Girl Detective

#30 in my 2007 book challenge was Chicken with Plums, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It details the final days of Nasser Ali, a famous instrumentalist in 1985 Iran. After his beloved tar (a type of lute) is broken, he takes to bed and resolves to die. Each chapter is a day in his march toward death.

I loved Satrapi’s three previous novels, Persepolis (soon to be released as an animated film), Persepolis II, and Embroideries. Chicken with Plums shares many strengths with these works. It includes history of Persia and Iran, meditation on religion, a simplistic art style, and creative use of panels and pages to graphically narrate the story. I found this book much less engaging, though. Nasser Ali is a complex character, at turns deserving of pity and scorn. His wife is similarly pitiable and unlikeable. I didn’t sympathize with either, though. Satrapi’s previous novels were about the lives of girls and women. She made a departure in this to write about the life of one of her male relatives. While an interesting personal project, I didn’t find it as universal as the other books. Recommended, with reservations.

#29 in my 2007 book challenge was the graphic novel My Dead Girlfriend, Volume 1 by Eric Wight. Wight was the ghost artist for Seth Cohen’s character on The O.C.

(I’m having trouble making that last sentence make sense. Adam Brody played Seth Cohen on the show. His character drew comic characters, including Little Miss Vixen. So Wight was the real-life artist who drew the comics for Brody’s fictional character Seth. Got that? Yeah.)

Finney Bleak lives in a goth world. His family is cursed to have interesting deaths. When he falls in love and the girl later stands him up, he seems like a typical geeky high-school boy. As the title suggests, though, there are some interesting surprises for him.

The book is published by Tokyopop, though it feels in story and art more manga-influenced than manga, though I know that’s a debate that can rage forever. I also saw a lot of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury in the expressions around the characters’ eyes.

Wight’s art style is distinctive and likeable. I found it much more engaging than the story, which was merely good, though it is an interesting riff on teen alienation. Funny and slightly bittersweet, the book will appeal to fans of both young-adult novels, dark fantasy, goth and manga.

For a lighter, younger walk on the goth side, check out Andi Watson’s latest effort, Glister, from Image Comics. Glister Butterworth is a sassy girl, around whom strange things happen. In issue one, she’s called on to type up the unfinished novel of a ghost. Along the way, she uncovers the truth about a curious teapot. Glister is all ages, fun, and funny. My 4yo son Drake loves both the book as an object, and for paging through to look at the art.

I recommend both My Dead Girlfriend and Glister.

#28 in my 2007 book challenge was And Then One Day, the collected autobiographical comic strips by Ryan Claytor. Truthfully, I bought this because he was on tour at my comic store for a signing; no one was there; he seemed nice; the art looked good; and I felt sorry for him.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. Claytor’s book has an “aw-shucks” nice-guy normalcy that stands out among the often aggressively dark, and alienated indie-comic crowd. He does a strip a day, much like James Kochalka’s Sketchbook Diaries. He lacks Kochalka’s sometimes off-putting weirdness, though he’s not quite as kookily charming, either. Claytor’s art style is strongly drawn, distinctive, and accessible. I think it will appeal to those who like Alex Robinson, as well as daily comic-strip fans.

At $10, I thought the small book was expensive, but the colored, textured gatefold cover and the upscale offset printing of the heavy, cream-colored inner pages make for a high-quality, attractive, easy-to-read book. Recommended.

#27 in my 2007 book challenge was Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution. The title is a play on Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Final Problem“, and the Nazi’ euphemistic response to what they called “the problem of the Jews.”

An old man becomes involved in a case of a murdered man and a missing parrot. He is a former detective, now retired, and he keeps bees. By these details, and others, the reader infers this is Sherlock Holmes, who somehow survived the Reichenbach Falls incident of “The Final Problem.” The parrot belonged to a mute, Jewish boy who had escaped from Germany. It recited strings of German numbers, and thus was valuable to various villains depending on what they thought the numbers meant. There are hints throughout, but their meaning is confirmed very near the end in a risky chapter told from the point of view of the parrot. The old man never solves the meaning of the numbers, but he does solve the mystery of the parrot’s disappearance, as well as the murder.

Both in story and writing style, I found this a tense, clever homage to the Holmes stories, and appreciated how Chabon gave it a dark, Holocaust influence that has become a hallmark of his last few novels. Recommended.

Added later, from G. Grod, who is more familiar with the Holmes story than me:

“The Adventure of the Final Problem” is the story with Holmes and Moriarty and the Reichenbach falls. But most of the stories come after that. Doyle tried to quit Holmes, but had to bring him back by popular demand - the story of his return is in “The Adventure of the Empty House”. It’s where he explains that he had to go into hiding to operate secretly against the crime networks still extant after the death of Moriarty.

In your review of Chabon, you make it seem like Chabon brought Holmes back, when in fact Doyle did it. Holmes never actually dies in the stories. In “His Last Bow” he is preparing for WWI. Stories published later occur chronologically earlier within the canon.

#26 in my 2007 book challenge was the first graphic novel is The Plain Janes, from DC Comics new imprint Minx. I liked Plain Janes, as I liked Breaking Up and the Hopeless Savages books. But they’re awfully similar to one another, and to the plot of Mean Girls. They all are told from the viewpoint of a cute but not beautiful artistic girl. She develops a crush on a cute, geeky guy, and in the end mean people get their comeuppance. It’s an enjoyable formula, made more interesting by individual art styles, but it _is_ a formula.

Jane moves to the ‘burbs after getting injured in a 9/11-esque attack. She has to make new friends and negotiate a new school. To rebel, she creates a guerilla public-art group. While I’m fine with people speaking out against strip malls and for more art, I disagree with bubbles in a fountain. Art? Maybe. Environmentally damaging? Yes–most soaps are corrosive. Expensive vandalism? Also, yes (see what happened in Philly last year).

This was a decent story with good art. Recommended, with reservations.

I thought a few pieces of our regular junk mail were inevitable–the weekly supermarket circulars, and the handful of coupon mailings addressed only to resident. I am happy to announce that I was wrong. Each marketing piece has a website, and each website has contact information, and I’ve removed myself from four of these nuisances recently. Kicking the junkmail can be daunting, but it’s worth it. There’s so much less coming into our house, and therefore so much less that I have to consider, sort, and throw away.

Friends and comrades,

I thought you might like to know that you can now hear my new single, “Old Clash Fan Fight Song” at

www.myspace.com/billybragg

It’s released today on 7” vinyl as a benefit record for the Jail Guitar Doors campaign. The money raised will be used to buy guitars and other equipment for those dedicated people who are using music to help rehabilitate the inmates of British prisons.

The single is available from my website

www.billybragg.co.uk

for £1.99 plus postage and packing. £1 from every sale will go to Jail Guitar Doors. Every 50 copies sold will buy another guitar. You can find out more about the campaign by going to the website at

www.jailguitardoors.org.uk

Billy Bragg

(thanks to The Mad Ripple for the heads up)

Drake’s and my semi-annual dentist appointment happened to fall on his birthday. He was an exemplary patient, and chose cookie dough flavored tooth polish, and bubble gum flavored fluoride treatment. I was gagging inside, but he seemed to really like them.

Did you know that the fluoride treatments in the trays are only 1 minute each, top and bottom? I remember them as endless misery from my childhood, or at least thirty minutes. I asked the assistant how long they were when we were kids. She said they were five minutes each. I think there are two possibilities. One, that my childhood mind magnified the experience since I found it so unpleasant. Or two, my childhood hygienist took the opportunity to go have a smoke and read a magazine, and just returned when she felt like it, leaving me soaking in nasty goo far longer than necessary. While I suspect the latter, maybe she was doing me a favor. I’ve only ever had one cavity, and every time I go to the dentist they gush over my teeth, which is strangely affirming to my esteem.

Since we had the morning to ourselves, I tried to make an adventure of it:

Child tooth cleaning: $101
Used book store: $20 + $1.48 for Magic Tree House #2–Drake’s birthday book.
Children’s store: $12 for clothes, $.27 for a birthday Matchbox car
Noodles & Co: $14.50
Ben & Jerry’s: $4.50
Morning spent happily tooling around with my 4yo, who was listening and not yelling: priceless.

Four years ago today, I became a mom when Drake was born. It’s a strange and disorienting feeling to compare life then and now. People say “it goes so fast,” but it feels like we’ve had a new lifetime in these four years.

Four years ago, G. Grod and I were living in a cute little condo downtown. We both had executive jobs, and walked to work. I regularly went to yoga, and we frequently went out to dinner and to the movies. Now our little family of four lives in a house in a neighborhood. G. has a different job, and I stay home with the kids. We have different friends, and different habits. We also have the extraordinary privilege of being parents to Drake, who is a very cool person. He loves books, music and cars. His current favorite CDs are The Beach Boys and Fatboy Slim. He loves to run, and he’s an agile climber. He’s learning yoga. He likes to shop at our grocery cooperative, though he often doesn’t eat what we buy there. Last year he wanted to be a quarterback and asked us to call him Donovan, since he’s an Eagles fan like his dad. This year, he says he’s Lito Sheppard.

I look forward to seeing who he is, and who we are, next year.

Like the backhoe loader in one of our favorite books, I’m Dirty, Drake wanted a (pretend) mud cake for his birthday. I skipped the scoop of Rocky Road–I figured the cake had more than enough sugar for the adults, much less the kids. I made the “mud” cake (actually a Blackout Cake from Cook’s Country) on Friday night, assembled it (complete with toy digger and mounds of “dirt” frosting), and cleaned the house on Saturday, and then had some of Drake’s friends over to celebrate.

THEN I began to bake again, because in a fit of something (madness? hubris?) I entered the baking competition at the State Fair in several categories, and samples were due the next morning. I made four recipes in three and a half hours: brownies, banana bread, corn muffins and scones.

I have no idea when the judging happens, or when and how the results are communicated. I had a great time baking this weekend, and an even better time eating the results. If I get a ribbon, that’ll just be metaphorical icing.

Final stats for all five recipes:

Eggs: 8
Sugar: 6 1/4 cups
Butter: 1 1/16 pounds
Chocolate (bittersweet, unsweetened, white, and cocoa): over a pound

whatever else she was going to say was interrupted because she accidentally stuck a nappy pin into one of Clifford’s rare moments of peace and he went very red and started to scream and scream until poor Nell shook him before bursting into tears herself and exclaiming to Frank, ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this.’

Behind the Scenes at the Museum has been sitting out for months now on my Book Stack of Reproach, as I’ve wanted to quote and quote again from it. I was shocked at the recognition of feeling when I read the above passage. I’ve felt that way so many times. It’s ugly, but it’s also sometimes true.

A French author, Corinne Maier, is getting a lot of press for having the audacity to write a book called No Kid: Forty Reasons Not to Have a Child, and to say that she sometimes regrets having kids. (Links via Bookslut Blog.) I try to write parenting anecdotes I don’t think my kids will mind reading in ten years, but I’m tempted to be honest here in a way that could easily be misunderstood.

Like Maier, I sometimes feel regret about having kids, rather in the manner of “Calgon, take me away!” While it feels perilous to admit this, I don’t think it’s either/or. It happens about once a morning when I am not able to meet some basic need of my own, like having breakfast or getting dressed, and the boys are screaming and fighting. The moment and the feeling both pass, and develop context.

Lately, I’m trying something new. Since these incidents occur almost every morning, I flirted with the idea of embracing the chaos. That was too much to contemplate. Instead, I’m trying not to mind the scream fests, meaning let them bother me, or attend to them (unless I suspect grievous bodily harm, which does often occur.) This new “trying not to mind” strategy is working pretty well. I find myself appreciating parenting more often, and wishing it away less often.

(thanks to Pages Turned)

What are you reading right now? About to start Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that? The Long Goodbye

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now? Entertainment Weekly and The Atlantic

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read? Paper by a racist student in a writing class I taught.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone? Lately? Eat, Pray, Love.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they? They know my kids by first name, since they often hear me calling after them. They know my last name, since that’s what my holds are under.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all? Gilead. Neither of my book groups liked it.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving? While I’m eating, if I’m eating alone, which is rare.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits? Yes, I sat against a wall at recess with my book, and always finished my schoolwork quickly so I could pull out my book.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down? HP and the Deathly Hallows. For me, half the night was after 11pm.

Is it possible to walk by a candy dish of Dark Chocolate M & Ms and not grab a few?

And further, would I WANT to be that person?

I think not.

Summer isn’t quite over, but Chris Gore has a Summer 2007 Movie Scorecard at Suicide Girls.

I still haven’t seen it, but isn’t Once supposed to be the sleeper hit of the summer? And what about Waitress?

Heh-heh. Quel surprise, I’m a literature nerd. But what I want to know is, what’s a social nerd?

(Thanks to Haddayr for the link.)

Speaking of overly critical, it should NOT have a hyphen. No hyphens after -ly. Again, heh-heh.

The copy of Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World that I’m reading is an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) I picked up for $2.98 at my used bookstore. I have a few other ARCs on my shelves, that I’ve either bought used, or was given by kind bookstore friends. But since my to-read pile is usually so large that the book is not only released in HC, but available in TPB or even MMPB by the time I get to reading it, I want to eschew ARCs. They’re full of typos, so they offend my copyeditor sensibilities. They can contain narrative mistakes. They’re usually larger, cheaper quality, and uglier than the for-sale editions. I’m not saying I need to buy any more books. But I can use my library and get an actual copy in about the time it would take me to get around to a distractingly imperfect and homely ARC.

“The idea is that you don’t have only one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one perfect course in comparison to which all the others are crap. The idea is to take the pressure off….There are varying advantages to each competing future. But I didn’t want to have one bad future and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”

I place far too much weight on decisions. I can agonize over such trivial things as whether to go to the grocery or to yoga. I used to consult my Magic 8 ball with far too little skepticism. This passage sums up the guiding theme of The Post-Birthday World. It’s a refreshing and freeing one for me.

Last week’s Top Chef episode 7, Guilty Pleasures, featured a bait-and-switch strategy. The chefs were told they were going out, and got dressed up. Once at the club, though, they were pressed into catering to the closing hour munchies of the other patrons. Some of them rolled with this better than others. Sara was asked to pack her knives, because she was slow to produce an underseasoned burger and terrible milkshake. Interestingly, though Howie’s sandwich was also reviled, and their team was taken to task for communication problems, he was not given the boot. The week before, Joey got sent packing because he wouldn’t listen to Hung. But this week, Howie didn’t get sent packing, even though he didn’t talk to Sara.

Episode 8, Restaurant Wars, was itself a bait-and-switch. Everyone is warned that competition is more fierce because the winner of the quickfire no longer gets immunity. CJ squanders his advantage by picking a weak team. What was with Casey’s pissed look as Brian and she joined the team? Not only was it clear to me that it’s Casey who’s going to get the boot (she’s the one who looks like she’s on the verge of tears in the studio interviews) but both teams did such a bad job of the impossible task of opening a restaurant that they got a mulligan, so it’s to be continued, and we won’t find out for sure till next week who is eliminated. To add insult to injury, the judges didn’t critique the chefs much. Instead, Padma read aloud from a blogger’s comments, and used her criticisms instead of the judges table. Oh, yes, great idea to have a guest judge of Daniel Boulud, then hand all the judgment to a blogger? Feh.

I think there were plenty of candidates for booting: Brian fell apart up front, Dale’s decor was awful, Tre had inedible potatoes, and Howie had bad and heavy risotto. Why not just send Howie home instead of drawing out the misery for another week?

I rarely comment on a book until I’ve finished it; I’m still a little bitter about the ending of Smilla’s Sense of Snow. But I’m very much enjoying Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World. Irina faces down a momentous decision on a friend’s birthday: to begin an affair, or go back to her long-time partner. After that scene, the book is told in alternating “what if” chapters.

One of those many interstitial sequences that didn’t tell well: Lawrence left for work in a jacket that wasn’t waterproof, and I ran after him in the rain with his overcoat and lunch. Little wonder that Irina began dinner with friends like Betsy at a loss for stories. But these moments were the stuff of life and they were the stuff of a good life.

I smiled at the above passage when I read it, because it’s something that the author at Mental Multivitamin often reminds readers: life isn’t the exclamation points, it’s the stuff in between. So cherish it.

I also had a wry smile for this passage, since it encapsulates the defensive-mommy zeigeist:

Tatyana had embraced domesticity with the same extremity as she had ballet. She was eternally quilting, canning, baking, upholstering, and knitting sweaters nobody needed. Her officious conduct of motherhood gave off that whiff of defensive self-righteousness characteristic of contemporary stay-at-home moms. She was stifling, fussy and overprotective, for if children were to redeem her existence, they would redeem it with a vengeance.

What I’m most enjoying about the book is Shriver’s uncanny ability to delve into the muck of secret thoughts and emotions. It feels rather as if she rummaged around in the dark corners of my mind. The alternating chapters could come across as precious, but I don’t find them so. Instead, they display (thus far; I’m about 3/5 the way through) an admirable complexity, with intriguing comparisons and contrasts. When I’m away from the book I am eager to get back to it. I wonder about the characters, and what they’re doing between the covers of my book. In addition to mesmerizing me, the book has also made me very eager to finally read Anna Karenina.

I love lists. I make them. I cross things off. There are a few problems, though.

One is that I don’t throw away lists every day. If there are things left undone, I keep the lists, but still make new ones. Is this a cause or effect of my anxious nature? I don’t know.

Another problem is that I have a very active monkey mind, and tend to write whatever pops into my head on a list, with no regard to whether it’s reasonable, achievable, or quantifiable. So my lists are not only always setting myself up for failure, but they’re also accumulating to remind me of my “failure” to achieve these ridiculous, impossible goals.

(Do you, like me, often mis-type “goal” as “gaol”? Significant, I think.)

I refer not only to task lists, but also to amazon wish lists, reading lists, listening lists, and watching lists. My lists for these have become so bloated that I hardly check them anyway.

I have a practice that I’ve abandoned for a while, and I think it’s time to resurrect. It’s to stop making lists. Instead, it’s to take the moment, when it arises, and calmly consider the next thing to do/read/buy/etc. It relies on trusting both myself and the universe to remember intriguing things, and to remind me of them enough times to fix them in my consciousness. If a book, or cd, or movie, is meant to be in my life, I hope to be reminded of it enough times that I don’t need to write it on a list.

It’s a sound plan. I have considered, and quailed before, the idea of deleting and throwing away all my current lists. Right now it’s all I can do not to make new ones. That is significant progress, so I’ll leave it at that for today.