Hi Bugan ya Hi Kinggawan by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Lovely.
I’ve been away from things for a while. Between taking a second job and the husband’s surgery, I’ve been using my creative downtime for writing the novel rather than blog posts.
What I had hoped to be a quick and easy revision is turning into a pretty thorough re-writing of the entire novel, thanks to Rob’s unrelenting criticism of my plot flaws. Should be good.
Anyway, just a note to let you know I haven’t vanished into the North Idaho wilderness. I’ll be back.
I have a new address. That’s nothing new–I’ve had a new address at least once a year since I moved out to go to college nine years ago.
I have a new phone number, and even though I’ve had it for a few months now I still have to pause and think hard before typing it, or giving it out. That’s nothing new, either, as this is at least my seventh new phone number since I’ve moved away from the 509 area code.
Yesterday I closed my Bank of America account, since I’ve been exclusively using the Joint Married People’s Account. I’ve had that 8-digit account number memorized for 10 years, and as I recited it for the bank teller yesterday I realized that it was the last time I’d ever say that sequence of numbers. Now when I want to make a deposit I’m left scrambling for that scrap of paper somewhere in my wallet, I know you’re there somewhere that has my new account number.
I finally opened an account with the Kootenai-Shoshone Library system, and now no longer do I type in my 13-digit Seattle Public Library card number when I want to place a book on hold. It’s still there, rattling around until we move back, but now I have a new number to type in, and if I’m working upstairs then my library card is inevitably downstairs and vice versa.
It’s as if all the anchors have been pulled at once–I feel a little adrift….
It’s been ages since I’ve read any paranormal stuff, but when I saw the cover of Changeless by Gail Carriger I was drawn to read the back cover, and, as I mentioned, when I saw what was written on the back I simply had to buy it, even though it was the second in a series, even though it was about werewolves (which I really have nothing against, but rarely read), even though I hadn’t bought a book in over a year. (By the way, that purchase initiated a shameful amount of time and money spent in bookstores over the past few weeks, both physical and online. Oops.)
I can’t promise much by way of review here because I just flew through the book, mostly while having after-shift beers one night at work. So, I guess in addition to initiating my book spending spree, I can also blame Changeless for hindering my progress in getting to know my new coworkers. Every time one of them would stop by the bar and say hi, I’d make the bare minimum of smalltalk, just itching to get back to reading. She has a parasol that shoots darts, for goodness sake!
The Story
Alexia Maccon, the Lady Woolsey, is a preternatural. If she touches creatures like vampires and werewolves they turn human. She’s married to a large and lusty Scottish werewolf lord, and spends her time advising Queen Victoria on matters of the supernatural. When her husband leaves for Scotland, Alexia sets off after him, armed with her trusty parasol and plagued by a pair of Victorian ladies, in the company of the mysterious but sexy cross-dressing French inventor Madame Lefoux.
This book is full of lovable and strongly drawn characters with quick wits and good conversation. Add a good dose of humor, manners, and steampunk, and you’ll understand why I’m gushing.
Carriger has a lovely way with words, and a knack for verbing nouns that makes her prose, I don’t know, sparkle and skitter across the page like an adorable baby bunny, um, covered in glitter. It just makes you want to smile, is what I’m saying.
“Have a little nip of this, my dear,” [said sexy cross-dressing French inventor Madame Lefoux], “Calm your nerves.” She handed [the flask] to Ivy.
Ivy nipped, blinked a couple times, nipped again, and then graduated from frantic to loopy. “Why that burns all the way down!”
Although this was the second book in the series, it stood on its own just fine for me. Carriger managed to write a story that was self-contained without either a) over-explaining what happened in the first book for those of us who completely ignore proper order or b) making the book read incomprehensibly. I feel like I can read the first book without really any spoilers, and I can’t wait to do it. Next paycheck.
The only thing was, I can’t believe that Alexia didn’t get that Madame Lefoux was a lesbian even though Lefoux breathed it out of every pore, as well as making thinly-veiled allusions to her sexual preferences in every other conversation. Especially since Alexia is friends with the celebratedly gay vampire Lord Akeldama (another fantastic and delightful character who I can’t wait to read more about in books 1 and 3.).
Read this book now!
From youtuber Ryan Iverson. Thanks Ryan.
The fantastic folks over at The Book Smugglers just posted the results of their cover survey. The results are interesting–to sum up, people do judge books by their covers, although they understand how little an author has to do with the cover art.
My thoughts? I’m much more likely to buy something I’ve never heard of if it has an interesting cover, but I’ll buy a book I’ve been wanting to read anyway despite the cover art.
If I’ve never heard of it and the cover art is nothing but boring cliches? A great blurb on the back won’t save it, because I won’t bother to pick it up.
Disclaimer: I think that most popular music falls short of good storytelling and decent writing, but I’m picking on country music today because that’s all I’ve been hearing on the radio lately.
I’m beginning to believe that each geographical region has an attachment to certain songs that have been lost to other regions. That each region has, as it were, their own unique mixed tape of once-popular, long-forgotten-everywhere-else musical numbers. Every radio station, department store and bar has a copy.
In Peru, that mixed tape included Madonna’s “Isla Bonita,” Men at Work’s “Land Down Under,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” Here in Northern Idaho that mixed tape includes Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” that new Pearl Jam song, and copious amounts of Country Music.
By the way, you’ve all seen this video, right? I had to include it, as it’s just so bizarre. Such as in the scene when they’re doing a synchronized digging-routine dance, then they all turn and hop away like kangaroos with no rhythm. What does it all mean?
But I’ve let myself get distracted. I was outlining points of my sound argument for the swift acquisition of an ipod.
Wherein I begin to talk about Country Music
I love the idea of Country Music. I dig the twang, I like the guitar licks, the fiddle, the boot-tappin’ tempo. I like the potential themes, having come from a a Country Background myself (though 8 years in Seattle, a cumulative 1.5 years outside the US, and an English Lit degree pretty much exclude me from “Being Country,” and that’s cool with me).
Music is a powerful medium for storytelling, but most Modern Country Music seems to run screaming from that, instead using bland, generic lyrics to describe bland, universal situations. Perhaps this is meant to make the song applicable to more people, but instead it just makes you wonder why you should care.
Basic Country Formulas:
- Love: Things were bad, but looking into your eyes makes them good.
- Breakup A: I’m out on the town in my sexy heels/studly cowboy hat, and you’ll soon be quite jealous.
- Breakup B: You left me and I’m pretty upset about that.
- Breakup C: Damn, I really screwed that one up.
- I’m Country: You can tell this because I drink cheap beer around a bonfire in the “backwoods”, drive a tractor, wear overalls, didn’t go to college but I’m good with a wrench, am hassled by the Man, etc. (Sung in the key of “defiant”).
- Pickup songs: These are both about one’s love for actual pickup trucks (or other Country Vehicles such as tractors), and about hitting on people in bars. Sometimes they’re combined, such as in “She thinks my tractor’s sexy,” which I always crank up when it comes on the radio.
Is there anything wrong with these formulas? Absolutely not. Every story is based around a generic formula–it’s the specific details of the situation that makes a story/song interesting. What I’ve noticed in my constant flipping through Northern Idaho Radio, though, is that most of these songs are carefully generic, as though to best encompass the Human Experience.
For example, Carrie Underwood’s new song “Temporary Home.” She paints a fuzzy picture of three generic situations that should elicit the listener’s pity/empathy: A kid in a foster home, a young mom in a halfway house, an old man on his deathbed. But they’re not characters. It’s not a story. They’re simply bland symbols intended to provoke an emotional response. It’s boring. (Also, the binge-drinking, tire-slashing Carrie Underwood is a whole hell of a lot more fun.)
What changed over the decades from the great storytelling of Early Country? Is this a deliberate attempt to write more universally applicable songs, Country Anthems that folks all the way from Washington State to Tennessee can identify with? And if you write songs meant to be universal, how will they possibly be interesting?
Here I gush for a while about how much I love the Drive-by Truckers
Haven’t you heard the Drive-by Truckers? Oh, really, darling, you must search them out.
Lyrically, Modern Country is pretty uninteresting. The closest thing I’ve heard to a double meaning in a Country Song lately was during an ode to gettin’ it on: “ain’t nothin’ on but the radio.” The line’s not clever, but at least it’s an attempt at creativity with language.
Music is like poetry, in that it requires a certain sparseness of language, the best choice of the best word to tell a story. I’m prone to long, over-evolved explanations (which means that I suck at both jokes and concise blogging), so I don’t write poetry. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, however, manage to write songs that manage to distill a compelling life story into 20 lines, more or less.
Their songs are intensely character-driven, something which makes the emotions and situations more compelling than the carefully bland Country Songs on the radio. Sometimes the songs are sung from the character’s POV, but often they’re sung from the POV of a friend or relative looking in, the words painting an intimate picture of a life. I don’t care about Carrie Underwood’s featureless foster boy, but in “Little Bonnie” (A Blessing and a Curse) I feel deeply for Bonnie’s (and the narrator’s) father. In “The Sands of Iwo Jima” (The Dirty South), the narrator sketches out an image of his great uncle:
When I was just a kid I spent every weekend
On the farm he grew up on so I guess so did I
And we’d stay up watching movies on the black and white TV
We watched “The Sands of Iwo Jima” starring John WayneEvery year in June George A. goes to a reunion
Of the men that he served with and their wives and kids and grandkids
My Great Uncle used to take me and I’d watch them recollect
about some things I couldn’t comprehendAnd I thought about that movie, asked if it was that way
He just shook his head and smiled at me in such a loving way
As he thought about some friends he will never see again
He said “I never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima”
If I ever teach a creative writing class, I will teach The Deeper In as a superb example of economy of language. Talk about lines with double meanings, the song is full of phrases that are both innocent and deeply sexual, which a song about illegal, societally-shunned love should be.
Love? Try “Marry Me” (Decoration Day) where the protagonist declares to his sweetheart that even though their hometown isn’t much of a place to live, “I’d rather be your fool nowhere / than go somewhere and be no one’s.”
Breakup (C)? Try “Sounds Better in the Song” (Decoration Day): “And ‘Lord knows, I can’t change’ sounds better in the song / than it does with hell to pay.”
Politics? From “Puttin People on the Moon” (Dirty South): “Mary Alice quit askin’ why I do the things I do / I ain’t sayin’ that she likes it, but what else I’m gonna do? / If I could solve the world’s problems I’d probably start with hers and mine / But they can put a man on the moon / And I’m stuck in Muscle Shoals just barely scraping by”
You’re not still reading this, are you? Put down this blog and go buy a Drive-by Truckers album right now!
I’ve decided that today will be the day I start working on my new novel. The idea’s been there for quite a while, and I’ve been letting the characters percolate in my head for the past few weeks. They’re nearly ready to come out, I suppose, but I’ve been working so long on The Scent of Rain that I don’t quite remember how to begin to extricate them.
I think it normally involves a pot of coffee and a pen. Onward.
I first learned about Carol Emshwiller while perusing Small Beer Press’s catalog a few years back. The idea behind her novel The Mount (a young alien and his human mount, Charley, negotiate their master/slave/friend relationship) intrigued me, and when I read it I fell in love with her quirky-but-serious writing style. A month before we left for Peru, Small Beer Press had a $1 book sale. Yes, really.
Wait. Do you not also obsess about Small Beer Press? Everything they do is awesome. Check them out.
That said, I went nuts on their sale even though I was supposed to be saving money for Peru, and I ended up with a copy of Carmen Dog that I knew would go in storage until Rob and I got back from our Indefinite Peruvian Journey.
But now we’re back. And I read Carmen Dog
(There’s one paragraph about the end–I’ve marked it with a spoiler alert. Skip it if you don’t like that sort of thing).
Here’s where I talk about the book
Carmen Dog is a shortish book, a quick read that left me both entertained and vaguely disturbed. The idea behind it is that women have begun to change into creatures and vice versa. A whole spectrum of biases against women are revealed now that the line has blurred between “wife” and “pet.” Women, having always been a frighteningly opaque species, are now even more incomprehensible as their normal feminine whims merge with the urge to fly, to swim in the sea, to climb trees, to gnaw on human flesh.
Emshwiller rarely describes her characters, only giving wildly colorful descriptions that leave everything to the imagination. The whys and hows of the women’s transformations are never fully answered: on one page the women do things that only women could do, at other times that only animals could. Emshwiller doesn’t try to direct our imaginings, she merely puts a few hints out to entice.
The main character is Pooch, a well-bred and extremely loyal dog-turned-young-woman. She teeters on the edge of her new-found humanity: she enjoys the new responsibilities, artistic leanings and the elegant new hands which are a part of her new transformation, but she’s also been thrust into a world of malicious intention and conflicted feelings.
Pooch is loyal, as a dog should be. Her self-worth is found almost entirely in the eyes of the men she desires to serve well and unselfishly, to the detriment of her own aspirations. In a dog, this is admirable. In a young woman, Pooch’s slavish desire to prove herself to her master is extremely uncomfortable to read about. Emshwiller plays with this tension: after hearing that the master will come for her at the pound, Pooch reels:
But if she apologizes profusely enough and promises to work much harder, to get up very early, eat less, and not take even one little moment for herself or even one little penny ever again for such frivolities as flowers [...], perhaps in this way she can make it up to him or do penance of some sort. “Anything,” she will say to him, “I’ll do absolutely anything: lick your feet, walk one step behind your left heel…just let me stay and serve you and let me see the baby now and then if only from a distance [...].” She hopes that after she says all this and makes the promises, he’ll see that she’s worth keeping–a thought not uncommon to many creatures of her sex. (p. 16.)
Carmen Dog is a brutal critique of the dynamic of relationships between men and women, but Emshwiller doesn’t come across as having an agenda–she’s just created a strange little “what if?” world, then taken it and ran.
Pooch is the only female voice in the novel. Emshwiller gives us the perspective of the Master, of the Doctor, of the worried men at the Academy of Motherhood who try to find a way to rear children without the tainted influence of unstable women. The men, it turns out, are nearly all assholes. Women have become property, a thing to be controlled, and beneath Emshwiller’s lovely prose runs an unsettling current of sexual dominance and manipulation.
It was almost as though the men had at last found a world to their liking, in which they had even more control than before and in which relationships and responsibilities were less confining. After all, they merely involved dumb animals who were not worth consideration, politeness, time, effort, gifts. [...] To be fair, however, one must admit that a small percentage of the men are trying to help out as best they can, both in bringing reason to chaos and also in bringing a little happiness or, at the very least, some small comforts, to everyone’s lives–whether human or animal or half and half–inasmuch as such a thing may be possible. (p. 32.)
Upon fleeing her master’s house to protect the baby from its mother (who is rapidly becoming a snapping turtle), Pooch is thrown into a women-only pound where the female creatures are abused and, in one instance, sexually assaulted. She is then transferred to a basement research facility where the Doctor performs cruel experiments on the women. After losing her beautiful operatic singing voice as a result of his torture, Pooch escapes with the baby and navigates the streets of New York, penniless and defenseless. Eventually the women and their allies form a resistance to fight their marginalization.
[Spoiler alert] In the end, however, there’s a happily-ever-after moment that rings false. Pooch ends up with her dream man, who seems like a very nice sort (yay!), but that is presented in a “happy epilogue” with two other matches that left a sour taste in my mouth. Two of the main sadistic male characters we meet–the Doctor and the Opera Producer–have repeatedly expressed interest (obsession? love, we’re told) in two of Pooch’s friends. Since we never get inside the heads of Pooch’s friends, it’s hard to know whether Chloe (an ex-siamese) really wants to marry the Opera Producer after weeks of sexual slavery to him, or whether Phillip (an ex-kingsnake who turned out to be female) really wants to marry the Doctor after he tortured her. Emshwiller presents their unions as tidy “of course it ended that way” moments, without any of the biting commentary and analysis that she used throughout the rest of the book.
In the end, however, I loved Carmen Dog. If you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it to you.
I’d apologize for not posting much lately if I knew that anyone was reading this except for you, oh dear supportive mother of mine. But I probably call you more often than I post lately, so I don’t feel too bad there….
I just bought the first new book I’ve owned in probably a year: Changeless by Gail Carriger. I’ve seen it around on the internets, and so I decided to pick it up. Victorian propriety meets werewolves? From the back cover:
But Alexia is armed with her trusty parasol, the latest fashions, and an arsenal of biting civility. Even when her investigations take her to Scotland, the backwater of ugly waistcoats, she is prepared: upending werewolf pack dynamics as only the soulless can.
I laughed out loud in the book store (Hastings–it’s decently big! With a good selection! And a little coffee shop! All is not lost in Northern Idaho.). I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all. Especially you, mom.
My heart has been lifted today in this Northern Idaho Wilderness. Not only did I find Hastings, I also got a chance to wander through Pilgrims Natural Foods, which is like a reasonably-priced PCC (Whole Foods for those of you who don’t live in Seattle. Mom, I know you got the reference.). My cloth grocery bags are now stuffed with organic limes, tofu, bulghar wheat, and a dozen other food items that have never before been inside the Upstairs Apartment’s kitchen.
I’m currently sipping a delicious coffee at Calypso Coffee and Roasting Company, which is a quirky big coffee shop with all the things we quirky coffee people love: mixed media art on the walls, muted earthen color schemes, furniture than looks like it was stolen from victorian mansions and mod lofts, and draped cloth with vaguely Indian prints. I am in love.
Plus, I’m high from two back-to-back fantastic job interviews. With any sort of good fortune I should be spilling cocktails and/or home-style gravy on diners by next week.
Just to put a damper on all the good news, it’s snowing. In April. Really, Northern Idaho? Work with me now.