Barn Blind

I'm reading Barn Blind, by Jane Smiley, at the moment. I loved her book, A Thousand Acres. In contrast, this one is kind of a slow burner. I'm not quite sure what direction we're taking the story, but feel like I'm in a Faulkner novel, one of those point-of-view novels where the family lives too close together, and everyone is caught up in their own story, missing everyone else's. Like the drama is happening elsewhere, or in retrospect, and we're only getting bits and pieces.

But this wasn't really meant to be a review. The point is, this book has some really outstanding quotes, and I wanted to write them down or pass them on, before I forgot them.

The first is from the point of view of a father who is trying to connect with his eldest daughter, who has just dropped out of college and is kind of at a loose end:
"He thought that the trouble with having a problem child was that the child thought you always wanted to talk about the problem, so that every mention of the weather became an evasion, and every word of praise became an introduction to the child's potential. Axel didn't know what Margaret's potential was. She seemed to him what she always had - a lovely, healthy, laughing girl who looked pretty when she smiled and still hadn't quite grown into her features. He thought she was a late bloomer and was not anxious to force her. It was she, he thought, who met his most conventional greetings with the demand that he not worry about her so that, in spite of himself, he had begun to."

The scene continues with another moment I've definitely experienced, a thought that is hard to put into words, and is summed up here very nicely:  "When she said, 'Well, I'm going to bed,' and got up gracelessly from her chair, and stepped gracelessly past him into the house, he wanted to impart something to her about her nature, about how he had seen her every day since the day she was born, and yet she was still a surprise to him; he wanted to say something about the human mystery of not adding up, something not about what he had learned, but about what there was to learn. He could not. He said, 'Good night.'"

"Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do"...rereading The Great Gatsby

I know, it's been ages since I posted, but I just reread this, and felt like I had something to say about it. So then I thought, 'why not say it on my blog?' And now here I am! Long time no see, blog readers!

When I first read this story, I viewed it as a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers. Poor Gatsby. Poor Daisy. Why couldn't they be together? Why couldn't Daisy have just stayed strong and admitted that she loved him? Coming to it now, in the span of years - well, just a few years longer than the span between Daisy and Gatsby's first and second meetings - now, it seems like a cautionary tale, one about how you can mess up your life when you are young, if you aren't careful, of how sometimes there are no good choices, and sometimes, if you haven't grown up, you make all the wrong decisions grasping after some ideal of what life is supposed to be.

If you haven't read this yet, and you are reading it for pleasure, go away and read it. Don't read this, as it will be full of spoilers. Ok, you've been warned.

When Daisy was 18, and a spoiled rich girl without plans, she met a young, poor officer, and fell in love. But being a rich girl, marrying a poor boy wasn't 'the thing to do', so he told her to wait - after the war, he would make his fortune and come back for her. But she didn't wait. This is where every reviewer I've read online finds fault with her. And I did too, when I was younger. I still hope I would've waited, in her place. But then I think, we're being too modern here, folks. Remember, women's lib came after Daisy. All the women she knew that she identified with - well, they had no marketable skills. They don't even take care of their own children. To deviate from the model she saw before her - dutiful, idle wife dressing up in pretty clothes - well, what would she have done instead? Daisy wasn't a brave girl. When she tried to be, the night before her wedding, she had her 'friend', Jordan, the voice of her place in society, of convention, around to tell her that it would never work out. To wait for Gatsby, while it might have seemed emotionally right, conventionally, it wasn't the right thing to do. She would've lost touch with her friends, her family...and what if he hadn't come back rich? Again, she had no marketable skills. What could she have done to help him? (Arguably, plenty - but not in Daisy's mind! She wasn't reading Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan - the women around her did certain things and the men did others. To think of breaking free from that pattern would not even have occurred to her!)

So Daisy gets married and she hopes for the best. The best doesn't happen. Her husband cheats constantly. Except that he does seem fond of her, in a Don and Betty Draper way (you'll have to excuse me here - I never got beyond the second season of Mad Men - so little time, so many movies on Netflix.) . Life goes on. They meet with friends. They sit out in the garden and birdwatch. He buys her jewelry, takes her to Europe, etc. Life is in some kind of stasis.

THEN - who should appear but her high school boyfriend! Ok, we don't know whether she went to high school, but lets think about this. She was 18 years old back then. Gatsby really was her first love. She did love him a lot back then. If he had asked her to marry him immediately, and not to wait, of course she would have. In her mind, only circumstances ever kept them apart. And now, here he is. Now that 8 years have passed, and she has a daughter and an unhappy marriage. But still, a marriage. What WOULD the right thing to do be here? What would you do, as a grown, married, adult, if your high school boyfriend showed up with the house of your dreams and a scrapbook full of photos of you, and promised to give you everything he couldn't the first time?

This is where Daisy seems so young to me. Because for a moment, this looks like the right thing to do to her. She indulges it. She wants to escape from this more adult life she's been living. Forget the part about them being rich, callous and blase. That may be true. But also, it looks to me like a quarterlife crisis. She is married, and that's kind of rocky. She has a daughter that she's not quite sure what to do with. Can't they just dress up in their high school clothes and pretend to be 18 again? Because that's what she really appears to want to do. When Gatsby asks her to confront her husband, then it is forcefully brought home to her - they AREN'T kids anymore. She must feel some obligation to her family, at least to her daughter, if not to her husband - and then her husband reminds her of all the things they have been through together. Would you leave your husband for your high school boyfriend, at that point? I wouldn't. (Not that I would, in any case - sorry high school boyfriend - you were a nice guy! But it was a LONG time ago, and I kind of love my family - yes, even the big one with the moustache - thankfully NOTHING like Daisy's husband!)

The book seems to present Myrtle, not just as a counterpart love story - Tom cheats, Daisy cheats, etc. - but as - well, what WOULD Daisy's life have been like if she had married Gatsby instead of Tom? Would he have been driven to make all the money? Or would she have become a Myrtle, trapped in poverty, but desperate to live in high society - hating her husband and her circumstances. I feel like, as a modern person, it's hard to have sympathy for Myrtle. You want to say, "Dude, poverty's not so bad. There's a lot of stuff I want right now, but it's not driving me to drink and run into the street or anything." But imagine, for a minute, that the women around you don't work. They don't teach you that you grow up and get a job. They teach you that if you are pretty, you will grow up and get married. Then, your husband will make the money, and you, if you have done everything right, will live this certain kind of life. Everyone you know lives this same kind of life. They go to parties. They fence on the lawn. They have tea. That's what they do. All of your friends do it. They don't work. If you were to go out and get a job - well, silly you - women don't have JOBS - well unless you're a nanny. Or a maid. But we don't associate with those guys. I would argue that, to a girl in Daisy's class in the 1920s, that's as if a modern woman were to say, "It's ok if we're poor. I'll just go work in a sweatshop." That's about the level of social prestige among her friends she would continue to have if she were going out to work. Daisy doesn't know anyone at all who is a family member or peer who works. To her, it just isn't done. In the same way that you or I, we don't say, it's ok if I can't buy my own clothes, I'll just spin some thread and make my own (and if you can do that, I am in total awe of you. But I can't!). It is something that is almost inconceivable to her. While she doesn't appear to have made up her mind to be totally conventional and satisfied with her life (like Jordan), she doesn't want to end up like Myrtle either. Not knowing an alternative, all she really knows how to do is 'go along to get along'.

So, except for her bad driving and total disregard for hit and run accidents, I feel more sympathetic to Daisy this time around. She seems like she's just trying to do the right thing, and she hasn't yet figured out what the right thing is, and she sure doesn't have a good example around to follow, in any of her friends or, presumably, her parents, who pushed her into this life to start with and presumably live in much the same way. And Gatsby - well, I like him -- he's idealistic and sentimental, and honest (if you overlook the mob ties), and he certainly goes for what he wants...but he's kind of a creeper too, isn't he? Unhealthily attached to his teenage years.

 It was interesting, reading it again. What do you think? Was Gatsby and Daisy's love affair tragic, or just an unfortunate series of mistakes? What books have you read again that seemed completely different the second time around?

Feed me

This is the best book series on the planet. As a former journalist and lifelong horror afficianado, strong enough words do not exist to convey how much I love this series, or how strongly I feel that if you have not read it, you should just drop everything, right now - stop reading this post, run, not walk, to your local Barnes and Noble and buy it. All of it. Right now. And read it. Or, if, like me, you're more the immediate gratification type, you can download it from iTunes. There are a couple of neat extras too, that McGuire has done. But we won't bother with that now. Just read the series, and come back and talk to me when you do.

To be clear, we're talking about the so-called 'Newsflesh' series, which starts with the book Feed and continues through Deadline and Blackout, all by Mira Grant. Mira Grant isn't really Mira Grant though, but a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire. I'm more than a little starstruck by McGuire, who is roughly my age, but who has managed to produce a prolific output of quality novels under both her own name and the Grant pseudonym, as well as contribute to a variety of filk albums. And, what is personally cool to me - she knows an old friend of mine from college/the SCA. That's the part that makes me squee a little bit, that she's a fellow SCAdian, and a friend of a friend, not just, dare I say, one of the greatest authors living today.

I know that's an extreme statement for a body of work that is (gasp!) genre - that is to say, about something - unquestionably telling a fictional story, something that appears to be frowned upon in literary circles. At the very least, it appears to cut you out of the immediate running for serious consideration by say, the list of this month's best works in Vanity Fair, or a number of literary prizes. And if you write fantasy and horror, it makes your English Composition professor send back your paper with a lot of silly criticism, as if the mere act of telling a story rather than writing a veiled confessional is somehow suspect. But to tell a story, one that couldn't happen now, circumstances being what they are, and make the reader believe that, given the right circumstances, it could, and that, furthermore, its telling reveals fundamental things about our own society, and about human nature, and moves you, as a reader, makes you care whether these people, who have ceased to become characters, but are people, friends even, whether these fully fleshed people live or die - that's when you've done something right. That makes you great. McGuire is great. Or Grant. Whichever she prefers.

Feed is a zombie tale, in the vein of 28 Days Later - fast, virus-ridden zombies. She takes time with her science - of course, I'm a former lit major, not a scientist, but as an armchair scientist, her theories sounded entirely plausible. In the bad future, where all good tales these days take place, two scientists perfect two cures, one for cancer, and one for the common cold, and through a series of events I won't go into, infect the entire human population. Or, inoculate them, if you will. The cures work by introducing viruses into the body that attack the cancer/cold. Unfortunately, when they combine, they also turn you into a zombie. Not all the time, because just as viruses work in the real world, the mere fact of having a virus present in your body does not make you symptomatic all the time. Think HIV. But like HIV, when the viral load of Grant's Kellis-Amberlee virus reaches a critical mass in your system and overcomes your natural defenses, you become sick. In this case, you amplify - i.e. become a zombie. So...zombie virus is unleashed...fast-forward 20 years. What happens to the world after that?

That was the most amazing aspect of the series. So often, the initial event of a story is where the story starts and ends. But life isn't like that. Events have repercussions. The interesting bit of a story isn't the action - not that there isn't action in this book. There is, and plenty of it. It's going to be a hell of a movie. I think of Dollhouse, at the end, when all the shit was going down. And, in the case of the third book, of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Which hopefully isn't too much of a spoiler. It probably isn't, unless you're a giant nerd, like me. But when was the last time a monster novel dealt with, not just the science, but the political implications? The social implications? Ooh, and did I mention the zombie bears?

It's good. You'll like it. Trust me.

The Best of 2011

Today's list post takes a page from Entertainment Weekly, or any number of other magazines and newspapers at this time of the year, as we announce our annual Best of awards. Being a completely biased publication, this blog will now submit, in snappy numerical format, my favorite (and therefore, the best, of course!) books, movies and music of 2011. If the Mayans are right and the world ends next year, I guess that makes these submissions the best of all time, since there won't be a 2012 list. But I think there will be one.

Drumroll please...

Books (Perhaps Not All From This Year, But Books I Read This Year)

1. What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets by Peter Menzel
4. Feed and Deadline by Mira Grant (2 books, but one amazing series)
5. One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire
6. IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq
7. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
8. Lisey's Story by Stephen King
9. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
10. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Movies and TV

1. Dollhouse
2. American Horror Story
3. Glee
4. An Education
5. Firefly
6. Army Wives
7. Never Let Me Go (a double category winner :) )
8. Fringe
9. Clare and Francis
10. Black Swan

Music (or, This Year's Soundtrack)

1. Owl City
2. Lady Gaga
3. Glee music
4. Harry Connick Jr - "Stardust"
5. Fastball - "The Way"
6. Music from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog
7. Jack Johnson
8. The Pogues
9. "What You Don't Know" by Jonatha Brooke
10. "Adventures of Isabel" by Natalie Merchant

Games

1. The Sims Medieval
2. Who Would Win?
3. Pandemic
4. Smallville
5. Top Ten: The Bill of Rights
6. Words with Friends
7. Fluxx
8. Mad Scientist University
9. The Sims 2 (still a better game mechanic than Sims 3)
10. Kung Fu Fighting

Descriptions of said winners are, perhaps, yet to come. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your best of lists, readers!

What Alice Forgot

What would your ten-years-ago self say about your life if she stepped into it this morning? Would you like the way you've been conducting your life? Has it turned out the way you had planned? Is the person you are now the person you wanted to be? These are the questions that Alice grapples with after she wakes up on the floor of a gym one morning with a head injury, unexpectedly 39 and divorcing, with three children, instead of 29 and pregnant with their first child, as she remembers being yesterday.

There were some page-turning questions that kept me up into the wee hours of the morning - will Alice reconcile with her husband? Will she get her memory back? Who is this Gina that she keeps hazily remembering, and wouldn't she have been better forgotten? Liane Moriarty is a hell of a writer. Watching her reconnect with her sister, and her husband, and her life, makes you want to phone all the people you care about and share your own good memories - makes you think about the choices you've made, and the things you've kept and lost along the way.

Everyone should read this book immediately.

The Christmas fun continues

Today's cooking endeavour was this plate of cupcakes, rounded out with some gingerbread cookies, for my uncle Leonard's book signing. Today, an important lesson was learned about baking, and that is - if you cannot find your muffin pan, propping all of the cupcake wrappers up in a sheet cake pan and then filling them with batter is not an acceptable substitute. Unless you want your cupcakes to turn into a sheet cake that looks like the surface of the moon. You have been forewarned. Fortunately, cutting the overgrown cupcakes into small squares and putting them back into fresh cupcake papers made decent-ish petit fours, so the day was saved.

Book signing, you ask? Why yes! My uncle, Leonard Urban, just happens to be an author as well, so excuse me while I take the next paragraph or so for some shameless family promotion.

The Millennium Conquest, Leonard's fourth book, is a semi-autobiographical story about a couple who, dealing with a recurring dream peopled by great historical figures, grapple with questions about the inequality and injustice in the world, and their place in it - what they can do, on a personal level, to help alleviate human suffering and make the world a better place.

This book would make an excellent Christmas gift for someone on your list who thinks about these issues. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Sister Mary Alice Murphy Center for Hope, a homeless resource center in Fort Collins, Colorado. Millennium Conquest is available for $14.95 from Ancient Echoes Publishing in Fort Collins. Leonard is also the author of Look What They've Done to My Church, Requiem for a City Church, and Sighs from the Desert.

Lastly, the pipe cleaner candy cane below was made by my daughter - a fun and easy Christmas craft you or your kids may want to try:

Rosemary and Rue

This is the first book in Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, and I thought I'd bring it to your attention. We are now up to the fourth book, I think, but it's no good bringing the fourth book in a series to anyone's attention - if you already like the series, you know about it already, and if you've never tried it, you're not likely to start with the fourth book. But, Seanan McGuire is one of my favorite authors, and as I promised books on this blog, I thought that now would be an opportune time to plug someone I consider one of the most fun and prolific authors writing today.

It is a testament to how incredibly good they are that whenever I read myself to a stopping place in the October Daye series (i.e. the last published book - so that I have to wait for McGuire's writing to catch up with my reading), the world becomes a sadder place. Patience is never my strong suit.

I began reading the series largely because I love the Newsflesh series so much (first book is Feed, by Mira Grant, McGuire's pseudonym). I am now hooked into this one as well, though to a lesser extent. Toby Daye's world is reminiscint of Charles De Lint's, with more of an emphasis on Celtic folklore and more believable, multi-dimensional characters. Toby is a faery knight cum private investigator, and she never runs out of crimes to solve, thanks to the faery-world's Macchiavellian royal court system and abundance of shady characters. There is a lot of backstory that is revealed in tantalizing little bits - and even more, the further you get into the series. McGuire has said on occasion, on her blog, or in interviews, that she admires Stephen King, and I can see it. As a would-be writer myself, I admire her, because she's learned a lot of King's tricks without copying him in any way. She is very much her own voice. This is a smart fantasy book series, and I think you all should read it.

I also think you should read Feed. But that is another post for another time.