Girl Detective

The New York Times recently did a stupid list of books, one that purported to discover the best American novels of the past 25 years. The list was predictable and boring, as was the pseudo-controversy it inpired, as other lists have done.

I find canon lists boring because I’m more interested in how individuals I like respond to books, emotionally or intellectually. And while some books are most certainly good, many of those aren’t actually enjoyable. Take Beloved, for example, the novel that won the top spot. A great novel. But so wrenching and awful that it scared the bejesus out of me. It’s not one I press on friends who are looking for a good read.

There are two questions I find useful when I ask people about books. One, what books have you read that you both admired AND enjoyed? And two, what was a watershed book for you, one that might not be a so-called great book, but that had an important role in your life?

The latter question was one asked by The Guardian in this article from last month, which discusses differences between typical watershed novels for men and women. I have read very few of the New York Times list, but most of the women’s watershed novels listed, and a few of the men’s as well.

There is one book that answers both of my questions: Possession by A.S. Byatt. I admired it, I enjoyed it, and it was a watershed novel (touched on previously here).

What do you think? Are lists worthwhile? Did you like the NYT list? What are books you admire and enjoy? What are your watershed books, and were they listed in the Guardian’s article?

I have grown tired of sarcastic humor. It’s a given in much of the blogosphere, but I wish authors would rely on other methods. They could even–gasp!–not try to be funny, and instead write in a straightforward manner. I’m not referring to the Onion/McSweeney’s et. al. but rather to the type of short, factual posts that I sometimes have to re-read in order to glean the information buried in the snark. Perhaps I’m impatient and befuddled from lack of sleep, but I’m increasingly annoyed by what I perceive as adolescent posturing. (Sorry, no links. The sites I’m thinking of are ones I like, in spite of the bitchiness.)

#21 in my book challenge for the year was highly hyped The Accidental by Ali Smith. The prose struck me immediately as more than usually challenging, though not in an obvious, arduous way. Smith worked some subtle hocus pocus behind the scenes. The book shifts among five points of view, four of which are told in third person, only one of which is in first person. Not only does Smith pull off five distinct voices, but also five distinct styles. I was indifferent to the book at first, suspecting it of being clever rather than good. It grew to a strong finish, and further thought on it has made me appreciate it more.

One thing that bothered me, though, was that the text of the book wasn’t justified. I wonder if this was done deliberately to unsettle, because it certainly did so to me. I never knew how comforting typesetting was until I experienced its absence in this book.

#35 in my movie challenge for the year was The Quiet Man, which was a pick of my husband’s off our Tivo’d cache. He enjoyed it more than I did. I found the Irish characters too calculatedly charming/drunk/whatever, and the Taming-of-the-Shrew-ish-ness of the story was more than a little troubling. It’s beautiful to look at, as is John Wayne as a young, tall, handsome man. But seeing Wayne drag O’Hara over miles to confront her brother over Wayne’s supposed cowardice had me staring in horror, especially as it was played for laughs. Additionally, the resolution, in which Wayne fights the brother, and wins back his bride, is both predictable and disappointing. Not as overtly sexist as Alfie, it nonetheless left the same yucky taste in my brain.

After I had my first child, I had to buy a bunch of new clothes because nothing fit. I was a size or two bigger, thicker in the waist, and larger in the chest due to nursing. Once I started exercising again, those post-partum clothes eventually became too big. But I saved them, figuring I’d need them again after Guppy was born.

Lo and behold, they were now too small. I am two or three sizes larger, with an even thicker waist. What to do? Revert to wearing maternity clothes? While I’ve done that a few times, some other things have worked.

Once I determine something doesn’t fit, I take it off the hanger, so I don’t try it and get depressed again when it doesn’t fit. Skirts with unstructured waists fit, since they can sit a bit higher than they used to. The only pants that fit have Lycra, and not even all those still work. The best tops are one that cover the waistband and don’t ride up.

I found a few inexpensive items at Old Navy and Target that should help until I can either buy for my new shape or exercise my way back toward my old stuff. (I’m not holding my breath for the latter.) I won’t win any fashion-forward awards, but I hope to avoid plumber’s butt and other behind-the-back, wince-inducing faux pas.

Old Navy Just Below Waist Jeans
Old Navy At Waist Jeans (online, but no longer in store)
Old Navy Tiny Fit Tees (tight but longer length)
Old Navy Long Layering Tank
Target Mossimo tank
Target Mossimo tee

#19 in my book challenge for the year is the ubiquitously reviewed Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. He wrote three previous novels, the first and third of which were nominated for the Man Booker prize. Most writers do their autobiographical stuff first, and move on to more complicated stuff. Mitchell, whose previous three novels are both lauded and derided for their intricacy, saved his autobiographical bildungsroman for his fourth book. He and others have noted how unusual this is. The benefit to this method is that it’s a really well-written personal novel. The drawback is that it’s frequently so well-written that it ejected me from the narrative, which was told in what is supposed to be the voice of a 13-year- old boy in 1982 suburban England. Yes, the character is a poet, and yes, he has developed a complex interior life in reaction to his stammering problem. Neither of these, though, completely convinced me that certain sentences and certain insights were congruent with the 13-year-old narrator. For example, “Mr. Nixon, the headmaster, dashed past the doorway, emitting fumes of anger and tweed.” and “….the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what they are.” It became clear as I read that Mitchell had set himself a difficult task, at which I think he partially succeeded–trying to write in the voice a boy who aspires to be a good writer, but isn’t there yet. In the end, though, I liked the book so well, and the characters in it, that I gave in and dismissed any quibbles that the voice wasn’t consistently believable. The book is the definition of bittersweet, veering between sadness and humor, with great characters.

Reviews, discussions, and interviews (strangely Seattle-centric links via Blog of a Bookslut):
Entertainment Weekly
CBC Canada
The Guardian: The Digested Read
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seattle Times
Christian Science Monitor
The Stranger
New York Observer
Village Voice
The Book Standard
Seattle Weekly
The New Yorker

#28 in my movie challenge this year is Crash. When I saw it in theaters last year, I was very moved. Watching it again on DVD, I was less so. In the days before and after the Oscars, many people kvetched about Crash. I found the complaints mean-spirited. On further reflection, having a negative opinion contrary to a popularly held one (as I have had on March of the Penguins and Prep, to name two recent examples) may rquire a little extra vitiol to counteract the prevailing saccharine. After re-watching Crash, I think the nay-sayers have a case. It felt contrived and overwrought in parts, though I again appreciated the dark, O. Henry-esque twists and, as usual, loved Don Cheadle’s performance.

Now that he’s a big brother AND he’s two, Drake continues to exhibit some strong opinions and spectacular tantrums if he doesn’t get his way. Of late, there are a few things that my husband G. Grod and I are no longer able to do if Drake is in the vicinity. He insists on doing them, and throws a spectacular tantrum if we don’t let him, or if, out of habit, we forget and do these simple things ourselves: flush the toilet (though he still refuses to use the toilet); use the microwave; put the lid on his sippy cup; and even more random, pass a burp cloth.

In some ways, though, these are easy to handle, because Drake is consistent about them. He ALWAYS wants to do them himself. Other things sometimes bother him and sometimes don’t, like turning the pages of books, opening the garage door, and unlocking the car.

or Pampers is messing with me. My two-year-old son Drake has shown no interest in using the toilet, so he is still in diapers. As he’s grown, I’ve had to largely ignore the weight guides on the diaper boxes, since they’re vast. Instead, I look at how the diaper is fitting him, especially around the legs. Sometime last fall, I thought, “These size 4s feel small; time to move up to size 5.”

After a few months in the size 5s, a friend changed his diaper and asked me why I was using 5s. “They’re huge on him!” she exclaimed. I dug up a size 4, tried it on him, and she was right; it fit just fine. I tried hard not to berate myself for however long I’d been buying 5s, since larger diapers cost more because there are fewer per box. I went back to buying size 4s.

But these past few weeks I noticed that the 4s seemed awfully big on him, too. I mentioned this to a friend who produced a size 3 diaper (keep in mind these are all Pampers, so all sizing SHOULD be apples to apples), I tried it on him. AND IT FIT.

Drake isn’t shrinking–he’s finally grown too tall for some of his pants. And he can see AND reach the shelf in his closet that he previously couldn’t. He’s always been on the thin side, but lately he’s been eating well and is not worryingly skinny as he has been sometimes in the past. So I don’t get it. Did I rush him ahead not just one, but two diaper sizes? (I cringe when I think of the wasted money over these several months. Pampers are not cheap, and we are a one-income family.) Has Pampers increased the size of their diapers? Is he growing up and thinning out in the diaper area?

Whatever the reason, I bought a case of size 3s today and they seem to fit him fine. I’ll just put aside those 4s and 5s for now. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be contrary in a good way, and start using the toilet before he outgrows (again?) the size 3s.

Whoever stole the sun away from Minnesota these past few weeks finally saw fit to bring it back today, and I for one couldn’t be happier. It’s not enough that the days have been cold, my toddler son Drake is firmly in the “No!” phase, I’m already feeling 7+ months pregnant awkward when I’m not trying to cram both of us into coats and boots to go outside, and I’m tired because I can’t seem to nap (heartburn) or sleep through the night (various pregnancy related discomforts, in addition to a lingering sore throat virus.) So the lack of sun for TWO WEEKS has felt like grievous insult, and has taken its toll. A friend asked how I was feeling the other day. I thought a moment. “Like punching someone.” Fortunately I was able to contain myself. Now that the sun has returned (oh, please, let it stay!) perhaps the other things will feel a bit easier to bear.

*That’s a Simpson’s joke, folks.

#104 in my book challenge for 2005 was Batman: The Long Halloween, written by Loeb and illustrated by Sale. This was Loeb and Sale’s first multi-issue collaboration, and it has much to recommend it. It is rooted in the characters from Frank Miller’s Year One, but expands on them in this noir tale of mafia and corruption in Gotham City. A killer is loose and taking out members of the Falcone family business. Batman, police commissioner Jim Gordon and DA Harvey Dent are trying to catch the killer and collect enough evidence on Falcone to put him in jail. Each member of Batman’s rogues’ gallery is introduced over the course of thirteen chapters, interpreted through Sale’s distinctive and striking artistic style. There is excellent characterization here, and great chemistry between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle, and their alter-egos Batman and Catwoman. The story falls flat at the end, though. When the killer is purportedly revealed in one of the penultimate chapters, it is satisfying and makes sense. Yet the book goes on to finger not just one but two other characters. It’s a surprise ending that was set up in advance, so I have no quibbles there. But it’s murky–it’s not clear who murdered whom, and this feels cheap after the earlier, more satisfying reveal.

#102 in my book challenge for 2005 was Rent Girl by Michelle Tea, a recommendation on Blog of a Bookslut. It’s an autobiographical account of Tea’s time as a prostitute. Just because a book is about prostitution doesn’t make it edgy or interesting. I found it irritating. Tea became a prostitute after she found out her girlfriend was one, and because she had nothing better to do and the money was good. There are some occasional insights about the relations between clients and prostitutes, and Tea’s honesty about her feelings about the clients are sometimes impressively complicated and dark. Ultimately, though, this is the story of a foolish, immature girl surrounded by others like herself. She does not grow or change over the course of the narrative, and I found it hard to care much about her. The book was further diminished by numerous misspellings. Additionally, the illustrations by McCubbin, a darling of comic-book bad-boy Warren Ellis, were not only stiff and too photo-model based, but they often contradicted the text. I found this disconnection particularly annoying. Did McCubbin not read the text carefully? Was the text altered after the art was done? Whatever the reason, the text describes one woman wearing a floral dress, but a solid-color sheath is pictured. Another woman is written as wearing a conservative dress, but one with a thigh-high slit is pictured. Later, a guy in a polo shirt is drawn wearing a button down. This book’s sales and reviews likely benefit from its salacious subject, but I found the story and art merely adequate.

After I read and enjoyed the book, I checked out reviews for the movie. They were largely favorable, so I rented it, #57 in my movie challenge for the year. Alas, I can’t recommend the movie. It annoyed me, and diminished my affection for the book. Skip the movie; read the book.

I got a speeding ticket yesterday because I was close to home, driving back after lunch, looked in the rear-view mirror, and saw that Drake had fallen asleep. I knew if he continued to sleep, he wouldn’t nap when we got home. I’d had a bad night’s sleep the night before, and he’d had a rough morning, so we both needed naps.

Immediately, I reached back, jiggled his foot, started singing the ABCs at the top of my voice, and hit the accelerator. Alas, I wasn’t able to multi-task just a bit further to make sure my acceleration was within the speed limit, or notice the police car. I was written up for “unwarranted acceleration.” I guess that depends on your point of view. Kid falling asleep in car just before nap time within twenty blocks of home sure seemed warranted to me.

On the inside back cover of Consumer Reports, there is usually at least one example of a fraudulent or misleading magazine solicitation. My husband’s favorite is the one that was a check. When you endorsed it, you authorized someone to charge you for the cost of a subscription, which was, of course, greater than the amount of the check. I’ve had a spate of solicitations, recently, some more insidious than others.

One, from Cook’s Country, I would like to think is just an administrative error. It took me some time to renew my subscription, I did it online, then our next issue had the “YOUR LAST ISSUE” brand on it. I double checked to make sure we had indeed paid them; we had. So I ignored it, and hope that no more solicitations would be forthcoming. In my other interactions with Cook’s, they have been sometimes slow, but scrupulous, especially about renewing our online subscription.

Another, from Everyday Food, is a little more suspicious. Friends recommended the magazine, and I decided to give it a try and signed up for a new subscription online. I got the magazine promptly, but I also got a bill. And another. I checked to confirm that I paid them; I did. If I get one more bill I’ll probably cancel the subscription. The magazine is fine. It’s a nice digest size, and it has recipes that are easy to shop for and prepare. Unfortunately, as my father is fond of saying, everything is a compromise. I’ve found that the recipes compromise convenience for flavor. This is a magazine for good ideas, but I’ve not yet made a recipe good enough to make again. I was already uneasy about giving money to the Martha Stewart empire. While the magazine is good, it’s not good enough to excuse sloppy or deceptive billing.

Finally, last week I received a “bill” from Yoga Journal, a magazine I subscribed to a couple years ago. It’s a lovely magazine, with good paper quality, good yoga information, and many stories about the spiritual side of yoga that is often forgotten in its trendiness as exercise. Apparently, the spirituality does not extend to solicitation practice. The item I received said it was an invoice for a three year subscription for $65. Funny, I don’t recall having contacted them to request a subscription. I discarded the “bill”.

These are all good reminders of why I’ve cut my magazine subsciptions to almost nothing. Not only are you getting a magazine, you’re getting all their solicitations and sometimes solicitations from others. Subscriptions are a tempting deal. They are inexpensive compared to individual issues. They also play to your fear that you might “miss” something if you don’t get every issue. What I’ve found, though, is that my life is a lot simpler and less cluttered when I don’t have magazines and their solicitations piling up. And I have more time because I don’t have to check whether I’ve paid or not. If I don’t have a subscription, then I don’t owe them anything. I can pick up single issues on a whim, and I buy them rarely enough that they never add up to the cost of a subscription. I must, though, admit to having taken some magazines away from recent doctor appointments. This is not a practice I can really condone as a way to avoid subscriptions.

Harold Bloom has a written a new book in which he says something that has been quoted a great deal already:

I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom.

The quote is short, pithy, and really pretty good, which is probably why it’s being quoted all over the blogosphere. I will paraphrase what I take away from it, which is that a work much be beautiful, provocative, and wise. I think Bloom’s criteria are good ones, especially in conversation with the questions I asked in a recent entry on novels, is there such a thing as a Great Novel, and if so, what are the determining factors?

Bloom’s criteria, though, don’t make the question of what is a great work and what is not any less subjective, because whether a work has aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom is a matter of opinion. For example, I noted that I did not think Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth, belonged on the Time best-novel list. One of my readers, Duff, disagreed. White Teeth has many strengths, among them a canny portrayal of individual voices from disparate cultures and insightful relationships of family and friends. I think these things give it cognitive power and wisdom. But I found its ultimate plot, which centered around a mouse, to be conventional and overly tidy. Because of this, the book lacked aesthetic splendour for me, and I consider it good, not great.

Bloom’s criteria, then, can be useful in discussing and disagreeing on what works have merit. Bloom earned many enemies when he trashed the Harry Potter books in a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Can 35 million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? Yes!.” I’ve enjoyed reading the Potter books, yet I can’t honestly say they have aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, or wisdom. I find them fun to read, and cleverly plotted. I’ve enjoyed the evolution of the characters over six books. But there are greater books out there, ones I eschew when I read a Harry Potter novel, so Bloom has a point. He’s an intelligent person, so this should not be surprising.

Yet when I read Bloom, my hackles rise, and I want to dismiss him as a hide-bound racist who perpetuates on an intellectual level the kind of fascism he decries on a political one. In an interview with Bloom at Eurozine, he says, right after he makes his comment about the three criteria he uses

And those are not the standards now applied in the universities and colleges of the English-speaking world. Nor are they the standards applied in the media. Everyone is now much more concerned with gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation, and twenty other irrelevancies, whereas I am talking about what I have never talked about before, and that is wisdom.

Throughout the interview, the link to which I found at Arts and Letters Daily, Bloom refers to the female interviewer as “Dear” and “dear child”. He names writers who exemplify wisdom to him. All are male; nearly all are white and dead. I don’t disagree with him on many of the writers he names, especially his author of particular expertise, Shakespeare. In the interview he has some fascinating analysis of Hamlet and the experience of reading Hamlet. I did find it curious that he didn’t talk about the experience of seeing the play but only of reading it. But when he says things so absurd as that he is one of the few teachers left who truly care about teaching, and when he refuses to recognize the worth of work by authors who are not male, I question whether any of what he says can be of value.

In the interview, Bloom quotes another influential but problematic author

Nietzsche said: “Jedes Wort ist ein Vorurteil”, which I would translate as “Every word is a misjudgement”. He also said in Twilight of the Idols — and I quote it again and again teaching about Shakespeare — “Anything that we are able to speak, to say or formulate, is something which is already dead in our hearts” — we can’t even feel it anymore, you know.

The quote reminds me that I don’t have to write clearly about how troubling and problematic I find Bloom and some of his views. It’s better if I don’t have clarity, and continue to wrestle with it. Like Nietzsche, Bloom has written some great things, some troubling things, as well as some things that have been used by others to maintain outdated and exclusionary status quos about whose value has work. Great work has been and will continue to be produced by all people, male and otherwise. Reading work by authors whose lived experience is different from one’s own allows one to expand one’s consciousness, one’s awareness of the subjectivity of great work, and one’s empathy. Bloom calls this irrelevant. Here are a few books that have earned permanent spots on my bookshelf, and that are good examples of why I think Bloom’s white male focus is wrong.

There are two problems, and they’re simple.

First, takeout is usually not very good. There is something about pre-prepared food other than pizza that seems to disintegrate by the time it gets home. Since I avoid fast food and most packaged foods, my choices are somewhat limited. Again and again I’ve tried prepared foods from our grocery coop, or takeout from restaurants that I normally like. Too often, it is merely mediocre. As regular readers may have divined, I’m not a big fan of mediocre. Mediocre, as far as I’m concerned, is bad. Food is either good or it’s not.

Second, takeout is usually expensive. There is a premium for convenience. This second point often accompanies and exacerbates the first–the takeout is bad AND it’s expensive. For our family of limited means, this is a cruel double whammy.

A further wrinkle is location. There may be good, reasonably priced takeout places here and there, but unless they’re close to me, they’re largely useless.

I rant because we tried a place last night for the second time. As before, the food was so-so, and the price was high. There was little prep and cleanup, which G. Grod and I were grateful for, since we both have dreadful, lingering viruses. But the cost, both in money and in middling food, is just too high. It is with dread that I contemplate tonight’s dinner.

Why is good takeout so hard to find? Why?

It is an growing peeve of mine when literary folk look down on comic books. (What does a peeve grow up into? Mine has gotten pretty big over the years.) Yesterday I read comics referred to on a literary blog as trash reading. In Ebert and Roeper’s review of Stealth, both agreed that it had “comic-book” effects, meaning flashy and non-substantive. “Comic book” is not an adjectival phrase that means simple and bad. Yes, some comic books are trash, just as some books are trash. But comic books and graphic novels can be art in a way that non-picture books can’t. Comic books and graphic novels can be literature told with words and pictures. If one loves books, I believe one can love comics. Comics, like all art , have myriad genres. If a comic book neophyte tells me what kind of book she likes, I can recommend a complementary comic book or graphic novel.

Victorian lit? League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Cop thrillers? Top Ten
Horror/fantasy? Shakespeare? Sandman
Military/Spy novels? Queen and Country
Mysteries? The Whiteout graphic novels
The Kite Runner/Reading Lolita in Tehran? Persepolis 1 & 2
Young adult coming of age? Goodbye Chunky Rice, Blankets
Travelogue? Carnet de Voyage

One of my favorite events is our family’s weekly trip to the comic store on Wednesday, which is new-comic day. Yesterday there were three–three!–new graphic novels (Tricked by Alex Robinson, Mort Grim by Doug Fraser, and the hardcover collection of Bryan K. Vaughan’s Runaways) plus a few issues from my favorite ongoing series (Fables and 100 Bullets.) When I go to the comic shop, I get to see friends, buy books, and watch Drake while he runs up and down the aisles, crowing with glee. It’s a rich joy, not non-substantive trash.

I don’t know why it surprises me when I find out someone reads this weblog. If I didn’t want or expect people to read it, then I’d write in a journal, not online. Over the years, I’ve found I can’t predict who will or won’t read it. There are close friends and relatives who don’t, yet distant acquaintances who do. Then there are also strangers, and others who I’ve come to know in person and online. This strange mix challenges me to try to write things that have significance beyond just my little midwestern life. I began a public weblog to keep me honest about my writing practice. The expectation of M to F posts helped ensure I was writing SOMETHING on a regular basis. And since that something was for public consumption, then it better be of interest to other people besides the ones who liked me already.

Since starting at this new URL last fall, I’ve had it happen not once, but twice now, that people involved with something I’ve critiqued have written to me. Both times, the responses have made me go back to what I’ve written and wonder whether I was fair and accurate. The good news is that the answer was mostly yes. The whole truth, though, is that sometimes things bother me out of proportion (see the topic category of “Weird Things that Bother Me”, for example) and that can skew a review to the negative. I’ll be editing a recent book review because the author asked me to clarify what it was that bothered me. In so doing, I also took the time to clarify what I admired and liked about the book.

I began this weblog three years ago as writing practice, and have kept it (perhaps, no, probably, at the expense of paying writing gigs) because I enjoy it. It is a good reminder to me that not only are people reading, but I can’t know who is reading. If I keep it honest, and fair, and fit for public consumption, then maybe I can please most of the people, most of the time.

And, just in case anyone who works on Battlestar Galactica is reading, I don’t take back my gripe that nothing happened in the first two episodes of Season Two. I was somewhat heartened when two things happened in the third episode–the team got off Kobol and Tigh declared martial law. But so many things happened on the last episode that I can’t even count them; I was thrilled. It was a very slow start to the season, but things look very good again.

Since when is blue raspberry a “classic” Jolly Rancher flavor? I’m pleased that they stopped including the yucky lemon flavor, and the other flavors make sense: cherry, watermelon, apple, grape. I used to really like the raspberry flavor, but its new, blue color is off-putting. Perhaps they thought that two red flavors in one bag were two many, so they turned raspberries blue and left out the quite nice strawberry, which I’d much prefer to grape.

I wrote recently about nostalgic food. I always think of Jolly Ranchers as pool food. When we were little, my mom would take me and my sisters to the public pool and give us a little money to spend at the snack bar. The big Jolly Rancher bars were a favorite treat. Not as good as the chocolate scooter crunch ice cream bars, but cheaper and really good.