answers to why we are the way we are. She thinks it's going to reveal a whole new map for human nature. (I think that, and also that the future's self-help is going to have to re-invent itself in light of what the epigenome reveals. Don't worry. I suspect the experts will adapt just fine.)

To recap: Thomas Jefferson. Genes. Genome. Epigenome. I'm sorry. That was a rocky trip through my thought process, no? Let's continue.

. I'm on some media list because of Brain, Child, and I got this email in my in-box today: "Opinion Available." Girlfriend? Have you seen the Internet?

. From my sister Erin: "Last night, Jeff and I flipped the channel and we stopped on Fox 5 news. The 'breaking' story was about a woman and her six children (ages 6 months to 6 years). The reporter went on to say how their dwelling (a basement) was sealed up and padlocked after someone reported that the place was filled with human and animal feces, rotten food, and broken furniture. Of course, the police allowed the camera crew to come in and video tape before the padlock was put on. Here's what pissed me off. Instead of finding help for this woman and her children, they embarrassed her on TV. Obviously this woman needs help if she and her family are living in that kind of mess. I hate Fox News."

Now, Erin and I both have dogs. There has been, and there will be, animal feces in our homes, but apparently this was old animal feces, which is a different story. (See how I drew the line?) And Erin's right--it's a sad cultural fact that instead of offering help, we offer shame as an incentive for this woman to help herself. Which she clearly could not.

Erin's story also reminded me of The Mommy Myth, a 2004 book by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. In it, Douglas and Michaels take a good hard look at how motherhood is portrayed in the media. They have a lot of fun with celebrity mothers, but it's their section on poor mothers that really makes the book. The pair makes the case that the sorry state of U.S. social spending depends quite a bit on Us seeing Them as different. So we get the woman with the six kids and old animal feces, not the working mother who still can't afford asthma medicine for her kid.

Douglas and Michaels--they break it down so you can learn the moves.

LYLAS!

At most social gatherings, I live in fear of the sensitive. There are good reasons, precedents, for this. I once unknowingly insulted an entire room of people with an offhand comment regarding house cleaning. I've made light of matters heavy. Just with my tone of voice, I've accidentally brought my sweet, poetry-loving niece to tears--twice. My sister Jill jokingly calls me Aunt Bitch.

I wrote a whole chapter on getting along with other people because the whole social butterfly thing doesn't come naturally to me, and The Experts say that people with friends, both close and casual, are happier overall. I was haunted by the idea of "casual" friends. As I imagined them, in their Friday khakis and collarless shirts, this subgroup of people included the sensitive, and I spent long weeks trying to parse out this particular conundrum.

I didn't write about my handful of close friends in terms of experiments, although they certainly brings me happiness. Last Friday, my oldest friend Beth came down for a visit. We met in eighth grade when we both tried out for the school musical and were both rewarded with positions in the chorus. (I think the play was about peer pressure, or the dangers of drugs, or some other very important lesson imparted by musical-theatrically-inclined thirteen-year-olds.)

I wouldn't have predicted Beth would be the close friend I have twenty years later. Although we went to many concerts together (we once camped out for Cure tickets) and skipped school to visit museums in D.C., Beth was popular in high school, preoccupied with her boyfriend, a Homecoming princess. I was vaguely dorky, preoccupied with Getting the Hell Outta Dodge, princess of Tetris.

But we kept in touch through college and post-college. I don't know what makes a friendship stick. I like the adults that we've become. Beth is Brain, Child's staff artist (she does the cartoons, the debate art, and usually the Motherwit art), so we have kind of a work connection. But I feel like I could call after months of not talking and still be able to confide anything without worrying about the sensitivity issue. It's a rarer quality than you might think.

I know that Beth will always be late. She knows that I'll say things that can be taken in an unfortunate way. We're familiar with each other's flaws. But I knew she was a true friend one afternoon when Caleb was a toddler. It had already been a long day with the fussing and crankiness on both Caleb's part and mine. The dogs were nuts. Beth came over, and I made us cups of tea. We talked for a while, but I was just spent, tired, out of things to say. On the other hand, I didn't want to be alone, in charge of Tantrum Boy and the Nuts Mutts. We settled in the sunroom.

Beth stayed and watched two viewings of CinderElmo with us. That, people, is a friend. Particularly if you consider that Beth herself was with single with no kids at this time. Particularly if you're familiar with Elmo's voice and his Cheney-esque habit of referring to himself in the third person.

I don't know how you luck into this. I wrote a review once about the connection between mothers and included a self-help book called The Friendship Crisis. It's an interesting book. The main thing I got from it is that you have to put yourself out there in the stream of potential friends, no matter what level of sensitivity is your comfort zone. (I don't know how that sentence just devolved into a condom commercial.)

Also, book clubs seem like a good idea.

Tips for Surviving a Nasty Cold

Do:
--Drink lots of fluids.
--Hit that OTC medication hard.
--Enjoy being a sniffly martyr.

Don't:
--Drink lots of caffeinated fluids.
--Watch five or more hours of America's Next Top Model, "Cycle" Six.
--Become overly upset that Jade (and not Furonda! NOT FURONDA!!) made it into the final three.
--Try to sleep off your ANTM overload and expect Jade to keep her obnoxious self out of your restless sleep.

Seriously.

The Case of the Missing Teachers

Hey, thanks for leaving comments!

I was hoping you could help a sister out with one more thing. I'm trying to find some of my teachers so I can send them a copy of the book when it comes out as a sort of thank you. (I know, I know--gift certificates are the preferred teacher present...)

This is who I haven't been able to find:

Katherine Greig
Arlene Edwards (her maiden name)
Sylvia Leidigh

They taught at New Galilee Elementary School (in western PA) in the late seventies, then later at Big Beaver Elementary. (I'm not making up the name of the school.)

Also: Susan Beasley Brown, who taught at Broad Run High School (in northern VA) in the 1986-87 school year.

If you know these women, would you shoot me an email? It's jennifer at PracticallyPerfectBook dot com.

Thank you kindly.

Paper Products

I got some samples of the dust jacket of Practically Perfect this week. I've known what it looks like for some time now--hey, you've known what it looks like for some time now, unless this is your first visit here, in which case look to the right. There 'tis.

There's something very exciting, though, about having the actual physical thing. Stephanie and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about the benefits of hard copy versus the internet. For one, it's just awfully nice to have portable reading. (Every evening, I'm eagerly awaiting the scenario in which I can turn on the fireplace and flop down on the couch with my blanket and Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills.The physical stuff is an important part of this scenario.)

For two, the screen requires a certain kind of writing (like the radio does): shorter sentences and a different kind of rhythm. It becomes physically uncomfortable otherwise, unless you have Super Eyes. And the posture of steel to park it in your computer chair for a few hours. I think very few people would read the same sort of long, chewy reporting onscreen as they would on pages.

Of course, Stephanie and I are biased. We publish Brain, Child. But Steph pointed out that having the physical magazine is something both that's truly a tangible benefit and something that's hard to tout to readers. (We'd both read that Malcolm Gladwell piece about people being notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy.) I suggested that maybe our next house ad should be: Brain, Child. It's paper.

Anyway, I got a huge kick at seeing the dust jacket. The blue is brilliant in real life, and the paper is super glossy, as if you could use Windex on it. Rock on, art department, I say!

*

Confidential to Myrtle: Joyce says she's not promiscuous.

Camelriffic

Listen, I'm just a small town girl. Living in a lonely world. Yesterday, I took the midnight train to the Camel Book Drive.

The writer Masha Hamilton has organized a book drive for a library in an area Kenya near the Somali border. I know next to nothing about Kenya (other than a man I know weirdly prided himself in pronouncing it KEEN-ya, which I thought made him seem like a bit of a PEEN-yis.) According to the site, the people who live in this region are semi-nomadic and get their books from a traveling camel library. They could use more books, and so I signed right up to send some.

I don't normally do stuff like this. I tend to give closer to home where I have an easier time understanding what the giving means. I like a no-strings-attached approach. I don't give to organizations where the recipients somehow have to change their lives to in order to receive help, whether it's accepting a certain religion or give up their vices. I'd feel like an asshole indeed if I were to give some money, trade someone else's dignity for my feeling of altruism, and expect them to conform to my expectations.

So, pretty such any charitable organization can become pretty controversial in my book. I wondered about my gift of books in English--a language these Kenyans know (along with Swahili). But they speak Somali at home. I winced. Hey, kids! Here's a package for you! It contains the destruction of your mother tongue! You're welcome!

(You can send books in Somali or Swahili, although the selection isn't all that. Also, they're pretty spendy.)

Then I found this post by someone who had the same concerns that I did--along with a note from a Kenyan intellectual, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who writes that the kids actually do need the books, and like it or not, English is a prominent (and, actually, the official) language in Kenya. I know he's just one man, but his comments resolved my conflict.

Coincidentally, the book fair at Caleb's school was last night. And not to sound too Deepak, but it really was great trying to broaden my persective, trying to imagine what people in a part of the world I've never been, would like. The pickings about Africa were pretty slim, but I wound up with a couple children's atlases, a book on African-American inventors, books on horses, dinosaurs, Egyptian pyramids.

Caleb picked up a few books for himself and took a shine to one of the atlases. I'm not of the opinion that motherhood is some universal bond, but I did get a kick out of thinking that somewhere, some other woman, might also be watching her kid wiggle his way to the front of the crowd so he could snag a book before other kids got the one he wanted.