I think my body’s fighting off another bug. You know that flu feeling you get when you’re just coming down with something? Not sick enough to take to your bed, or even sick enough to take a decongestant. Just blargh, run-down, body aching, head caught in a vise not squeezing very hard but still there and stuffed with cotton to boot.
Yeah. Like that.
My Friday post is up at Fangs, Fur, Fey; it’s titled That’s Great. Now, Do It Again. It is a reprint of a post I did last June. Sorry about that, but the subject has come back up again and I think it’s useful. Above all, I didn’t want to retype the damn thing.
You’ve been continuously mugged and beaten and robbed blind for the past seven years straight, and as you lay there on the cold, hard economic ground, bleeding and gasping and wondering what the hell happened to your vacation time and your health care plan and your mortgage payment, your attackers scoff and leer and toss a couple of bloodstained nickels on your pulverized face and mutter, here sucker, have some bus fare, and then they cackle and stomp away with all your loot and dignity and hope, back to the White House from whence they came.
What, too harsh? Not really. It’s a lovely feeling, made even more sweetly ironic by the fact that Congress will likely soon shove through another $108 billion in war funds like a giant gallstone through our collective fiscal urethra. Right there, that’s about 500 bucks for each and every adult human in America, baristas and Baptists and NASCAR fans alike.
Do you see? Your “economic stimulus” check is meaningless, an empty gesture, a trifling crumb of recompense after robbing you blind via insane gas prices, infrastructure meltdowns, massive failed wars that aren’t really wars. Thanks for the bogus check, Dubya, now where can I buy a sliver of our missing national dignity? (Mark Morford)
Yeah. I really can’t add much more to that. Except that later on in the article, he links to a study that shows meditation can strengthen empathy. Make you kinder.
Boy, do I ever need that today. I’m feeling like Nix, our third cat–the one who looks like a ferret and is jumpy as a…erm, big jumpy thing. (I almost said coke fiend, but decided that would be Too Much. Oops…) Anyway, I feel like every inch of my skin is too aching and sensitive today, like I’m skittering and jumping from one shadow to the next, trying to find one big enough to hide me from.
Anyway–on the reading front, I read Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties and Specials yesterday too. The series was great. A little deus ex machina-y (what the Selkie and I call magic dingus-y) at the end of Specials, but no complaints. It was great, well-structured, and nicely done. Bravo. Usually when I blaze through a book or two that fast I’m not looking under the hood and tinkering with the engine, which means I’m not being pulled out of the story. I did find some of the luck stuff–like the main character just happening to land inside an anthropological experiment–a bit heavy-handed, but what are you going to do? It’s YA, and short YA at that. All in all, it was a fantastic little series, and just what I needed.
Last but not least, my Mother’s Day present arrived. I’ve taken to buying my own and enthusing over them so nobody has to buy me soap on a rope or a tie or anything, you know. Everyone’s happier that way. This year the kids got me a Garbo box set. I’ve always wanted Queen Christina on DVD. Now I can satisfy my longing for sultry Swedes who just want to be aloooooooone. What an awesome gift.
Heh. Not too many complaints, despite the post title. Oh well, it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised. Also: I scored this at Powell’s last time I went. What a great title, eh? I’m hoping it will live up to it. Even if it doesn’t, the premise is awesome and should provide me with grist for the mental mill.
But first, work today. And a nap. Definitely feeling like a nap.
I almost forgot: Saturday (tomorrow) I will be at Cover to Cover Books from 5-7PM for the monthly Writer’s Mixer. I’ll be presenting on the topic of continuity and character development in a multiple-book series. In case you want to, you know, come by and beat me up or anything.
Good morning (again.) Didn’t get much sleep, but I don’t feel like I needed it–I did fall into bed really tired, couldn’t sleep, read some Bukowski, and finally did sleep, with weird dreams of lanterns and spiders.
Don’t ask.
Anyway, last night the Selkie and I (on kind of short notice) made it to the Alice Hoffman signing at Beaverton Powell’s. Hoffman is only the Selkie’s favorite writer in the world, and we were both fangirly and all. Ms. Hoffman was divine–sweet and funny and old-fashioned polite. She read a bit from her newest book and answered some questions. Both the Selkie and I got questions answered, though mine was pretty much the Selkie’s question; it was about Ethan in Blue Diary. I wanted to know where he came from and the Selkie wondered why we never saw anything from his POV.
Yeah, us writers, always thinking about craft. The Selkie asked about The River King and the answer was so heartbreaking. In a kind-of-good way, though. I suppose if there was a theme to last night it was “writing can save your life.”
Anyway, Ms. Hoffman told us that Ethan was Bluebeard (which the Selkie had got ages ago but I hadn’t, and I’m usually quite good at spotting my fairytales.) And that she had to love her characters, so Ethan–a character who was either evil of had some evil in him, is how she put it–wasn’t someone she could get near.
I understood. Really, I do. The urge to love your characters is deep and profound, and I suppose I do love all of them down deep in some weird way. But mostly I dislike my heroes. I downright hate a couple of them–Michael Constantius, for one, is a manipulative asshat and I hatehatehate him. (One of the best times I ever had writing was that crucifixion scene.) Japhrimel I also dislike in some very fundamental ways, as he’s so wrapped around the axle by what he feels for Danny he won’t tell her anything for fear of losing her or frightening her. Plus, he was a demon, for Pete’s sake, and his idea of “truth” was so flexible as to be absurd. Darik? Insufferable and arrogant, but he’s nicer than the others just because of those exquisite manners. The Watchers? Collectively, they’re one creepy bunch of guys. I do like Jack Gray, though, and I’m awful fond of Merrick. I have a little black spot in my heart for Merrick.
I ramble. But the way I feel about my heroes is usually a complex mishmash of not-very-positive feelings. My heroines I’m closer to, but all of them are flawed–I mean, Christ, try spending an afternoon with Danny while she’s On The Rampage. Or with Elise when she’s in a snit, or Rowan when she won’t do anything for herself. Argh. I can understand my heroines and to some extent my heroes, but I don’t love my characters. They’re people to me, and fully-formed and fleshed people at that, but I don’t love them.
Part of that is because they’re going to leave when the story is done. Another part is that the story demands horrible thing to happen to them, and it’s wrenching. Dead Man Rising was terrible for me, because I understood Dante so thoroughly and could feel what she was feeling. It was awful.
Hrm. I’m rambling, and that can’t be very interesting. Suffice to say that it was ALL KINDS OF AWESOME to actually see Alice Hoffman in the flesh and get some of my favorites–especially Seventh Heaven–signed.
The Selkie and I had a longish dinner afterward, and a chat about character motivations. I can’t wait to read her WIP. *fidgets* Then we both wended our way home, and I settled in and read Scott Westerberg’s Uglies, which was (as I’ve said) a very good, very rolling read. It really reminded me of Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite The Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which is high praise from me. I finished it in about three hours, give or take about twenty minutes, and wasn’t bored once the whole way through. I did like how the subject of anorexia was approached, in a quiet almost-glancing way, and dealt with very lightly. I can see this book doing a lot of good.
And now it’s Tuesday morning, the kitchen is full of dishes, I haven’t had coffee yet, and I’ve got the YA to do a draft on. I think once I get through the first three chapters–which I’ve retooled and retooled because that’s what first chapters do, for me–it will go better and smoother.
Weasel Boy is going well. 4k yesterday, and a lot of it usable. There will be dead weight in the rough draft, sure, but I want it well underway by the time I go back to the YA.
This is in many respects my favorite part of working, the creative burst that precedes a lot of revision. I had been having dark, dismal thoughts that the creative burst was in my past, that I couldn’t get up that head of steam anymore, etc., etc., shake that Internal Censor until s/he howls. But I’ve discovered that wasn’t the case. I was just resting, the ground kind of fallow and my usual speed slowed to a crawl. The creative life is somewhat of a bicycle ride, because one has to balance carefully and watch for danger and look at the bloody scenery. When one has to juggle on top of riding the cycle, speed necessarily slows–and this ain’t no Tour de France, it’s okay to sniff some roses and kiss some pretty boys along the way.
Or girls. Or tentacled monsters, if one prefers Cthulu.
On the book front, I’ve finished Wages of Destruction. It was a fun read, very dense, and I don’t understand half of what I should about statistics etc. but the author made it reasonably clear in context. I haven’t read any other studies of the German economy during the interwar and WWII period, so I’ll have to take the cover blurbs’ word that this is a revolutionary study. It did inform several other books I’ve read in odd ways–like Alan Clark’s Barbarossa and Beevor’s great study of Stalingrad. Now I’m hoping Tooze looks at the Russian economy in the same period. I’d read that book.
So…what I’m reading now: The Guns of August, Ivan’s War (thanks to all the Readers who suggested those) and, to leaven everything, The Beasts of Tarzan. I like Burroughs, actually. It’s pulp, but it’s reasonably good pulp and I know what I’m getting with every mighty-thewed chapter. Srsly, I haven’t read this many thews since the Iliad.
I have this regrettable fondness for Tarzan, mostly because of Travis Fimmel. I wish the WB would release that series on DVD. Hey. Quit laughing. I loved that show. It was awesome.
I am tossing around the idea of a historical Watcher series. It would mean a lot of research, but it would probably be fun. Of course, since I’m booked for the next couple of years it’s going to take a while and might never come to fruition…but it’s nice to think about these things, you know.
Happy Tuesday, all. And now, back to the salt mines–and I’m cooking Fifteen-Bean Soup and rye bread today. Let’s hope it works out as well as some of the writing is…
Tonight I’m hoping to make the Seattle Urban Fantasy Author-A-Thon, 7pm-9pm at the Beaverton Powells. Mark Henry and Mario Acevedo will be there, and the audience will hold such luminaries as Richelle Mead and (I think) Caitlin Kittredge. I am certain there will be heckling and much fun. My own attendance is based upon the car not making that knocking noise and the Muffin getting home from work before 6:30. Wish me luck.
Yesterday I (are you ready for this?): knocked off 4K on the young adult book, made bagels from scratch, made homemade pizza, started Mixed-Starter Bread, and cleaned. Of all those things, it was the work on the YA that made my brain feel like it was ironed out flat and squeezed dry.
I’ve been thinking lately of books I feel are sorely neglected, so I decided to list five of them. Your mileage may vary, but I love these little books I’m about to list–and should you try them, I hope you like them too.
* A New England Girlhood, Nancy Hale. I read this when I was about nine, and I loved it. It’s a slice-of-life, a woman who grew up as a New England debutante thinking about her childhood and telling what it was like to live in that world. Some childhood experiences are universal–like losing something precious, or being cruel to a tag-along and only realizing later how bad that is, or wanting to go with your parents so badly you throw a tantrum. Interspersed with this are little stories about living as an adult, and how childhood memories can be misleading or illuminating, sometimes on the same day.
* Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, Various. This is an anthology I bought once at a library sale that has some of the finest short stories I’ve ever read in it, like The Desrick on Yandro by Manly Wade Wellman, Homecoming by Ray Bradbury, Stephen Vincent Benet’s King of the Cats, and more–like Henry Martindale, Great Dane, or The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. It’s just one of the finest compilations I’ve ever read, and I’ve read three copies of it to pieces now.
* Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson. I read this, again, when I was about nine. (That was a good year for formative books.) Sara Louise is born first, and her twin Caroline almost dies at birth. Everyone cossets and pets Caroline, who is a musical prodigy, and Sara is left feeling ignored and unloved (at one point, her bitch of a grandmama quotes the Old Testament to her, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated). So Sara turns to making her own way. The great thing about this book is the setting, an island in Chesapeake Bay fast losing land every time there’s a storm, crab pots, the stultifying suffocation of small-town life when everyone has already decided what you are. The ending leaves a little to be desired–even when I was nine I thought that Sara Louise deserved much more than nursing and marriage–but it has the virtue of being the ending Sara chose for herself and worked toward, so it made sense.
* Psion and Catspaw , Joan Vinge. Every once in a while I get the great urge to reread these two books; nothing else will do. Xenophobia, telepathy, poverty, outsiders, the longing to belong–it’s all in here, and Cat is a hero the way Sam Spade is a hero. He’s trying to do the best he can, measuring himself by a fierce internal standard, at the mercy of forces and people he can’t control, taken advantage of, and just generally mistreated. I think Cat was the first hero I ever really wanted to marry and “take away from all this.” Ironic, no?
* Passion Play, Sean Stewart. I think Stewart’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. In particular, Passion Play, which was one of the major influences for Dante Valentine’s world, is a dystopian work that kind of mixes a less-repressive Handmaid’s Tale with Psion, structured like a medieval morality/passion play, and with a tough female protagonist that could probably arm-wrestle most male protags under the table without breaking a sweat. I like a lot of Stewart’s other work, but Passion Play is a book I wish I’d written. And that, for me, is the sincerest form of flattery. The codification and government use of psionic talents in Dante’s world gets a lot from the structure Stewart built in this one slim little volume.
There you go, five books I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years and hope other people will discover.
And now I’m off to knock off more of the YA. I am SO SO hoping I get out to Beaverton tonight! If only to squee with Richelle about some neat stuff that I can’t share with everyone just yet, and to possibly see Scockercrew. *wink*
Last night the Teen and I watched Into the Wild. I’d read the book, of course, and knew the ending, so it was heart-in-my-mouth time. The film succeeded for me, I think, because I understood the parents, the protagonist, the incidental characters, and the desire to get out and away, to flee.
The movie affected the Teen very strongly, because of how he feels “about nature”, he said. And because when he was younger, he had dreams of striking off into the world just like Chris McCandless did. It has always seemed ironic to me that the youth who wants to flee the most is often the most ill-equipped for the harshness of the world. There is beauty and kindness out there, sure, and most people are decent. But there is also very real and very present danger, from people and elements AND everything else. Surviving a few hard knocks should make one a little more cautious–but sometimes, the false sense of young invincibility from surviving a few hard knocks can be oh-so-dangerous.
So the Teen and I talked about that urge to get out and go away, and I said something that apparently shook him. “Those types–the explorers–God, they’re selfish. I mean, they have the best intentions in the world, but they’re always heading off into the blue and leaving people behind them to wait and worry. And they’re so self-centred, even though they don’t mean to be.”
He was still thinking about that, and we were still discussing it, when the movie showed what eventually happened to McCandless. I knew, but the Teen didn’t, and he was very taken aback. Afterward the Teen leaned over and wanted a hug.
They get so big, but never so big they don’t need a hug every now and again.
I think both Krakauer’s book about McCandless and the movie succeed as pieces of art, one more documentary than the other. They both provoked strong feelings in me, and both helped me to understand a very human tragedy. More and more, the older I get, I think there are very few cases of true “evil.” (I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, just that it’s rarer than we think.) When you understand both sides of a story, of an issue, of a bloody dispute, it breaks the heart to see people blindly battering away at each other, physically or emotionally.
I also think that to be an artist is to search for understanding as a means to communicate. You cannot communicate clearly without understanding, and (again, Johnny, you’re rising in my thoughts) such understanding breeds compassion.
Ah, I’m getting maudlin. Here’s a few links I’ve enjoyed in the past few days: first, SPATS! and next, golly, they just figured out young humpback whales communicate with their mums. (Gee, go figure.) And Mark Morford’s note to China, where he points out that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out there’s bloody totalitarian repression going on in Tibet, and maybe the Olympics will blow the lid off it. (Hey, we optimists can dream, can’t we?)
Last but not least, watching Into the Wild last night made me figure out something: I want to look like Catherine Keener when I grow up. Talk about aging with grace and beauty. Damn.
But more about that later. Have a good weekend, dear Reader. Hug someone you love–and if you can’t, then hug yourself. Please.
This last weekend was…interesting. On Saturday I worked, and the Selkie came in even though she was too sick to be there, paper-white and coughing. I finally chased her out. The Kiwi showed up and came on-shift, and I took the Teen to get his ear pierced–the Big Thing about him turning 18.
Got home and found out that the washing machine is, in fact, dead. The main bearing is shot. The good news is we can get a new one delivered on Tuesday, and on sale too. Still, it’s an expense we could hardly bear. The only reason why we reshuffled everything to do so is because the laundromat is, in fact, more expensive. And, as the Muffin put it, “I am not going to insist you go to the laundromat, dear. I value my nuts.”
Heh.
Which just makes this funnier. I know I’ve linked it before, but Candy reminded me of it last week and I’ve been thinking of it ever since.
Ah now. Wasn’t that nice? Laughter is the best cure for everything. I’ve had a low-grade fever and approaching-and-receding intimations of flu all weekend, which hasn’t been fun. But enough sleep and treating myself nicely seems to have kicked the flu’s ass, for once.
In other news, I’m going to be back and forth-ing between Redemption Alley revisions and reading Cassie Edwards’s Savage Wrongs for the Smart Bitchery. I figure it’s the least I owe them. But it’s going to be rough going. Already on the first page we have a hero named Echohawk (which my eyes persistently misread as “Ecohawk” and I have visions of Greenpeace mantitty) and a prized rust-colored horse called Blaze, which I keep confusing with teen-girl-horse-novel.
Pity me, dear Reader. I’m not sure the laughter won’t bust me in half.
Speaking of huge laughter, I about died when I saw this over at SB:
God. I suspected that was what men do in the shower. To have proof just makes it funnier.
I also went and saw Jumper this weekend. I wanted a totally disposable movie, and I got one. It’s sad, because the book is in my top 10 YA novels of all time, with Cynthia Voight’s Homecoming and Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland. I hope Gould got paid a lot for that option, man. Even Samuel L. Jackson and Diane Lane couldn’t save that movie, though Jackson was menacingly great as usual. Poor Hayden Christensen. Star Wars just buggered him up royal, didn’t it. On the other hand, Jamie Bell as “Griffin” was AWESOME, and I wished the movie had been about him.
One of the things I liked about David in Jumper (the book) was that he was a problem-solver. He planned. It was a far cry from a lot of other YA novels, where the hero/ine seems incapable of even ordering a latte. Kids are smart, and kids in bad situations will try to get control any way they can. I’ve met a lot of kids who are hyper-planners, and Davy fit right into that mold. I also appreciated the fact that Davy didn’t get everything he wanted. The movie just excised everything I loved about the book and left a lot of special effects and trash. Don’t get me wrong, the special effects were nicely done. But it was a disposable movie, where the book was so much more.
I wanted to go see 10,000 B.C., because half-naked cavemen are always good when one is feeling down. (I saw 300 for the same reason.) But you could not pay me enough to go see that movie on opening weekend, no sir. I’ll wait until the guys get that it’s not a “date movie” before I go. Yes, I know it’s going to be total trash. I’m kind of in a mood for total trash right now, since my reading has veered into dry history (no, not Savage Wrongs, dammit. I’m reading that for review purposes only.)
Anyway, it’s shaping up to be a busy week. I can’t wait for the new washing machine to get here. Laundry’s piling up.
I really, really like Mark Morford, even though his writing style is one of run-ons that sometimes drive me up the wall. But it’s worth it for this nugget from his most recent column:
Maybe it’s not about abandoning God at all, and instead merely broadening your definition of the divine so as to encapsulate and swallow it all, every God, every dogma, every attempt to corner the market on belief and parse it and put it into cute little boxes and break us all up into angry tribes who stomp our feet and wave our little gilded books and launch screaming bloody wars over promised lands and chosen peoples and crucifixes and crusades and witches and pagans and gays.
In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it’s all God, it’s all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times. And hence, to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.
Exactly. I have always held, too, that polytheists are less likely to burn one at the stake–and don’t give me that old crap about Romans “persecuting” Christians. Christianity was, in its early years (and to some extent even now–look at the peeps who “get Jesus” in prison and go on to commit more and heinous crimes), the religion of thieves, murderers, and arsonists–because no matter how bad you were, you could “repent” and be baptized on your deathbed and go to heaven. Such a deal. And when early Christians weren’t criminals they were insufferable prigs who took delight in “suffering” by rubbing everyone’s nose in their difference and their new religion. (Probably the first recorded instance of self-induced mass-market hysterical martyrdom.) The Romans just rolled their eyes and prosecuted them accordingly–always giving them a chance to be reasonable or at least less annoying, and therefore save themselves.
The rise of monotheisms came about for one reason: a monotheism lends itself well to temporal power, and can be used to either challenge or prop up the dominant political system. Every sleaze with ambition saw this for the tool it was and jumped onto the bandwagon, and we’re still feeling the effects of the hate and poverty that breeds today.
I’m reading Barry’s The Great Influenza now, along with Beevor’s Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege. Now there are two events to show you the worst and best of human nature. Beevor is, as always, a joy to read; Barry is…not so much, due to his overuse of a few words and some sloppy assertions–within twenty pages, the vaccine for polio Lewis developed for monkeys is described as “nearly 100 percent effective” and just “100 percent effective.” Am I pedantic because I know there is a VAST DIFFERENCE between the two? And the militaristic hubris of science is wellnigh unbearable in this book. Not to mention it wasn’t the secular tradition of humanism that stifled scientific inquiry; it was the Church that did so and effectively crippled medicine for centuries because they held a lock on education of the populace and the upper classes, dammit.
Sloppy assertions make me angry.
All that aside, it looks to be a gripping and pretty-good book. I will enjoy it for the story of a historical event I know little about, at least.
Right now I’m kind of floundering a bit. The Tristan book is picking up steam, but I know as soon as I really get going on that I’m going to have revisions land in my lap. *sigh* Oh well. And someone please tell me why I have Emmylou Harris and Roy Orbison singing “That Loving You Feeling Again” on repeat inside my skull? This does NOT mesh with an alternate seventeenth-century France in my head, people! How am I supposed to write harquebusiers while listening to Roy Orbison? My head might ’splode.
Well, the book that I liked so much last weekend–Love and Consequences–turned out to be a hoax. (Kudos to Reader Elaine for the link.) This brings up a few things:
* “Jones” is obviously a talented writer and method actor. It’s sad she felt the need to lie. I wonder why she did it?
* Did the book affect me so deeply because of the ring of truth, or did it play to white middle-class prejudices by virtue of she who wrote it?
* In my opinion, this doesn’t make the sociological points the book makes about poverty and crime any less valid, though it does mean I’m never going to trust this particular writer again unless the book’s clearly labeled fiction.
* Would this book have been acclaimed so highly if it had been labeled fiction? Probably not, for a few of the things–like the vagueness about the protagonist’s original home and some uneven characterization–are acceptable only in the light of memoir.
Do I feel angry and betrayed? Not really. I enjoyed the book and got my cover price out of it. I am a bit piqued I didn’t spot it was false, but a hoax that someone takes years to perpetrate and believes themselves is a little hard to spot from the other side of a page. So, there it is, dear Reader. What do you think?
ON a very separate note, I finished Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. There were several awesome moments and statements worthy of underlining, but my absolute favorite was this:
I’ve always seen the novel as a large black castle to be attacked, a bastion to be taken by force or by trick. The thing about this castle is, it appears to be open. It doesn’t look buttoned up for siege at all. The drawbridge is down. The gates are open. There are no bowmen on the turrets. Trouble is, there’s really only one safe way in; every other attempt at entry results in sudden annihilation from some hidden source.
My God. I laughed for a good half-hour at that last night, in varying stages of hysteria. Because it is so, so true. The core problem in writing a novel is not “How will I do this?”, it’s “which of the many ways to do this will work?” Because you’ve got plot, uppity characters, the threshold of disbelief, all sorts of things working against you.
Speaking of which, I’ve got some serious work to do today. See you soon, dear Reader…
It’s like one of those papers you had to write in grade school, isn’t it. During My Summer Vacation. Somehow the teachers never wanted to hear about the interesting stuff. That’s one’s first experience of writing for an audience, in most cases, and an education in what authority figures really want to hear when they ask you a question.
So this weekend I:
* worked at the bookstore
* met Steve, a very nice fan, who kindly enthused
* saw four rainbows on my way home through stormy weather Saturday
* saw a fight almost break out in the pasta aisle of Trader Joe’s, spurred no doubt by the stormy weather and the fact that EVERYONE and their cousin was at TJs
* finished 6500 of 7k words in a short story for an anthology, to give the editor a choice of stories
* made everyone in the house help me with the tidying-up, which means the house looks less like a disaster area and more like…a soon-to-be disaster area
* read Love and Consequences, which was amazing
* went grocery shopping, saw a flock of seagulls, and witnessed what might have been almost a kidnapping
* bought Girl Scout cookies because I am a sucker for a little bright-eyed kid
And this morning I finished a 3K essay for an anthology (more about that when I can give the details). Frankly, I’m pooped. I need to find someone to beta that essay and the 7K shortie so I can be sure they’re as good as they need to be, but all my betas are tapped out. *groan* Oh, well, I’ll think of something.
The most enjoyable part of the weekend (barring twining antennae with the Selkie) was reading Love and Consequences. Margaret Jones was a foster child, and she ended up in South Central LA, in the middle of a foster family torn apart by the battle against the poor and Reagan’s drug policy. It’s a quick read, and I would have hoped for more about her initial home and circumstances. Hell, I would have wanted more of everything in the book, which is rare. It is heartening to read a memoir where the bleakness of poverty and violence is balanced by the sense of people really, honestly trying to do their best.
Most examinations of inner-city violence, drug use, and poverty take a moralistic tone just by virtue of what they are. It’s hard to see the animals made out of people by grinding hopeless poverty and not escape into moralizing, in sheer self-defense. But if there’s hope and a solution to the problem it lies in reminding ourselves that these are people, for God’s sake, and by turning on them we turn on ourselves.
That isn’t meant to be a “bleeding-heart liberal” (as my stepfather so often called me) viewpoint. I have a healthy sense of self-preservation when it comes to being in the Bad Part of Town. I am merely saying that we need to examine the reasons why there is a Bad Part of Town in the first place. America’s economy is underpinned by a vast pool of underpaid (read “slave”) labor, and various facets of the drug policy and that rigging of the economy against second-class (i.e., darker-skinned) citizens breed the kind of hopelessness that feeds the bacteria of crime and violence in the petri dish of society. Turning the funding for corporate welfare and the huge teat of the military-industrial complex toward social justice would make short work of the problem. But that would cut into the profits of the ruling class.
And we can’t have that, can we.
ANYWAY, Love and Consequences is very well written, mostly unflinching (though I could have wished for more of the author’s perspective of street violence and how she witnessed it), and all-around a compelling read. I even paid full-price for it in hardcover, which I almost never do. The author also works for International Brother/SisterHood, a gang outreach program–putting her work where her mouth is, so to speak. All in all, highly recommended.
So, that was my weekend. One of the wonderful things about a blog is that there’s no teacher grading this little “what I did during X” essay. All hail the Internet.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go lay down and drool on the floor, and wait for my brain to become less like oatmeal and more like thinking matter.
So my forum was hacked recently. This morning was spent fixing that, applying security fixes, and purging spam members from the database. Fun fun fun until someone takes my keyboard away. I have kind of neglected the forum of late, being occupied with the Chihuahua of Real Life making advances to my metaphysical leg. Bad Lili. No biscuit.
On the other hand, the hack was amateur and the fix simple, so that’s good. That’s the kind of problem I can solve.
I’m slowly catching up with the mountain of work that slammed into the bay during the recent unpleasantness. I think I’ve done a month’s worth of work in the past week alone. Plus I’ve been stuffing my head with books. In addition to all the new stuff I’ve gone back to comfort-food reads–Stephen King’s Rose Madder and Nancy Price’s Sleeping With the Enemy. Both are about abused wives who leave their husbands, but there the similarities end. Of the two, I think Price’s is the better book; but Rose Madder hits a few nerves with me that are both uncomfortable and cathartic. I seem to remember King saying in On Writing that he wrote it while Under The Influence, and there are certainly some stylistic messes in there. Still, there are moments of cold shivers that I keep going back for.
Sleeping With The Enemy is as different as it’s possible to be. The structure is much tighter and the book is much, much shorter. There is no paranormal element. The motif I like best is the “books can save your life” running through the whole thing. As a testament to the curative power of literature, it’s pretty matchless in my opinion.
The biggest quibble I have with BOTH books is that the abused wife goes straight from the abuser to a New Love. Which is SO NOT WHAT ONE SHOULD DO. That’s a good way to get into a new abusive relationship. I wonder why such different books share this hiccup. The treatment of domestic violence in a lot of fiction hinges on highlighting the New Love as gentle and sincere, a change from the Old Bad Love; maybe because the idea of a woman who doesn’t want anything to do with men after being beaten to a pulp by one might not move a story along in the traditional way. Or is it because a woman, in our culture, is still largely viewed as an adjunct to maleness and therefore must go from one relationship to another in order to be “defined” enough for the story’s purposes?
Why is this theme so prevalent in fiction about domestic violence? It’s damn near a trope; I seem to remember it in every movie that touches on the subject as well as most novels I’ve read dealing with it.
I am undecided whether this is a narrative crutch/copout or whether there’s a deeper gender bias issue here. I’m interested to hear your thoughts, dear Reader.
