Year In Review: *Ugh*, *Meh*, *Sigh*

37 out of 60.

Half. About half. Half full? Half empty?

More like half-assed.

Yeah...this reading year did not go as I imagined/planned, and that's what I get for planning in the first place --- life always points, laughs, and switches up on you.

At the beginning of the year I felt a bit confident that I could build upon my reading goals, something I've been steadily doing for the past four years, adding more books to the count and challenging myself to read more, and this year was the most I had dedicated myself to do. 60 books I was going to read and relish in for 2018 and I was going to write all the reviews, but...disappointingly I overreached, the words didn't flow, and I only got half-way in terms of my goal, GoodReads' Reading Challenge meter mocking me the entire way.

*long frustrated sigh*

So what happened? As I said, life happened and laughed at me, disrupting things, but something felt 'off' about my reading pattern in general all year long.

Should I blame the books themselves? In a way. I will say I ran into some speed bumps with a few of them and got stuck in a couple of reading ruts to where some of my choices wouldn't hold my attention for long (save for the late Kevyn Aucoin's iconic Making Faces or Lisa Eldridge's Face Paint cause oooh pretty pictures and makeup!). Also this year was a bit trying for personal reasons (hold that thought...) so my mind was kind of elsewhere. I don't know, this year I just didn't really love most of what I read, which is a strange situation for me to be in. I enjoyed a bunch of books, no doubt, but I wasn't enraptured as so few allowed me to get lost within their worlds. There were a handful of books that when I finished I looked at them and went: "why weren't you better?" others I was "meh" on, some I was re-configuring the ending in my head due to being unsatisfied with what was written (looking at you Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen). A chosen few got some eyebrow raises and left impressions on me, thus it wasn't all a trash heap. So, yeah, this year was a mixed bag.

Though this blog is in its fawn stages, and I'm allowing it to wobble on its new legs for a little while, I'm just not pleased that for it's grand debut, that I'm not keeping up with my reading goals or scribbling out reviews at a steady pace. ← And note that this criticism is the Virgo in me --- we are annoyingly hard on ourselves.

With all my frustrated sighs and ughs, I'm looking forward to a fresh new year and a fresh batch of books to read, relish in, and review. This blog is shaping up to be nice little nook for me, and with a new year brings new possibilities and challenges so hopefully 2019 will be paved with pages that will invite me right in and words to guide me along the way.

But! in the meantime let's go backwards a bit and revisit my favorites and fails of 2018!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Aretha Franklin's homegoing was a complete circus of odd to me.

Eight long hours where a bevy of questionable men made it a mission at the pulpits to scream about Idiot Orange In Chief and other random non-Aretha related topics. Eight long hours that occupied a mixed bag of performances that (to me) failed to stir the soul, where the corpse changed costumes four times, a minister groped a pop star, who wore club gear to a funeral, that led to a former president to ogle at her...*exasperated long sigh* Eight long hours that seemed removed from its honoree, and a complete affront to a woman who was a musical legend, a deity diva whose soundtrack called and responded to a generation. From the onset, the whole affair almost seemed designed as if nobody knew who Aretha Franklin truly was.

Then again, Aretha seemed to want it that way.

This is something author David Ritz points out in the introduction for Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, the struggle he had at getting Aretha to tell her side of the story when he wrote an early biography of hers. She was not interested, that is, unless it was on her terms. Fine. Yet, the woman loved to fabricate, spin her own fairy tales, convince herself of the what-could-be, so anything coming out of her mouth outside of singing came to be taken with showers of salt. Her protection of herself in controlling her own narrative may seem laudable. As a woman of color, not too often we're given carte blanche to our own narrative, but it does do a disservice because we never do know who the real Aretha is. This book doesn't exactly skirt from that either.

Novella November: Plague Of Hollywood Locusts

"I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her. "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want. If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

At one point in my life I wanted to be an actress.

Yeah, when have you not heard that line? But seriously, I wanted to be one because of what I naively thought it represented --- you know --- fame, wealth, glamour, prestige, insta-acceptance, the chance to act with Benicio Del Toro (sorry, I love me some Benicio Del Toro). I even did theater for three years in high school just to see if I had what it takes to become a true thespian. Within a few years of being an understudy-turned-sound-director-turned-make-up-artist, I realized that just because my mother calls me a "drama queen" doesn’t make me an actress cause the fact stands that I'm a terrible actress. Truly terrible. Trust me, I'm someone who thrives better behind the scenes, not front and center.

For this, to some extent, I envied the stage kids, the kids who could cry on cue and who sung show tunes with colorful gusto at the drop of a fedora. These kids, my classmates, were going to be ACTORS, maybe not famous ones, but they were excelling at my girlhood fantasy to be a bronze Meryl Streep. Still, I think I admired them more for how they had the same teeth-grinding spirit I now have about writing. No matter what happened, they were never going to stop acting, never going to extinguish their dreams no matter how many bit parts, failed auditions, and false hopes they encountered. They held out hope that one day all the struggle and sweat would be worth it.

But what happens when reality sets in? When those bit parts never transpire? When your dream is deferred and denied over and over again into a webbed net of jaded insanity?

You get The Day of the Locust.

Novella November: The Love Child

"A love-child, the phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her---the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her."

Being an only child led me to manifest Jasmine. She was a bit older than me, smarter, cooler, owned a pink Corvette, and had luxurious glitter dusted hair that she dragged across the floor. I told anyone who'd listen that Jasmine (yes, she was named after Aladdin's main squeeze) was my sister. My parents played along. They poured extra Kool-Aid for her, set a placemat at our table for her, made sure she was buckled up in the backseat --- for my benefit they entertained this second "daughter".

After some time Jasmine started to become an issue, this when I began to talk about her outside of the comforts of home. Jasmine never went to school with me (she was older and cooler remember?), but I blabbed about her enough to where she became known to my teacher. Little did I know that I had successfully convinced her of Jasmine's existence so much so that when my parents came to a PTA meeting (yes, my parents actually went to those) my teacher asked about Jasmine's whereabouts and was greeted with my parents' quizzical stares.

Jasmine is no more, as all the "imaginary friends" I have now are characters in stories that I have hibernating in unfinished word docs, but it's a little funny that what made Jasmine more "alive" was not me just believing in her existence, but that I kept her in the confides of home, and once she became realized outside of that, poof! she was gone. Gone because she wasn't just exclusive to me anymore. I had messed up giving her away. Reality had intruded the fantasy. In short, I grew up.

To create a person out of thin air, give them shape and identity and then be able to convince others of such a creation requires an intimacy that is challenging to explain. Of course psychoanalysts, child experts whathaveyou have tried to link the appearance of an imaginary friend to a child having a social "problem", and since only children are sheltered little monsters who bray at the moon at midnight every third Thursday, we are classified as having such a "problem." (I'm kidding) True, I created Jasmine's existence due to a desire to have siblings, but it also was an inkling of the storytelling life I would quasi-live one day, and the wild imagination that I continue to have all so I can keep a little fantasy in my reality.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to this odd little novella as The Love Child actually delves into that weird, sorta Frankenstein-equse way we 'create' individuals in our adolescent, and how they somehow translate towards our adulthood. The Love Child delves a little further as it asks the question: what would happen if you conjured up your imaginary friend as an adult? If you're Agatha Bodenham, you'd play along, that is, till such a creation begins to consume you greatly...

Novella November: Seasons Change

"Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions."

"An ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic" is how Stephen King described the novella in the afterword of this collection, and of course he of all authors would say that.

King laughs in the face of the 'slim novel' as even his leaner efforts seem to feel wide, and wander around in their labyrinths longer than the norm. It's why I wondered if placing this book among the miscellany of novellas I read and revisited for this monthly series was a bit fair. Different Seasons is a whopper at 600+ pages, as it contains not one little novel, but four B-I-G novels. The stories pack a punch, and have in a way, outgrown the spines they've been sewn in as three of the four novels have all gone on to become feature films, two of them  (Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption and The Body) now considered to be classics and some of King's best adaptations set to celluloid.

Different Seasons itself is also considered to be his best collected work of shorts and novellas for this reason, and I concur. For a time I thought Night Shift had that title on lock, but nah, Different Seasons yanks that crown off of its head, as he doles out some of his finest writing and introduces us to some of his most enduring characters in this collection.

Released in 1982, Different Seasons was considered "un-publishable" at the time due the four tales detouring away from the horror genre that made King serious coin, and it's true, this collection is devoid of supernatural elements, but there are things present that are tangible to terrify and evoke shivers. King excels at putting a lens on humanity (and inhumanity), making humans being as monstrous as we are capable to be, and this collection knows no different. The "monsters" in Different Seasons, whether it be the occupants in a looming maximum penitentiary, a former Nazi war criminal and his psychopathic adolescent tormentor, or four young boys who come face to face with death, do roam, and roam a range that only King himself could concoct.

Novella November: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life"

Dead Poets Society. To Sir with Love. Lean On Me. Stand & Deliver. Mona Lisa Smile --- Miss Jean Brodie tosses a floral scarf across her shoulders and scoffs at those narratives about teachers who inspire and want their students to succeed. Inspire students? Pish posh. Urge students to succeed? Sure you jest!

Jean Brodie uses the classroom as her own stage. She is the star of a show called "Miss Jean Brodie in Her Prime" and she wants everybody to understand that being in one’s prime is the "crème de la crème".

Miss Brodie is a teacher at a Scottish girls' school during the 1930s. She is charming, self-assured, well-read, well-traveled, and an arresting storyteller with a swell of opinions on just about, well, everything.

She's also full of shit. So full of it.

Sure, she's got wit and sass. Sure, she's a raconteur of an unconventional sort, but she's also manipulative and a narcissist. She's also a Fascist. Truly. She stans for Mussolini and Francisco Franco. If she was around today she’d follow them on Twitter, write annoying think pieces on her Tumblr, and set up a GoFundMe in order to gather donations to help Mussolini 'improve' Italy. Aside from her love of Fascist dictators, her self-absorbed foolishness makes her quite dangerous, unfit to even be an orator of any kind, but there she is, her Roman nose held high in the air, teaching at a girls' school, "putting old heads on young shoulders".

It's also a shame that she has her admirers. Six impressionable students named Sandy, Mary, Eunice, Rose, Monica, and Jenny who are dubbed "the Brodie set". The girls hang onto Brodie's every word, idolizing her to points of extreme influence. They eat, sleep, and live Brodie. Two of them even write fan fiction about Miss Brodie (and as a bonus Spark provides every cringing word of it!).

In the book we follow the girls as they age and Miss Brodie being ever present in their lives and never wavering in encouraging a cult of personality between her 'set'. Brodie is so invested in these girls that she goes so far as to spin fantasy lives for them, "predicting" how they will end up (one girl is to be known for her "sex", though at 13 she’s giggling about sex) Yet, Miss Brodie doesn't realize that her idea to put "old heads on young shoulders" is soon to backfire, because as the girls mature and become more fully-formed individuals, the glow around Brodie begins to dull, with one member of the Brodie brood falling into disdain for her once beloved mentor, betraying her in the end.

Novella November: Breakfast Of Fancy Fakery With Holly Golighty

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get."

I must be in the minority, but as much as I adore me some Audrey Hepburn, I never warmed to her role as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards' 1961 cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I truly disliked the movie when I first saw it, and when I tried watching it again about a year ago, I still felt cold towards it. The iconic and stylish fashions Audrey sported throughout was the only thing that kept my eyes on it, and can we just say that Mickey Rooney in "yellow face" is about the most offensive on-screen performance next to well… Flex Alexander slapping chalk and wet baby powder on his face to portray Michael Jackson? (Yes, that was an actual thing that some people spent money on, recorded, and foisted upon human eyes…welcome to your future nightmares...)

So why read the source material for a film I have such an aversion too? Because books are always often better than the movie (duh) and Truman Capote is one hell of a writer (double duh). He is. He's a natural born storyteller who during his reign possessed the sassiest tongue from the South, and if he was alive today would have the shadiest Twitter log ever. His prose is so delightful and dagger-sharp, and tinged with just the right balance of purple. It's more so lavender and plum --- the relatives of purple --- to where you're whisked into word wonderment while reading, but never do you feel like you're suffocating on adjectives the whole time. He’s also a master at autopsying his characters right down to the atom. Holly Golightly would just be some insufferable white girl in someone’s inexperienced hands, but in Capote's she’s a "wild thing", untamable and feral, with dimensions that rival the facets on the diamonds she longs for from Tiffany's window displays.

Most consider In Cold Blood as Capote's masterpiece, but I don't know, as much as it is the godfather of true crime novels, I enjoyed reading Breakfast At Tiffany's a lot more and found it lingering in my mind longer. Of course, these two tales are incomparable. One is written as fiction, the other as fact; one is set in the rural Midwest, the other in the bustle of New York City. Night and day these stories are, but both books are about desperate, lost people who make poor choices over and over, because they don’t know another way and don’t care to find the exit sign, even when its glowing red in their face.

Novella November: The Shape of Mrs. Caliban

"You are too frightened. It spoils your enjoyment." / "Larry, you're all I've got"

Let's get this out of the way...

Mrs. Caliban was The Shape of Water before The Shape of Water. And yes, it too is about a woman who gets her freak on with a sea creature.

Oh, and you thought Guillermo Del Toro's Academy Award-winning film (and it's book accompaniment) was wholly original?* Surely you jest...

Now whether Del Toro was inspired by Rachel Ingalls' slim novel from 1982 is up for debate (Del Toro has stated that he was inspired by the romantic undertones in the creature feature classic Creature From The Black Lagoon), but it's not hard to detect that something was cribbed, as both posses strikingly similar threads of DNA whereas a lonely woman, stifled silent by her oppressive environment finds solace and personal freedom through loving an equally misunderstood sea monster. Both too also blur the lines of normal and abnormal (or how we define such...), but Mrs. Caliban, for me, detours into something deeper. Much deeper.

Bookshelf Newness: White Oleander, Dusty, Fire This Time, Herland, Black Eyed Susans

"I don't need to buy any new books" --- said no one EVER. 

Last month was my birthday (*throws confetti*) and all I wanted was a messy cheeseburger, a margarita, and to spend the day among dusty bookshelves. Wish was granted...well, a few weeks later, cause that's what happens when you get your adult on --- things just don't work out when you want it. But better late than never, right? So these are the first books I picked up as a 32 year old...

White Oleander, by Janet Fitch

This is one of those books that has been persistent in making itself known to me. It's a book I often come across when browsing bookshelves in stores and libraries. A book that is often recommended to me whenever I finish a novel akin to it. A book that was turned into a movie that comes to me whenever I browse movie titles online. After all these years of it nudging at me, I have relented and picked up Janet Fitch's debut novel in a nice paperback with an Oprah Book Club sticker on it (see even Oprah wants me to read it...) All I know about this book is that it's a story about a young girl who gets ensnared in the foster system after her mother is sent to prison for committing murder, and since I'm all about character studies that explore the complex intimacy of mother-daughter relationships, I see why this book kept being relentless.

Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Music Legend, by Karen Bartlett

I love my music biographies, and love them even better when they are about women in the industry. Back when I was writing music reviews, I noticed the lack of in-depth analysis on female singers and songwriters, especially those outside the rock genre. It's why my previous blog (Audio Diva, for those who wanted to know) was reinvented to be more female-focused, as I attempted to really analyze and celebrate a lot of the women artists I adore. I'm quite the Dusty Springfield fan, after being exposed to her music by way of an Internet friend many moons ago, and really get annoyed when she's not mentioned among the great voices of the 20th Century. She was one of the few white singers who sang soul without gimmick as she churned out searing classics such as 1969 classic, Dusty In Memphis. I saw this book sticking out on a shelf, right when I walked into the store, so like White Oleander's persistence, it was fate. The reviews on it are spotty, and less than stellar, but it's about the only book on Dusty Springfield that is in print, available on American shores, and is updated, so I will definitely dig into it.

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward

When this book was first announced last year, it immediately went onto my to-reads list. I'm figuring this book is even more necessary now than when it was published considering the shitshow that is our government at current, but as long as America keeps entertaining racism, such topics will (unfortunately) never read as ancient news. Reading about rampant racism in America as a Black American is never what I call a "leisure read", but I'm up for the challenge, and to be enlightened as well as keep that fire lit for change.

Herland, by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman

Thought the classic that gave awareness and a voice to post-pardum depression, The Yellow Wallpaper was Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's only proto-feminist rodeo? Nope. She had this slim little number in her bag as well, and it's about an all-female society that is discovered by three male explorers, who freak out as they for the first time have to think about their position in a society where they are now considered inferior. Oh yeah, this is pure fantasy feminism, with a smattering of early science-fiction to make this book a curiosity for the 21st Century mind. Since it was written in 1915, I'm going to be forgiving of some of the politics and sociological faux pas that I know will leap out of this (wanna bet this society is an all-white female society?) because the concept as a whole sounds so damn fascinating, and sounds like something that could be turned into a Netflix series in 5, 4, 3....

Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women, edited by Mary Helen Washington

This is yet another book that leaped at me from the shelves (that happened a lot on this trip...), and couldn't resist having it in my little hot hands considering it's a collection of Black women writers and you know I'm ALL about that. Scanning the pages there are some writers who are unfamiliar to me (Jean Wheeler Smith, Frenchy Hodges), and there are familiar names (Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison) with works here that I'm un-familiar with so it looks to be a good mix of rare gems to unearth. Only bummer is the portion focused on auntie Alice Walker feature selections from her short story collection, You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down, which I've already read. Still, it doesn't hurt to read them again, you know?

Breathe In, Breathe Out

"Feminism. I'm new to it. The word still sounds weird and wrong. Too white, too structured, too foreign: something I can't claim." 

Juliet Milagros Palante is a bit lost, but she's desiring to be found.

She's a 19-year-old queer Latina that feels out of pocket in her Bronx community and the world at large. She hasn't exactly come out to her family (or more so to herself), and she's unsure of where she stands in a relationship with a girl whom she met in a gender studies class. Juliet also constantly struggles with how feminism and queerness work, especially when these things weren't created to include her brown body and voice in mind. She consults the pages of a feminist tome called Raging Flower, and feels she has found her literary lifeline and she-ro in its author, a feminist icon by the name Harlowe Brisbane, as both have opened Juliet to questioning her view of life on a deeper level than she ever thought possible.

So moved by the book, she is compelled one day to write to Harlowe and express her feelings. Juliet is beside herself when Harlowe writes back and invites Juliet to make a trek to her homestead in Portland, Oregon, where she has a summer internship awaiting her. With little trepidation, Juliet accepts the invitation, and goes forth, hoping to seek and find herself.

There is much to celebrate within a book like Juliet Takes A Breath. Not only for the queer Latina protagonist with a compelling voice that trumpets not just fierceness but vulnerabilities as well, we're also privy to a melting pot of personalities, cultural pride, sex positivism, and motivational dialogue that gives you that warm and fuzzy fight the power feeling. It's radical as fuck. It's intersectional as fuck. It's proud as fuck. It's truly one of the few works of fiction I can think of that confronts how feminism isn't a default code word for "white women only", as author Gabby Rivera has crafted a world where many characters are exploring how their sexuality, ethnicity, and gender intersect, and do it all without compromise. Such grounding for a book is refreshing and bold to read, and should be championed more in fiction, especially young adult fiction.

As this is a book for young adults, I understand that this book was designed to be as a primer of sorts for those whom like Juliet are attempting to wade through the contradictory waters of feminism and find themselves within the movement. If I was in my teens reading this, I would've been enthralled, and savoring the range of topics, characters, and communities mentioned, getting a nice taste of what living that intersectional life can be like, and should be like. The message of evolving as an individual is strong here, and that is oh so important. Still, my thirty-something self felt that for the diversity dreamscape Rivera has crafted, that she didn't exactly provide her younger readers with something with a bit more sustenance.

Let The Long Walk Begin...

"They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?"

Humans presented as the true monsters is what all the best horror stories entail. Stephen King, no doubt raised on a diet of Rod Serling, Shirley Jackson, and Ray Bradbury, learned such a notion from the best, and he too has explored with wit and depth how malevolent and miserable human beings can be, and are to each other.

King might not be as verbose or fragrant in his prose as his predecessors, but he knows how to push you, headfirst, into the pool of facing reality through a warped lens. So realistic are the worlds and the people he creates that deja vu sets in --- you have encountered such a surreal moment, you're acquainted with that abusive asshole, you've passed through that weird town or even lived in it for a time --- and that dahhling, is the horror in itself, how fiction begets truth.

This aspect is what I've always liked about King's works ever since my Mom (a King fangirl before it was in vogue to be so) allowed me to read and watch the film adaptations of 'Salem's Lot, Carrie, and The Shining as a kid. I was drawn to how a vampire could just move into a small community and separate the strong from the weak, how a meek high school girl's menstrual cycle emboldens her and sparks cataclysmic horror, how a family would just willingly stay at this strange isolated resort, and cave into their own mental madness. For all it's fictitious elements, it all still felt real. What King laid out had definitions, but various shadings, and you can bet even my precious R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike paperbacks began to lose their luster due the types of complexities King coaxed out of his works.

I'll be honest: I haven’t read a lot of King's works, post-1990s that is. I got turned off after Dreamcatcher (farting aliens? Go home Uncle Stevie you are drunk...), and have been content with sticking with the classics. I know. I know. I might be missing out on some gems he wrote (11/22/63 has me intrigued), but I prefer my King old school, so I went old school with The Long Walk, one that he wrote under the Richard Bachman moniker, and was treated to one of his best nightmares set to paper.

The Bachman years dealt with King trying to distance himself from Stephen King: The Brand, and where he could rework and release unpublished material so it wouldn't rot in the depths of his desk. The Long Walk is said to be the first book King wrote, this back in the 1960s when he was in college, and such a fact lends to why this book doesn't feel quite as fleshed-out or rich in character and dialogue as his future works would, but some of the bare nakedness of this heightens the ominous intensity of the plot, as well as provide the reader to put themselves into the literal worn shoes of our doomed travelers, and oh boy, it's brutal.

Catwalking With The Muses

Walking With The Muses is a literal escapade into the intoxicating swirl of the 1970s fashion world, as told by a true BAP (Black American Princess).

The title is perfect as supermodel Pat Cleveland truly walks (or more so) struts and twirls side-by-side with her "muses" which are a colorful cavalry of creatives from the 1960s and 1970s. Halston, Karl Lagerfeld, Andy Warhol, Antonio Lopez, Stephen Burrows, Yves Saint Laurent, Diana Vreeland (and an extremely weird) Guy Bourdin are all ruminated on, as are legends and icons like Marian Anderson, Nina Simone, Salvador Dali, Diana Ross, and Liza Minelli. Also a peppering of paramours such as Muhammad Ali, Mick Jagger, and Warren Beatty (who's kinda an ass) are kissed, and lead to some juicy tells. And to round out the glittering world of Pat Cleveland, along for the ride are a who's who of top models of the time like Donna Jordan, Sterling St. James, Naomi Sims, Marisa Berenson, Grace Jones and Jerry Hall.

Oh yeah, this book is deliciously gossipy and drops names like cookie dough batter on a baking tray, with Pat being that personable and glamorous griot, delivering a vibrant oral history that is nothing short of fun.

As a fan of this era, and the 1970s fashion culture in general, I was enthralled reading about Pat's adventures in couture paradise. From spiritual awakenings during her flower child days, sojourns in Europe and Africa, pre-gentrified New York City in all of its 1970s era grit and artistic gusto, near-death experiences (Pat clearly has nine lives...), to even an UFO sighting (!), Pat pours an effervescent cocktail of stories and keeps the libations flowing. Still her grandest adventure is being the daughter of artist Ladybird Cleveland, and their relationship, while marred by the exit of her musician father and Pat being passed off to some less than supportive relatives for a short spell, is a beautiful meditation on the mother-daughter bond, and the intimacy that it so entails.

Come On Eileen

"I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen."

Unreliable and unlikable narrators usually fall into two categories: fascinatingly frustrating or frustratingly annoying.

With Eileen there is deception, a grey area. A character that is an exception to such rules. Author Ottessa Moshfegh has assembled her in a ominous lab a la Dr. Frankenstein. You'll either see her as a disfigured, pathetic misfit or want to raise a pitchfork to a complete monster --- or you may find yourself somewhere in that muddled middle.

The voice of Eileen that we're introduced to is less than pitiless, as its in the distant present. She's older, calmer, and seems more at peace with herself, as she reflects on the muddled mythology of a time when she claims to have "disappeared". That time is the early 1960s, somewhere near Boston in a town that she distinguishes simply as "X-ville". She is in her mid-20s, self-loathing, and miserable, wiling the days away occupying two separate prisons. One she works within --- a private boy's prison where she shuffles papers and swoons over a prison guard named Randy who doesn't even know she exists. The other she lives in --- a disheveled trash heap of a home playing warden to her drunk and disorderly father, a widowed ex-cop who exudes verbal and mental abuse towards her on the daily. Vying for a way out of her hell hole, Eileen receives it one day when the beautiful, red-haired siren Rebecca Saint John glides into the prison as its new education director, and the two of them intertwine and submerge into a seedy reality.

This reality is what is warped. On the outside Eileen is seen as a dowdy, apathetic spinster, but on the inside, a storm of deviant thoughts swirl within her ranging from the sexual to the violent to the disgusting (TMI on the what she does with her bodily fluids...). Her unhealthy thoughts on her body and with food swirl around her in a cloud of filth.

"I guess that is how those sick people get by. They look like nobodies, but behind closed doors they turn into monsters." 

Even in times of self-loathing, she also possesses a superiority, this especially when she gets around her loathsome father, and her co-workers at the prison, but strangely, never the young prisoners she's around, she in fact sympathizes with them even though some are child killers and have slit the throats of their parents. Though she denies it, Eileen wants to belong, to not be as invisible as she's made herself to be, but she still has a "I'll show them" fist wave in her hunched shuffle.

"I was naive and callous. I didn't care about the welfare of others. I only cared about getting what I wanted."

Choices

The harpoon moment during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice occurred when California Senator Kamala Harris asked nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh if there were any laws, on the books, that give the government power to protect the male body. With this question she was met with a furrowed brow, some beads of sweat, and not a clear answer. She repeated the question, and Kavanaugh, assembling the few brain cells he possesses, replied thus: "I'm not thinking of any right now."

This exchange lets us know three things: 1) Harris is one bad mutha, and deserves to be a Senate majority leader, 2) Kavanaugh is an unqualified sexist assclown, and 3) it's 2018 and this is where we are. We are in a time where a senator has to pose a question like this, and that the question is met with pause, with a dumbfounded look, and with a muddled non-answer. If anything, this disqualified him for me, this even before all that would emerge about Kavanaugh in the coming weeks. It was a simple "yes or no" question, "no" being the answer, but it was his lack, his reluctance at saying this, pissed me off.

There are numerous things that make Kavanaugh unfit for the Supreme Court (and a lot of it goes beyond the scope of just his opinions on Roe v. Wade and women's bodies), but the strongest stench that permeates off of him is his utter disdain and disinterest of women, and the frenetic need to control said women. I don't care if he has a wife and two daughters, or that his staff is comprised of all-women. Hitler had a mother, and a girlfriend, and women who followed him throughout the Nazi regime. There is no such thing as a "good sexist".

Pushing aside a lot of the ugly that occurred during, and in the aftermath of a hearing where a woman had relay the most traumatic moment of her life to a prying audience of strangers, and an Angry White Man who conveniently made himself the victim made me return to a read that made one of the deepest impressions on me last year. So I write this on the eve of the assured confirmation (barf) for Kavanaugh, and wonder still: will we ever get to a point where women and their bodies are left the fuck alone?

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, by The Nation writer, Katha Pollitt didn't have to convince me of anything, even at the time of reading it. I have a fierce belief that women, from all walks of life, deserve choices and to rule their lives the way they see fit. I'm against patriarchal-driven governments and churches, and rooms filled with avaricious white men making decisions towards people and matters they know nothing about, and choose to know nothing about when it's all said and done. Pollitt didn’t need 272 pages to convince me that pro-choice is a balm to aid a bulk of our societal ills or that "abortion opponents" (her wording) have ill-informed, insincere thinking, and yet, she converted me, a 100xs over converted, confirmed, and made me stand stronger in my convictions that pro-choice is what I believe.

So why are others so feverishly against abortion? To quote Janet Jackson: "cause it's all about control" --- but control of what?

Pro takes on the heft of such a question and outlines how abortion opponents, and even some defenders, use their words as weapons to terrorize and hold women hostage within their own bodies, and how there are layers to how society as a whole punishes, controls, and shames women ---- particularly women of color, and women who live in a poorer class bracket. Though its a book preaching to the pro-choice choir, Pro is mostly written for the "muddled middle", those who sit on the fence about reproductive rights, or don't think two ways about it. Pollitt dispels a lot of doubt, and puts forth a lot of potent truth, as she gives clear and reasoned arguments to time-worn conspiracy theories and junk science, making sense of what "pro-life" is, what stokes people's fears about legal abortions, and how we should re-frame the concepts of sex, childbirth, and motherhood for the sake of our future.

Candor Continued: Celebrations, Frustrated Sighs

A month where I got a little older (happy birthday to me!) and where toxic masculinity just flung itself all over the place...


Anita Hill continues to eloquently speak truth to power even though she probably wants to bust car windows and say: "Y'all back on this admitting lying sexual predators onto the Supreme Court fuckshit again?"

In Sometimes I Hate My State News: Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, and Helen Keller are deemed "unnecessary" for Texas school books because well, it's just not 1812 enough for some people.

How to write a great sentence according to Joe Moran

Rebecca Solnit explores the storytellers of gender narratives and the gross entitlement of white men, while Megan Garber wonders if we'll ever get past the "boys will be boys" narrative in the time of #KavaNope

Blackballing and bigotry: the price for being a 'cocky' Black woman

I'm in good company with these 25 writers who dish about the agony (and defeat) of writer's block

The traditions of Audre Lorde reside in US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith 

So we're still calling Joyce Maynard an "opportunist" for her relationship with J.D. Salinger? *eyeroll*

Thirty, Flirty & Thriving: Roald Dahl's telekinetic bibliophile (and my first literary she-ro), Matilda Wormwood turned 30 this year, and book's illustrator Quentin Blake imagines what she'd be up to today.


Let me know what were your favorite reads of the month!

Thomas and Beulah

"We were good, though we never believed it" 

Somehow we became the curator of the family photographs.

When a relative died, or time needed to be revisited, out came these mammoth leather-bound books and worn manila envelopes that now occupy an already stuffed secretary, awaiting my lethargic ass to get in gear and assemble them in some cohesive, chronicling fashion. Crammed in the plastic and glued atop yellowed paper is a captured history of intertwined lives, of greeting cards, of pressed flowers, of announcements, of varying faces, and its this history that I stem from.

Whenever I look at these photographs, I wander into daydreams about who these people were. Who is this man in the baseball uniform that I got my nose from? Who is this woman with the pensive stare, cascading pressed waves, and corsage who I should thank for this thick mane atop my head? Who are these light-bright girls in cotton shift dresses standing, squinting, and smiling in the Texas sun? How did they live as they did? How did they thrive in times of transition? How did they cope when the world was even a bigger ball of confusion and conflict than today? These sepia-toned images of varying sepia-toned individuals accompany stories, stories that as the years crawl and rush by are as fading as the images themselves.

Reading Thomas and Beulah by acclaimed poet laureate, Rita Dove felt as if I was rummaging through piles of family photographs, uncovering stories and recapturing a unique history. Though Dove's roots aren't mine, but her words made me feel as if it could've been, that the individuals she crafted weren't strangers.

I know a Thomas: he is my Grandfather.
I know a Beulah: she's my Granny.

It's this act of unearthing familiar familial roots that made this collection such an enriching read for me.

Thomas and Beulah is, on its face, a love story, a story that was intended to mirror the union of Dove's own maternal grandparents. These poems also double as a historical document of the Black American experience, this told through the eyes of two individuals who see the world unfold at the turn of the century, with wars, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement charting their course. Due to Dove's lyrical flair the prose cloud rolls into forming a fable, where ordinary tasks and events such as Thomas arriving by riverboat from Tennessee to a new future up North, and Beulah rearing four girls take on a mythical sheen.

Organized in two parts, the dual perspectives Dove fashions for her characters gives depth to these ordinary lives. Here we have two people who occupy a similar world and are conjoined in their biography, but both have a unique and contrasting viewpoint, and it's Dove's careful, tender wording that gives us this delicate dance between the two of them. With her enriching word meals, it's truly no wonder that this won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.

Vagabond Heart

 "A female I was, and a female I find myself again; to suffer from it and to rejoice in it."

Renée Néré is my kind of heroine. She's damaged, but still tenacious in the fight; smart, but human enough to second guess such intellect when her heart wants to run free.

She's a 30-something Parisian vaudeville performer whose reveling in a crucible of change and newfound freedom after divorcing a controlling philanderer. Emotionally beaten and bruised by the marriage, Renée is suspicious of romance and isn't keen on surrendering the singular life she has so meticulously assembled for herself. When a handsome and wealthy admirer named Maxime makes his intentions known, Renée is thrust into a tailspin of doubt and temptation, where she wonders if she should allow herself to love again, or remain in a hardened shell of independence.

Colette is my kind of writer. A writer who isn't afraid to prick at human emotion and write about the battle scars. A writer whose works feel so human, so 'lived in'.

Usually I'm not much of a fan of stream-of-consciousness narratives, but Colette's approach at the technique in The Vagabond is exquisite and engaging. Never does Renée's voice wander or sound contrive, and even when it feels frantic it still romantically swings as we experience every doubt, every act of resistance, every passionate surrendering, and every anguished decision. At times while reading a section of prose, I would find myself nodding in agreement, thinking --- is this me? --- even though last I checked I occupy a different skin, a different world than Renée. It's this intimacy towards a character that Colette has achieved best of all in the pages of The Vagabond.

There are claims that this is the most auto-biographical of Colette's works, and that's quite the truth as Renée is in a lot of aspects a vivid rendering of Colette. Like her, Colette was a young woman whose much-older first husband, author and publisher, Henry Gauthier-Villars, was a notorious libertine and an imposing figure in her life. Gauthier-Villars was the one who steered her into a writing career, this at the cost of her own voice, as her classic Claudine series was first published and promoted under her husband's nom-de-plume "Willy".

Most writers often write from experience, and then lie about it later (ha!), but after learning this bit of information I got the sense that Colette, in a way, regained her suppressed voice within the pages of The Vagabond, being one of the first books she wrote that was correctly attributed to her. It's why Renée is written to have such determination for autonomy, and why it's so potent whenever she declares it for herself:

 "You want me to behave like everyone? To make up my mind? Him or somebody else, what does it matter? You want to disturb the peace that I’ve won back, you want to direct my life toward some other concern than the rugged, bracing and natural one of earning my own living? Or are you prescribing a lover for my health, like a purge? What for? I’m feeling well, and thank God, I’m not in love, I’m not in love, I’ll never love anyone, anyone, anyone!"  

Candor Continued: First Take

Where I allow someone else to do all the talking....


Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman shows how white supremacists utilize language into a weapon

Is journalism a form of activism? I pump my fist in the air and holler: 'hell yes!', but others see it differently...

There is such a thing as a "literary detective" and now I want to be one when I grow up

I'm so here for Anne With An 'E' setting the stage for a super feminist, queer-friendly season 3 and for drawing on under-discussed history to expand on the world L.M. Montgomery created.

Nicole Chung on how to write a memoir while still grieving the loss of a parent

The Hate U Give's controversy isn't in its subject matter, but a debate over cover art, colorism, and casting in the wake of its film adaptation

Just because we needed a reminder of how much of a fright fest our government is now, how 'bout we scare ourselves with seven books that imagine life without landmark Supreme Court Cases!

Hollywood needs saving, and Wattpad is the unsung hero throwing on a cape

A trio of women are bringing much needed color to the romance industry

Erik Hane on why the more resonant books written in the Trump era won't be about Trump

The hidden oral history of Zora Neale Hurston's "lost novel" Barracoon

Trees, tanks, and tunnels --- the weirdest libraries around the world

Only children (like moi) will get this hilarious table of contents


Let me know what were your favorite reads of the month!

The Quiet Madness of 'Séance on a Wet Afternoon'

I'm often drawn to the more muted mystery thrillers. The ones that star quiet, unbalanced individuals who promenade in gloomy, claustrophobic habitats that tend to close in ever so slowly with every page turn. Where the only explosions that occur are the synapses of the mind, when mental slippage is in its most sinister, and secreted form.

Written by Australian author Martin McShane in 1961, Séance on a Wet Afternoon checks all those boxes for me when it comes to psychological thrillers, as it takes an unsettling dive into the disturbed mind of Myra Savage.

Myra is a middle-aged medium who believes she possesses special sensory "gifts", "gifts" that have her foresee the future and has her in touch with spirits from other dimensions. She supports her unemployed, asthmatic husband, Bill, through this "gift" by conducting seances out of the couple's isolated Victorian dwelling.

As quaint as it all sounds, Myra isn't content. She vies to be world-renowned for her "gifts" and abandon the meager existence her and Bill share, thus, she hatches a plan to kidnap the child of a prominent businessman, and to use her "gifts" to find the "missing" child and collect the ransom, with camera bulb flashes, congratulatory headlines, and patrons lined up at the door to soon follow. Ensnaring the assistance of her hapless hen-pecked husband into the plot, Myra is convinced that the plan possesses no flaws, but it's obvious to the reader that the signs are there for a flurry of disaster to unfold.

Baldwin's Beale Street

When it was announced about a year ago that Barry Jenkins was going to direct an adaptation of James Baldwin's 1974 novel, I knew Baldwin's commentary of young love caught in the storm of systematic racism was in capable hands.

Slow-paced, "every day Black folks" stories are what I often gravitate towards, and Jenkin's 2016 Academy-Award winning film Moonlight was such a masterful quiet character study that put my faith in the Miami-bred director being a proficient teller of Black American stories for the 21st Century. With this teaser trailer, released on what would've been Baldwin's 94th birthday, I'm even more confident that one of my favorite novels from Baldwin will be taken to heart, and bring to proper vision the bittersweet love story of Fonny and Alonzo, a Harlem couple whose love is put to a test when Alonzo is falsely accused of a crime.

Baldwin's works deserve to be framed as straight-to-the-marrow character studies, that concentrate on emotion over extravagance, that are style merging with substance, and Jenkins seems to have achieved that byway of the trailer's pensive, yet poetic tone. To my knowledge, this is the first of Baldwin's books to go from page to big screen (Go Tell It On The Mountain was made into a television mini-series in the 1970s) and from the look of things, won't be the last. From a standpoint, it no doubt baits that Oscar, but truly, it's time for more diverse stories to grab that golden honor, as I'm always here for anything that shows Black people living, loving, and leaping over society's complex hurtles, especially if its coming from the pen of Baldwin.

Oh, and I'm happy to see Regina King starring in this as Fonny's mother, as if you look up "underrated" in the dictionary, her name is pretty much the freakin' definition.

If Beale Street Could Talk will be in theaters November 30th.

Bookshelf Newness: Dodsworth, Radio Girls, Nikki Giovanni

New additions (and book smells) to the family...

Dodsworth, by Sinclair Lewis

File under: seen the film, never read the book.

Prior to purchasing Dodsworth, I re-watched the film starring Walter Huston, Mary Astor, and Ruth Chatterton on FilmStruck (aka one of the best streaming channels ever), and it felt more 'now' for me than it did years ago. Possibly due to how Sam Dodsworth's retirement mirrors my father's recent induction in the club of leisure, well, minus the fact that my father isn't an uber-rich auto mogul, he is widowed instead of dealing with a conceited wife, and he's much more content catching up on his reading instead of traipsing around the world on an ocean liner. Still, the emotional impact of a drastic life change that is more than meets the smiling happy faces on the retirement brochures is on par. Lewis, known for his more satirical works, seems to arrow straight to the human condition on Dodsworth, choosing to refrain from taking jabs at middle-age grumps like Babbit, and Bible thumping charlatans like Elmer Gantry, and taking a tender realist focus on a couple in flux --- or so the movie tells me...

Most of Lewis' works I tend to not get past a few chapters (Main Street, Elmer Gantry, Babbitt) or even a few pages (It Can't Happen Here), so here's hoping that Dodsworth will be the one to break the cycle.

Radio Girls, by Sarah Jane Stratford

I'm a sucker for historical fiction that focuses on a "girl squad" ---- think Call The Midwife, Bomb Girls, The Bletchley Circle, hell even add GLOW to the list --- thus the simplistic title was a draw. Also it being based in the 1920s (just look at that art deco cover) and being about the early days of British radio through the eyes of one American expat in England, bought and sold me. The reviews for this are positive, so this has a great chance of charming me.

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni (1968 - 1998), by Nikki Giovanni

For the longest Nikki Giovanni was a just literary shout out in Teena Marie's 1981 classic "Square Biz". I knew she was a premier poet, knew of her being involved in the civil rights fight, and knew about how she challenged Bill Cosby and his grossly elitist "Poundcake" speech with the greatest of linguistic ease, but since poetry wasn't my bag I never read a word Ms. Giovanni put to paper.

Sacrilege, I know.

Flash forward to last year where I decided once and for all that I needed to give poetry a second chance and allow it to become a part of my regular reading life. 1978's Cotton Candy On A Rainy Day was my first foray into Giovanni's work, and I'm not looking back. I obtained Giovanni's 2003 collection in Kindle form, but realized that reading poetry on the Kindle feels almost...impersonal. You can't write notes in the margins, highlighting it kind of a pain, and sometimes the formatting of an e-book kills the flow of the prose --- and the rhythm of a poem is its most essential element. When I saw this nice hardback lying in a clearance section (score!) at the Half Price Books I love to frequent I couldn't resist grabbing it, knowing that I can write and highlight to heart's content, and digest Giovanni's words in the manner that they should be.

Mucking Around With Mitford

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty" - Jessica Mitford

I must admit that today's political climate (and the exposure of Hollywood's sexual abuse "open secrets") has reinvigorated my love for investigative journalism.

For a time, the media seemed to allow one of its cornerstone mediums to sit on a shelf and collect dust as a new form of communication sashayed its way in. That new, sexy moll was the quicksilver truth serum known as social media. As it caught on, it became the fastest, most effortless way to compartmentalize and digest news, and it gave us a gift in return as it stoked our need for instant gratification and affinity by way of shares and likes.

Not that there is anything wrong with seeing those little hearts light up or wanting to nosh on your news in bite-sized tweets, videos, and memes --- I too enjoy the zip n' zeal of Samantha Bee's half-hour, hunkering down in forums of interest, and getting my point across in less than 140 characters (or is it 280 now?) --- but with the good comes the bad, and with every push towards progress, "clickbait" and "fake news" were bred as journalism's unfortunate new reckless onuses.

Instead of safeguarding how we share and report news I hate to say that journalists slept at the wheel. It often pained me to see falsities not taken to task, opinions weren't constructive but an exercise in ignorance and assholery, where we seemed closer to an Orwellian' "doublespeak" vocabulary that backed people into corners, and bred a sense of classist and racist entitlement. With such a breakdown of ethics, a laziness towards protecting the fourth estate was inevitable, and why I shouldn't have been surprised at the media's contribution to the rise of the walking bowel movement that is currently residing in the White House.

News isn't supposed to be glamorous, but it isn't supposed to erroneous either. It's to give voice to voiceless, not turn the volume up on those who are already screaming. Now we're getting a brisk, frigid shower wake-up to why you can't have it both ways, that you can't refashion the news just because the outcome doesn't suit you. Such distraction and ill-informed tactics do in fact dumb down a sizable portion of the population, and make it easier for propaganda-driven media conglomerates and cyber warfare to slink in.

Not only that, it allowed people to forget that fact checking, interviewing, extensive research, and the exhaustive and meticulous organization of such matter are elements that are essential for journalism and its assembly, and that all these elements work to expose and bring down corruption. It's bad enough with the current Fool In Chief we are gaslighted into believing that facts, realities, and just literal common sense are figments of the imagination, but for someone who came of age during drastic shifts in media --- where the Internet pretty much changed everything --- it was obvious to me that journalism took a hit, and began to dissent into fallacy and well, fuckery.

Time will tell if we're witnessing an All The President’s Men on steroids moment, where careers will be made (and others will crash and burn) and where we stop trying to legitimize talking heads and web darlings as "journalists". American journalism at current, to me, continues to be in a state of flux. It still wants to flirt with the loudest foghorn in the room, all while not checking any balances, but if there is anything  positive that has come out of the current presidential shitshow, the fourth estate --- the art of hunting and gathering, reporting and being forceful in corralling answers to inform the masses --- got its groove back and proved it wasn't totally knocked out by emojis and snapchats.

This new era of journalism was in the back of my mind while reading Poison Penmanship last year, and reworking this review for this year. I wondered what its author, the late Jessica Mitford would've thought of the "alternative facts" clusterfuck that became American journalism. What would she have thought of the Liar In Chief?  The infiltration of the fake news she so often rallied against in her hey-day? What response she'd have if she'd heard the authoritarian bravado of former Press Secretary Sean Spicer when he said that we should "disagree with the facts"? Maybe I answered my own questions, because within the pages of this 1979 collection of Mitford's greatest hits (and misses) is an honest and fierce exploration of the world of investigative journalism, and a woman who reveled passionately in it to seek the unfiltered truth.