And I'm Nobody's Motherfucking Hen!

Last weekend there was what seemed to be a big Nora Roberts movie marathon happening on the Lifetime network. I wouldn't have paid much attention to it but our book club just read Nora Roberts' Savor the Moment, which is book three of her "The Bride Quartet" series.

Book Club doesn't usually veer toward such overtly mass-market material, though we have read some non-traditional choices in the past: a Mary Morrison "urban fiction" pick was eye opening in its depiction of anal cleanliness and Tim LaHaye/Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind helped get us up-to-speed on how the rapture is going to happen. Everyone enjoyed reading those two books, even if we all did so in a sort of anthropological way.

Then there's Nora Roberts.

The theme of this month's picks — whoever is picking comes armed with three choices that the club decides on — was shit that Lori's aunts read. One of Lori's aunts loves Nora Roberts. A majority of us wanted to see what Nora Roberts was about. We ended up reading Nora Roberts.

I'm always up for an anthropological Book Club pick because I imagine that I'm doubling up on my personal edification. With Mary Morrison, I wanted to know what exactly all those folks on the subway were reading. With Left Behind I figured it was finally time to wrap my mind around Kirk Cameron's worldview. So Nora Roberts — same deal, you know?

The thing with really popular titles is that I guess I assume that they're fun to read. Whether it's salacious sexually or salacious Armageddonly, I just took for granted that some books were "page turners." Not that all books' pages shouldn't be easily turned, but some pieces of writing are slogs, you know?

Anyway, I sort of assumed this Nora Roberts book would be filled with gossip and sex and maybe even intrigue — I assumed I'd be above it all and say something along the lines of, "Oh, well, of course it was trashy, but I'm a guy who doesn't mind sorting the recycling, so of course I appreciate it on some level," etc., etc.

And then I'm reading it, and I'm like, "Dude, where's the sex?" and, "Dude, where's the conflict?" and, "Dude, why do I feel so fatigued while I'm reading this, because this beautiful mass-market mega-popular tour de force is just kind of . . . well, bad?"

This is not to say that The Bride Quartet series isn't an inspired idea. It revolves around four best friends who start a wedding company — because nothing is more exciting to romance readers than weddings, right? This particular business is a full-service wedding factory and each lady has a special skill, whether it's planning, flowers, photography or cakes. They use those headphone/microphone thingys and use abbreviations like "MOB," "BM" and "SMOG" — that's "mother of the bride," "best man" and "stepmother of the groom" (don't worry, I had to ask, too). It seemed so superficially accurate it was hard not get wrapped up in their world.

The four friends also live on a big estate in Fairfield County. The "tribe" — that's what they call themselves — eats lots of wedding cake and drinks a bunch of white wine. All consequence-free. Total mass-market gold, lady reader wank fantasy catnip.

So yeah, it's an inspired concept: Weddings! Besties! Connecticut! Think a cross between Sex and the City and The Baby-sitters Club. You could make years of Lifetime movies from this stuff.

Laurel McBane, the cake maker, is the focus of this book. I guess part of my problem with the book was that Laurel McBane is so unlikeable as a character. She's this joyless, single-minded, type-A pastry chef who even though she doesn't work in a bakery still gets up at four a.m. to make stuff.

Another part of my problem with the book probably stems the lack of sex. I don't mean that I need a Harlequin-level of sex — whatever that level is, I don't know, maybe every ten or fifteen pages or so? — but I just assumed romance novels had more of this.

The three sex scenes in Savor the Moment are dispensed of quickly and efficiently — sort of half a paragraph each. Almost like they're placeholders for longer, steamier scenes.

The sex in Savor the Moment is somewhat like the road trip scene where the tribe sets out for their Hamptons beach house. The drive — 2 1/2 hours without traffic from Greenwich to Southampton — is boiled down to "Everything changed when they cut east of New York and started across the skinny island. She lowered the window, leaned out. 'I think I can smell the water. Sort of.'" And suddenly they magically appear in the driveway.

Dude, have you ever driven from Fairfield County out to Long Island on a summer weekend? It sucks.

A world of besties who never have to bother with beach traffic. Add that to the fantasy.

Perhaps traffic is not the point. Perhaps the sex isn't even the point. The other part of the fantasy I can discern is that all of the men they interact with are really sweet! Perfect, in fact! Gentlemanly, too! Always — always — taking it slow! The only time one yells is when naughty old Laurel McBane is trying to ramp up the sexual tension on page 49:

"What the hell's wrong with me? I'll tell you what the hell's wrong with me." She planted a hand on his chest to push him back a step. "You're irritating and overbearing and self-righteous and patronizing."

"Whoa. All this because I wanted to pay you for a cake I asked you to make? It's your business, for Christ's sake. You make cakes, people pay you."

"One minute you're fussing — and yes, the word is fussing — because I'm not eating the kind of dinner you approve of, and the next you're pulling out your wallet like I'm the hired help."

"That's not what — Goddamn it, Laurel."

"How can anybody keep up?" She threw her arms in the air. "Big brother, legal advisor, business associate, motherfucking hen. Why don't you just pick one?"

"Because more than one applies." He didn't shout as she did, but his tone boiled just as hot. "And I'm nobody's motherfucking hen."

Romantic hijinks ensue: "And she fixed her mouth to his in a hot, sizzling, frustrated kiss, one that gave her heart a jolt even as her mind purred: I knew it!"

So that's basically — basically — the extent of the conflict between Laurel and Del — or "Delaney Brown of the Connecticut Browns"; the next 250 pages feature the inexorable march toward (spoiler alert!) wedded bliss.

By the time they drove out to Long Island, part of me wanted Del to get on the phone from the beach and just cut loose on the ladies, "You stupid little children, I told you to take the Throgs Neck, not the Whitestone!" Something, anything, to make it slightly more edgy.

Maybe literature doesn't always have to feature conflict — but, gosh, books can be so boring without it! Without conflict there's just Fourth of July softball, working out in the gym and — once at least — tremendous morning sex. It's like listening to your officemate talk about each of her friends in very great detail. Except you've never met them because they live in another state. And they have really boring lives. And it's only 3:45 and you can't go home yet. You're left with ample time to ponder whether Nora Roberts is being sarcastic or ironic with the title.

I don't totally understand what "character development" means, but people use this term all the time and I know that you have to throw it around if you're trying to seriously critique something.

I also know that when critiquing writing people love to talk about how important it is to "show don't tell" — I don't know that I completely understood this either — until I read Savor the Moment, that is. I guess that counts for something.

Unclear? Take look at this opening sentence from chapter eight: "It was strange and interesting to go out with Del as a date rather than one of the group."

Isn't this exactly the type of sentence that editors everywhere love to circle in big knowing red ink? Like, "Don't tell me it is 'strange' and 'interesting,' show me!"

And if you do decide to tell and not show, isn't it particularly bad to default to words like "strange" and "interesting"? If you must tell, can't it be something like "Although it made her feel like Michael Jackson's publicist to admit it, Laurel McBane felt a not-entirely-unpleasant twinge in her tummy when she went with Del as her date rather than as one of the group." Or something. I don't know. But, jeez, "strange" and "interesting" must be some of the laziest of words you could choose.

I think ultimately I was struck most by how much Savor the Moment read like a first draft. The other thing about using a line like "It was strange and interesting" is that it reads like someone who has been scribbling ideas for a story. That's the kind of note someone might jot down and then expand on later or sort of fleshed out at some point. I figure that writers know to do this before they submit a draft to an editor. I assume that a writer who gave a shit would make this idea more intriguing somehow, or at least attempt to express it in a more creative way.

Then again, if you don't care about spending much time on a piece of writing, you just go with that line. You can also feel comfortable composing page after page of dialogue — just absentmindedly hitting open-quote, closed-quote, inserting words, any old words, lulling your mind with how people "sound." Dialogue seems easy to type, especially when it's impertinent dialogue — I bet you can write it while you watch TV — you don't even have to look at the computer screen . . . I imagine Nora Roberts plowed through multiple DVDs of 24 or even the American League Division Series while she wrote a bunch of the dialogue. And don't get me wrong, dialogue is fine — I'm sure it helps you imagine how the characters interact with each other — but stuff like that happens in a first draft, not a finished paperback.

Jen confirmed the hunch about Nora Roberts' writing regimen when she read the New Yorker profile about her. Apparently she just holes up with cigarettes and Cheez-Its and starts writing. And keeps writing. And then hits "send" and it's done with.

Part of me thinks this is great — just get it out there — click print and go! Why sweat details? Write and move on to something else. It's impromptu. It's expansive. It's like The Fall's discography. Nora Roberts and Mark E. Smith should get together and do business seminars.

And yet . . . couldn't Nora have spent a little more time working through the idea? Reading writing like this is just fatiguing. You get bored by impertinent details. You get antsy when you start to think that a writer is just checking the word count every ten or fifteen minutes. Writing like this is not fun to read. Writing like this makes you reconsider the notion that It's Not Important What You're Reading As Long As You're Reading. Read one of these and see if you still agree — I bet you start to think that it's better to hunker down with season four of The Wire than read. Even go see a romantic comedy — at least with that you can still appreciate that a lot of effort probably went into it.

My Mind Ain't So Open

The B-side to Magazine's "Shot By Both Sides" single was a song by Howard Devoto called "My Mind Ain't So Open". Like a lot of songs, especially early punk/new wave songs, the titles were better than the lyrics. So when Devoto writes, "My mind/It ain't so open/That anything could crawl right in," it's great. Except then he followed it with this:

Oh my lover
We are opening
Windows we see
All that we've seen

Overlooking
A vivid room
Is it such a dumb thing to do?

Huh? Are the lyrics on the internet wrong or something? What exactly is he saying?

By my count we've read four or five sci-fi/fantasy books for book club, including Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (October 2007), The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (June 2008), Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (May/June 2009), City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer (October 2009) and, if you count it in the genre of sci-fi, the sci-fi-esque Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (May 2006).

I think the stuff we've read runs the gamut in the genre — "soft" or "social" science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, fantasy. And I have to say — I don't totally see the appeal of it. I liked aspects of some of these books — Snow Crash, for example, seemed to correctly predict Wikipedia, yet it also included a frankly bizarre sex scene involving its 15-year-old protagonist that seemed like it crossed a line.

I am one of those people who is happy not to have to think about techno music anymore — or if I do, it's usually because it's background music at a restaurant or on a commercial or when the Mets are threatening to score a run. For a while there though I kept wondering if there was something wrong with me. Why didn't I "get" it? Wasn't I supposed to get it? Isn't one of the characteristics of a fully formed human being that he or she is able to converse about — and maybe even be legitimately interested in — anything that the Arts section covers?

Instead I read stuff like this and knew it was hopeless:

And instead of the mourning that peeked through his early techno music, there was a broad-shouldered, mechanized jubilation, the certainty that a good time is its own reward.

Jon Pareles gets it — why can't I?

Thankfully, that era is long, long gone.

I kind of hate feeling like I don't like entire genres of art, but the more time I spend consuming stuff the more I think that life is too short to force yourself to like certain things, even if that thing is as brilliant as Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft 400 (Sports Remix)".

Which is to say, I'm not sure I'll ever be into sci-fi/fantasy, though I'll acknowledge that maybe I'm still missing better examples of the genre. Maybe it's the retsina or grappa of literature — I think I can go the rest of my life fully comfortable with the fact that I just don't think grappa is that good.

The last book we read was Philip Pullman's Northern Lights/The Golden Compass. (I was going to write "Human Compass," but that was actually what we called a high school math teacher who had an astonishing ability to form a perfect circle on the chalkboard without the aid of any circle-making device.)

The Golden Compass is not only fantasy but it's young adult fantasy, which as far as I can tell does not necessarily mean that the author relies on simplistic plot devices and facile twists but does maybe necessarily involve a child estranged from her parents who is smarter than most adults. (Adults must think kids want to believe that they're smarter than adults, and orphans, too.) The hero here is a talking polar bear. It's the first book in a trilogy. I don't know what to say beyond that.

So it didn't take long for book club to devolve into a heated exchange about whether it was democratically responsible to allow legislative committee chairs to pick what bills will be heard in committees. No, for reals, I swear to god that's what we spent perhaps a good hour arguing about. Which is to say, Albany may be in need of fixing, and it is also not a talking polar bear. And "My Mind Ain't So Open" ain't no "Orgasm Addict," either.

I don't remember why we started debating this or why it matters now. Senate MC believes that all bills should get a hearing while I maintained that I was totally comfortable with the idea that the party in power gets to choose which bills it will hear — for better or worse, that's the two-party system. If you don't like it, move to Nebraska. Or read this Brennan Center report.

I have six tabs open on my browser with evidence that I think buttresses my point that legislative bodies need some manner of gatekeeping to move forward legislative priorities, but sometimes arguments turn to mush when you sit down to write about them. They can be like dreams in this respect. And then we move on to something else.

The Best Thing A Mother Can Do For Her Newborn Is Poop On His Or Her Head

Last month the Book Club read Jessica Snyder Sachs' Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World. If you're inclined to freak out about superscary and mysterious bacterial infections such as MRSA for example, it's a frightening read. Overall, however, it's actually a compelling call to action: One of the salient points Sachs gets across is that antibiotics — once very widely used and still rather widely used — disrupt the body's native microflora.

An antibiotic is like a nuclear weapon — yes, while antibiotics are effective at killing bad bacteria they also wipe out a body's "good" bacteria. If you or someone you know ever became ill with a subsequent infection after using an antibiotic (or even just had diarrhea) this is what is happening.

Over and over Sachs drives home the point that we have become "too clean" — for more than 50 years, scientists and researchers and drug companies have quixotically and simplistically attempted to eradicate bad bacteria vis a vis antibiotics and antibacterial cleaners without fully understanding the delicate ecosystem of the bacterial world. And even if you yourself abandon antibacterial hand soap and house cleaners in favor of good old vinegar and non-antibacterial products, it's actually too late — because everyone else is using these items and subsequently increasing germ resistance. You've probably heard these theories in some shape or form before and Good Germs, Bad Germs is a good primer on exactly how this all works.

One thing I didn't really understand was how antibiotics worked in poultry and livestock. I mistakenly assumed antibiotic use in animals was a prophylactic to prevent sickness. It is that but antibiotics are also used in livestock because many years ago scientists discovered that antibiotics also sped up growth, giving farmers an added economic incentive to mix them in with animal feed. It's unclear that these antibiotics are contributing to germ resistance, but a larger lesson the book hammers home is that over the years nearly every example of antibiotic research produced unintended consequences that either didn't help or even eventually made things worse.

Although it's a relatively quick read, Good Germs, Bad Germs can be thick with details; you may find yourself flipping back and forth to remember all the exotic Latin names of different bacteria. Some passages however are gripping. An early section about how a human baby develops a healthy mature immune system, for example, will blow your mind. I had no idea this was what happened:

Like the colonization of the mouth and the skin, that of the human digestive tract — home to 99 percent of the body's microflora — begins during birth, starting with the lactobacilli encountered in the birth canal. As the baby's head crowns, it compresses the mother's rectum, pushing out a small amount of stool. Though doctors and nurses move quickly to wipe away the offense, their squeamishness may run counter to nature's purpose — an immediate and direct inoculation of the newborn with the mother's own intestinal bacteria. If so, it's no coincidence but rather the result of natural selection that a newborn's head typically faces in the direction of its mother's rectum when its head first emerges and remains there until the next contraction delivers the shoulders and the rest of the body. This head-to-anus juxtaposition ensures that, of all the billions of microbes the baby will meet in its first day of life, the first will be those to which its mother's immune system has already developed protective antibodies. . . . A chaser of breast milk delivers the second wave: millions of bifidobacteria

Suffice it to say, Holy Moly.

Basically, babies are immunological blank slates for several years while their immune systems develop. And the book goes on to explain that if you have allergies, it might have something to do with not coming in contact with these helpful bacteria early on — babies born via C-section instead of vaginal childbirth miss out on all that helpful vaginal bacteria and stool. And breast feeding seems to be as much about the bacteria on a breast as it is the milk itself. It's a fascinating read.

Speaking of allergies, if you grew up in an era before parents and schools freaked out about peanut products and maybe you have a cynical "harrumph" reaction to all these newfangled food allergies, Good Germs, Bad Germs is helpful as well — basically the rise in instances of weird food allergies and mysterious autoimmune ailments like Irritable Bowel Syndrome is related to a general imbalance in our bacterial ecosystem. You'll understand it, feel sorry for the people who suffer from these ailments and if you are of childbearing age, you might strongly consider pooping on your newborn's head — if not often, then at least early.

The good news is that there's a way out — love good bacteria, and don't try to wipe them out with antibiotics. Doctors have got this message and are doing their part in no longer overprescribing antibiotics. These things change slowly, but they're changing — though you might remember (recently even) being prescribed antibiotics before minor dental work, for example — apparently this is an example of a surgeon covering his or her ass.

But the biggest thing we can do that we actually have control over is eating yogurt — or at least somehow getting a "probiotic" like Lactobacillus GG. This good bacteria travels through your gastrointestinal system and helps keep a healthy balance among the body's microflora. We traveled to India in 2007 and ate yogurt every morning — and we never had any stomach trouble. We only vaguely understood what the yogurt was doing — our driver said something along the lines of that the yogurt had local enzymes that made us adjust to the food — now I guess I understand that it was the live lactobacillus cultures that assist the microflora in our digestive tracts. We repeated — and evangelized — this strategy on our recent trip to Egypt and Jordan — it worked for me again (not sure about the others though).