Rich Handsome Stalker dreamboats - Oh My!

A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, bought me Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, for my birthday. Luckily I could read it on my lovely new iPad, so my daughter didn't see me reading it. This is not one I would ever recommend to a young woman- or any woman, for that matter.

Let's take the writing first. I know this was first written as fan fiction and then published by a small press. Did an editor ever see these pages. Ever? Or even a critique group? Was everyone so distracted by the sex scenes that they didn't notice the constant lip-biting, how "Oh My" became Possibly the Most Annoying Signal for Female Arousal Ever, and the dear Lord if I hear about this one more time I'm gonna throttle the beyotch "Inner Goddess" who alternated between gymnastics and dance moves whenever it looked like sex was a possibility. And this is was often, let me tell you. They don't call this book "Mommy P*rn" for nothing. My "Inner Goddess" is bordering on Traumatic Brain Injury from banging my head against the wall in frustration from the overuse of banal words and phrases. Has this woman never heard of a thesaurus?

Do I sound like I'm ranting? Well, hold on to your hats, people, because Auntie Sarah has only just got started. Now I'm getting to what I really HATE about this book.

It doesn't surprise me at all that this started as Twilight fan fiction. I was always happy that my daughter was bored with Twilight after reading the first chapter and never read any of the other books, because I forced myself to read the whole series and the fourth book had me absolutely enraged. The whole series bothered me because Bella was such a weak and undeveloped character who was defined by the boys and how young girls were falling in love with the idea of this "love" between her and Edward, which had all the characteristics of an abusive relationship. Like hello young teens - when a guy breaks into your bedroom to watch you sleep? THAT IS NOT ROMANTIC!!! That is EFFING CREEPY! CALL THE POLICE AND GET A RESTRAINING ORDER!!! And book 4 - where she ends up bruised and brutalized after sex but it's okay because they waited and did it in the sanctity of marriage...OMFG. That is SO NOT a healthy message for teenage girls to be reading and idealizing as a love relationship.

So along comes this Fifty Shades of Grey (oh, yeah, she actually calls him "Fifty Shades" as a nick name) which takes Edward and puts him on steroids. He's handsomer ('cause he's not so pale). He's younger by at least a century. He's richer and self-made to boot. He's even more tortured and broody with a dark sekrit past. And boy, is he even more effed up and creepier. He REALLY DOES STALK Ana. Right after they meet he has a PI investigate her so he can just show up at her place of work. He buys the company she gets a job at because she won't work for him. When she flies across the country to visit her mother because she needs some time and space to think, guess what? He just happens to show up in the bar where she's having drinks with Mom - and he's got a hotel room in that hotel. Does Ana think this weird? Well, a little but...it means he LOVES HER SO MUCH.

NO! NO! NO! IT DOESN'T!!!!!

This is what I hate about the whole Twilight phenomenon and now this Mommy S & M crap that it has spawned. Right now, women's rights are under attack from all sides and we have a generation of teen girls who are reading this stuff and thinking that a man being abusively controlling is ROMANTIC. That it's a sign of the ULTIMATE LOVE.

Maybe it's because I've been in enough dysfunctional relationships that I know both the compelling seductiveness and the dark, dehumanizing destructiveness that comes when the initial glow has worn off. I know how hard it is to rebuild your sense of self when you've had it destroyed and I hate that any woman or any girl should think that this is romance. That cutting you off from your friends is romance. That the guy having female friends but that not allowing the woman to have male friends because he's jealous is a sign of love. It's not. It's a sign of being controlling and abusive.

Well, that's my rant over for now. I'm off to write some more empowering books books for teens.

Innovation, creativity, and humanity - what I learned from reading Isaacson's Steve Jobs

Last night, just as my daughter was coming in to say goodnight to me,  I turned the final page on Walter Isaacson's fascinating biography on the late Steve Jobs. My daughter, who is, like me, a big Apple fan, asked me, "So did it change your opinion of him?"

The answer is complex, as it must be for a very complicated man.

There are  many things I admire about Jobs, both as a creative person, and someone who studied business administration  (I hope this becomes required reading for MBA courses).

The first, and perhaps the most important is that Jobs had a fervent belief of the importance of the liberal arts and humanities - as exemplified by the slide at the end of his product presentations showing the intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street.

"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing...We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds of products."

Compare this thinking with that of Tea Party politicians like Florida Governor Rick Scott, who wants to drastically cut funding for higher education in the liberal arts in favor of the "STEM" disciplines. Scott should read Isaacson's book, pronto, in hopes that he might gain some understanding why his approach is moving us back to the past rather than preparing us for the future.

Steve Jobs was a great example of the term "Synthesis" - he drew ideas from different, disperate sources, many outside the field of technology and from them was able to originate a new way of looking at an issue.

Isn't that what we need more of in our society, in business, education, and government? There's so much pressure on kids to focus, focus, focus, so they can get into the "best college" (but is it the "best one for them?) and then get out there and make money. But we need more polymaths -people who can see beyond the balance sheet and profit and loss. People who can draw inspiration from other cultures instead of fearing them, because like it or not, we are a global society and there's no way to turn back the clock, no matter how much some people appear to wish to do so.

One of the most fascinating things for me from a business management perspective was Jobs' unique understanding of how the very culture of a business is shaped by the design of its' headquarters. (p.430-431).

"Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. 'There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,' he said. 'That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow', and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.'"

The Pixar building, therefore, was designed around one central atrium in order to promote just those kind of serendipitous encounters. The front doors, main stairs, and corridors all led to the atrium, the company cafe and mailboxes were there. It was the hub around which Pixar gravitated. And it worked.

"Steve's theory worked from day one" [John] Lasseter recalled. "I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one."

But like many geniuses I've read about, Jobs was not an easy man to be around.  He clearly had disordered eating, if not an actual eating disorder. He appeared to exhibit many symptoms of  narcissistic personality disorder. Perhaps the best example of this comes late in the book (p.543). Isaacson is talking about Jobs' "complicated but always loyal" relationship with his wife Laurene Powell, who, early in their marriage, cofounded and launched College Track, an organization that helps disadvantaged kids graduate high school and get into college.

While Jobs paid lipservice to her work: " What she's done with College Track really impresses me," he never actually visited her after school centers.

So here's the woman who has supported him, loved him, looked after him, raised his kids - yet he couldn't even put himself out to visit the centers that are important to her? Sorry, that's husband fail on a grand scale. One of the most poignant parts of the book was an interview Isaacson had with Jobs' middle daughter, Erin, in which she made excuses for her father's inattention to her:

"He does his best to be a father and the CEO of Apple, and he juggles those pretty well...Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he's doing is very important and I think it's really cool, so I'm fine. I don't really need more attention."

 Erin...for the record - I just want to say that I think YOU are really cool and I think you are very important. I bet you'll do some pretty cool stuff yourself someday.

So in answer to my daughter's question about if reading the book changed my opinion of Jobs - I think it made me respect his ideas and genius more, but him as a person less. Could he have been one without the other?

Isaacson's conclusion is that Jobs could have controlled himself if he wanted to. "When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will."

But on the other hand - even the people who he bullied acknowledge that he pushed them to do things they never thought possible.

My final line to my daughter: " He was a genius and a brilliant businessman, but I wouldn't want him as my husband or my father."

The Politics of MOCKINGJAY (contains spoilers!!)

In addition to writing books for teens, I’m a columnist for the Greenwich Time/Stamford Advocate. Perhaps it’s because of my admitted political geekedness (I also majored in political science in college) but for me, the focus of the Hunger Games series was never about Team Gale or Team Peeta: the romance was a subplot. For the record, I started a Gale fancier and ended up firmly convinced Katniss would be emotionally destroyed by a relationship with him, and could only find happiness with someone like Peeta, for reasons I’ll explain later. For me, reading these books was always more about the system – a political system that would allow – not just allow but require - children to fight to the death in televised games.

I had a lot of time in the car driving along the highways of Pennsylvania on college visits with my son to think about Mockingjay, and I while I don’t know Suzanne Collins or her political views, I don’t think it’s any accident that this series was published when it was – after seeing the decisions made by our own government, and watching, with amazement and no small degree of horror, the debate in our own country about the tactics used in fighting the so called “War on Terror”.

According to the Christian Science Monitor
Collins said she drew her inspiration from imagining a cross between the war in Iraq and reality TV, after flipping through the channels one night and seeing the juxtaposition between the war coverage and “reality” programming.

I started as a regular columnist for the Greenwich Time in January 2003 on eve of the Iraq war. It was, perhaps, an inauspicious time to be a critic of the Bush administration in a largely Republican town, one where George H.W. Bush had grown up and the Bush family still had roots. Yet looking back, it was the right time, both for the paper and for me. The mail I got received the paper that my columns generated a strong reaction, both positive and vehemently negative. As for me, I was learning to find my voice as a woman and as a writer. Learning to deal with hate mail, where people made assumptions about my personality, personal life and character, based on a 700 word column, was great preparation for being an author.


What resonated so much for me when I read Mockingjay, what has stuck with me and been buzzing around my brain for days after, is that I felt I was reliving through Katniss some of the helplessness, frustration, anger, confusion and sense of looking at my country in Through the Looking Glass that I felt during the Bush administration’s “War on Terror”. When I read about American citizens being designated as “enemy combatants” and held for years without the right of habeas corpus. When I read about our government using water boarding a recognized form of torture for which we prosecuted Japanese officers after WWII, yet using the Orwellian doublespeak of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in an attempt to ameliorate their crimes.

But more than that, I was reminded of the letters I received after I wrote a column decrying our governments use of such “techniques” and after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed.

When I wrote the column about water boarding I received letters from readers calling me, amongst other things, an “America-hating terrorist lover”. One woman actual wrote to me asking me how could I say it was torture since it left no physical scars – “it was just water.” And after all – these were terrorists we were talking about. The ends clearly justified the means, in these writers’ minds.

Here’s a paragraph from a column I wrote back in 2004 after news broke about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison:

“As for President Bush, by framing this conflict as a struggle of good vs. “evil”, he rationalized the “anything goes in the War on Terror” philosophy, pushing this country down the slippery slope that led to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. I still find it astonishing how so many otherwise intelligent Americans believe it acceptable for the U.S. to hold prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. Because once the principle that international law is for other people (but not us) is established, it’s not such a big leap to the “serious violations of international humanitarian law…in some cases tantamount to torture” documented by the ICRC. History proved that when you start to consider others as untermenschen, humanity goes out the window.”

Let’s take a look at what I think is a pivotal passage in Mockingjay, one where it became clear to me that Katniss would never end up with Gale:

p.185-186: “This is what they’ve been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale’s traps and adapting them into weapons against humans. Bombs mostly. It’s less about the mechanics of the traps than the psychology behind them. Booby-trapping an area that provides something essential to survival. A water or food supply. Frightening prey so that a large number flee into a greater destruction. Endangering offspring in order to draw in the actual desired target, the parent. Luring the victim into what appears to be a safe-haven – where death awaits it. At some point, Gale and Beetee left the wilderness behind on focused on more human impulses. Like compassion. A bomb explodes. Time is allowed for people to rush to the aid of the wounded. Then, a second, ore powerful bomb kills them as well.”
“That seems to be crossing some kind of line,” I say. “So anything goes?”
They both stare at me – Beetee with doubt, Gale with hostility. “I guess there isn’t a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.”
“Sure there is. Beetee and I have been following the same rule book President Snow used when he hijacked Peeta,” says Gale.

Gale’s response reminds me of some of the mail I got after the Abu Ghraib column. I had one letter asking me how I, as a Jew, could feel badly about what happened at Abu Ghraib when Nicholas Berg, a Jewish contractor working in Iraq, had recently been beheaded. To me it was a non sequitur. The murder of Nick Berg was horrifying in the extreme. I would have found it equally abhorrent had he been a Christian or a Muslim, a Sikh or a Hindu or an atheist. But that in no way excused the behavior of the U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib, or not the culture, from the top down, that enabled it.

There is no “rule book” but across all faiths and creeds there is some version of “The Golden Rule” - “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.” In modern times, in response to some of the worst atrocities in the first half of the 20th century, we created a system of international laws and treaties in an attempt to prevent the recurrence of the worst abuses.

To me, Mockingjay is a brilliant book for our time, because it raises difficult, eternal questions of war and humanity, grief and revenge.

Gale and Peeta in my view, represent two very different styles of dealing with grief. Gale wants revenge at any cost, by any means necessary – and ultimately that cost is very, very dear. I’ve been very angered by reviews where Peeta’s called a wimp, because I actually think he’s the braver of the two. Why? Because Peeta’s the one who, despite everything he’s been through, is able to retain his essential humanity. Peeta’s the one who, unlike Gale, recognizes there is a line that should never be crossed. That’s why he’s the one that Katniss has to end up with, in order to stay true to herself and to allow herself to heal and find some measure of happiness that Gale could never have provided.

Some of the people I admire most in the world are Marianne Pearl, the wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, whom I was fortunate enough to meet last year, and Judea Pearl, Danny’s father. Ms. Pearl and father in law, are people who could so easily have gone down the Gale path, and it would have been hard to blame them. But instead, through the work of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, they work towards cross-cultural understanding.

What results from the revenge path, as Katniss observes to the mineworker on p.215, “It just goes around and around, and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always the Capitol.”

And not just The Capitol. We’re meant to think that Snow and Coin are opposites, but as we learn by the end of Mockinjay, Coin’s name was no accident. The leaders are, as the old saying goes, two sides of the same the same coin.

Which brings me to another point that’s really surprised me about some of the reviews I’ve read – that people think Katniss’s shooting of Coin was either a last minute decision or an accident. The vote for the Hunger Games of retribution is such a revealing, heartbreaking moment. Coin makes it clear that “if we do hold the Games, it will be known that it was done with your approval.” Like Snow, she’s trying to manipulate the Victors for her own purposes until the end.

p.378

Johanna: “It seems very fair to me. Snow even has a granddaughter. I vote yes.”
Enobaria: “Let them have a taste of their own medicine.”
Peeta: No. “This is why we rebelled! Remember?”
Annie: “I vote no with Peeta. So would Finnick if we were here.”
Beetee: “No. It would set a bad precedent. We have to stop viewing one another as enemies. At this point, unity is essential for our survival. No.”

The decision comes down to Katniss & Haymitch. Anyone who thinks shooting Coin is an accident or a misfire should reread this passage on p.378

Was it like this then? Seventy-five years or so ago? Did a group of people sit around and cast their votes on initiating the Hunger Games? Was there dissent? Did someone make a case for mercy that was beaten down by the calls for the deaths of the districts’ children?... All those people I loved, dead, and we are discussing the next Hunger Games in an attempt to avoid wasting life. Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change now.

I weigh my options carefully, think everything through. Keeping my eyes on the rose, I say, “I vote yes…for Prim.”

“Haymitch, it’s up to you,” says Coin.

A furious Peeta hammers Haymitch with the atrocity he could become a party to, but I can feel Haymitch watching me. This is the moment, then. When we find out exactly just how alike we are, and how much he truly understands me..

“I’m with the Mockingjay,” he says.

I didn’t realize when I first read it what that passage meant, and was shocked by Katniss’ vote because it seemed so antithetical to everything we knew about her character beforehand, but afterwards it made perfect sense, and it was clear that she agreed for the purpose of setting up Coin.

The BookPage blog asked Suzanne Collins: What do you hope these books will encourage in readers?

Her answer: I hope they encourage debate and questions. Katniss is in a position where she has to question everything she sees. And like Katniss herself, young readers are coming of age politically.

Thank you, Suzanne Collins for this wonderful series, which has this middle-aged political geek thinking and questioning and slacking off on her own writing to ponder all this. I hope it encourages younger people to do the same. Our country is in dire need it.