Mardi's Link

Go ahead, send me your holiday newsletter. I dare you.

 

Rhymes With "Bold"

After reading this, then being horrified by this, and finally this too, I feel I must offer a personal response, in the form of five women who have lived long enough to actually have something important to say.

Here, in no particular order, are five "rhymes-with-bold" biddies who kick ass.

1. Helen Mirren, assasin

 

 2. Joan Didion, change artist

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

(From The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir which won The National Book Award in 2005 when she was 71.)

3. Madeleine L'Engle, explosives tech

“One day while I was happily pretending to myself that I was Madame Curie, I blew up the lab.”

(From her address to the Library of Congress on Nov. 16, 1983. At 15 she was pretending to be Madame Curie; when she addressed the Library of Congress, she was 65. And had won the Newberry Award, the USM Medallion, the Smith College Award, the Sophia Award, the Regina Medal, the ALAN Award the Kerlan Award and was President of the Author's Guild.)

4. Diane Wakoski, truth teller

"You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language, You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen."

(From her poem, "Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch," published when she was about 50. Backstory here.)

5. Dora Hain, trailrider, trailblazer, ukulele player, long-distance swimmer, sport fisherwoman, campfire chef, and my maternal grandmother.

"Cryin' about it will get you exactly nowhere, Mard. Now, do you want to swim across the lake or go pike fishing?"

This is my hero, who's yours?

What 50 Looks Like

I got a little nostalgic yesterday and I blame it on two things: The New York Times and my impending milestone birthday.

An article in the newspaper's Style Section introduced a handful of photogenic brainiacs and their recently launched online magazine of literary criticism, The New Inquiry. Bravo, kids.

It's an old story, buffed and polished for the internet. Shunned by the establishment, these younsters started their own literary gig. Marcel Proust did it once, and so did Queen Christina of Sweden, The Bluestockings got their thing going, and these ruffians did, too.

Yours truly has fond memories of following this same bliss. Back in the prehistoric year that was 1998, I helped get this going concern off the ground.

On April Fool's Day that year, Victoria Sutherland, Anne Stanton, and I plotted to launch a book review magazine to give independently published books their due. It still amazes me that I was standing at the top of the escalator at BookExpo America in Chicago just two months later, eager in my new lime green suit to hand out copies of our first issue of ForeWord to the rising throngs. And boy, did they take them! And read them! And visit our booth to subscribe! We had launched!

Then, some spoil sport called security.

Apparently even back in 1998, you couldn't occupy such high dollar real estate for free. No, the book fair had a protocol for guerilla marketing like this and said protocol involved a fee for exhibitors who greeted attendees with swag. And no quarter was given for high brow literary swag, either.

But no matter. Even two of McCormick Place's thuggish rent-a-cops couldn't wipe the triumph off our faces that fine day.

Tomorrow I turn 50. And you know what? I've still got that lime suit.

What's your gig?