Wednesday reading post

Just finished: Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, by A.S. King. I liked it more than any of hers since Please Ignore Vera Dietz. Yes, the future that Glory sees is implausible in its facts, and yes, I do think the book partakes in the character’s slut-shaming, or at least doesn’t counter-write it. But the questions about friendship and how to cope when your vision of the world isn’t shared by anyone else redeem it for me.

Just started: Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World, by Mark Miodownik. Going to get educated on some materials science at $0.25 a day until I can turn this overdue book back in! Started with a great origin story of being stabbed on the subway as an adolescent and becoming obsessed with steel as he examined the weapon at the police station.

Bedside book: Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. …Again. I finished it and turned right to the beginning again. At least in ten-minute installments, it never seems to get stale.

Bathroom book: Syllabus, by Lynda Barry. Induced me to seek out Staedtler non-photo blue pencils, and I have never bothered to pencil before inking drawings or comics before.

I just found my bookmark for making wordcount progress bars, so here’s Biosquid‘s current stats:

3912 / 50000 (7.82%)

the bad poetry method

When I’m stuck in writing or don’t know what to write in my notebook, writing short lines that are lyrical and/or angsty and vaguely like song lyrics or bad drippy poetry usually works. By “works” I mean that at the end of a page or two I feel unburdened and maybe a few tiny ideas have trickled in about what’s coming up in whatever I’m working on. And maybe I’m laughing at the ridiculous emo of it, but kindly. Sometimes I mix in the actual song lyrics I’m hearing if I’m listening to music, or phrases from overheard conversation.

Here’s a sample. The middle part is noodling over my next bit of ~~nano~~novel. And Leif Erikson is the name of a local trail.

[redacted]
what does she think
of me what do they think of me
a v of geese flying away
or maybe just to the next golf course
the wild cry is the same
we’re the same
wild playing candy crush
wild on the bus
wild eyed
yesterday, combing 24 hours
finding so little. Wasn’t I supposed to find more?
working on something alleviates this.
why are these dinner tables
so explosive?
Because these people wouldn’t, and don’t usually, eat together.
There are expectations.
Hey Mel. So this tutor will be kind of a big deal.
Unless she or he is a flake and you conceal it.
Someone who knows lots of professors.
Maybe a Quest editor.
Or another faculty brat, but an older, tenured one. A library rat. A lifeguard.
Burping into my Emergen-C like an aquarium.
Staedtler non-photo blue pencil from Blick’s.
near the Chinese Garden.
Thursday?
So fucking tired of this already chores
and where to stash the car and what
can we do with no exercise
I want to walk on Leif Erickson
maybe Sunday

It isn’t worth much, and yet it inched me forward. I think I like this method because it has just a little more breathing room than “the pen must not stop moving” freewrites. And it can switch mood on a dime, and whatever came before is left behind more completely because of the line break. It feels more emotional yet I feel in less danger of being carried away.

It’s something I do that I’ve never run across in a class or a book, and I guess I like that too.

Three on the Third, January 2015 Edition

I’m trying to streamline the spiral-notebook-to-blog process for images, via my phone and Google Drive and the WordPress interface. Not sure how much progress I’ve made, but it means you get to see my Three on the Third comics, which I haven’t done in I don’t know HOW long. Dedicated to J with admiration for how she’s (singlehandedly?) kept it going!

[Sad Little Kitty Noises: A Lesson. “meow..arowr…” What I thought would happen: purrrr, purrrrrr, purrrrz. What really happened: scratch scratch, lick lick lick lick, “wet foooood!”]

[Critter Control. 8:00 a.m.: “Hello, we have a catch in our roof trap. I think it’s a squirrel. Okay thanks bye! (Good, it was voicemail.)” 1:30 p.m.: “If the squirrel’s not gone when we get back, should I call? I mean, it gets dark at four something.” Later: “It’s the ‘service completed’ email. It was a rat. That’s…four rats? One more rat and rats are free.”]

[Nutella: The Big Jar. One person on sofa: nomnomnom. Both people on sofa: nomnomnom. “Wha…oops, I went to put this away. Do you want it back?” “No, here’s the lid.” “I guess technically it was a joint present.” “Yeah.” “Heh.” “Heh.” “It’s better to just think of it as yours.”]

2015 yup

Happy New Year! I got up this morning and put my 2014 books-I-read list in order. The whole thing is here if you want to pore through it, but here are the highlights:

Favorite Audiobook: Graceling, by Kristin Cashore. Romantic and exciting; the full-cast audio rendition seemed cheesy at first but won me over. Strangely, the sequel Fire did absolutely nothing for me and I didn’t even finish it. I still plan to give Bitterblue a try.

Favorite Nonfiction: She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by Herbert Kohl. Nonfiction. Short essay on how elementary school curricula glide over the political and activist elements of Rosa Parks’ story to make it an individual, idiopathic anecdote (“she was tired”). Aimed at educators, but made me want to read more about the bus boycott.

Favorite Kidlit Fiction (Middle Grade and Young Adult):

The Cardturner, by Louis Sachar. Love the passion for detail about bridge, love that Sachar wrote about whatever the hell he wanted and that was bridge. And I like the story too. Were the parents too cartoonish, though?

Flora Segunda (trilogy), by Ysabeau Wilce. I love the physicality, the military mama, the cultural setting, the butlers, the uncertainty of the romance, the plot twists! Can you imagine how excited I was to get a Flora Segunda gift for Fic Corner?

Favorite Adult Fiction: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I immediately felt like I knew the characters and enjoyed their observations. Good pair with Ha Jin’s A Free Life. I want to go back and read her earlier work.

Favorite Trend: Picture-book musician biographies! Some use song lyrics in the text, and 32 pages often seems about right to evoke a life and career trajectory while focusing on the music. Included When the Beat Was Born (DJ Kool Herc), Hello, I’m Johnny Cash, and The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra. Although it’s not a biography, I also loved Gus Gordon’s Herman and Rosie. So much love and music.

Mt. Scott Park, cold and sunny on New Years Day

New Years Day is when I practice my new perfect life and all my shining good habits, like talking to you in this blog and going for walks to the park and cooking vegetables, and yet it’s still a holiday so I can do all these things at leisure and also eat nutella and reread Dykes to Watch Out For and browse a few more Yuletide fics. Speaking of which, I’ll close with links to three Yuletide fics, from kidlit fandoms, that I loved:

The Kindness of Men, a Black Beauty fix-it for Ginger, with a stealth crossover!
Frog and Toad Forever, “Or, Frog and Toad are Friends with Benefits,” as the summary says. Non-explicit and super sweet!
Restrike, what happens next in Mildred Ames’ Anna to the Infinite Power! I guess the book isn’t that obscure, but I’m still excited to find others who have read it, as it was one of the creepiest, most memorable library books I checked out as a kid.

Eleanor & Park – not spoiler safe

When I mentioned I was listening to the audiobook of Eleanor and Park, a couple people wanted to know what I thought. I finished it tonight, so here are a few notes:

There is almost no emotional distance from the characters. The writing is so close-up that there doesn’t seem to be a point to trying to keep perspective. (This was also true in Fangirl, but it’s even more noticeable here where the characters are in high school instead of college.) I didn’t feel much support from the book for thoughts like, “What would Eleanor’s chances be with Child Protective Services in this time and place?” or “How is the omnipresent racism affecting Park and his family?” No, this book’s strength is its no-distance rush of feelings and romance. Very teenage, heart through a strainer, experiencing it all for the first time and can’t believe it’s happening!1!!1!

Given this, I would be okay with enjoying a runaway heated wish-fulfillment romance…except, it is Eleanor’s romance and book and transformation, but is presented as though it’s supposed to be Park’s too. The point of view alternates between Eleanor and Park, about 50/50. But Park’s family problems are piddly compared to Eleanor’s– arguing with his dad over eyeliner and driving a stick shift, big whoop. He just doesn’t have high stakes like she does, and mostly goes around being kind, cute, stable, and righteous. He has a few moments where he breaks out of being too good to be true– when he asks whether maybe Eleanor wrote horrible comments on her own books for some reason, and when he irrationally has hurt feelings about her falling asleep in the truck on their way to Uncle Deus Ex Machina– but he gets over these quickly and spontaneously, and goes back to Being There For Eleanor.

There’s something creepy about the story being presented as half Park’s, when the real story and point of view aren’t his– like the book is making him into a puppet. Eleanor’s racism and the book’s racism are continuous, because Eleanor’s viewpoint is the only one that’s really solid. So many embarrassing comparisons of food and skin color. The pair of Sassy Black Friends who seem to exist only in the gym and lunchroom are an example of racist stereotypes in the book itself, not just in the minds of the characters. So while Rowell is very talented at All The Feels, I wouldn’t recommend this book without caveats.

In the audio version, the reader for Park’s point of view reads Park’s mother with an accent that I found over the top, and reads Eleanor’s dialogue in a high, breathy, tentative voice that would have gotten on my nerves so fast if she really spoke like that. I liked the reader for Eleanor’s point of view.

I’d love to hear what you thought!

from yesterday’s four-minute diary

yesterday, Sunday:

Sunny and windy. I took myself for a walk around the neighborhood, because I get cabin fever if I don’t do a couple of miles. I wanted to listen to my current audiobook, Eleanor and Park, but when I walked into the wind it whistled in my ears, even with earband plus hat, and I couldn’t hear the narration at all. I’d turn around a walk a block or two with the wind at my back, listening just fine, and then try to sneak east again between gusts.
Sang and Evan had cleaned up the turkey carcass Thursday and plunked it into the big stockpot, where it simmered ever since. Midafternoon I turned the heat off so we could finish straining and freezing the stock in the evening…but then it was evening and we just turned the burner on again. Sang finally dealt with it tonight. That is some nice roasty concentrated stock there in the freezer.

currently reading: My Own Country, by Abraham Verghese. He’s one of the doctor/writers that Atul Gawande listed as inspiring his own writing career, and this memoir is about treating AIDS patients in small-town Tennessee in the late 1980s. I like it so far. I would have thought some of his wide-eyed straight-person reportage on gay culture would grate (his nervous first visit to the only local gay bar), but it doesn’t.

Kate, Emily, and Sabriel

I made Jean Little’s Kate my bedside book recently, then of course followed it up with Look Through My Window. They’re comfort books that I’ve read over and over. But this time I felt more on the outside of Kate than any other time I’d read it. The first note of the book, Kate finding herself enchanted with an eight-year-old soulmate when she herself is nearly in high school? It’s not a wrong note, but it’s not usual. It just is, without explanation even when we learn more about Susannah later.

The Kate+Emily friendship is the best, the best. I still love it so much, but I guess I don’t project myself into it quite as much as I used to. But I definitely still firmly believe that they will be friends when they are old, old ladies. (I was so happy and grateful that Jacqueline Woodson let us know at the end of Brown Girl Dreaming that she and Maria are still close friends!)

Look Through My Window has some very episodic chapters that, again, are just there without apology, like the one about Ann’s accident with the car. And Chapter 18 jumps into Kate’s point of view after 17 chapters of Emily. These things, they work, and it makes me want to keep that freedom and not have to press everything into a seamless narrative. But in previous readings I just went with it all. This time I noticed, and then went with it.

Now I’m reading Sabriel for the first time. It reminds me of reading The Dark Is Rising at twelve, a new world laid out for me and knowing there’s several books to be lived in it.

I made pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips. They are delicious.

#omgyouguys

Neeble neeble neeble, neeble neeble— neeble neeble neeble neeble!!

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life is wonderful

The Eighth Day

Now reading: The Eighth Day by Dianne K. Salerni

Yesterday I was looking forward to reading my book after work. I’d missed out on my usual bus reading time, because on Tuesday I drove to work for the first time since I started my job in 2008, so that Sang and I could go to the suburban Powell’s in the evening and see Atul Gawande. And yesterday we drove across town for breakfast with Sang’s parents, who were on their way home from a reunion, and then parked on campus again. Such decadence. Actually, driving to work was completely tedious, even with the radio. I am relieved that I’d actually much rather ride the bus (since it’s way cheaper and greener).

But yesterday I walked through the pouring rain to the Stott Center before six p.m. to get seats for Sang and me for Winona LaDuke’s talk at seven. Sang was tutoring until 6:45, so it was just me and my book and my notebook on our two little white plastic folding chairs.

The Eighth Day is about a boy who turns twelve and suddenly starts experiencing a day between Wednesday and Thursday. No one else is there, the first time this happens. AWESOME, right? I love extra-time tropes! Except, they are always ruined. Nicholson Baker’s Fermata, so icky. I remember liking Jane Louise Curry’s Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time, but it turns out it’s a time travel book. Where is the book about a character stopping time and catching up on studying, getting a little extra rest and tidying up the house? It’s like that wouldn’t make a good story or something, sheesh.

Anyway, this one turns into an Arthurian thing, with descendants of Merlin and the Pendragon and others in various factions, and for some reason it’s a bit of a trudge. It felt weird to be reading a Merlin story in a hall full of Indigenous Studies and Sustainability people. I overheard greetings in Chinuk Wawa nearby!

I’m glad I went to hear Winona LaDuke. I look up to her for finding a way to live as an activist and a leader without giving up on doing the cool stuff that’s important to her, her way. Growing corn and teaching the kids at her grandkids’ school how to braid it, and also running for vice president. Last year she and other Anishinaabe and Lakota riders traced the routes of three proposed oil pipelines, on horseback. Sometimes I feel like being an activist consists of going to a lot more meetings, ugh, and it’s good to see that it can be much more. Sang said on the way home that she’d been worried it would be like two hours of listening to Mo from Dykes to Watch Out For… but it wasn’t at all.

Celebrity dinner party: Winona LaDuke, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman.

from yesterday’s four-minute diary

I saw:

a small plastic tub containing a jumble of single-use syringes filled with flu vaccine
a mouthguard lying on the astroturf of Stott Field, where I walked a few laps before work (5 laps = a scooch over a mile)
a yellow rose, still fragrant in October