Confessionals

First of all, and let's get the minor things out of the way, I learnt a new word this week which was highly applicable to a situation I was in earlier in the week, "butterface," as in, "She was great all the way through, but her face."

I would rather think "buthisface" doesn't work. Anyhow, the how, and the what, and the where, and the when, and probably the why were fantastic. But the who - - - well, you get above the neck, and it's like, what the hell happened? Ima ask him to wear one of those leather hoods and claim it turns me on.

And Alex's girlfriend's car got stolen, and then my Dad's car had to have the thermostat replaced, so I am not the only person dealing with Inanimate objects breaking. That's not particularly confessional, but I just wanted to note that. Else I shan't remember.

So my real confessional was that - - - I read Erma Bombeck. And love her.

I know! I am a single (dammit, too single) gay guy! I have no children (but I would love to) and that may drive some of the passion. . . and it's like collecting macrame owls and shag carpeting and avocado appliances. . .

Well, I know that she's an odd cultural artifact, disdained today, like jello molds and the aforementioned macrame owls, but she continues in the tradition invented by Betty MacDonald in "The Egg and I" and Shirley Jackson, most sharply in "Life Among The Savages" and less sharply in "Raising Demons," and then by Jean Kerr, in the concept of domestic satire and in evincing memories of a bygone age in which those of us who are Gen Xers were born. Mrs. Bombeck is seen today in the likes of Dave Barry and P.J. O'Rourke, who take ordinary situations and through degrees of hyperbole and satire, transcend the ordinary. But the days of housewifery and stable marriages have passed. The days of the No-Draft window in the car have now gone, leading to a comfortable nostalgia for those of us who remember them from our childhooods.

She's a fairly sharp satirist and some of the satire is yet current, and some of it is, reference the No-Draft window, a note has been forgotten to be left for the milkman and so he leaves fourteen half gallons of milk in the garage over a four day vacation, the girdle creeping up, the concept of separate sexes in dorms, the vacuum/magazine seller, trading stamps glued to books and collected are gone and therefore nostalgic to those of us who distantly remember such things.

Nostalgia: Women who take "word-a-day" improvement courses in which they are instructed to learn a word-a-day, such as "tsetse fly" and work it into everyday conversation; a woman who was suggested by a British obstetrician to become pregnant to improve her golf game and did, to amusing results; our author takes painting classes to be defeated by professionals, our author suffers through her husband's inept home improvemnt phrases, remarking, " my husband came home from the drugstore ecstatic with two cigar boxes under his arm. He rushed to the basement, nailed them together, painted them dark green, and called them 'shadow boxes.' Despite the fact they looked like two cigar boxes nailed together with 'King Edward' bleeding through, I avowed they belonged in the Metropolitan."

In a chapter on home improvement difficulties, Mrs. Bombeck describes her frustration as she is regarded as a capapble woman.

"How masterful," she said, dabbing her forehead with a lace handkerchief
"Not so masterful," I said. "From that day foreward i was awarded custody of the mower. I also had ot repair spoutings, clean out the dryer vent, repair the clothesline, build the rock garden, drain and store the antifreeze, and wash the car."
"My goodness," she whispered, "I'm so addle-brained about cars I scarcely know how to turn on those little globes in the front . . . . the . . . "

Mrs. Bombeck, of course, responds in form, with dry comments.

Erma Bombeck was smarter than she casually appeared in writing. Once she complained dryly to a writer asking about women's liberation, "We were the women who forgot to burn our bras." She was remarking on the fact that although she- and thousands of women like her- had not taken a vocal part in the women's liberation movement, at the same time, they were not unthinking, and not to be taken necessarily part of Nixon's "silent majority."

It's unfair to underestimate her; although she never wrote polemics on the level of Germaine Greer or Simone de Beauvoir, her writing yet contains a sharpness and an understanding of commercial adaptability. She was a woman with a career, although the career was divided between maintining her household and the career she chose, through sheer marketability, this indicates a shrewdness, an understanding of what her values were (family, foremost) and what it would take to sustain that, and what the market would accept from her.

The writing has been underestimated as a classic of American Literature; like Mark Twain, her writing characterised a time and a class, and it characterised a sense of satire. Although her writing was never as politically important as Mark Twain's, there is a strong value in her writing, to understanding the American culture at a certain point in time, as was Mark Twain's.