susie boyt & judy garland

the real impetus to start the blog came, strangely enough, from an up front in the March 2009 Vogue. I can never be accused of being extremely up to date with my publications. I love them dearly, but I find that with great glossy magazines like Vogue I tend to be slow consuming them, especially since what I really want are images for collages. I would have liked to link directly to the article, but since I am so late in discussing this issue, it is no longer on Vogue's website.

To give a bit of background, the first feature in Vogue--called Up Front--is the only part of the magazine that I can read and stomach. Anna Wintour's letter to the editor always offends (especially because I ascribe to the Ugly Betty/Devil Wears Prada portrayals of major magazine editors never actually writing their letter). Nostalgia is too stuck up its own ass, to put it crudely. Fashionistas of today writing about fashionistas of the past. Or, if we're lucky, we get to read Galliano's reminiscences about the good ole days at the beginning of his career. Call it jealousy, but there's something about the rich remembering the rich that strikes me as incredibly ostentatious and gaudy.

Up Front has a range of subject matter, but mainly it deals with some writer who has had some conflict with her family/husband/upbringing/etc who portrays it in a few magazine pages while simultaneously dropping designer names in regards to the events of their lives. My favorite example of this ridiculousness occurred in an Up Front that excerpted It Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies' novel about her hard luck life as part of New York Elite. I read this selection with avid interest, as her ex-husband taught at my college and their separation occurred mere months before I started attending the school. It was discussed in many corners of the campus,
nowhere more rabidly than the newspaper office. In this excerpt in Vogue, she managed to trivialize Oberlin because people wore *gasp* LL BEAN JACKETS TO DINNER. Astonishing. They should be hanged. Life outside of New York? How trite! How sweet! How...provincial.

On second thought, maybe I gave Up Front too much credit earlier. It has obviously angered me before, but I found this particular issue to be more heartwarming. Titled "All the Things You Are," this piece briefly outlines writer Susie Boyt's attachment to Judy Garland. Boyt writes:

"When I was born in a tall thin house with no foundations, in an eerie Gothic London square, my mother already had four children; allegiances had been formed and strong characters established. It soon seemed quite clear that all the major personality types had been taken. There is a battle to make yourself heard when you are last on the production line.

I was a conscientious and reliable girl, chubby and intense, so sensitive that my heart went out to everything--strangers, ants, even that sad cluster of abandoned items in the supermarket next to the cashier's till. My parents had parted before I was born, and I missed my father so much it was a physical pain.

As a young child it seemed that all anyone ever said to me was 'You must learn to toughen up. You mustn't take everything to heart so. You really ought to control your feelings, or you just won't have a happy life.' This, then, I learned, was the job of childhood, the work of adolescence. If you could only gain mastery of your emotional world, why, you would be set up forever! But how to do it? Nobody said. Was I to arrange myself so that I had no feelings at all? Or was it more a question of keeping very quiet for a few years until my mental capabilities could match the intensity of my heart? As a small person you can feel very unformed, and there is a certain humiliation attached to this."

This piece resonated with me, as someone who can certainly be described as emotional. I grew up in a sports-frenzied household, and on more than one occasion found myself crying over criticisms from various sources (coaches, etc) over my qualities as a player. A thicker skin I needed; a thicker skin I (arguably) never grew.

What bothers me most about the concept of the thicker skin or the English stiff upper lip is that it points so clearly to the gender divide-->drawing from the traditional ideals that men are stoic and women are hysterical, stoicism was idealized. The abstract ideals that divorce humanity from nature (abstract art/transcendental writing) are "better" than art that deals with emotion or *gasp* womanhood.

Susie Boyt, all the power to you.

the independent review