Admitting my big love of The Hunger Games is nothing like as embarrassing as admitting my feelings for the Twilight Saga was. Its journey from bestselling novel to blockbuster movie has been accompanied by all kinds of speculation as to why so many actual adults are reading a novel categorized as, “Young Adult,” so at least this time [...]
It isn’t often that you find Patterson Hood in a road-weary state of mind. So when the Drive-By Truckers singer/guitarist says it’s time to take a break from performing live, you know he isn’t joking around.
Two brothers from Alabama, Jon and Andy Erwin, have reached the top 10 of the weekend movie-box office rankings with the pro-life, evangelical film October Baby, according to Allison Yarrow in a March 28 report at The Daily Beast. And Jon Erwin says that the film is an opportunity to counter certain media stereotypes of him and his kind. “[Usually] if there’s a Christian virgin character, she’s the nerd,” Erwin tells Yarrow. “I wanted to swing the pendulum to say Christian home-schooling virgin teenagers, of which I was one—we’re not that weird!”
A photo exhibit now on display at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute showcases lesbian families living in the Deep South
Elizabeth Hughey
The Birmingham Public Library has recently presented a poetry series with compound-complex title bestrewn with a surfeit of punctuation that includes commas, colons, ampersands and an em dash that may or may not be errant: “Word Up! 2012: The Art of the Word — Celebrating the Art of Poetry: Spoken & Print, New & Familiar.” The lineup has been so great (M. Ayodele Heath, Kevin Young) that I have to assume those are marks of exuberance, tiny typographical imprints urging all of us with eyes and ears to ready ourselves for National Poetry Month in April. In any case, the series concludes this week with a reading from Birmingham-based poet Elizabeth Hughey, who won the 2007 Iowa Poetry Prize for her collection Sunday Houses the Sunday House.
Click the links below to hear Hughey reading her poems “If Oaxaca Means If” and “How to Be in the Movies.”
You can hear her read these poems and others on Tuesday, March 27, at 6:30 p.m. in the library’s Arrington Auditorium. The program is free. To learn more, call (205) 226-3671 or visit www.bplonline.org.
When sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s latest book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, was published last month, I wasn’t in any rush to read it. With the exception of an unfortunate year or so spent in cohabitation with some boy I used to hang around with, to whom I now refer as the zombie, because he’s dead to me, yet still walks amongst the living, I’ve lived alone since my college graduation. I’m well aware of the appeal of living alone, and find it not surprising in the slightest. All I expected to get from the book was irritated. As it turns out, I can’t say I was wrong.
In 1950 9 percent of Americans, aout 4 million people lived alone. According t
o the 2010 census, those numbers have skyrocketed, with 31 million people, comprising about 28 percent of the households, are on our own. Here in Alabama, for once we’re right on track with a national trend, with 28% of households consisting of just one person. For all the hysterical, inexplicable, ranting and raving about the threat same sex marriage poses to so called, “traditional marriage,” nothing could be farther from the truth. How can people wanting into any institution, a school, the military, or marriage, possibly weaken it? If people are willing to fight their way into any such thing, their presence will only strengthen it. It’s the people opting out of marriage altogether who put its continued existence at risk. An honest look at how and why people are choosing the pleasure of their own company over that of sharing their homes would require us to reappraise the meaning and value of marriage as we currently define it. As far as I’m concerned, consenting adults should be able to marry whoever, however, they want. I just don’t understand why they’d want to, aside from access to health insurance.
Given the longstanding American tradition of attacking troubling people or ideas, rather than engaging in any kind of discourse with them, a media backlash against the domestically discrete was probably inevitable. Given the extent to which their increasing numbers are driven by feminism and its fruits – more and better educational and professional opportunities for women, later first marriages, etc. – and the 3 million more women than men living alone, it’s no surprise the criticism has been largely directed at us.
We’ve had real life concern trolls warning us of the risk of infidelity associated with putting off pregnancy. One who went so far as to urge us to stop looking for Mr. Right, and settle for Mr. Kind of Good Enough, Maybe. Self described Christian self help authors have described single life for women as, “unbiblical,” and marriage as, “biblically mandated.” We’ve been told we’ve educated ourselves right out of marriageability, given declining numbers of college educated men. Yet, no one seems to be telling men they’d better get started on some SAT prep, if they ever hope to marry. In this context, Steven Kurutz’s equal opportunity fear mongering in his New York Times article, “The Freedom, and Perils, of Living Alone,” could be seen as a refreshing change of pace. It’s not, he tells us, that there’s anything wrong with living alone, per se. Rather, if you do it for too long, you’ll become too weird to ever live with anyone else again.
The premise seems plausible enough, I guess. The trouble is, Kurutz bases his claims in part on the behavior of tv characters, reminding us, “as tv has taught us, the single occupant home can be a breeding ground for eccentricities.” He goes on to reference Clair Danes’s character on Homeland, and Kramer from Seinfeld. I had no idea either CIA dramas or nineties sitcoms could be substituted for sociological studies. And didn’t everyone on Seinfeld live alone anyway, with the one attempt at marriage ending in death? Maybe Kurutz isn’t watching enough TV.
He doesn’t seem to spend much time with actual living, breathing, humans either, considering the behaviors he finds so dangerously eccentric. They include eating at odd hours, strange sleep schedules, wearing weird ugly clothes at home alone, and leaving the bathroom door open. That bathroom door thing really seems to bug him. None of these strike me as relationship killers. In retrospect, considering Kurutz’s inability to appropriately deconstruct Seinfeld, and evident lack of familiarity with the actual spectrum of human weirdness, his description of, “Going Alone,” as “a mash note to domestic solipsism,” probably shouldn’t have motivated me to check it out. I should have known better. I should have remembered how I let my friends talk me into seeing Jurassic Park, even though I knew I’d hate it, and hate it I did.
To be fair, Kurutz isn’t the only one who sees Going Solo as favorably inclined toward its subject. Discussing the book, Kleinenberg himself seems similarly deluded, saying he went from seeing the increasing numbers of people living alone as a social problem, to seeing it as a, “social experiment,” and endlessly repeating his apparently astonishing discovery that people who live alone aren’t necessarily tragic shut ins, but in fact, “tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married.” This positivity is nowhere to be found in the actual book. At least I couldn’t find it, and I was really looking for it. Admittedly, I may have had trouble getting past Klinenberg’s insistent use of the precious, cloying, term, “singleton.” But I don’t think that was the whole of the problem.
Going Solo focuses on four groups. Twentysomethings for whom the transition from living with roommates to living alone represents a transitory step towards adulthood. Older people living alone in the aftermath of a divorce or break up. The elderly who live alone, and finally, those who die alone. The only people portrayed as unambiguously pleased with their domestic arrangements are the twentysomethings, who assume the whole thing’s temporary anyway. The rest struggle with the expected issues of loneliness, reproduction, and ambivalence. My experience of living alone was nowhere to be found.
Technically, I could be considered one of those living alone after a relationship ended. But I’d lived alone for years before that. For me, cohabitation was the unexpected experiment, the deviation from the norm, not living alone. However weird I might be by myself, I wasn’t much less so living with someone else. I was probably somewhat less likely to walk around the apartment naked, but that’s pretty much it. I like living alone, and always have, for all the usual reasons. I get plenty of quality time with myself, to read, or write, or dick around on facebook, without which I get a little crazy. Possibly more than a little. When my Siberian huskies woo-woo-woo at me, I woo right back. Sometimes I make them dance with me, and tell myself they’re learning to like it. I don’t have to worry about the clutter to which I’m oblivious bothering anyone else. I eat and sleep at odd hours, and certainly wear clothes in which I’d never venture past my front door. Who doesn’t?
In the immediate aftermath of the personal zombie apocalypse that ended my adventures in cohabitation, the idea of ever getting to know, and be known by, another person again just seemed exhausting. Just about everything to do with relationships did. That’s no longer so, or at least, it’s much less so. But I’m not at all sure about another shot at domestic bliss. I think I’d do much better with some living down a door or two, or maybe across the street. Sharing has never been my strong point.
This comedy that takes Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston to a hippie commune provides a lot of laughs, but gets a little dull whenever the movie remembers that it needs a plot.
At the beta pictoris gallery in downtown Birmingham, six artists wave their own interpretations of flags.
Grotesquely disfigured heads and hands, floating in their specimen jars, and centuries-old anatomical models, especially a selection of meticulously carved ivory miniatures, created the perfect setting for an otherworldly contemplation of magic, madness, disease, death and science.
The Alabama Shakes will join Jacks White for a leg of his three-month tour this spring and summer, Paste Magazine reports, with scheduled performances in Nashville and the Hangout Music Fest in Gulf Shores.
