This book was distinctly surreal, and rather cool. It took me a little while to get into it, because I had trouble following what was going on, since Windling threw a lot at me. But once I started to get accustomed to the style and the transitions and the characters, I found The Wood Wife to be rather gripping, and I started plowing through it, stopping pretty much only to eat a potato.

While the book takes place in the Southwest, Windling spared her readers the horror of cultural appropriation, and instead made up an entirely new world of spirits and mysterious figures, rather than borrowing from the now almost-cliched culture of the Southwest. Which I liked much better than yet another book written by a white person about Native American culture. The fantasy characters in this book were interesting, multifaceted individuals, and I liked slowly learning more about them, seeing who to trust and who to avoid.

I’m not a huge fan of poetry, so the random poetry junk interspersed in the book didn’t get me that excited, but I tried to look beyond it, because the characters and the setting were neat. I haven’t really been in desert country before, and I wonder what I would think of it. I suspect that I am too closely tied to my own home to adopt a new one, and I can’t imagine only finding a true home as an adult, like the main character in this book does.

The concept of being devoured by the muse (in a sense) is familiar to me, and I thought that this book had an interesting way of describing the relationship between artist and muse; it is indeed a bargain, and sometimes the artist loses.

Demographics:

The Wood Wife, by Terri Windling. Published 1996, 320 pages. Fiction.

In King Dork, the title character opens up a book and is sucked into an extremely complex and convoluted situation with layers of meaning, enigmatic characters, and a whiff of conspiracy. At the same time, he’s forced to cope with the horror that is high school when you are on the low end of the totem pole, and there’s a fair bit of growing up to do in the process. (Although he claims at the end of the book that he didn’t grow up at all.)

There was a lot about this book to like. I can’t decide if I liked the language yet; I enjoyed the running mispronunciation joke, but sometimes I felt like the author was trying a little too hard to be jocose, struggling a smidgin too much to be “hip” and what have you. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Books about high school also always feel weird when they are written by people who are much past high school age. Obviously they experienced high school at some point, but I can’t help but wonder if some rose-tinted glasses have been donned.

The book is a send-up of Catcher in the Rye, right down to the cover, and it’s almost too neat, if that makes any sense. There are parts which seem stiff and forced, as though Portman wants to make sure that you “get it,” because he wants to make sure that you don’t miss the parallel. Catcher is certainly a culturally important novel, and I couldn’t help but enjoy the digs at the Catcher cult in King Dork, but in a way the book was so pat that you felt like it was secretly idolizing Catcher, rather than making fun of it.

The beginning of the book was extremely scattered and all over the place. I can’t decide if that was a plot device, allowing readers to think that the writer  was finding his voice, or if Portman just flailed around in real life and his editor decided to keep it. One thing I will say in the book’s favour is that Portman used a lot of fun words, for which he earns style points.

Demographics:

King Dork, by Frank Portman. Published 2006, 344 pages. Fiction.

Growing up, I usually strongly disliked my father’s girlfriends. Some of them really were losers, so I feel fully justified in disliking them (in fact I continue to dislike some of them even now), while others, I’m sure, were perfectly nice people. And a handful were actually likable, but this entry isn’t about them. It’s about the girlfriends I disliked, because, as we all know, I am pathologically incapable of even the most basic common courtesy, so it never occurred to me to conceal my dislike for the sake of household harmony. In short, my father’s dislikable girlfriends were fully aware that I disliked them.

Usually my dislike simply manifested in a tendency to absent myself, or to snipe at them. Perhaps unfairly, I was a rather well-educated child, so I was an expert sniper. I could snipe with the best of them, and in fact sometimes I sniped so craftily that the girlfriend entirely missed the fact that she had been hit. Alas. My father did his best, but you can’t make someone like someone else, so I think he just gave up, in the end.

For one girlfriend, whose name has faded into the mists of time, I really pulled out all the stops. I don’t really remember what the poor woman did to make me hate her so very much, but I did, and one day, I devised a foolproof plan. Bored in class, I carefully redesigned the labels for our shampoo and conditioner, and meticulously drew them on some oversized labels, decorating them elaborately with Sharpie so that they wouldn’t run in the shower.

I waited until the hapless girlfriend visited again, and then carefully applied the labels and waited. This particular girlfriend was a fan of taking showers in the morning, so I was confident that my wait wouldn’t be too lengthy.

The next morning, I brought my father his coffee as soon as the girlfriend had disappeared into the shower, and I challenged my father to a game of chess to distract myself. Almost as soon as I had set up the chessboard, there was a shriek and a strange crunching noise, and my father looked at me with deep suspicion while I tried to look innocent.

“I wonder what that was,” he said, while muffled shrieks continued to echo downstairs. I kept mum, but I trailed after him as he got up and went to investigate the situation.

To my delight, the house itself had taken revenge on the girlfriend; the floor of the shower had rotted through and collapsed, causing the girlfriend to fall through the floor. But only partway; her upper torso stuck out of the shower, while her legs dangled in the netherworld under the house, and water rained down on her, which explains the muffled nature of the shrieks. She had also taken the shower curtain down with her, so there was a widening pool of water outside the shower, and a single shampoo bottle had rolled across the room and come to rest on the large box we used for towels.

“GIRLFRIEND KILLER,” the label said. “Effective with only one application!”

“You’re wasting water,” I said, snorting with glee.

Will the protest vote manifest in a big way in November? This New York Times article claims that it will, and the comments thread exploded, so pull up a cup of tea and dive in with me. Incidentally, I agree with many commenters who said that classifying votes for third party candidates as “protest votes” is rather offensive, especially to people who vote for such candidates on their own merits.

Union projectionists are battling in Alameda for the sake of their livelihoods, and good movies.

Go, read, laugh.

Daily newspapers are struggling, and the Maui Time Weekly has a radical solution: go offline.

In the wake of the wussy earthquake in SoCal on Tuesday, editorials are already raging.

British Gas just raised prices by 35%. Woah.

Sorry for that whole slavery thing, says the House.

I’m organizing an exquisite corpse. Email me (meloukhia at gmail dot com) by 5pm PST if you want in!

The other day, Baxt and I were discussing adventuring plans which involved going to Mendocino twice in rapid succession. I pointed out that we could bundle the plans together, thereby visiting Mendocino only once, for efficiency, and there was a pause, and then Baxt said “I like efficiency,” and so do I, so this week’s entry is all about trip planning.

Apparently gas prices have fallen somewhat, but they are still pretty darn high, so thinking ahead about where you need to go and when will still save you money. It also, of course, helps out the environment, by reducing the amount of emissions from your car. (Or, if you’re a leech like me, other people’s cars.) It’s also easy. Given these three criteria, I’d say that planning ahead officially meets the rules for my saving the environment with minimal effort series.

There are times in your life when walking, biking, or busing just aren’t an option, for a myriad of reasons. I still highly recommend putting serious consideration into each trip you take, to determine whether or not you really need to take a car, but once you’ve determined that a car really is necessary, you might as well make the most of it.

The thing about trip planning is that it involves sitting down and thinking ahead a week or so. You think about all of the tasks you need to accomplish, and you generate a list, either in your head or on a notepad or wherever. Then, you start thinking about which missions can be bundled together, and you bundle them, and then you go do them. Along with trip planning, it’s a good idea to come up with a grocery list of doom which will sustain you for a week or so, so that you can cut down on grocery store trips. I’m also a huge fan of the master list of things I pretty much get every week, which I can use to start a weekly list.

This also saves you time, because you’re not running around all over the place trying to get things done, since you have an orderly plan, and you have made yourself more efficient. If you’ve got multiple household residents, try to bundle your trips in with theirs, thereby making yourselves even more efficient. Or consider setting up a joint agreement with a friend, where you take turns driving for errands, instead of both taking your cars to the same place all the time.

I realize that all people are not as controlling as I am, and, therefore, that trip planning may be more challenging for some than others, but I promise it’s worth the effort. And the savings, of course.

Those air tanker drops that end up in news photos all the time? Apparently they are usually a complete waste of time, performed purely as a publicity exercise. I’m sure all of the people who are concerned about the toxicity of the chemicals used in flame retardants will be delighted to hear that air tanker deliveries are referred to as “CNN drops” in the fire protection industry.

Some female athletes are being singled out at the Olympics for “gender testing” to confirm that they are women. I can’t even begin to describe how wrong and infuriating this is, and maybe I will write a post about it later, although this article does a pretty good job of outlining some of the major problems with the gender testing. Just for starters, if you’re going to be “testing” gender, you need to test all athletes, not just female competitors, because otherwise it stinks of discrimination. Furthermore, kids, intersexuality is a fact of nature. Go read the article.

Classism has penetrated medical waiting rooms; in dermatology, two-tiered practices are apparently growing much more common. Yikes.

WTO talks are, er, not going well.

Officials in the EPA are not apparently allowed to talk to the public; that lofty mission is reserved for press officers.

A Sikh student in Britain successfully fought to retain the right to wear the kara in school; despite the flippant headline, I think this story is pretty interesting.

Yet another media shitstorm is brewing over a comatose woman. Let it be said, for the record, that if I am in a coma without the possibility of recovery, I would appreciate it if one of you would take me out back and shoot me.

Chris Hedges was a war correspondent, and I actually remember when this book came out, but I am ashamed to say that I dismissed it as polemic drivel, and I ignored it, despite the fact that it was flying off the shelves. Or maybe because it was flying off the shelves. I am always deeply suspicious of popular books. When Vicki recommended this book to me, I figured there must have been more to it than I thought there was.

And indeed, there was a lot more to the book than its wild popularity in liberal Northern California would suggest. It’s a pretty darn good book, in fact, delving into the anthropology of our relationship with war, and into Hedges’ own career and life. My studies on war and military issues had much more to do with the military itself, and much less with the civilian attitudes about war and relationship with war and the military, so it was definitely interesting to read this book and see many of the same books I read in college cited, things like Life in the Tomb, a pretty obscure Greek work, and Goodbye to All That, a much more well-known entry in the huge collection of war-related material. Hedges has a lot of excellent things to say in this book, and those things were informed both by study of war, and by personal experience; the fact of the matter is that war is a shitty thing, and there’s no getting around it.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that Hedges leveled his finger at the media, stressing the idea that the media is culpable for the way in which we view war, and for the complex mythology which surrounds war. Talking about the first Gulf War, he discussed the severe restrictions on the media, and pointed out that most journalists actually welcomed such restrictions, feeling that they were working for the state. So much for an impartial media.

Hedges delves into a lot of issues in this book, talking about religion, the media, and the state, and in the last chapter, he explores the relationship between eros and thanatos, ultimately concluding with the idea that eros will prevail, even if it doesn’t stop the tide of war. But, he cautions, war is a dangerous addiction, and one which is left largely untreated.

I know I suggested that I had read the book of the month when I read The Power of the Dog (another Vicki recommendation), but I might have to rescind the title for War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If you haven’t read this book, you really, really, really should, no matter what your politics are, because this is not a book about politics, and I don’t mean that in a figurative way. It’s. Not. A Book. About politics. It’s a book about humanity.

Demographics:

War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. Published 2002, 211 pages. Anthropology.

Recently, the MTV movies blog posted an open call for questions for Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books. The idea is that she is going to read through all the questions, pick a few out, and then answer them at her book launch. A lot of the questions are pretty basic, and usually accompanied with effusive professions of adoration for Meyer and her characters. I was actually pretty impressed that it took so long for the questions to devolve, but they inevitably did.

At first, the questions were just dumb, and then they started crossing the line into offensive. And, almost immediately, questions about her weight started popping up. “Why don’t you lose weight, out of respect for Bella,” one bizarre comment said.

This, of course, led me to go look up a picture of Stephenie Meyer, since I didn’t remember anything remarkable about her weight. And, lo and behold, I found a picture of an attractive, healthy woman, with soft curls and nice eyes. She’s definitely undergone a bit of a makeover since her early book releases, and she has a much more polished look today, but I think she’s rather pretty. And, yeah, not a size two.

But I don’t see how her size is at all relevant to her abilities as an author. I think it’s a bit unfortunate that her books are about impossibly beautiful people, but her supporting cast of colors could probably come in an assortment of sizes; she’s kind of deliberately left her descriptions vague, allowing readers to fill in the blanks. But again, I don’t see how her size is relevant, and I don’t see how its any of our business, anyway. Stephenie Meyer can be any size she wants, and it’s still not relevant to our existence.

I think Meyer is lucky, in that she has a huge, very supportive fandom, and her books have kind of been flying under the radar. Now that Twilight is turning into a big movie, however, I think that Meyer is about to encounter the ugly side of fame, and I think that’s a great pity. She strikes me as a fairly self-possessed, very together woman, and I think it’s going to take serious effort to find a chink in her armor, but that chink will eventually be found, because such is the nature of fame, especially in the age of the Internet, where deliberate efforts to be as malicious as possible seem to abound.

Size hatred never seems to get old, judging from the comments on the MTV post, and everyone’s a target. I would almost like to see her answering one of the fat hatred questions, just to take a chance to expose sizism for the hateful, nasty, foul thing that it is. I think it would send a great messasge to the young women who read her books, and a pointed message to the world.

This book is a collection of interviews with Edward Gorey which date to the 1970s. They were edited a bit to tone down repetitive parts, since interview questions tend to be very similar, and then they were organized chronologically. The result is a fascinating glimpse into the mind and work ethic of Edward Gorey.

For the record, let it be said that Edward Gorey liked Buffy, and I think it’s rather a pity that he didn’t get to see the later seasons. He was also apparently a huge fan of the Tale of Genji, which I did not know, and of the New York City Ballet, which I did know. It was fascinating to read his thoughts on his artistic inspirations, his policy of never looking at his own work after he publishes it (a sentiment I agree with), and his attitude about work and life in general.

Gorey was a notable eccentric with a lot of cats who managed to find a niche which allowed him to be precisely who he was. This gives me hope that perhaps I will someday have the same luxury. But he was also a very practical, clear-thinking man, macabre streak or not, and I loved to read about that. I especially adored his discussions about work, in which he pointed out that he would do pretty much anything to avoid work, and that everything is a potential distraction; a situation common to many of us freelancers, I’m sure.

If you’re at all interested in the life and work of Edward Gorey, you should definitely check this book out. There’s lots of great stuff in here, including some selected illustrations.

Demographics:

Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorery, edited by Karen Wilkin. Published 2001, 292 pages. Biography.