I recently re-read the PAF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. Published in book form in 1959, it collected 3 sections that had previously appeared in a sci-fi magazine. It centers on a monastery in post-nuclear Utah. There the monks seek canonization of the sacred Leibowitz of the title. A man of science instrumental in the nuclear holocaust of the mid 20th century, Leibowitz converted to Catholicism and advocated peace and learning. The book’s first section is set in the mid 21st century:

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

The subsequent sections jump ahead hundreds of years, though there are through lines for characters and artifacts that are fun and satisfying to recognize. I found the first section with Brother Francis, the most engaging. It’s the most funny, and Francis was my favorite of the many characters in the book. As the novel progresses, though, it shifts from being speculative to more preachy and explicative. The only females are in the third section, and this book fails The Bechdel Test, which identifies gender bias in fiction, in that no female has a conversation with another female.

Since the book is set in a monastery, it could be argued that it wasn’t within the scope. Yet after I read this book, I longed for a female perspective, something like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Since I hadn’t read her most recent post-apocalypse novels, I decided to check out Oryx and Crake, the first of the MaddAddam trilogy, which was followed by The Year of the Flood and completed with MaddAddam, to be published this September.

The events in Oryx and Crake are typical of PAF: a genetically engineered plague has wiped out probably all humans except one man, our narrator:

Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wve sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep. ..

Out of habit he looks at his watch–stainless steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

Snowman is not alone; he is surrounded by a variety of genetically spliced creatures. The series proceeds ahead then flashes back. Typical Atwood, she breaks every rule of how to write fiction, yet the story unspools seamlessly into a compulsively readable narrative. Although devourable, the book left a bitter aftertaste. The central characters are a love triangle: two men and one woman, who embodies several cliches, and meets a clicheed end. She never converses with another woman, so this book too fails the Bechdel test. And, for anyone expecting closure, remember: you’re reading Atwood.

I continue to puzzle over this book. What does it add to the PAF genre other than a ripping yarn typically devoid of females? Is there a deeper layer of irony that I’m missing? Is Atwood saying a fully realized female is impossible in PAF? Is this an extension of the female-suppressing world of Handmaid? Does the apocalypse somehow preclude women? Certainly, it’s provoking, though what it has provoked is perplexity and anger and disappointment at Atwood, not my usual admiration.

I found a possibly parallel question in Vanessa Veselka’s essay in The American Reader, “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters“:

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road.

Left to my own devices, I’d go down a rabbit hole and explore PAF with female protagonists. Maureen McHugh has done some excellent stories and her novel Mission Child is one of the few I can think of. Octavia Butler? Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country? Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time? YA PAF often has female protagonists, e.g., Katniss Everdeen, only to shackle and domesticate them in the end.

Alas, being part of 3 book groups, one of which I lead (hence Canticle, which sent me down this “road”) means my dance card is limited, so I’m unlikely to read up on these questions soon. If any of you kind readers have any insight, please, please, start a thread in the comments section.

I love most of Hope Larson’s graphic novels, Gray Horses, Chiggers, Salamander Dream, Mercury, with the exception of her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. I was interested to see how I’d like the oddly titled Who is AC? which is written by Larson, whose art I really like, but illustrated by manga artist Tintin Pantoja.

Lin is moving to a new town with her family. She’s a writer who puts out her own ‘zine. On the plane she gets a mysterious phone call that somehow results in superpowers, and further shenanigans ensue in creating a villain. There are a handful of strong female characters.

There’s lots going on with a big cast of characters. Good and bad lurk in the cyber-background and while this is clearly the beginning of a series, it is a standalone story that worked better for me than Foiled and Curses Foiled Again, but this feels more disposable than Larson’s earlier works.

I can’t even blame recent binges or Blu rays from Half Price Books, since none of the recent viewings are from recent used purchases. Sigh. I suppose there are worse habits to have.

Django Unchained (2012) Hyper violent, of course, it didn’t impress me as Inglourious Basterds did. Good, but overlong and unfocused. I do like the revisionist history/wishful thinking aspect that it shares with IB.

Pitch Perfect.(2012) Flawed, but charming, like a real person. Don’t have high expectations, and it’ll be fun. Geek note: I bought the soundtrack, plus Kelly Clarkson’s Greatest Hits after watching it.

Dredd (2012). This I borrowed from the library because I thought my husband would like it and I watched it too. Hyper violent, again, but with dark humor, and an intriguing villain.Like V for Vendetta, this comic-book adaptation made more sense when it was grounded in Thatcher’s England.

Clueless (1995). I was reminded of it when I saw this article on game theory. Charming and fun, but a little low on the acting quotient. Paul Rudd has come a long way.

Iron Man 3.(2013) Date night. Glad I saw it before anything got spoiled, ’cause there’s loads of stuff to spoil. But overloud, overlong, and over ’splodey. Towards the end stuff was going down and I just kept thinking, “I’m bored. This is silly. Please move the plot along.” It does set things up interestingly for the future. But I’d say see it at a matinee, though sooner is better because of spoil-i-tude.

P.S. We saw a trailer for The Lone Ranger, that has Johnny Depp playing Tonto, and in Iron Man 3, Ben Kingsley plays a character called the Mandarin. Why are white people playing non-white roles, still? Shouldn’t we have moved past this? Can’t we PLEASE move past this, and have more non-white roles in movies played by non-white actors?

18 years old, I’m new to a stickshift, grinding the gears and riding the clutch of a cheap, noisy car. 7:45 in the morning, running late on the way to school, my best friend is in the passenger seat. Between my knees a cold Diet Coke. (This was in the days before cupholders.) In my left hand, a Marlboro Light. Squeeze Singles blaring from the tape player. We laughed. We stalled out. We cursed. And somehow we got to school.

Foiled by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro is a middle-grade graphic novel about Aliera, an introverted girl who fences who is ostensibly in high school, though she feels much younger to me. There’s a cute new guy at school who seems a little odd and when she tried to meet him at the train station, things become really odd. Aliera’s only friend is her wheelchair-bound cousin with rheumatoid arthritis. She just got a new practice weapon (NB: not a sword) that her mother picked up cheap from a Chinese woman at a tag sale. (I don’t like the Mystical Asian cliche).

My description of the book won’t flow, because my experience didn’t either. It also ends just as it’s getting good. While I know this is part of what a series does, I do feel that each volume should have a complete story, and I didn’t think this one did. So I had hopes for the sequel, Curses Foiled Again. Alas, this worked even less for me, as a big villain was revealed, whose identity, past actions, and motivations I didn’t buy at all.

The illustrations are strong. Aliera is smart and funny, but as a whole, this didn’t work for me. There’s little subtext, so it’s all on the page, and the story isn’t complex enough to fully engage me. Perhaps because I’m not the target market? My children, 7 and 9, both boys, loved them.

[this is another fragment of a bigger piece I recently unearthed, one that I thought worked as flash fiction on its own.]

About a month after Julian left, everyone still missed their things. But they’d pretty much stopped missing Julian.

[Found this when I was putting together a writing sample. It was part of a larger manuscript, but I wondered if it worked as flash fiction.]

This is funny for a few reasons. It is EXACTLY what I was thinking when Mantel was included in this year’s Tournament of Books. She won it last year, give some other books a chance. Then I was thrilled when Orphan Master’s Son won, but it proceeded to win the Pulitzer, so it’s not like it was some tiny little book that needed recognition. But I agree entirely that she should be on this shortlist, which recognizes literary excellence. And her writing is excellent, even if I don’t care for it.

This was the point made by chair of judges Miranda Richardson.

“I was very keen to keep a balanced approach about Hilary Mantel,” she said, “because we have in the UK this tall-poppy syndrome: ‘You’ve already had too much; you can’t have any more. Go away and die now.’ It’s disgusting, frankly, because this competition is about excellence for writing.”

And I read this and was like, what? Is that THE Miranda Richardson, of Blackadder and oh so much more? Or was there some other, literary Miranda Richardson.

It IS the actor.

Every year there’s a kerfuffle over the prize, since many people (including AS Byatt) think it’s sexist to have an award just for women, except that last year’s VIDA stats show us that we’re still living in a world that slights women authors. But even AS Byatt agrees that Mantel should be on the list.

via Bookslut

Bernie (2011) Jack Black manages to control and channel his usual over-the-top-ness playing an assistant funeral director/choir director in a small Texas town who befriends a cranky old woman, played hoot-inducingly by Shirley MacLaine. Matthew McConaghey is great as the smarmy but well meaning local politician, and the performances are all elevated by the surrounding chorus of small town gossips, some of whom are from the town where the movie’s story is based.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012) Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg are charming as a couple who married young but can’t quite make it in the long run. Lots of nice supporting roles for good character actors, and a story that mostly lightly treads a tough balancing act that could easily have veered into the saccharine. Quiet, a little slow, but worthwhile.

Safety Not Guaranteed Up front, I loved the movie. This definitely belongs on that Entertainment Weekly list of movies you should see that you may not have heard of. (The previous two probably do, also, but this one, most definitely.)

Aubrey Plaza plays a withdrawn character not unlike that of April Ludgate on Parks and Rec, just minus the goofiness. She’s a magazine intern who gets assigned to check out a weird classified ad that seeks a partner for time travel. She and two others from the paper meet up with the guy who may or may not be nuts, and things play out in weird, surprising, sad, and sweet ways. Again, the tone on this could have gone so wrong, and that it didn’t veer into offensively weird or saccharine sweet delighted me. SEE THIS FILM.

Yay! I thought when I got the weekly pile at the comic shop and it included the 7th graphic novel collection of Peter Gross and Mike Carey’s comic-book series The Unwritten: The Wound, about a Harry Potter-like guy who finds that truth and fiction have a very complicated relationship. The problem with these six-issue collections, though, is that this bunch of 6 issues didn’t tell a complete story. It doesn’t stand alone, and merely leaves me hoping that closure comes in volume 8. So, you should absolutely be reading The Unwritten, as it’s one of the best current series out there. But v7 didn’t satisfy on its own.

Also recommended? Brian K Vaughan’s Saga. I buy that one monthly; can’t wait for the collections.