But, wait, Jess, Avatar is totally for the ladies! And you know how I know? James Cameron said so! In the totally rocking New Yorker profile of him, he told Dana Goodyear,

“With Avatar, I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars—a soldier goes to Mars,” Cameron told me. “Of course, the whole movie ends up being about women, how guys relate to their lovers, mothers—there’s a large female presence,” Cameron said. “I try to do my testosterone movie and it’s a chick flick. That’s how it is for me... Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how a film is made. It’s an emotional story. It’s a love story. They’re not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool—battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it’s that, too."

Whether or not I quite believe Cameron, I am totally jazzed about the good reviews Avatar has been getting as of a screening last night. I don't know when exactly I got brainwashed into thinking of the guy who made the biggest grossing movie of all time as an underdog, but I am now totally rooting for his movie about blue cats with boobs not to fail. Schadenfreude be damned, I'd rather something that cost a fortune and millions of man-hours be good than bad. Also, this is the guy who gave us the supremely badass Sarah Connor. I'm not sure it's his movies we should be refusing to see.

Still from Avatar. © 2009 Fox and its related entities. All rights reserved.

Tags: avatar

Janet Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy when her first collection of short stories won a prestigious New Zealand literary award in 1952. Fortunately, the superintendent of the psychiatric hospital where she was a patient had a literary bent. When he heard about the Frame's win, he cancelled the operation. Frame's writing literally saved her.

Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame is a survey of Frame's short fiction, including stories from that first collection, The Lagoon, and three subsequent collections, along with four stories never previously collected. Frame, the subject of Jane Campion's 1990 biopic An Angel at my Table, occupies herself mainly with the frustrating reality of how little we can know of others' thoughts and how much we assume. Many of her characters end up emotionally isolated because they have never exchanged childhood intuition and honesty for adult subterfuge. Those who do make that bargain are left to repeat platitudes that will never reassure them: "They were intelligent, they understood each other." Frame's characters often equate material comfort with emotional safety—one story is titled "Insulation."

For being written as early as the '50s, these tales have uncanny currency: The title story explores the emotional emptiness of the aptocratic life. Several young protagonists chafe under their parents' attempts to name their talents and interests and their dependence on their children's achievements as a primary source of self-esteem. And Frame describes those parents with biting insight and unexpected, intimately observed details that suggest she knows whereof she speaks.

Tags: book of the week, janet frame

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: How do you react when you get a holiday gift you don't like?

Amanda Marcotte: Being born and bred in Texas means that I was carefully trained to stifle inconvenient ingratitude under a sea of sunshine and fake gratitude. From the time I could speak, my parents hovered over me at gift-giving time to make sure that my immediate reaction to any present, no matter how stupid, was to grin like it was exactly what I wanted. That reaction is so automatic in me that sometimes I try not to grin too hard when I get a gift I dislike and give away how I really feel. Bad gifts can usually be handled by returning them to the store later, as long as the store tags are left on. There have been times when I returned a gift to a store that had nothing I liked for exchange, and so what I do is use the store credit to buy something the giver would like and keep it on hand for the next birthday or Christmas. After all, I may not like that store, but they clearly do.

Hanna Rosin: Graciously, except when it's from my mother. If there is even the slightest defect in a gift she's given me, I use it as an excuse to unload thirtysome years of stored complaints on her. It's juvenile and unreasonable, and every holiday I swear I'm not going to do it and then ... the wrong color scarf comes out of the box and I start. Maybe this year she should give me a therapy session as a present.

Jessica Grose: My family avoids this problem by having a no-gift policy. What can I say, I come from an unsentimental lot. My mom and dad bought us presents for our birthdays and the holidays until we were about 12, at which point they felt we were old enough to dispense with the custom. Since then, we get cold, hard cash or specific requests for information about what we want. Of course, this approach also eliminates the joy and happy surprise that result from opening a thoughtful, carefully purchased present. But I never have to worry about pretending to love a godawful sweater, either.

Tags: holiday gifts

There's another hand-wringing article about the lack of female directors in Hollywood in today's New York Times. This article is written at least once a year, and I've never read any good or satisfying explanation as to why only about 10 percent of the movies reviewed in the Times were directed by women, or why only three women have ever been nominated for Oscars. In the Times piece, Manohla Dargis capably deflates the usual excuse for why there are so few female directors—studios say movies by women don't make money. What's more, Dargis adds, "The vogue for comics and superheroes has generally forced women to sigh and squeal on the sidelines."

Enter James Cameron's Avatar, which appears to be about blue aliens and dragons. Oh, and also CGI alien boobs, which Cameron seems inordinately obsessed with. As Josh Levin points out in Slate, Avatar is not meant to appeal to women. I have zero interest in seeing this film, despite the rave reviews so far, including the one from Variety that says "everyone who ever goes to the movies will need to see" Avatar. Since Hollywood does only care about the box office, it is my small act of quasi-feminist resistence to refuse to see this movie. I know that if Avatar flops, it won't necessarily get more films directed by women with stories starring women made. But maybe it will mean that instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make the ideal cat-person breasts, studios might take a smidgen of that cash and spend it on one or two movies that aren't geared toward 15-year-old boys.

Tags: avatar, manohla dargis, women directors

The latest issue of Narrative Magazine includes an excerpt from Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. The 1/30th we get is from Joyce Carol Oates, who says she can’t think of any mentors (which is very Lady Gaga of her). She just tells some fabulous stories about Donald Barthelme, John Gardener, and her lonely relationship to Alice and Wonderland. I doubt she intended for the essay to be at all gendered, but she comes off as surrounded by self-mythologizing men:

With one so strong-minded as Donald Barthelme, you could not easily change the subject. You would remain on Don’s subject for as long as Don wished to examine that subject, he with the air of a bemused vivisectionist. As Don’s prose fiction is whimsical-shading-into-nightmare, cartoon-surreal-visionary, so Don’s personality on such quasi-social occasions was likely to be that of the playful bully, perversely defining himself as an outsider, a marginal figure, a “loser” in the marketplace, in contrast to others whose books sold more, or so he believed. No sooner had my husband and I been welcomed into the Barthelmes’ brownstone apartment—no sooner had I congratulated Don on what I’d believed to be the very positive reviews and bestseller status of his new book of stories, Amateurs —than he corrected me with a sneering smile, informing me that Amateurs wasn’t a bestseller, and that no book of his had ever been a bestseller; his book sales were “nothing like” mine; if I doubted this, we could make a bet—for $100—and check the facts. Quickly I backed down, I declined the bet—no doubt in my usual embarrassed and conciliatory way, hoping to change the subject.

But Don wasn’t in the mood to change the subject just yet. To everyone’s embarrassment—Ray’s, mine, his wife’s—Don picked up a phone receiver, dialed a number, and handed the receiver to me with the request to speak to his editor—he’d called Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Giroux—and ask if in fact Donald Barthelme had ever had a bestseller; and so, trying to fall in with the joke, which seemed to me to have gone a little further than necessary, I asked Roger Straus—whom I didn’t know, had scarcely heard of at this time in my life—if Don had ever had a bestseller, and was told no, he had not.

This brief and painful encounter with the male ego strikes me as very Joan Didion: the slight swallowed in the moment (his books “nothing like” hers), later to be caustically unveiled on the page.

Tags: donald barthelme, joyce carol oates

Sen. Max Baucus has admitted to being involved with Melodee Hanes, his former state director and senior counsel. The relationship was made public because Baucus had nominated Hanes for the position of U.S. attorney in Montana. Politico has a juicy headline about the pair, "Max Baucus gave girlfriend 14K raise," but then buried deep on the second page of the story the authors mention, "the raise was on a par with the legislative director’s and less than the chief of staff’s." Both Baucus and Hanes were recently separated or divorced by the time they began the relationship, and despite the flashy ledes, the only major mistake the pair seem to have made was not disclosing the union earlier on.

However, it does raise the Letterman conundrum once again. If you'll recall, back in October, Nell Scovell, a former writer on The Late Show wrote for Vanity Fair's website:

Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.

There's no concrete evidence yet that Baucus's other staffers felt like Scovell did—that the senator's relationship with Hanes created a hostile work environment. However, it's worth mentioning here that Baucus was sued by his former chief of staff Christine Niedermeyer for making unwanted sexual advances (he says he fired her because she was abusive to the rest of the staff), but the case was thrown out. Again, since Baucus was already separated when the relationship with Hanes began, he doesn't reach cad status ... but if more negative information on his workplace behavior emerges, he may make the 2010 list.

Photo of Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus by John Moore/Getty Images.

Tags: cads, David Letterman, max baucus, melodee hanes, sexual harrassment