Posted 1:18 PM by Blah blah

For all you SATC girls out there! Candace Bushnell Single No More (AP):

"The author of Sex and the City has gotten hitched. Bushnell, whose best-selling book was adapted into the HBO television program starring Sarah Jessica Parker, married Charles Askegard July 4 on a wind-swept Nantucket beach in Massachusetts."

Candace Bushnell and Charles Askegard (NY Times). The story of their courtship, and why an alpha female decided to marry a ballet dancer.

With all of Unica Hija's talk of the "alpha male" (with epsilon, mu, nu, omicron, and pi men sure to follow), this book seems to lie contrary to conventional wisdom about him. Endangered species (Salon.com):
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Why are there no more rugged, self-reliant he-men like the subject of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man? Because no women will put up with them....

[Eustace] Conway sees himself as a woodsman, in the tradition of such boyhood heroes as Daniel Boone. As a child he embarked on an extremely methodical and focused campaign to teach himself how to live in the wild, and he became very good at it. He's an expert hunter who knows how to turn his prey into clothing as well as food. For years at a time he lived in the forests of North Carolina in a teepee he made himself. He carved his own bowls from wood and made his own pots from creek clay. He wove baskets and started fires without matches. He hiked all 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail, eating only what he could catch or forage along the way. He rode a horse across America.

Gilbert sees Conway as both the consummate woodsman and as the last specimen of something she holds dear, a classic American man. It's not quite clear if Conway himself finds the question of masculinity very compelling (although at one point Gilbert describes him as regretting the vanishing of coming-of-age rituals for boys), but for Gilbert it's the crux of the matter. For her, Conway truly is what the rest of American men can only imagine themselves being; "computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media moguls" may call themselves "maverick," or "pioneer," but Conway is both things in actuality....

He's had a series of beautiful, strong, capable girlfriends and many worshipful disciples. And yet these people, no matter how much they may idolize Conway at first, have a way of getting fed up and walking out on him. Despite his heartfelt desire for a wife and children, he has neither....

The thrilling masculinity practiced by [Daniel] Boone and other frontiersmen, it turns out, was founded on the principle of bossing everybody else around and getting no back talk about it, either. Why would anyone want to live with that who didn't have to? And what happens to the patriarch when suddenly there's no more patriarchy, when everybody who doesn't like playing by his rules decides to take the ball and go home?