On Tina Fey being "curvy" (or not)

Since I had lost my April 28 New Yorker, it took me a while to actually read the Anthony Lane review that had people pissed off back in, well, April. Here's the part in question:

Angie is skinny to Kate's curves, loose-tongued to her zipped-up sense of fun, fertile to her barren jealousy. Angie wears pedal pushers and tank tops, whereas Kate stalks around bare-legged in skirts that lurch to a halt two inches above the knee, which is a length that Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off. It's possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, thought in complete command of her deliver -- dry, spiky, but unthreatening -- she hasn't yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn't big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she's no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball -- a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

Alright, so obviously* this is annoying, but besides being sexist, it's also inaccurate. Tina Fey isn't big at all, nor is she curvy to Amy Poehler's skinny. Hello? Look at them here. I always thought -- and think -- that Tina Fey is kinda bony -- her body and her attitude/delivery are sort of the same -- "spiky," wry, laidback. She's not ripe at all, and in this movie she's the opposite of ripe because she is, oh that's right, unable to have children of her own. If anything it's Amy Poehler who is ripe -- and she shows off what "curves" (I fucking hate that word**) she has way more than Tina does because she dresses kind of skanky. Tina's skirts that "Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off" actually professional on her, which, hello, dumbass, is part of her character. (She is just a little tightly wound.) Plus, they actually look pretty good most of the time.

So in other words, not only are you apparently kinda sexist, Anthony Lane, but you kind of sucked at reviewing this movie. (Which, for interested parties, was actually pretty good.)

*Emily Gould comments that Tina Fey is "normal-sized," but I have to say that the women of the Gawker blogosphere (by which I mean the Jezebel girls and then Emily Gould), for all their more-mainstream-than-Feministing championship of women and all that, still totally suck at perceiving "normal" women's bodies. For them "normal" seems to be "unfamous," but still thin as shit. Perhaps that is because they are all some kind of pseudocelebrity themselves (case in point), and therefore have skewed perceptions. At any rate, I think Tina Fey is pretty hot.

**Every single magazine that has a "size" issue or a "body" issue or who wants to show you jeans or swimsuits or what-have-you "for your body type" always labels one type "curvy." That is their PC word for "fat," and they never actually have clothes for real people who are overweight and not like big boned or whatever. I want clothes for people who are supposed to be kinda skinny with not a lot of waist, but who have managed to add on 20 pounds at some point and therefore are "curvy." Not to go off on a rant but one good thing about Self magazine (besides everything) is that when they do a body breakdown, they actually do it by shapes, like "bigger in the middle" or "bigger on top" and shit like that. Anyway, just a thought.

Carbon Footprints

A very interesting article in this week's New Yorker about the complexities of measuring something's (or someone's) carbon footprint. Turns out "food miles" is a pretty darn inadequate way to think about how what we eat or buy affects the environment:

“People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told me. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.” Williams pointed out that when people talk about global warming they usually speak only about carbon dioxide. Making milk or meat contributes less CO₂ to the atmosphere than building a house or making a washing machine. But the animals produce methane and nitrous oxide, and those are greenhouse gases, too. “This is not an equation like the number of calories or even the cost of a product,’’ he said. “There is no one number that works.”

Many factors influence the carbon footprint of a product: water use, cultivation and harvesting methods, quantity and type of fertilizer, even the type of fuel used to make the package. Sea-freight emissions are less than a sixtieth of those associated with airplanes, and you don’t have to build highways to berth a ship. Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.”

The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO₂. Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya—where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure—tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems.

Williams and his colleagues recently completed a study that examined the environmental costs of buying roses shipped to England from Holland and of those exported (and sent by air) from Kenya. In each case, the team made a complete life-cycle analysis of twelve thousand rose stems for sale in February—in which all the variables, from seeds to store, were taken into consideration. They even multiplied the CO₂ emissions for the air-freighted Kenyan roses by a factor of nearly three, to account for the increased effect of burning fuel at a high altitude. Nonetheless, the carbon footprint of the roses from Holland—which are almost always grown in a heated greenhouse—was six times the footprint of those shipped from Kenya. Even Williams was surprised by the magnitude of the difference. “Everyone always wants to make ethical choices about the food they eat and the things they buy,” he told me. “And they should. It’s just that what seems obvious often is not. And we need to make sure people understand that before they make decisions on how they ought to live.”

(read the whole thing here)

Crime and Punishment in Poland

This article about "a postmodern murder mystery" in this week's New Yorker was fascinating. Don't read the summary, even though I linked to it. I scanned the article into my computer, so just comment or e-mail me if you want to read it. Seriously weird.

New Yorker Roundup

I supposed I should preface this by saying that I am either a bad exerciser or a good reader. When I use the elliptical machine at work, I like to read a magazine with it. Today, that magazine was the Dec 7th issue of The New Yorker. This not only reveals that I'm probably not a very vigorous ellipticizer, but also excuses me for being really into this issue thus far, because it could be just the endorphins. Still.

I really liked this Talk of the Town -- one of the funnier I've read recently, but filled with pertinent and somewhat scary information about the religious slants of our political candidates, specifically Romney and Huckabee. I'm more scared of Huckabee than Romney, for that whole not believing in evolution thing, but I am more grumpy about Romney's hedging about, well, everything, in order to diffuse fears of his Mormonism. An excerpt:

Romney himself warned, in a speech, titled “Faith in America,” that he delivered on December 6th, “There are some who would have a Presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited.” The weasel word here is “distinctive.” Romney had no problem describing his church’s not-so-distinctive doctrines. “There is one fundamental question,” he continued, as if he were speaking on tax cuts, “about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of mankind.” (But please don’t ask about Jesus’ post-Resurrection travel schedule.)

Another article I found pretty fascinating was the Political Scene piece "Old Habits" on Giuliani. I admit I don't pay a lot of attention to him -- I think partly because the array of supposed and actual scandals surrounding him is just too diverse and confusing for me to digest it all. This article, however, sums them all up (at least, all the political ones, from patronage hires to financial iffiness to how well he actually prepared for 9/11). It definitely made him sound much more like a boss man during the Gilded Age than like a good Presidential candidate. But quite frankly, I'm pretty baffled by his campaign strategies thus far, and he still feels like a wild card to me. I haven't been following the Republican candidates as closely as the Democrats, but I have a (totally uninformed) feeling that as this campaign progresses, that's the race that's going to be more interesting.

I've been a bit behind on my New Yorkers because of the holiday but am catching up well and remembering again how much I love reading it every week. Stumbled across this blog post this morning, "How to read the New Yorker in 10 easy steps" and wasn't too impressed, although I do find it always kind of amusing to talk to people about how they read their New Yorkers. I read it almost always in page order, starting with flipping through the short reviews in "Goings On About Town," and ending up with the reviews in the back. I sometimes do skip the fiction, and I either read the poems last, having passed them during my reading of the meaty articles, or before said meaty articles, because that way I won't forget to go back for them. I think my friend Jordi said once he always reads the reviews first, and I know Justin starts with Talk of the Town and moves on to any profile of an actor (at least, I remember him saying that once) or maybe politician. I find it odd that my reading is so linear -- as I get older I find these very nit-picky, perfectionist, procedural, planning parts of my head that I never thought I possessed. (I also read books of essays or short stories in order, and never skip them.) It's very strange.

(via)

Raymond Carver

I'm behind on my New Yorkers (by, like, a week or two), but I'm finally wrapping up the double fiction issue that came out at Christmas. I had been writing off the whole Raymond Carver-and-his-editor controversy (I love that in the book world this is a controversy), but ended up finding the piece interesting. For those of you who don't pay attention to decades-old literary gossip, Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, did a lot of cutting. Like, 4o percent of the stories lot. There are some who say, therefore, that the editor deserves credit for a lot of Carver's success, his "minimalist" style, etc. Some others would argue that the role of the editor is complex and this is not much different from other editor-author relationships. Some would say that the editor is trying to take credit for this, but Carver is still Carver. Some say the writing would have been better left less touched, longer, rambling-ier. The article sums up the controversy, but more interestingly, the magazine published excerpts of letters Carver sent to Lish over a 15-year-ish period of time. The longest one is a really rambling, impassioned letter sent after Lish had severely cut down the stories for the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Carver was pleading with Lish to halt the publication entirely. It's pretty amazing, really, to get this window into Carver's mind, given his alcoholism and general fragile state, and also to see how he writes when he's overemotional and stressed out -- it repeats itself and it's sort of rambling and strung out-seeming. It makes me think I should read more letter collections, except quite frankly, I have too much to read already. Still, this is recommended reading if you are a writer, Carver fan, or book nerd.