Girl Detective

Years ago, when I was in grad school, an erudite English friend lent me her copy of the Arden Hamlet, with her notes from her secondary-school Shakespeare class. The Arden editions have useful and copious footnotes, but I found my friend’s notes even more helpful. It was very hard for me to give her back her book, since I felt I learned so much from it. Buying my own Arden copy helped. A bit.

Currently, I’m reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I still have the copy I read in 9th grade English class. My notes are in hot-pink ink, in a rounded script that is sufficiently different from my current one that I didn’t immediately recognize it as my own. But what’s most disconcerting is the pedestrian tenor of the notations and underlinings. They probably were quotes from my English teacher, a very nice man who also happened to farm hogs. When I re-read comments such as “shows Jem’s maturation” or “themes: empathy, prejudice,” I cringe. I very much wish my 9th-grade self had been more sophisticated, and not just in pen-color choice and script style. It’s humbling to compare these glaringly obvious notes with the memory of my friend’s more complex ones in her Hamlet.

I am familiar with the disappointment that my education was not what I wish it had been, and envy of my friend’s experience. Yet I console myself with a few things. One, I have taken responsibility for my own ongoing education, and have progressed at least enough to have moved beyond my 9th-grade understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird. And two, To Kill a Mockingbird, while a very good book, is no Hamlet. It’s a book that’s easy to teach, with clear themes and language. Hamlet is complex enough that scholars are still arguing over it centuries later. To Kill a Mockingbird might be appreciated in the coming centuries, I don’t think it has the subtlety to inspire similar debate.

This morning, I wondered where that strange chemical smell was coming from. The neighbor’s new roof? Oh, no. It’s me. Curse you, Dr. Bronner’s.

I tried the eucalyptus soap, figuring it would be good for sore, post-yoga muscles. I didn’t find it any better than the peppermint, which I quite like. But the lingering scent was a weird, pungent one that I found unpleasant. I found myself in the odd position of needing to take another shower to wash off the smell of the soap from the previous one. Rather than playing it safe with my old reliable, Dove for Sensitive Skin, I decided to throw caution to the wind and try Neutrogena’s Energizing Sugar Body Scrub. It smells of citrus, and left my winter skin feeling well hydrated. I followed it with the Neutrogena body oil, and I think I’ll be able not only to endure, but to enjoy, the scents tomorrow.

Added later: The Neutrogena Sugar Scrub leaves a huge mess in the shower, and should only be used sparingly, with care taken to dissolve the crystals completely.

People who know me may be familiar with my habit of forming bizarre theories. The fact that I have had little scientific education does not deter me.

Three fourths of our little family is in the throes of a nasty cold, and one of my theories is that viruses are sentient life forms, intent on propagating themselves on a microcosmic level. I only have to observe toddlers with colds for supporting evidence. My usually introverted son Drake suddenly becomes very physically affectionate, far beyond needing some extra physical comfort because he’s sick. He especially becomes more physical with baby Guppy, giving sticky hugs and snotty kisses. He also becomes even more enamored of things in the kitchen. Yesterday I caught him licking the lid of the honey bottle, sticking his hand into the salt dish, and groping food in the refrigerator.

The health cautions of magazines primly advise parents to wash hands, and keep hands away from faces. But I’m pretty sure the only way a toddler can resist the biological imperative of that virus to spread is through quarantine.

The boys had croup recently. Baby Guppy’s lasted longest, and I was beginning to fear an ear infection because he was waking each night. If he woke again, I vowed, I’d take him to the doctor the next day. Of course, Guppy slept peacefully that night. But at 1:23 a.m., Drake’s crying woke me. I stumbled into his room, and patted him on the back.

“The M was scaring me, Mom,” he wailed.

I sighed. “Yeah, that’ll happen sometimes.”

Every so often a meme goes around the blogosphere that asks about favorite books. Not only does this often yield non-illuminating answers (people who name only classics, or don’t say why they chose a title), but the lengthy entries are a reminder that the word meme is made up of me and me. While they can be fun to write, they are usually less fun to read.

Some recent disappointing books have gotten me thinking about books I haven’t loved, and perhaps have even hated. And hated books, I thought, are possibly more interesting than favorite ones.

This is not a meme, but a question: what is one book you hated, and why?

I hated Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I disliked the main character, who did not grow or develop over the course of the narrative. I disliked how long it was, and how much time I felt I’d wasted by the time it was over. I disliked it even more when I found it had gotten numerous positive reviews, and was selected by the New York Times as a best book of 2005.

At six months old, our son Drake refused rice cereal, veggies AND fruit, presaging the years since of picky eating. Twice I tried to make my own baby food. Twice he refused it, and I was stuck with veggie puree and tons of dishes. Forget it, I thought. He can eat out of jars.

When baby Guppy was waking frequently in the night after four months, I offered him a tiny amount of rice cereal. He slurped it down. This is going great, I thought. Then he was up with gas all night. I tried again after six months. He became constipated. So I mixed in a little prune juice, which caused gas. What to feed him, then? I unearthed my two baby food cookbooks, Mommy Made and Daddy Too by Martha and David Kimmel, and First Foods by Annabel Karmel.

Both books say cooking for kids is easy. As I found before, it’s not the cooking that’s hard, it’s the cleanup. The Karmel book is particularly bad for dirty-dish intensive recipes. While it’s pretty with lots of glossy photos, the more I spend time with it, the more I dislike it. Page 35 shows 12 panels of brightly colored infant purees. But they repeat three of the photos twice, identifying them as different foods, e.g., the same photo for carrots and sweet potato. Additionally, the Karmel book does not give details on what foods to introduce when. It simply recommends avoiding common allergens early.

The Kimmel book give details on what to introduce and when, but it’s not clear that the recommendations are from the American Academy of Pediatrics. And the website in the book is no longer owned by the authors. The Kimmel book swears that fresh baby food is far superior to jarred. I’m not completely convinced, especially because even conventional baby food doesn’t contain additives these days, and there are at least three readily available organic brands to choose among. Yet once again, I’ve been swayed into cooking my own baby food. I baked sweet potatoes and bananas, and steamed peaches and pears. Then I pureed them, and froze them in tablespoon dollops. I was reminded that sweet potatoes should be riced or put through a food mill; putting them in the food processor makes them gluey, which the Kimmel book doesn’t caution against. Guppy is mostly rewarding my efforts by being a good eater, but he doesn’t seem to mind the jarred stuff, either. And we’re still having bouts of tummy trouble.

#57 in my book challenge for the year was Bangkok Tattoo, the sequel to Bangkok 8, by John Burdett. While I loved B8 both times I read it, I found Tattoo less deft and engaging. I still whipped through it and could hardly wait to get to the end. But there were myriad bumps along the way: infelicitous sentences, mixed-up characterizations, too much going on, and a narrator who was somehow less present and engaging than he was in the first book. Worst of all, the story centers around that most wretched of cliches, the hooker with the heart of gold. As with B8, the sense of place is wonderful, the cultural divide is lovingly detailed, and Sonchai’s past-life and Buddhist insights make for a singular main character. Yet there were too many traffic-jam talk-radio interludes, a dead-end subplot with Sonchai’s new partner, and more information about other characters that Sonchai is privy to than is believeable.

Bangkok Tattoo is the third sloppy sequel I’ve read recently, after Second Helpings by Meghan McCafferty and Magic Lessons by Justine Larbalestier. All three books were less well plotted than their predecessors, and included a distracting and unnecessary number of details. All three would have benefited from more severe editing and at least one more draft. I suspect they were rushed to publication based on the success of the former books. I found all three disappointing in comparison to the first books, on whose merit I bought them. I will not be buying the third installments without having read them from the library first.

#54 in my book challenge for the year is a re-read of one of my favorites from last year, Bangkok 8, in preparation for the sequel, Bangkok Tattoo. I have the mistaken impression that re-reading will help me slow down and savor books. Knowing the ending helps me recognize all the clues are in place, but I think it also abets me in going through a book faster, since I don’t pause to puzzle things out. It’s a Buddhist noir murder mystery about a Thai policeman out to avenge his partner’s death. The atmosphere and sense of place are stunningly well drawn, while the asides about Buddhist practice and Thai culture are fascinating and mind-opening. I’m sure some could argue convincingly that the author goes light on the sex trade and its implications for women. My guilt over enjoying it in spite of its unPCness may lead me to track down a book on prostitution in Asia, Casting Stones.

The weird thing that bothered me about this book was the page numbers. Not only are they in a barely legible font, they’re at the top only on odd pages that don’t start a chapter. I would much prefer to have legible page numbers in the bottom margin on every page.

Another weird thing is that Drake loves to pull this book off the shelf. I don’t know if it’s the bright pink cover, or the snake, or the big number 8, but he goes after this book all the time.

or, Why I Shouldn’t Ask for Books Before I Read Them. Drake’s third birthday was last weekend. I told his grandparents that he would enjoy the new Olivia book by Ian Falconer and the new Lilly book by Kevin Henkes. I thought these were sure things. In one way, they were. Drake loves them both. I, however, only love Lilly’s Big Day.

Don’t get me wrong. Olivia Forms a Band has many of the elements that make our previous favorites, Olivia and Olivia Saves the Circus, so wonderful: the pencil drawings, the imaginative inclusion of real images, the humor, the spare use of color. But this time I found some of the photorealism a little creepy when Olivia puts on lipstick and sports a coquettish smile full of teeth. Of course, Drake loves these pages and wants to linger over them. Also, I didn’t enjoy the pages that didn’t move the story forward (the first two about red socks and the lipstick pages) and I found the ending predictable. This is a book I’m happy to own, but I would be just as happy to return it to the library, as we did with Olivia’s third adventure, Olivia and the Missing Toy.

Lilly’s Big Day, though, made me laugh. I don’t enjoy all of the Henkes mouse books. I think Lilly is too mean in Julius, Baby of the World, and I was appalled by Wendell’s behavior in A Weekend with Wendell. Lilly’s Big Day, though, reminded me pleasantly of my favorite, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. It has a finely balanced story, with some nice in-jokes for the adult reader. Lilly’s teacher Mr. Slinger is getting married. She wants to be a flower girl, but he’s already asked his niece. Lilly is spirited and charming, and the ending was not predictable. While the book isn’t preachy, Lilly, unlike Olivia, learns something about herself by the end.

I am reminded yet again that the library, not the bookstore, is where I should browse for books.

Did you know if you kill a centipede, and some of the legs fall off from the body, they keep wriggling for a LONG time? This is especially creepy if there’s more than one pile of them. Drake was with me, so I had to be all “brave mommy killing the bug” but I was shuddering inside.

#47 in my reading challenge for the year, and #23 in my summer reading challenge by The Perks of Being a Wallflower. If I were in a different, more generous mood I might like this book more. But I’m not, and it struck me as precious. The main character, Charlie, is so stunted emotionally and socially that he reminded me strongly of the main character of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The ending, which purported to explain some of Charlie’s behaviors, felt contrived. Also annoying was the conceit for the structure, which is Charlie writing letters to a stranger, and supposedly hiding people’s identities. So is his real name Charlie? Do the other characters have different names, or details than what is included in the story? The idea of the anonymous letters is more than awkward; it defies belief. If you’re looking for a high-school-boy book, King Dork, Catcher in the Rye, and Black Swan Green are all more worthy of your time.

I wondered a few days ago what fate spammers deserve, and I continue to battle spam even after turning off comments. Then I received a forwarded email that warned of the dangers of ball pits, since a little boy died of a heroin overdose after being stuck by a needle from one. I checked Snopes, confirmed it was a fake, but wondered: what Dantean level of hell is reserved for authors of fraudulent dead-child emails?

In the wake of turning off comments, yet still having to field spam and edit individual old posts that are attracting said spam, I wonder: to what level of hell would Dante consign the people who create and refine spam? I have no doubt they’d have plenty of company, what with junk-mail creators and telephone solicitors. I might want to reserve a special hell, though, for door-to-door solicitors. I put up a sign, and still the exempt groups brazenly come knocking. Perhaps I should change my sign from “No Solicitors” to “Just Go Away”.

People might get the wrong idea.

Then again, maybe they wouldn’t.

I am Wile E. Coyote. And my metaphorical Roadrunner is the self-tanner. Two years ago, I tried Clarins and Sally Hansen Airbrush Legs. The former smelled, while the latter made a huge mess of my tub; both turned my skin orange. Last summer I resisted the siren call because I felt so nauseated in my first trimester carrying Guppy. This year, though, I succumbed. I tried Dove Energy Glow Daily Moisturizer with Self-Tanners, seduced by its Campaign for Real Beauty ad and model, and its claims of subtle change. But the song remains the same. In spite of exfoliation, shaving, and a preventive sheen of moisturizer over knees and ankles, my legs have weird, orange-y streaks and overly pigmented knees and ankles. My arms don’t look bad, though, and it hardly smells at all, even to my sensitive schnoz. But I have to stop doing this to myself every year. IT’S JUST NOT WORTH IT.

#27 in my book challenge for the year, and #3 in my summer reading challenge, I feel abashed that I couldn’t finish Catcher in the Rye over the weekend for a 48 hour reading challenge, but I did finish it Monday. I wanted to read it prior to reading King Dork, but the library due date for KD made that inadvisable. I definitely recommend reading both, with Catcher first.

First, I am not a member of the Catcher cult, as it’s called in KD. I wasn’t forced to read Catcher in high school. Whether this says something good or bad about my high school English education is debateable, but I think it was bad. Over four years, the required reading list was short–probably what I’d go through in a month or two nowadays. Instead of entire novels, I remember reading a lot of excerpts from big hardback textbooks with shiny pages. I read Catcher on my own at some point as part of my self-education (or autodidacticism, as it’s called at Mental Multivitamin) to compensate for deficiencies in my schooling.

Catcher, like KD, does a good job portraying what a social horror high school is, and how difficult it is to survive. Catcher is also historically important, not just as a good novel, but because it helped to establish the Young Adult novel paradigm–it gave a distinct voice to a teenaged character who told the story in first person, and sometimes in present tense. It also proved to publishers that teenagers were legitimate members of a critical reading audience.

Because I have affection for the YA niche, I thought I would love Catcher. Perhaps I was negatively influenced by the de-pedestalizing of Catcher in KD, but I finished Catcher feeling profoundly ambivalent. I started the book annoyed at Holden and his affected voice. I then realized it was bluster, not unlike Gatsby’s, and that it hid a character who seemed to have a good head and a good heart. As the story wore on, though, I began to sense the presence of the writer showing off by creating a singular character, and having him repeat, ad nauseum, some suspiciously Salinger-esque negative opinions of phony people, Hollywood, and society in general. What bothered me most, though, was Holden’s repeated idealization of childhood. This novel is supposed to be about the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, but I found Holden’s view of childhood at least obsessive, if not fetishistic.

Catcher in the Rye deserves to be a classic. It’s well written and historically important. It does not deserve to be uncritically lauded as an every-person’s book, though. There is some creepy, disturbing stuff in there, and I don’t think all of it was intentional.

I once had a friend from NYC who loved A Prairie Home Companion. I gave a listen, and was bored by its content and physically repulsed by Keillor’s voice. I talked with other friends about it, and formed my first theory, which is that non-Midwesterners like APHC, but people who actually grew up in the midwest (or close to it, as I did in central Ohio) are immune to its purported charm.

Then I moved to Minnesota, and found that plenty of people who live here (and who aren’t transplants, like me) like Keillor and his radio show. So that theory went bust.

I also found that living in Minnesota made it much more dangerous for me to listen to the radio. If I scanned channels, I might come across APHC. “Bad man! Bad man!” I would holler, not unlike a toddler, as I lunged for the button to make GK’s distinctive, smarmy baritone go away.

Then a friend of mine got a job working on APHC. I would occasionally listen because my friend, a nice person and very funny guy, was writing some of the jokes. But they were still told in that same creepy voice, so in spite of my best efforts, I could never listen for long. Eventually my friend and the show parted ways, so I no longer had any reason to hide how much I disliked it.

The reviews of the new film APHC have been mixed, but not in the middle. They tend to be polarized. Critics who like the radio show like the film, and vice versa. Ebert and Roeper did a polar split in their reviews. Since I’m not a GK and APHC fan, I’m not going to see the film even though Altman is one of my favorite directors.

From this, I have conceived a new theory on GK and APHC. It’s love or hate, perhaps because of some genetic, physical predisposition, like this. Some people love it. But many, many people don’t. There’s no middle ground.

A few things have slowed down my comic reading: the birth of Guppy, several deadline-driven books to read, and a slowly growing sense of comics ennui. Lately I’m reading comics out of habit, not for fun. Several of the titles I’ve enjoyed in the past just don’t excite me: 100 Bullets, Ex Machina, Fables, Queen and Country, Y the Last Man. Are they in a rut, or am I? Most comic-book people I know have experienced the ennui, as I have before, and I know that it usually passes.

It could be me. I took the time to read one of the best reviewed comics of the year, Ganges, and I was not blown away. It was good. It was thoughtful. It has very good art and a beautiful presentation. But, truthfully, I was kinda bored by it. It reminded me of James Kochalka’s work. It’s less crazy, and more polished, but also less wackily charming.

But then I read the four issue series Batman 100 by Paul Pope. Pope’s distinctive art infuses a frenetic energy into his dark, future Batman story. The four issues are satisfyingly long, with a lot of text intos and outros. The whole story is great. I can’t say it’s dispelled my comics ennui, but it has reminded me why I love the medium, as did recent issues of Daredevil, and Fell, the latter by my husband G. Grod’s favorite comics author Warren Ellis.

Cutting baby finger and toe nails is hard. I have to wait till Guppy is asleep, and not care if I wake him, which is hardly ever the case. But I just trimmed his nails on Friday, and I used the regular scissors, not even the safety ones. So why does he look like he’s been in a monkey knife fight today?

When Drake was a baby, he cried a lot. I was very frustrated at baby books, articles and other parents who said that after a few weeks, I would learn what his cries meant. I never did get that kind of spidey-sense. I took my best guess, and spent a lot of time longing for him to talk, so that he could TELL me what he was crying about. Now that he’s been verbal for over a year, I see how misguided I was. When Drake is upset, he has a hard time using words. Further, he doesn’t yet seem to understand cause and effect, so “why are you crying?” doesn’t compute. Finally, when he does answer, it doesn’t always make sense. Does “bug in the air conditioner” mean he saw one, he dreamed one, or that he’s afraid it might happen? And might his extreme response be due to illness, even if he says he feels OK?

I wish I could go back in time and tell my former self I was wasting my time wishing. My almost-three-year-old boy is an unreliable narrator.

#23 in my book challenge for the year was The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis. This was a complex, challenging and disturbing book. Set in the New England town of Varennes, its omniscient point of view shifts among characters, animals, and sort of wide-focus panning of history. The prose defies a quick reading. The characters are beautifully drawn, which is suprising given the number of them. I cared about many of them, which is why I found the novel so troubling. In general, good things did not happen. I love a good redemptive ending. This novel not only didn’t have one, but also suggested that redemption may be only lucky accident.

One thing that bothered me in this novel that had so much going on was an apparent mistake. One character at a dinner early on says, “Help yourself to some of Mrs. Banner’s mashed potatoes, girls.” (p. 28) but on the next page, the omniscient narrator states “The room smelled like potatoes and varnish and baby powder, though they weren’t having potatoes but Le Sueur canned peas…” This novel is juggling so much that I needed to feel the author was in complete control. This passage made me doubt it early on, though nothing else in the book did.

Overall, though, the book was provocative, thoughtful, dark, and funny, like this passage I particularly liked:

The minds of twelve-year-old girls are wound round and round with golden chains, padlocked shut, and the key tossed out the car window on the way to the fast-food restaurant. This is probably a good thing, since what they keep in there isn’t always very nice. Human sacrifices, cockeyed sexual advantures both sadistic and masochistic, also kitties with balls of yarn and puppies chewing on slippers and soft pink babies and disembowelings. (p. 59)