The truth is, the "bikini body" craze goes so much deeper than fatism or fatphobia. It is part of our society’s relentless insistence that a woman’s body is not her own.

The last part of the line really struck me. I’ve been spending so much time lately thinking about all the ways the government tells us what we can and can’t do with our bodies that I have never really though about how the media sends us the same message.

(Via There Is No Such Thing As A Bikini Body – Jezebel.)

Even in its hedonic infrastructure, Galveston displayed grand aspirations. The city had five hundred saloons, more than New Orleans, a city not exactly known for banking its fires. Galveston’s poshest whorehouse was situated right behind its richest men’s club, the Artillery Club, which barred women except for an annual ball and the occasional coming-out party of a member’s daughter. The city’s most disreputable block was Fat Alley, between 28th and 29th. In Galveston alcohol was blood, but one could also gamble, acquire love, and lose oneself in an opium mist.

The city exhibited a rare harmony of spirit. Blacks, whites, Jews, and immigrants lived and worked side by side with an astonishing degree of mutual tolerance.

From Issac’s Storm. Oh how I wish the city was still like this.

Since then I’ve harbored a longstanding fascination with the film. It’s in the list of 350+ on my queue now, but last week, when Maud Newton tweeted about a story of the same name by John Cheever I realized the movie was based on the same short story, which you can read online here.

Summer ends today. Maybe I should bump the film to the top of my list?

My current editors are pretty awesome — so awesome that I have sent a letter to their bosses and their bosses’ bosses highlighting the ways in which they’ve made my life, and my work, more enjoyable and easier. Which is why this memo, from Village Voice editor Tony Ortega to writer Foster Kamer, makes me giddy.

We put into words the things people actually think and say when they are being honest with each other and not talking in that pretend-voice that the dailies and the television people put on. Right? I mean, that is at the core of this foul-mouthed, truth-telling, non-pandering institution. I mean, that’s the only reason I want to work here, anyway.

It is so heartening to have an editor stand up for the bottom line (the realbottom line, journalistic integrity, not the financial one).

I referenced the Bechdel Test in a longform essay test today about the plight of the female protagonist in Leslie Fiedler’s pattern of the male narrative. I am awesome.

One paper is about sexual tourism and the other is about something I haven’t quite figured out yet, which sucks because it’s totally due in six hours. In the meantime, I wish I was working on something like this: the feminist implications of Dirty Dancing

I was going to start by bringing up the one thing in your work that I know has influenced my own work, which is the green ray, because I put that little bit of dialogue in Middlesex about people talking about a green ray, which I learned about from you, not having seen your film The Green Ray. I think you said that you got the green ray in the film, but it never appears in any single frame. But you can see it momentarily when the film is running. Is that right?

Jeffrey Eugenides interviews Tacita Dean for BOMB Magazine, circa 2006.

More info on the green ray.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep a woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she still has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought.

Historical note: The Scarlet Letter was published two years after the Seneca Falls Convention.

*And yes, I read this in junior high but never understood the complexities of the novel. There is SO MUCH THERE. It’s way better the second time around.**

**Also, The Custom House Sketch, a kind of intro to The Scarlet Letter, is amazing for Hawthorne’s description of his own writer’s block. AMAZING. Who knew I was a Hawthorne fan?

Right now I am in the middle of a book called Catfish and Mandala. It’s a travel memoir by Andrew X. Pham, a Vietnamese-American man whose parents immigrate to the US in 1977. He is ten years old at the time.

Twenty years later, after his finance leaves him and his sister commits suicide, he bicycles his way back to Vietnam.

It’s the best book I’ve read since The Road. Pham’s writing is intensely lyrical and moving, especially his passages about learning to travel by bike. Before the trip he was not a “cyclist” and he makes the passage on a used $200 clunker.

I’m not a “cyclist” either, but as a person who participates in endurance sports I particularly liked the following passages (emphasis mine).

His initial departure — Page 30

Thin strokes of clouds score a sky as blue as a blessing. A brisk wind washes across the bridge. I wobble through the throngs of pedestrians and cyclists with a ready grin for everyone I pass. A light-headedness buoys me as if ambrosia courses in my veins. I am intoxicated with a feeling of rightness, a psychological snapping together of mating parts, a lucid moment of geometrical perfection. A liberating bliss.

“Yes!” I shout over and over as I race away from San Francisco.

The euphoria lasts until I crank up the cliffs of Highway 1. I’m not a cyclist. The bike is heavy. My precious enthusiasm dissipates with every incline. My map shows an inland road meandering some way from the coast rejoining Highway 1 at Stinson Beach. Confident that it will spare me grueling coastal hills, I huff up the grade, too exhausted to venture a guess why this stretch of blacktop was named Panoramic Road. It steadliy get steeper without a sign of leveling out. I inch up the mountain, pulling over to breathe at every half mile.

Endurance euphoria — Page 34

Alon the Pacific Coast, I meet cyclists who lick their chops at the challenge of a six-percent grade or an eighty-mile ride. I am a distracted rider, the sort that thrives on flat roads without wind. I haven’t encountered a mountain I like — from the front side. The only mountains I like are the ones I’ve summited. And there are no mountains finer than the ones I’m coasting down. On the road, I find myself vacillating between elation and abject misery, my senses narrowed to the hundred yards immediately before me. Beyond this, I am solely concerned with my next meal and my next campsite.

I learn it all the hard way. From San Francisco, I curse my way up the California coast. Every fiber in my body balks aggainst the strain of propelling two hundred pounds uphill mile after mile. The second day out, I heel over again, this time halfway up another mountain. My loaded bike topples like a wildebeest felled by one well-aimed bullet. I crawl out from under the bike and try to stand, but my legs give out.

I roll onto my belly, my legs locked rigid — a pair of two-by-fours jackknifed by a stampede of charley horses. I bite my knuckles, tears welling in my eyes. High school kids in a red Jeep roar by, laughing. I begin to suspect the authors I’d read weren’t entirely forthcoming about the physical ordeals of bicycle adventures… Every muscle groans and complains with each movement. My back aches. I am so stuff I can barely tie my shoelaces. What was I thinking? My Baja trip could hardly be called cycling. I had dragged that bike through the desert like a crucifix.

Milestones — Page 35

The day my odometer registers 500 miles, just before coming into Eureka, I feel invincible. I’ve fixed plenty of flat tires, warped rims, loose breaks and broken spokes. Somehow through the torment, I have developed a taste for bicycle touring. Every time I top a big mountain, I dismount and dance a little victory jig around the bike, not caring who might see me. The coast is gorgeous. I cannot swallow, breathe, soak it up fast enough. At least once a day, there is a moment of absolute perfection when my muscles sing with power, full of vigor, raw and very alive — the air sweet with grass and pine, the whirling chain and the humming tires but extensions of me.

For more good vibes, please see Web-Goddess’ post of inspirational running videos.