Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist (review)

270Fourth Genre stages ofdecompression; better, obeying a law ofmeasuredjettisons to move out of a mundane orbit. Shoring up, digging in, laying low. Architecting essences. Becketting. Speaking in contractions to minimize the echoes. Making the darkling plain." It is as if he has overturned a trunk filled with language appropriate to his situation—puns, aUusions, metaphors, synonyms —and is rummaging through them. He is constantly aware of possibility and continuaUy alert to Umitations oflanguage. In "Offerings," an essay which is mostly a segmented musing on death, Saltzman talks about his favorite words and brings the reflection around to his father and his father's language. "To my father, making a career out of literature was comparable to making a working motor out ofsticks and rubber bands, but I owe him for putting up with my private (and from his perspective , highly questionable) passions." On the highway his father, a lawyer, teUs him, "Judges love behoove . . . They reaUy perk up when they hear it." Ten miles later he recommends "sabotage." "It sounds subversive. A good, cagey word to use. Have you tried sabotage?" Objects and Empathy is rich with good, cagey words, immersion reporting from the interior of a reflective, observant, highly literate mind. Reviewed by Robert L. RootJr. Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist by Rosemary Danieli HiU Street Press, 2001 203 pages, cloth, $22.95 Rosemary DanieU, best known for her book Fatal Flowers, is a self-avowed feminist, although one more in the mold ofEricaJong than Gloria Steinern. Like Scarlett O'Hara, DanieU is a southern beUe with an attitude. Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist is a coUection of essays and reportage written over a period of three decades. It's interesting to see the progression of themes through the years. One of the earliest, "The Feminine Frustration," outlines many ofthe concerns ofmainstream feminism, such as unequal pay and unequal representation in the professions. Many ofthe later essays deal with sexual liberation. DanieU sees sexual liberation as an inextricable part of cultural and poUtical liberation. In "The PiU and Me: Before and After," she asserts that "what I now think of as my Anarchist's Heart, could not have existed without the Pill." Such liberation was also artistic, as witnessed by the title ofher book ofpoems, A Sexual Tour ofthe Deep South. Book Reviews271 The best piece of writing here is "The Deer who Love to Be Hunted: A Reflection on James Dickey's Women," which leads offthe book. Although recently written, "Hunted" recounts an affair DanieU had with the famous poet and novelist. DanieU also interviews other women who were sexuaUy and professionally used by the writer. It's a haunting portrait. Dickey abused women ruthlessly, and yet many ofthe women who were involved with him remain loyal to him and his memory. DanieU s own feelings are ambiguous: "He loved ... to seek out the mystery layered beneath reality, to put it into words and rhythms. If only he could have kept it to that." Another fine bit of reportage is "The Scandal that Shook Savannah," which recounts the now-famous murder that formed the basis for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. For my money, DanieU captures in a dozen pages the flavor of her adopted hometown without the sometimes tedious myth-making of either the more famous novel or film. DanieU relates a comment a "feminist spokesman" made to her when she was promoting Fatal Flowers. DanieU reports the woman as saying to her, "You're Uke a combination of Harper's Bazaar and Screw magazine." The reader feels that DanieU is quite proud of that characterization. When Ms. magazine rejected her poems for having "too much blood in them," DanieU repUed that when she has bloodless poems, she'U send them. Confessions ofa (Female) Chauvinist is not afraid to bleed, but with style—the only way DanieU knows how to do things. Reviewed by MarcJ. Sheehan My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum Open City Books, 2001 177 pages, paper, $14.00 In the introduction to My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum explains: "The pieces in this book ... are aU about the way intense life experiences take on the qualities ofscenes from movies. They are about...