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by Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

May 16, 2002 • Today's weblog

The Virgin and the Dynamo, Part 2:

"Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental Goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was Goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund." -- The Education of Henry Adams.

A long, long time ago, my teenage self read an essay in Mademoiselle magazine that bluntly said, If you don't want to be a hapless bimbo, read these books. I carried the list around for two years, eventually getting them all. I can't remember the essay's author -- Who changed my life? Budd Schulberg, perhaps? -- or most of the books. Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf was on there, Colin Wilson's The Outsider appealed to my teen angst (The Outsider sees too deep and too much and what he sees is essentially chaos); Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, probably Fitzgerald; the only woman I recall on the list was Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead).

(Is there a similar list, updated to include the entire range of 20th-century authors?)

What brought this all to mind was discovering Moxie, published out of an attic loft in Berkeley, a magazine of short stories, some fiction, some first-person accounts, most by younger women authors. (One, republished on AlterNet, led me there: Are We Dating Yet? by San Friancisco writer Lori Writer, whose name is astonishing in itself.) Moxie, on a page devoted to an award it seemed surprised to win, characterizes itself as "Designed for smart, gutsy women who want an alternative to fashion, sex, and beauty magazines." Fecund it is.
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