NOV - How To Be a Woman

November review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: How To Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, 2011. [Humor category]

How To Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran has been on my radar for a while, and not only because she spells her name like I do (but pronounces it differently. cuz she's british). I have been interested in her comparison to Tina Fey, her cavalier and funny choice of title, and just her general super-coolness that I really really want to find the secret recipe for. I mean, she's worked as a writer basically since she could legally collect her own paycheck, and that is something I have sort of always been afraid of--even though it's the thing I want most in this world. So when I had the idea to pick her first book for the humor category in my year-long romp through literature, I jumped at the chance.

This memoir-slash-manifesto was everything I thought it was going to be and more. Every self-deprecating chapter ("Chapter 3: I Don't Know What to Call My Breasts!" or "Chapter 7: I Encounter Some Sexism!") is a mixture of funny anecdotes from Moran's childhood which effortlessly transition into greater musings about the chapter's relation to feminism or the female place in the world at large. While her tone is pretty flippant at times, with LOTS OF CAPS LOCK, she manages to sound incredibly down-to-earth and friendly at the same time. She has this new idea about not a new way to think about feminism, not as another wave but rather as an incoming tide--because around the fifth wave of anything it doesn't appear to be individual anything anymore, and that's when things get interesting. She talks about sweating the small stuff, making a big deal about the minuscule things because one broken window going unfixed will lead to more and more vandals and squatters and all kinds of ill-mannered folk wreaking havoc on what was once just a nice building quietly minding its own business. A lot of things she says I agree with, a lot of the gray areas she points out. I read an article recently about women dealing with misogynist culture and being told to just lighten up' and smiling but inside feeling like "if you lighten up anymore you're going to float the fuck away." Caitlin Moran has a lot of the same feelings as the author of said article, Roxane Gay, does, and this sort of call to arms for women, this assurance that fighting against this shit doesn't make you a militant freak or a social outcast, is what really drew me home into this book.

At one point, Moran talks about strong female role models (Chapter 14), mostly recording artists--because that is where she got her start--and mentions a whole slew of them, including Lily Allen ("a gobby ingénue!"). Now, I was reading this book at about the time the whole "Hard Out Here"/Lily Allen-is-a-racist fiasco. 2013 was a really weird year for women, what with the vomit-inducing Robin Thicke and the parodies and the backlash, and the backlash on the backlash, women yelling at other women for speaking their mind even if they fuck up in the way that they do so, and so I was interested in reading a wonderfully belligerent feminist's attempt to make sense of it, and I continued to read Moran's writings after the book was over. I've always thought the idea of intent was a very tricky one, and we talked about it a lot in my lit classes, but I've never really tried to apply it to pop culture or artists making their waves in the present. I think one of the obsessions with authorial intent is that most of the time, the author can't be reached for comment and it allows for endless debate without actually reaching any meaningful conclusion. The thing about intent with living artists is that it gets messy, with revisions and anger and takesie-backsies and she-said-she-said. But that is the difference between the study of the past and the study of the present. And even though it hurts my head (and my OCD) a little bit to be a part of it, I love immersing myself in the mess. I read every article about Lily Allen and her anthem, trying to figure out how I felt versus how I should feel or am allowed to feel. The easiest way for me to line everything up, I felt, was to find something that took a few steps back and spend a moment reflecting upon the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.

And that brings me to speak in terms of the category this month, humor. In all honesty, this book fits "memoir" much more than Olivia Munn's book did, and I think that is mostly because Moran bared more of her soul and allowed us to be more vulnerable with her. But I read it for "humor," why? No bookstore or website I saw ever put it under a "humor" banner, not technically, but she's so funny and these are my rules so whatever. It might be because she's not afraid to denigrate herself, to address her own flaws. She admits freely that humans are inherently imperfect and once you can look back on that without shame, you can see the humor in life.

I loved this book. I found a lot of things Caitlin Moran writes about resonate with me. As a writer, as a woman, as someone with a brain. I wasn't being preached at, I was a co-conspirator, almost. And that's all anyone really wants, I think. To be taught alongside someone else, rather than at the expense of someone else. If this year has taught me anything, it has taught me that.

Other reviews I enjoyed:

• Slate

OCT - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

October review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, 1988. [LGBTQ category]

One can never go wrong with a book suggestion from a fellow bibliophile.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was written by Michael Chabon for his MFA program after he finished undergrad in the 80s. Right off the bat I am intrigued because, as a woman recently deluged with wave after tidal wave of First Time, I am curious about his first; I want to feel those first feelings from another creature any time I can, to see how they translate theirs and put it out into the world. There is a familiar sense of "wait, I could do this. . ." as the novel progresses, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It keeps the reader grounded and aware of the raw, uncut beauty of this author's first try. Sure it could be better, more polished, more insightful, but these are once again the shortcomings of a newcomer, and they should be acknowledged but made to sit in the back of the room. But I digress.

The Mysteries of Pittsburg is a book of firsts, both in story and in circumstance. It story of a summer after, a new beginning, a reinvention. Art Bechstein, son of a mobster, returns to the library one last time after graduation and there his summer (and subsequently his life) is changed forever. Sounds like the log line of pretty much every summer blockbuster ever, huh? It is exactly this touchstone that situates the reader in comfort, letting them come to the discoveries that crop up alongside Art, gathering as he gathers, feeling as he feels. Chabon's prose is unparalleled, even this early in his career, and I have loved his handling of language ever since I read Summerland when I was 13. Phrases like "solace is in the fabric of sweatshirts" (219) and "I was watching the clock slowly fold up my last ten minutes like the pleats of a fan" (61) drew me in with their simplicity, and I felt at home in the words.

As for a general summary of the book, it is really the story of Art and a few other players, most of whom we don't get to know very well in the short space we're allowed between the covers of the book. There is Phlox, the Girl Behind Bars who entrances him then entraps him with every insistence and arrogance. She is introduced to Art by Arthur, a gay man Art runs into at the library that fateful day, the strong forearm behind the crank of the story. Arthur becomes Art's link to the rest of the major players, Jane and Cleveland, a couple the most defining of whose characteristics seems to be that they are in a relationship and it is dysfunctional. On the fringes are Cleveland's mobster father and other members of the Pittsburgh elite who intersect with either Art or Cleveland in the latter's dabblings with the seedy side toward the end of the book. I am going to say straight out that I hate Phlox. I do not understand her. I realize that it is 1988 and views on gays are radically different from my own in 2013, but I almost cannot reconcile her thinking gay men are disgusting or cowardly (95) with then her apparent embrace of her own sexuality--"But do you know what those Christians told me? They told me I would have to learn to live without sex. I can't live without sex, Art. It's ridiculous. If Jesus really loves me, then He wants me to sleep with boys" (101). On the other hand, Cleveland's outlook on all things gay seems much more in line with the humanistic view I've come to adopt--"So why don't you just let me do what I want, and I'll let you boys do what you want, and maybe that way we can all stay friends" (238). It was nods to these themes that made me pick this book for the LGBTQ genre.

In terms of LGBTQ, Michael Chabon is a singular entity. With the publishing of Mysteries, Chabon was almost rebranded as a gay writer by the critics due to his straightforward, almost playful treatment of gayness and bisexuality. In his P.S. section in a newer edition of the book, Chabon voiced some concerns about how he was labeled, also putting forward his marriage to a woman as a lens to interpret his writing through. I chose this book rather than any of the other popular (read: token) LGBTQ books floating around my environs (read: Middlesex. (No really, everyone I know on this campus has read Middlesex)) because it wasn't proclaiming to be anything, and that ambiguity, that process of discovery, makes this in my view a perfect introduction to a genre/topic that I myself am not particularly familiar with. A fact of which I am very glad because I was able to stumble across this beautiful beautiful line that encapsulates everything I've ever thought about sexuality ever: "you're just clowning around with your sexual chemistry set" (237). Not only does Chabon deal with a single boy developing his possible bisexuality, he almost nonchalantly calls into question the idea of what is feminine as Art observes Arthur's body one day at the pool (164). How do you describe a man's body? What words are charged and why? How can words be so "erotically feminine" without being gendered at any semantic level? I love books that make me ask questions, even if the questions are not themselves present in the text, and Chabon does a brilliant job of just setting something on the table for readers to engage or not, depending on their will.

And speaking of will (pardon my insufferably heavy-handed segue, please), one of the recurring ideas of this book that stuck out to me was the "will to bigness." Art wants it from the first 50 pages, Cleveland gets it in the end, the whole novel is peppered with the desire to be something more than what you are, and I think that it is a phrase that encapsulates the ideas behind this story; a boy's first summer in the real world, an author's first novel, the desire to be something MORE. As a grad almost a year out of school, I can appreciate the will-to-bigness that is so intoxicating: life is hard without the desire to be something bigger, the desire to move forward and toward some new thing. I've spent the past few months trying to figure out the bigness I am striving for, and this monthly book blog has definitely helped me along. So thank you, minuscule number of readers, for sharing this journey with me. Books like this make me feel like my time has been well spent. (p271)

{Like a nerd, one of my favorite things to do is read literary criticism by authors, both about their own works and others floating around in the aether, so here's a link to an article Chabon wrote about his book in The New York Review of Books. So check it out! Maybe we can be nerdfriends.}

Hey! Hey you! Come to our micro horror fest!

Coming soon to the Ugly Mug near you, a miniature version of our Horror Fest!

Wednesday, 26 Oct, 2013
6pm-9pm
Ugly Mug's HORROR FEST 2013!!

For you we will have:

+Film Screening of Three Corpse Circus' Best of the Fest Collection
+Horror Art Showcase
+Costume Contest
+Spooky Snacks

www.threecorpsecircus.com
www.uglymugypsi.com

You will be missed.

Today, I went into work to find a note that popped up repeatedly throughout the store informing staff of a shattering event: A coworker of ours had committed suicide yesterday morning. The boy in question was a quiet kid, kept to himself, and we weren't friends by any stretch of the word, but I tried to say hi to him every time I let him in in the morning. I felt shook up, like someone had pushed into the record player of my brain, jarring the needle out of its habitual groove. I thought that if I felt this disoriented about the loss of someone I just brushed elbows with occasionally, I cannot begin to fathom the loss of someone closer, someone whose elbows never left yours, someone who saved more than a good morning smile for you.

It seems that I've been faced with death a lot this year. Just a few months ago, my boyfriend's coworker drowned after jumping off a bridge after a party, and I actually had a panic attack and couldn't go into work. The finality of it cut me deep, the internalization of the idea that today something that had once moved, breathed, laughed, texted, just hours before, was simply ended, gone. With little to no explanation. I'm trying to describe the feelings I've been nudging against today, and it's hard, mostly because I think we think about death in such cliché ways that when it finally breaks into our little bubbles, that is the only way we know to respond, with half-baked thousand-times-used phrases that everyone will know. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the emptiness of the words lets others know that we feel the same, we have no words as well. I don't know.

SEPT - The Bone Season

September review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, 2013. [Dystopia category]

It's a rare moment when I buy hardcover full-price. Shiny, intriguing covers help.

Wiling away the hours in our newest hip bookstore last month, I was trying desperately to find a book that would fit my dystopia category. I went through classics lists on the internet, debated H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, but ultimately went outside to sit on the curb, anxious and tomeless, redoubling my internet efforts on my tiny phone screen. On a whim, I had picked up the IndiePicks! newsletter for the month as I was leaving Literati, and I thumbed through it looking for catchwords that might possibly mean "containing post-apocalyptic oppressive society." The stark blue cover of The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon struck me, even in thumbnail form, and as I read through the blurb I became more and more excited about it. Luckily, I hadn't gone but four steps from Literati, so I turned around and walked back inside and on whim, bought a $26-hardcover-new-realease from a 22-year-old British author and walked back out. (There aren't words to explain how rarely I do such a thing. I suffer from a double dose of inherited Jewish stinginess and buyer's anxiety, so such a splurge really spoke to me.) Immediately I sat down and started to read in the sun, hoping for anything to make my soul thrum with excitement again. It had been a while.

At first glance The Bone Season seems to be a typical sci-fi concept, the story of a singular individual built into an oppressive world whose skills make it dangerous for her to be there at all. (One girl in all the world, anyone?) Add some clairvoyance and a little bit of 1984 cross-bred with V For Vendetta and you've pretty much got The Bone Season. Paige Mahoney is a teenage clairvoyant living in 2059 London, a city that is now taken over by the terrifyingly closed-minded Scion (haha clairvoyance pun...sorry guys). Paige is a special kind of clairvoyant called a dreamwalker which essentially allows her spirit to leave her body to interact with the aether around her and even the minds of other people. This rare talent makes her a hot commodity in the rebel underground where she is employed by a rather pompous clairvoyant named Jaxon Hall. Her talent is untrained, though, and when forced into a corner Paige accidentally uses her power and kills two underguards, making her even more Most Wanted than usual. Her attempts to fly under the radar fail and she is captured and taken to what is essentially a concentration camp for her kind, called Sheol 1, built in the ruins of what used to be Oxford, and it is ruled by alien creatures called the Rephaim. Paige, being a special someone, is taken under the command of Warden, the blood consort and one who rarely consorts with humans. Isolated and confused, Paige has to learn to either adapt to this crushing new lifestyle or own her abilities enough to break herself and her newfound friends of the compound, all the while being tormented with gossip of faceless monsters, the Emim, who prowl just outside Sheol 1, snacking on a human limb here and some Rephaim blood there. Most of the story takes place within Sheol 1 and follows Paige's day-to-day traversal of her new life. Though the phraseology at times seemed a little too quaint and the final battle came rather quickly after so many pages of painstakingly detailed mind-jaunts, the novel as a whole was more than satisfying to me, due largely to the snarky female protagonist.

Paige is strong and bullheaded and ultimately very flawed, but her imperfections possibly make it easier for the reader to take her story as something to be heeded. The budding interest between Paige and her captor is interesting but also takes a backseat: it is not the point of the whole frame, as it would be in Twilight or some such work. Some critics have disparaged Paige as too self-absorbed and inconsiderate of others, obsessed with her gift but unwilling to push her limits, but I think the very fact that she has all these problems allow her to be a real human being, not a one-track-mind cyborg (*ahem* Bella) who can do nothing except chase a horribly toxic relationship with a horribly unavailable and dangerous individual. Our Paige is young and she messes up (a lot). She gets angry at Warden (not that he doesn't entirely deserve it) and gets into fights and spins out of control as she flails against the huge dystopian force that is Scion London.

Trying to find a book to read for dystopia was really interesting because it brought up a lot of questions and observations about the genre. Originally, I thought about doing Ender's Game for this month's category, but when I read the internet's thoughts on the matter, it seemed as if Ender was widely not considered dystopic because it takes place during the end of the world as the characters know it, rather than after. I feel that this is an unfairly specific restriction on dystopia because one could argue that it is never really the end of THE world but rather the end of A world. In this respect, I think Ender's Game could've worked nicely but I'm glad I chose The Bone Season because there's something about near-future radical regime shift stories that speaks to me lately. The Bone Season is at its core about exclusion. Parallels can be drawn to Holocaust tropes ("a humane means of removing clairvoyants from ordinary society" p402) or anti-gay propaganda (the pamphlet Jaxon writes is called On The Merits of Unnaturalness) or even vampire stories (at one point Warden drinks Paige's blood to restore him after he rebelliously gets his ass shredded by an Emim, not to mention that the Rephaim sleep during the day). But Shannon does not pedestal any of these threads, does not allow any singular one to become a watchword for her story. In this way, as well, I think it is derivative and silly to compare her to "the next J.K. Rowling." Allow her to be her own phenomenon, should her work deserve it. I myself am looking forward to seeing that it does.

Charts! I love charts!

The Bone Season is being hailed as everything from the next J.K. Rowling to the next Stephanie Meyer, and the reader reviews are just as varied. I truly enjoyed this book, thought it was new and full and a good first start. There were of course some failings, it being Shannon's first time out of the gate and all, but I don't think any of the comparisons both critics and publishers are making are fair to her--or anyone's--nascent talent. Being compared to such publishing powerhouses could automatically stunt Shannon's growth under all the pressure such completely different stories unfairly place upon her. To me, there were many things that were inspiring about this book, first and foremost that Samantha Shannon is 22 and published, an beacon of hope to me as an aspiring 22 year old writer who still only writes on her lunch break at the coffee shop. Her main character is a strong young woman who claws her way out of the world that was forced upon her. And her imagination is to die for. Being a lover of words, I was so excited to have a glossary in the back and a hierarchy of (vaguely defined) types of clairvoyants in the front. While many critics raked Shannon across the coals for "info-dumping" and unintelligible language, my heart leapt at the challenge of understanding not only this new world but the way it describes itself. I have been looking for a new world to jump into lately, and I think Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season just might do the trick.

Sleepy Hollow (2013): Meet Ichabod Crane with a Backbone

what a progression, huh?

The new Sleepy Hollow premiered on Fox tonight, created by sci-fi bigwigs Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. I've always loved Sleepy Hollow, from the bumbling Ichabod in the animated version to the screamy-fainty big-eyed Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's version. This sort of dark fantasy has always intrigued me, the beauty of it paired with the mystery of the unknown. I've read a lot of little tumblr review blurbs about the show to try to sort through how I feel about this new show, and a lot of it I've read from both camps is right in line with how I'm feeling. Mostly, I am intrigued, though, and that intrigue stems from all the threads Orci and Kurtzman are pulling in to shake up the story: some Revelations prophesy, a witchcraft undercurrent to everything you know about history, time-travel thrusting an ordinary human to a still-ordinary-but-different world (albeit 250 years in the future), among other things.

First of all, the main players. Abbie Mills, Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman, Katrina Crane--even the ones they killed off in the first episode (sorry, spoilers...). The relationships are well-developed and well-executed for the pilot of a new show, and enough of a plot surfaces to drive certain ones together and others apart. Abbie makes me me happy at my core, a strong [minority] woman in the lead role, in a place of [relative] power, who makes her own decisions and isn't obviously sexualized from the first second. The relationship established between her and Ichabod right away is one of understanding, of being an outsider, of being made to feel small without anything you can do to stop it. It is not romantic, it is not her being saved by him or swept off her feet She is confident in her capability, even when faced with things that shake her to her core, make her remember the day that broke a part of her. This man who has had such a history of unsurety and doubt, Ichabod Crane, finally has a backbone. He doesn't bumble like the animated one, and he isn't a scream away from a faint like Johnny Depp. He is impressively cavalier about accepting his fate, all the while adapting to 21st-century sarcasm while devoting himself to the task at hand, but he can't figure out how to open a car door. He's pretty scruffy and attractive, there's no doubting that, but somehow he was written with an actual personality to go with it! Flaws and everything! Even being supernaturally tied to a big scary axe-wielding mystery man doesn't seem to phase him. Granted, he is told that in a dream by his assumed-to-be-dead lovely wife Katrina. A strong, powerful GORGEOUS witch with bitchin red hair. She was, obviously, burned at the stake for witchcraft shortly after Ichabod "died" and is somehow still playing games that no one knows the rules to except for her and a few select members of different covens. I've heard angry hard-core feminist rants about her boobs being pretty prominent all the time but hey, 1780s fashion, amirite? A good décolletage was a girl's best friend, especially as a means of manipulation, and I am sure Katrina Crane was no stranger to getting her way by any means necessary. She was the one who cast the spell that bound her lover to the Headless Horseman, after all. Speaking of said Horseman, he is probably the most interesting twist on the old mythos: Death itself come again as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and Sleepy Hollow is his battleground. Not to mention the fact that he's actually pretty good with an assault rifle.

The stories were made better by the cinematography, the general feel of the show. Even the corniest concept can be made great when treated with the right respect. The colors are brilliant and there is a really interesting use of camera angles, especially when heads are involved--or rather, camera perspectives. In one such moment, a beheading occurs and the camera is seemingly looking out of the eyes of the beheaded as it falls to the ground. I'm interested to see how they'll deal with the hell-characters aspect of the first season. The feel of the show was very similar to Grimm and Supernatural, with a touch of old X-Files believer/non-believer dichotomy.

The thing that I am nervous about was the heavy-handed insinuation of the general layout of the show: "Two witnesses brought together for a seven-year period of tribulations" -- I am nervous about this show getting ahead of itself before it figures out how to grow up and not be a corny little knockoff show that's too full of itself. However, I do enjoy the plan because it implies that there is, you know, a plan. . . this shouldn't end up like Lost that forgot what the hell it was doing by season 4. I am looking forward to following this show, if not religiously then academically, if you'll excuse the turn of phrase. There's the historical aspect that I like a lot, and the fictionalization of certain moments and persons from history itself really tickles my fancy. There is a beautiful use of sarcasm and fish-out-of-water humor, and a refreshing number of sassy remarks. But really, in the end, it just comes down to this:

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.

Find a spot where you are comfortable waiting

When I was talking to my family's financial advisor earlier this summer, he said something that struck me. He said that this is a hugely important transitional period in my life and if I don't know what I'd like to do yet, I should "find a spot where I am comfortable waiting." It struck me because I really think I have for the moment. I got this new promotion at the café, I'm writing more, applying to jobs; I have an amazing relationship with my boyfriend and my parents, I have a good new place to live, and a solid schedule to keep myself in check. The future is uncertain and scary but I am learning to cope, learning to write and get it out, while still allowing myself small happinesses. I have found my spot to be comfortable.