The Glass Character

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

WHERE did this goddamn thing come from?

Good morning, children of the universe! It's time for a Psychology Test.

Do any of you remember this from a Long Time Ago? Did maybe your pretentious sister, home from university and spouting her usual boring neurotic bumph, start gassing on and on about her answers to this test and her friends' answers to this test? as if they had some sort of Great Existential Significance and/or revealed something Great and Existential about themselves? Did the whole thing strike you as an exercise in total narcissism?

Have any of you ever wondered what sort of ninny actually WROTE this thing and why everyone fell into lockstep and decided it must Mean Something because SO-AND-SO wrote it and decided it must be important, therefore WE must think it's important too?

OK then, let's begin. . .

A Psychological Test

The Test:

First picture yourself in a FOREST. Describe the forest.

Its ah, got treesn' stuffinnit? And I'm like, I'm really scared cuz I'm like, lost or something or maybe it's an animal?

Next you come upon a KEY. Describe the key and what you do with it (pick it up, leave it there, look at it, etc.).

Look at it first cuz I'm like, I like them cuz they're cute, specially those little ones?

Uh I think I'll leave it there cuz it's a donkey? and I'm like not strong enough to carry it.

Next you come upon a BEAR. Describe the bear and what you do in reaction to it.

Bears are cute and stuff, and they wave their like paws? I wave back at them. Some of them are pandas, way cute like a stuffy. But don't walk backwards when you see them, you should run fast instead.

Next you come upon a CUP. Describe the cup and what you do with it.

Um. I don't know what to do with a cup.

Next you come upon a HOUSE. Describe the house and what you do with it.

I'm like scared of this house because it's falling down? So I can't go inside of it.

Next you come upon a body of WATER. Describe the body of water and what you do with it.

Am I spozed to do something with a body of water cuz I don't know what. Pull the plug or something.

Next you come upon a WALL. Describe the wall. If you can see it, describe what is

BEYOND THE WALL.

Is it lunch time yet?

What It All Means:

The FOREST represents YOUR LIFE.

The KEY represents OPPORUNITY.

The BEAR represents OBSTACLES.

The CUP represents LOVE.

The HOUSE represents MARRIAGE.

The WATER represents SEX.

The WALL represents DEATH and

BEYOND THE WALL represents the

AFTERLIFE.

ummmm. . . . . does that mean I like failed?

The shitless, screamless, no-mess, no-fuss baby

Most people who see a video like this one have an instinctive "ewwwwww" reaction: "oh, that's creepy". There's something about an object that's described as "lifelike" - those embalmed-looking Madame Tussaud's waxwork figures, or the Victorian post-mortem "subjects" photographed sitting up with sculpted smiles - that makes most of us feel a sinkhole open up in the pit of the abdomen.

These sweet little things are called Reborn dolls, a creepy name if there ever was one, evoking both recycling and born-again evangelism. For many women, mostly older women, they call forth feelings that we normally associate with a kicking, squalling, pooping, drooling, red-faced little spud that causes endless trouble because it requires constant care.

But if you "adopt" one of these (and the cost can be well into the thousands), the baby is surprisingly low-maintenance, or perhaps even NO-maintenance, for it doesn't cry or require changing or bathing or cuddling. No, the requirement for cuddling rests with the cuddler, who must be trying to fill some sort of inner emotional abyss in constructing and buying/selling these things (for things they are, complete with crusty little rashes and runny noses).

The obsession with collecting is beginning to spread into a mania for actually making these things, and Reborn kits are surprisingly easy to obtain on the internet. The woman in the video, who with her stony face and turned-down mouth looks extremely unhappy, turns out a complete Reborn doll per day - but, even more disturbingly, she doesn't sell them or even give them away. Her house has rooms packed full of them, 1800 in all, to the point that I don't see how she has time to rock and nurture them all. Though she insists she was only seeking "inspiration", the local maternity ward told her to stay away because she was giving patients the creeps.

The more I got into this subject, the more I was reminded of something infinitely more horrifying. Awhile ago I saw one of those semi-sensationalistic documentaries about World War II on the History Channel. I confess right now that I'm obsessed with that war and with the Nazis and their twisted ideology. Probably the most pathological idea they ever had was to breed babies.

The Lebensborn project was a means of producing a master race of full-blooded Aryans, many of them fathered by members of the SS and handed over by their young mothers as a duty to the Fatherland. In fact, surrendering a baby in this way was seen as an honor, with your child guaranteed the best possible education in the unassailable truths of Nazism. They'd learn that stiff-armed salute before they were two.

What gave me the shivers - and I haven't been able to find a picture or clip of this - was a very brief shot of babies - dozens of babies - scores of babies - some with diapers, many without. They lay kicking and squalling, squashed together on the flat surface of a giant table, with a few nurses moving around among them, maybe checking to see if they were still alive. But that's not the worst. In the foreground more babies were coming in, shoulder-to-shoulder and knee-to-knee. . . on a conveyor belt.

These babies were "product", something systematically mass-produced to carry on the horrors of the Reich. My personal view is that the Nazis feared that these children might feel something unacceptable - pangs of conscience, perhaps - if they weren't indoctrinated from their very first breath.

When I found these photos, they made my scalp prickle because everything seems so wholesome, so "normal". No doubt much of this normalcy was fabricated for the camera to reassure people that their lost babies were being properly cared for. The shot of nurses cuddling life-sized dolls made my hair stand on end. What is this bizarre photo all about? Did they really think they could perfect their childrearing skills on an inanimate object?

I'm not for one minute saying these dollmaking women are Nazis, but they sure are strange. They're turning out what amounts to "product": inert replicas of babies, blobs of primal instinct made of latex and fabric, monuments to departed children or grandchildren, or maybe just something to fill an aching space inside.

I've felt it in unguarded moments, usually at the supermarket checkout line: a sudden pang when I see a newborn baby. Not only did my own children's infancy hurtle by in a blur, my grandchildren are growing up at an appalling rate, like those old Wonder Bread ads where the kid shoots up right before your eyes. I was in the delivery room when Caitlin was born, a compact little football swaddled in a green towel with almost unnaturally-bright, almond-shaped eyes. And now she's nearly nine. NINE - ye gods, I remember being nine! That was the year Kennedy was shot. The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on my tenth birthday. So she's already in that phase of cynicism that I remember so well, sometimes causing my older (much older) siblings to cry out, "Oh, stop!"

I'm not in a rush to get one of these Reborn things, carefully weighted in head and body so that it "handles" just like a real baby. I'd rather get a puppy or a kitten, something that is at least alive. As a matter of fact, being very tired of shovelling shit and listening to earsplitting shrieks, I don't think I'll get another bird when Jasper dies. Didn't I do enough cleaning up shit when I looked after real babies?

But this is the perfect creation, the shitless, screamless baby, a baby that never changes, as if it has been dipped in wax or embedded in plexiglass. Frozen in time, it's always there as a comfort. The only problem is, it gives me the shivering creeps.

SPOT THE REAL BABY! One of these photos is a real baby (not counting the Caitlin newborn shot). Can you guess which one?

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Mommee. . . I'm. . . hun. . .gry. . .

"Did I make a stinky?"

It's summer, I'm lazy, don't feel like writing anything, but just had to share with you, my faithful friends, the bare facts about a doll that used to be popular a few decades back. A doll that keeps being reissued, with refinements, I guess.

There are lots of far more graphic videos of this thing in which little girls check its diaper and find a slimy mess of ingested material (begging the question: how do you clean this thing out so it won't be full of rotting food? Does Mommy have to stick it under the tap and flush it out?) But instead I thought I'd lazily append a detailed Wikipedia entry in fairly bad English, which nevertheless gives us the basic facts of this incredible artifact.

In all the ads I saw, the doll's feces is called "whoops", "an accident", or other coy terms. My kids' childhood would have been a lot easier for me if they had produced "whoops" every day.

I apologize for the length of this, but it seemed too astonishing to touch. Just read the parts that disgust you the most.

Baby Alive is a baby doll made by Hasbro that eats, drinks, wets and in some cases messes. Its mouth moves and is supposed to be lifelike, as the brand name suggests. It was originally made and introduced by Kenner in 1973, and reintroduced by Hasbro in 2006. Today, Baby Alive is offered in Caucasian, African-American, and Hispanic varieties. The newest versions include Wets & Wiggles (male or female), Sip 'N Slurp, Sip N Snooze, Pat N Burp, Baby Alive learns to potty, and baby go bye-bye.

History

1970s-1980s

The first Baby Alive doll was introduced by Kenner in 1973. It could be fed food packets mixed with water, and came with a bottle, diapers, and feeding spoon. The spoon would be inserted into its mouth, and a lever on its back pushed to have it chew the food. The food would move through her and end up in her diaper; this version did not speak, so you had to check the diaper a few moments after feeding. It also produced droppings and threw up regularly.

1990s

In 1992 the first talking Baby Alive doll was produced. It was fed in the same manner, but swallowed automatically without the need for a lever, and used a potty instead of a diaper. There were sensors located inside the doll to detect what stage the food was at, and trigger its voice to say "I have to go potty" or "All done now". These dolls did not sell well due to the loud gear noises and her "deep adult voice".

It was later discontinued, and a non-speaking baby was released in 1995 with snacks and juice boxes, although these came in boxes and cans rather than packets that were mixed with water. They, as opposed to modern Baby Alive doll food and juice, had names such as Yummy Juice and Baby Cherries. It only came in two versions, Baby Alive and Baby All Gone.

It appeared as a doll with blue eyes and messy curly blonde hair, not dissimilar to the modern doll, although the 1990s version seemed more traditional and less "cartoon-ey". Nowadays, Baby All Gone is fed bananas instead of cherries, and the juice is given from a bottle instead of a juice box, which saved on cardboard waste from empty boxes.

A doll was introduced called Juice & Cookies Baby Alive who could be fed juice from a box, and cookies could actually be made, when a mix was put in a triangular mould, baked and removed with a scoop. The doll drank and chewed automatically.

Newborn dolls

Sip 'N Slurp, A baby which when her tummy is squeezed she "drinks" from her juice cup with a straw attached and "wets" her diaper. A Sip 'n' Slurp birthday doll was released in 2008 is the same principle as sip n' slurp, but her birthday can be celebrated everyday because she can "blow" on her party blower and "blow" out a candle on her cupcake she has a cup with attached straw just like the Sip 'n' Slurp.

Wets 'N Wiggles, This doll comes in either a girl or a boy and is given juice and lets you know it is wet by crying and wiggling and then the diaper is changed. Unlike the other dolls, it does not speak.

Pat 'N Burp, A newborn baby that "drinks" from her bottle and when pat or squeezed, she "burps". She can come in numerous skin and eye colors.

Sip 'N Snooze, A baby that gets "sleepy" as you feed her a bottle and gets snuggled when she falls asleep. She can come in blonde or brunette hair colors.

Speaking toddler dolls

Baby Alive Learns to Potty: A new potty training version of the doll, where the baby gets fed and is given a bottle and tells you when she has to go potty by saying phrases such as "Potty time!" or "Hurry-hurry!", and she "goes" when the food and water move through her, but she has a diaper just in case and then she says "oops! I had an accident" if she is not put on the potty in time.

She also says "I'm a big girl" or "I love you, Mommy", says "Yummy!" or "Mmm, good!" when she is fed with her doll food or from her bottle, and sings a discordant version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Also, she has a learning feature, where she gets better at using her potty after each feeding. She will ask to use it twice after the second feeding before she goes in her diaper, and so on until the fifth feeding.

Baby Alive Baby's New Teeth: A doll who is "teething". If her tongue is pressed, new teeth will appear. She has a special teething chew ring, and if you give her a teething cookie she will actually "take a bite". She drinks from her cup and then wets her diaper. She comes with a toothbrush and toothpaste so the child can "brush" them.

Baby Alive Changing Time Baby: she can be fed a doll food paste made from a powder, and given a bottle of water. They move through her and end up in her diaper, which is then changed.

Baby Alive Real Surprises: A doll who eats her doll food and drinks from her bottle, and then wets and messes her diaper afterwards saying "Uh-oh! I made a poo-poo" or "I made a stinky!" or "Surprise!". She talks, sucks her pacifier and sings a discordant version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". Many people make handmade bottles, doll food and pacifiers for these dolls instead of using those designated.

Baby Alive Bouncing Babbles: A doll who can bounce up and down, operated by a small internal motor, and which makes giggling and cooing sounds.

Baby Alive Better Now Baby: A doll who is ill and needs treatment. She drinks water from a cup, and then wets her diaper. She is given medicine and the child can "check her up" as if they are a doctor caring for a patient.

Baby Alive Bye bye, Baby: A doll that is designed for travel by having a papoose and baby carrier in one unit.

Baby All Gone: a doll who is fed "bananas" on a magnetic spoon and makes them "disappear", although the food and drinks do not move through to minimise mess caused by doll food moving through. They seem to go into the doll's mouth when they are mechanically retracted back into the spoon. Also, she drinks juice from her bottle, although this doll, unlike other Baby Alive dolls, does not wet. The juice, although seeming to disappear, is also retracted back into the bottle instead of being consumed and moving through.

My Baby Alive: a doll who is fed powdered doll food mixed with water and water from her bottle. She makes a belching sound, wets and messes her diaper, and then asks "Did I make a stinky?". She comes in numerous skin, eye and hair colours.

Baby Alive dolls at present are more sophisticated than those of the past, including a stationary bracelet with a button, which when pressed activates the doll to say a phrase, a moving mouth which opens when it senses its special magnetic spoon, bottle or pacifier, or it speaks, and large cartoon-like eyes which can be programmed to open and close, rather than traditional closing eyes when the doll is put down.

Criticism

On January 22, 2009, Baby Alive Learns to Potty was nominated by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for its 2009 TOADY (Toys Oppressive And Destructive to Young children) Award.^[1] Saying it will "Ruin your girl's creativity" and also criticizing the cost of refills. It lost, however to one of the latest Barbie dolls.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Are you Ginger or Marianne? (or: the worst book I have ever read)

Let's get to it. I've been reviewing books for - jeez, now I don't want to say how long, nor do I want to say how many I've reviewed for fear of someone out there saying, or thinking, "Loser."

It's a few hundred and yes, I do get paid. When I tell people how much I get paid (because they always ask, just like you'd ask a surgeon or a teacher), they have one of two responses:

(a) That much, eh?, or

(b) Is that all?

Anyway. Sifting through these hundreds of review copies, I can't help but think back to. . .(now my face gets all blurry and there are harp glissandos and stuff). So I won't give you a top ten or anything, or a bottom ten, but there are a few that definitely stand out.

There was one by Doris Lessing called Love, Again, and it was simply (but not at all simply) about a woman of 60 in love with a man of 20. It was dazzling and intimate at the same time, and it reminded me of why we write (oh OK - why she writes - she's on a whole 'nother planet from everyone else, even won the Nobel Prize a few years ago). At the same time, I was also reviewing an atrocity by Toni Morrison called How Stella Got her Groove Back, which was about a woman in her 40s in love with a man of 20. It amazed me how you could take the same subject matter and either lift it to the level of incandescent art, or throw it down into the gutter.

There was one by Daniel Richler called - what the hell was it called, anyway? Hated it. Just a huge waste of talent. One by Anna Murdoch, then-wife of Rupert, called Family Business, all about the McLeans, a newspaper family that had "printer's ink in their veins". Jesus. If they'd had that, they'd be dead, and perhaps that would be not such a bad thing.

I just want to quote one thing from that book, the only thing I really remember. The McLean family plays a weird twist on the Name Game ("Shirley, Shirley, bo-Birley", etc).

Paper Caper
Nicker-aper, Coo-faper,
Barbar-aper
That's how you spell paper!

But nothing prepared me for a slender volume called Ready to Fall by Claire Cook. This came out in 2000, when email was still considered strange and mystical, with messages coming out of the thin air, so the fact that the book is written as a series of emails must have been a selling point. These are mostly one-way emails that a frustrated suburban housewife writes to her would-be lover, a globetrotting/bestselling author who lives next door. The fact that he stops replying to her on page 27 should have clued her in that he was either dead, or completely uninterested.

The publishers, Bridge Works Publishing Company (which sounds more like a dental office to me) convinced a few authors of some repute to say nice things about the novel, so that next time another author from Bridge Works would say something nice about their novel. That's how it works, folks, just like on Open Salon.

"Ready to Fall is pure delight," burbles one Helen Fremont, author of After Long Silence (and I only wish that the silence had been a little bit longer). "A Bridget Jones's Diary for the post-twenties. Fresh and full of pizzazz (oops, I thought that said pizza)."

Mameve Medwed, yes, THAT Mameve Medwed, gushes, "In this stunning debut, Claire Cook creates a whole world through one character's one-way e-mails. . . Bells rang for me on each and every page." Bells?

But Alexandra Johnson sums it all up with: "In Ready to Fall, Claire Cook ingeniously shows us that e-mail is the modern diary beamed into cyberspace. Refracted at dizzying speed and"

Bluggghghg, bluggghhh - sorry, folks, I don't like to throw up in public, but in this case it was just getting too unpalatable.

In the acknowledgements, Cook gives "eternal thanks to my writing group", then names them all. One of them is Helen Fremont - you know, that Helen Fremont, the one who burbles away about Bridget Jones and pizza. "Writer's group" is an oxymoron anyway - writers hate other writers, if not all human beings, and do not run in packs, or run at all. We sit alone at our desks and eat Chee-tohs and get very sloppy. She then thanks her husband and children for "giving" her time to write. I don't know how you can do that, see. Give someone time. If you can give it, you can take it away. If anyone wanted to take away my time to write, they'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

But on to the novel!

Maybe it's not fair to make such fun of a technical marvel that is now so creaky. We've since dropped that cute little dash from "e-mail". Anyway. The story. Beth Riordan is trying her best to work up a good case of lubrication for a guy (somebody she doesn't actually know) called Thomas Marsh, a walking nom-de-plume who dangles her for a couple hundred pages before dropping her like a dead rat.

Actually, I see now that he does throw her a couple of crumbs at the start, just enough to get her hooked so she'll pick up his mail and newspapers. "I stopped to get bagels on the way home from swim practice this morning. . . The whole time I was thinking how nice it would be to walk over to your house with some freshly brewed coffee and the rest of the bagels. Just to say hello and maybe have. . ." (etc. My fingers are getting tired, not to mention my brain.)

He's not home, surprisingly, so she feeds the bagels through the mail slot in his door. "I simply can't believe you're gone, Thomas," she says with a long, shivering intake of breath. "I almost dropped my sandwich when I saw the little bouquet of flowers you had left just inside the door. Were those from my garden?"

Such economy, a sure sign of a man of character! Why go to one of those pesky stores when the flowers are right there in her garden? The rest of the e-mails are sorta one-way and talk about Beth's life sitting in the parking lot waiting for her kids to come out of swim practice. (Claire Cook was quick to tell the media in the mad promotional whirl that she wrote this novel in 15-minute segments while sitting in the car waiting for her kids to come out of swim practice.)

The story, such as it is, comes out in half-page blurts with "e-mail" headings such as:

Date:   Sunday, August 20, 3:49 A. M. EDT
From:   Swimslave
To:     Wanderlust
Subj:   SO ANGRY, SO HURT

I don't remember what, if anything, really happens between Beth and Wanderlust (I mean Thomas), but near the end of the book she waxes hopeful. "But the minute I got within smelling distance of you, I felt this strong, physical pull. A chemical response, something olfactory and beyond. You must have strong pheromones because all of my earlier reservations disappeared." Reservations for the hotel?

But this particular passage is the real reason my mind flashed back to this atrocity, because it left a little fishhook in my brain that will forever be there.

"Do you like hammocks, Thomas? This one IS comfortable. I try to keep my mind clear, but as soon as it empties, an image rushes in. I am in a rerun of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. I try to decide if I am Ginger or Mary Ann. In the long run, is it better to be sultry and sexy or perky and peppy? Ginger looks good now, but Mary Ann will probably age better. Plus she will have developed her personality in a way that Ginger won't feel the need to. But Ginger DOES get all the men. (Reviewer's note: Cook seems not to have heard of italics.) And the good clothes. And you certainly never see her doing any real work. She'd never risk breaking a nail. I decide that women have just talked themselves into thinking they'd prefer to be Mary Ann. We'd all really rather be Ginger."

This passage is too putrid even to appear in Cosmopolitan magazine, but it passed muster in 2000. So long as it's in an e-mail. I vaguely remember, though I'd rather be hung upside down by my toenails than try to find my copy, a mystical novel where a woman was getting emails from a spectral presence, someone who existed only in the realm of Cyberspace. And that one passed, too.

Oh, don't join writer's groups, don't sit in cars scribbling! Why would writers support each other anyway? Do you know how precious and few are the opportunities to get published these days, how pointed the top of the pyramid? Don't hand the prize to your friend, just don't. You've worked hard and it's (to paraphrase Claire Cook) YOURS. To be too generous with your secrets is like a golf pro taking another golf pro aside and saying, "Here, let me show you my special swing, the one that won me the U. S. Open three years in a row."

Only in the writing field (and only among amateurs - take my word for it) are people expected to help each other improve their skills so that the other person can trounce the hell out of you and jerk away a fat contract that is rightfully yours. If you have to show your work to someone, show your mother. Or an agent. There's nothing in between.

But all is not lost! You might be asked by the publisher to write some effusive back-of-the-cover bumph for your friend's new novel, a little neon sign for your own pet project. You won't be paid for it, but hey, be grateful: it's exposure, isn't it? Maybe next time, SHE will write some nice juicy bumph for YOU.

But don't count on it.