Brothers, lovers & British women

Abandonware by An Owomoyela on PodCastle is an excellent SF story about grief, siblings and powerful love. Owomoyela captures so much about the experience of a "shrinking family," the strange, painful tension between the roles of child, adult and sibling and the strange rituals required for "moving on." I don't believe in moving on exactly, more like moving through, but this story was a nicely wrought piece of sibling fiction.

Here's an interesting interview with Owomoyela at Fantasy Magazine.

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The other blogger in my house finally posted something! If you like music and blurry pictures, you will love this mega post.

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Because I lost two awesome books in a row, my subway reading dwindled to reading those eerie "Does NYC need church?" ads and NY Post headlines. This was not sustainable, so after a very long class I went to the library on campus and checked over their paltry fiction section for something to distract on the ride home. At first nothing seemed to grab me from the college-bookshelf collection, but then I saw Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. It was a nice edition and looked intriguing. I'm loving it so far with its wise and anarchic old ladies and precise, pulsing language. I can't wait to dive back in. That's one of her amazing paintings on the cover. After I finish the book I want to find out more about her art.

Recently lost, in transit, in limbo:

1) my glasses
2) my keys and various other things in an excellent, and also lost, tote bag
3) a half-read copy of You Were Wrong
4) a just started copy of Lucius Shepard's short stories
5) the only cord that works for my computer
6) time to write
7) my attention span
9) healthy wrist movement

I have a little something over at The Rumpus, third item down.

I don't know what the selection process was like, but I'd like to imagine that there was one. I'm glad it was chosen, as I am trying to work out some things for my zine. I was so excited that I told some people at work, who, of course, wanted to read it. Then the shame of having written something sad and true, a shame I am trying to get over, reared its ugly head and I wished I hadn't said anything at all.

Exactly.

Mixt

Comics and librarianship comes together in this excellent post about CCS's Schulz Library by Caitlin McGurk. She talks about the history of their catalog and her newest project, using Koha to revamp the catalog and make it "more robust and 21st-Century." Besides all the details she provides about the project, a great help to me as a library student, this article shows what a dedicated community can do. The Schulz Library is for the students and it is the students that have largely created it. Fascinating!

Plus, check out the photos and illustrations in the post. So good!

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This Dear Sugar column is about dating and love, but it also brings together two of my passions--smart pretending and the future. As someone who deals with, let's call them unhelpful, messages from my body all the time, I sometimes have to pretend that the day's challenges are worth it. I do this for my loved ones and friends and plants and home, but also for my future self--she needs smart decisions and good days to be the happiest and best version of me. I pull her together from everywhere--books, films, women I respect, dreams and good conversations--and make her real every day. If you tweak that scheme a little bit, you also basically get the blueprint for how I write. Shh, don't tell anyone my secret process!

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Today I got a letter from an old friend with several small children. I could read the distraction in her lines--dropped words, glossed descriptions. I am so happy that took the time to write to me about her day to day. We don't live all that far apart from each other but our lives have diverged to the point that it is very difficult to get together or even talk on the phone for more than a few minutes. I miss her and must send off something exciting soon.

*Top photo by by Rudolf Eickemeyer from the NYPL Digital Gallery,Image ID: 92135; bottom photo by me

My Top 15 in 2010

2010 was a pretty good reading year. Strangely, I didn’t seem to review many of the books that delighted me most. I read a ton of books about British women in various types of confinement. Maybe that certain type of dry escapism is what I needed to carry me through my semesters and various infirmities. Two of my favorites were published in 2010: Meeks and Love in Infant Monkeys. Eleven were by ladies. Three were comics. And, with that riveting introduction, here is the list:

Meeks by Julia Holmes
This first novel was a weird surprise. At first I wasn’t sure that I was into it, this book about men with extremely limited options in life, for whom marriage is the ultimate goal, but then I got completely sucked in. Something about Holmes’ details, and the way that the broader story emerges from three characters’ points of view, makes reading this like unfolding a secret message prepared by an origami master—getting to the answer is half the fun.

The book’s design, with its French flaps and lovely cover art by Robyn O’Neil, should also get a shout out. It looks so unusual and compelling that even though I’ve already read it, I keep wanting to pick it up again for the first time.

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
This is a re-re-read. It’s a lovely meditation on old age and death done by a master.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey


Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
How, why, did I not write about this British gem when it was fresh in my mind? This was a nasty little book about the horribleness of family and the loneliness that withheld wealth can bring. A huge flood in a small village is central to the plot and Comyns writes beautiful, gory details of rotting, waterlogged nature like no other. Calm yet precise, I loved this book!

Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
I will admit it here—I have never read any Moomin books. However, Tove Jansson wasn’t a one-comic pony, she wrote in many forms, including novels. This book is a quiet, hypnotic book about time, family and small worlds. I loved it.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

The City and the City by China Mieville
A mystery in a divided city, this book was a total treat. Mieville’s usually florid writing is reined in here and it really works. Though the setting, two distinct cities existing in the same geographical area, with the possibility of a third emerging, seems like it could have turned into a blow-me-down political allegory or an exposition nightmare, the author’s character work holds its own. Check it out!

This year I also read Looking for Jake, an uneven collection of Mieville’s short stories. It was interesting to see how The City and the City could have developed from ideas he explored much earlier in a story about feral streets called "Reports of Certain Events in London." In The Scar, which I also read this year, the idea of a living, moving city was taken to extremes. The story was quite different from TCATC, and those with no patience for Mieville’s wordy style would not enjoy it. I read it at the perfect time however—in a sickbed—and was transported.

Norwood by Charles Portis & Amulet by Robert Bolano
Both of these books were gifts from The Prog Lady. I was concerned that her love of old man stories would have clouded her judgment, but both short books were excellent in different ways. Norwood was funny and deceptively simple. Amulet had an amazing main character, a jailed woman who considered herself the “Mother of Mexican Poetry” and a looping pace that challenges ideas of memory and truth.

Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Davis
This book of short stories totally rocked. They each have a central animal presence, but are fully about human inadequacies and excess. And the book was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction runner up if that means anything to you.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Being middle-aged and female sucketh, as this book of malignant benignity shows. So, sometimes you need to become a witch.
The usually excellent introductory essays furnished by the New York Review of Books were not represented here. Alison Lurie’s intro was superficial, boring and gives away the entire plot of the story. Read it after you’ve finished the novel, if you must.

Monsters by Ken Dahl
A curious mix of sex ed and autobio, Dahl’s big book on herpes illuminates life with an unpopular disease. The self-loathing infused self-portraits fill the pages alongside facts about herpes and several painful anecdotes about self treatment and relationships after the herp. His hideous visualizations of his body were my favorite part. If only I could express my internal hatred so beautifully! Of course, things straighten out for him in the end, but it is an interesting path to what feels more like a compromise than peace.

Cross Country by MK Reed
I initially picked up the single issues of Cross Country and was super bummed when I found out that there wasn’t going to be a final chapter released. So it took me awhile to pick up the trade but I am really happy I did. Reed’s writing shines here and though the art looks a bit labored, the story of a work-related road trip works really well.

Down the Street by Lynda Barry
Before Marlys and her pals, there was Down the Street, where puffy-haired ancestors of the alternative press darlings played in sadder stories. It’s not quite as smooth and universal as Barry’s later work but it’s a great, instructive read nonetheless.

all those todays

Today I forgot to do every little thing on the list, crying and dreaming in equal parts. Nothing important got done, I think, but I’d like to believe that this neck-up action will lead to something akin to what Renee French talked about on her recent Inkstuds interview. She discussed how when she has migraines she can’t do anything but sleep and imagine lightly around a blocky world. Those flights from physical reality ultimately inform her work. It’s nasty and tiresome and painful, but she makes something out of it.

I just keep reaching in and rooting around in my guts and heart looking for a hold on any one irritant, something I can pluck out and expose on the page, pin down and examine until it dies and disappears. I want to reach out instead, and perhaps I should, but right now I am out of step with my people. Friends, near and far, are often mired in pits of things done and left undone and likely don’t have time for search parties and good cop, bad cop.

It takes me forever to lurch around my own mental landscape and find words. To find out if the way I’ve arranged stuff is worth keeping in any way and then move on. I’m working on something depressing but very important—a difficult position for someone like me, someone who flees from pinpricks but often ends up trotting straight into the woodchipper. Even though I hate them, I need the failures almost as much as comments and kudos and victories. Without them I can’t get to the good stuff and I’ve been avoiding failure for more years than I care to mention and, of course, only failing to do anything at all.

Shining a light on a wheel as it spins in place doesn’t tell you much, does it? So, how about I turn off the light and just listen for awhile?

Image from the NYPL Digital Gallery, Image ID: 1157702

Books of 2010

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Meeks by Julia Holmes
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer
Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction, Edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev
Zero History by William Gibson
Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel
Bookhunter by Jason Shiga
Hound by Vincent McCaffery
Amulet by Roberto Bolano
The Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
The Scar by China Mieville
Momento Mori by Muriel Spark
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey
Monsters by Ken Dahl
Rainforest by Jenny Diski
Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks
Absence Makes the Heart by Lynne Tillman
The Salon by Nick Bertozzi
Looking for Jake by China Mielville
Cross Country by MK Reed
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
King Rat by China Mieville
Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
Artichoke Tales by Megan Kelso
Summer Will Show by by Syliva Townsend Warner
A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
Whirlwind Wonderland by Rina Ayuyang
Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton
Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
Exit Wounds by Rutu Mondan
Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. Mc Hugh
Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy Edited by Ekaterina Sedia
Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, eds.
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
The City and the City by China Mieville
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
Sweet Tomb by Trinie Dalton
Norwood by Charles Portis
Down the Street by Lynda Barry
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Davis
Lolly Willowes by Syliva Townsend Warner

3 for you and me

Yesterday B went shopping for his family for Christmas. I was along to advise, but in a bookstore it is difficult to simply observe and comment. We were in Williamsburg so we went to Spoonbill & Sugartown and Book Thug Nation. While S&S carries the nonfiction and eye candy that would fill my shelves if book money grew in shower mildew, BTN is a used bookstore after my own heart.

But, I sure do miss Clovis. It was somehow less serious than BTN and had more comics and zines than Unnameable. I would always forget about it, but then there it would be, holding down that corner spot on Bedford quietly being the one place I really liked to go in the neighborhood. Until the day it wasn't, of course.

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I did buy myself a book last night from the book thugs--Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century. I heard about it on Amy H. Sturgis's superb column A Look Back at Genre History on Starship Sofa 164.

I love these segments for Sturgis's taste in history lessons and her hypnotic voice. She injects new life into tired genres (vampires for instance) by focusing on examples that I might actually be into. She certainly sold me on the unfortunately-named Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood, a penny dreadful available on all the best out-of-copyright sites on the web. Turns out I had an excerpt of it in an old Penguin anthology at my parents house.

Oh, old-timey horror, you're the best for hiding in the bathroom with!

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I just ate several carrots, rinsed and skinned and cool to the tongue. The crunch was a sweet bit of escape from my nasty cold. I doubt I'll be doing any reading today but at least the food will be good.

My semester is over. Here is a picture from the NYPL Digital Gallery that perfectly illustrates my feelings:



Here are some things I've accomplished since last night:
1) Left the house
2) Didn't check my email for over five hours
3) Felt relaxed

A good start for the break, no?

2010 Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest

I've missed every con this year except MoCCA. This, the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest, is the other local show that I'm interested in and has happened to be on B's birthday weekend both years it has existed. Why do comics want to ruin my romantic life?



The gym of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Williamsburg was packed and sweaty with the unfortunate haired and bespectacled. A little different crowd than usual, but seemingly very into what was at the fest. I wasn't able to check out any of the panels

I got there around 4:45 and by 5:30 several tables had sold out of stuff, which I guess is a good sign for them. I was there to get minis and prints, and I did much better on the mini side. Though there were a few prints I was interested in, so many of the tables were laden with this neon-impaired-child-melting-heads shit that I am just not into.

Here's my haul:


I got to see a ton of people that made me smile; most are not pictured here:
Mika Oshima, author of Dense Valley, as seen above

Travis Robertson & Joel Speasmaker

This seemed to be a Pepsi church, and I am really more of a Coke gal...

Finally Robin and I met in person. Did you hear the fireworks? The guy on the left was sassy, and is named Zack Soto.

Three people converse intensely about comics. Or something.

The green glow apparent in many of these photos was not created as an artistic nod to nausea or the rotting corpse of arty comics, but was in fact the color of the light in the exhibition room. Very flattering!

letters to I

Recently I started a correspondence with an almost-3 year old. So far we've had two volleys by mail. It all started because while we were visiting this charming child, went to a big girl's birthday and came home with two favors--a decorated megaphone and a little red mailbox. I thought it would be fun to slip a note into the box.



It was fun, for her and me. So, we've kept on doing it.

As I wrote to her father, I'm not just paying attention to one little girl,(though that's no burden), I'm furthering my serious agenda to bring back letter writing, to write myself, and to capture my history note by note.

*Sadly, the wax sealed letter in the pic above was set on fire when I tried to reseal it. I was able to save the stamps, though. The second draft is on its way!

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

Fleshy characters are all I desire when I need distraction. I want heavy adjectives that knock wetly against my head as I wade through a book. I want a book that sprawls in interesting ways and, even if it’s a fantasy, feels “real.”

So, perhaps I’m just not in the headspace to enjoy Berry’s noirish mistaken identity mystery. Set in a no-name city, the story follows Charles Unwin, a clerk in a monolithic detective agency called simply the Agency who files cases for a star detective. When the detective goes missing and Unwin is suddenly promoted, he decides to investigate his former detective’s disappearance. Pretty standard stuff this is, and though it gets wrapped in layers of fantastic happenings including mass dreaming and giant archivists, the story can’t survive on plot alone.

All we really get of each character is a tic (Unwin won’t relinquish his hat, his secretary is a narcoleptic, a security guard important to the case can’t remember anything) with a few bits of back-story stuck to it. This does not inspire involvement with Unwin, the missing detective or any of the other major characters, so it is quite difficult to stay engaged with the quest or to feel any urgency to return Unwin to his former, dull occupation and life. It doesn’t help that Berry’s dialogue channels the output of an untalented 40s screenwriter, as in this exchange:
“Detective Sivart?” he said.
“Yeah, Charlie,” said the boy.
“I can’t remember the name of this game.”
“It’s an old game,” said the boy. “Older than chess. Older than curse words and shoeshine. Doesn’t matter what you call it, so long as you know how to play. Everyone’s in on it, except one guy, and that guy’s ‘it.’ Okay?”
“Detective Sivart?”
“Yeah, Charlie.”
“I’m ‘it,’ aren’t I?”
“And quick too,” the boy said.

Much of the sense of fun that Berry tries to inject into the book with wacky scenarios is smashed flat by the overwhelming gray of the story. It rains everyday, places and people are described with affectless names, the intimation of oppressive by hints of labyrinth rules of the Agency—I get it, I get it—world building happening here! But without a little red blood, I don’t care.

2 things Unnameable

1) I got my first email from Unnameable Books today. It was full of information on their upcoming readings and events. Because I had a crappy morning, I pretended that its sweet, excited tone was just for me. Now I feel better.

(Sometimes these tricks are the carrot that keeps the pony moving.)

2) Adam Tobin, owner of Unnameable, is interviewed at Prospect Heights Patch in a new series they are doing about working in PH, inspired by Studs Terkel's classic book Working. "I really love going through piles of books and picking out the ones that I want. I really enjoy trafficking in them, moving them from the hands of one person into the hands of another person. And just coming across surprising things all the time."

photo from brownstoner

This could be good

Avi Steinberg will be at Pratt Manhattan to discuss prison librarianship and his new book, RUNNING THE BOOKS: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.

Wednesday, November 17th
5:30 -7:00 PM @ Pratt Manhattan Campus- Room 610
144 West 14th Street

Interested folks MUST RSVP to prattsilssa@gmail.com by noon on Tuesday 11/16 to reserve a spot and get on security's list. They are very into not letting people into the building, so definitely RSVP w/ your full name.

From Publisher's Weekly:
“In this captivating memoir, Steinberg, a Harvard grad and struggling obituary writer, spends two years as a librarian and writing instructor at a Boston prison that’s an irrepressibly literary place... Steinberg writes a stylish prose that blends deadpan wit with an acute moral seriousness. The result is a fine portrait of prison life and the thwarted humanity that courses through it.”

I'll be in class that evening, but you should go and send me a report.

Brain savers

While I've been plugging away at school and other projects, I've had to maintain a stricter internet schedule than I'd like. However, there have been a few sites that have recently helped me keep sane. I thought I'd share them with you:

Final Girl & The House of Self-Indulgence write about movies that I like in hilarious fashions, keeping me thinking while I can't watch movies.

Pure and hearty like beet soup, The Rumpus prods several of my emotion areas with good writing and the joy of experimentation. And, of course, Sugar is the sweet on top.

I turn to StarShipSofa for beautiful, occasionally confusing accents and extreme dedication. Plus SF of course.

Wendy MacNaughton's site is good for the eyeballs and re-humanizing.

Image from the NYPL Digital Gallery

I miss you and I'll be back soon.

I'm doing a lot of reading and working for school, which is more enjoyable as the semester goes on. But there is SO MUCH WORK.

I'm reading Zero History by William Gibson. It's making me want to reread Pattern Recognition and Spook Country because I know that I am missing stuff.

Any bookstore recommendations for Middlebury, Vermont?

birthday bonanza

I forgot to tell you about the best gift I got for my birthday. Sorry for leaving you on the edge of your seat.

On the day we left for Portland, two packages awaited me in the pile of crap that usually constitutes my mail. They were both from my Mom and contained an assortment of well-chosen items of practical use, well, practical if you are me. Which you are not. (I hope!)

My mother and I have been reading Muriel Spark books--picking up whatever copies we find in thrift stores and used bookstores and trading them back and forth. My mother was apparently doing some research because, several months ago, she told me that ol' Sparky had once written a children's book. And, get this, the illustrations were by Edward Gorey, friend to odd children everywhere! We jokingly put it on the wishlist at Unnameable Books and went on with our day.

You know where this is going:




My mother never ceases to amaze me. The above is an enjoyable example of that trait, and I try to relish those.

home and away

I review J.T. Yosts's Losers Weepers 1 & 2 over at inkstuds. Comment there!

Samuel Steward: Studs in the Library

Last Wednesday, instead of the usual class, we went to a talk being held downstairs at the NYPL with Justin Spring, author of Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. I read about the book and was cautiously interested.

When we entered the auditorium the image on the screen was a of a dusty black file box with a label reading Stud File in Germanic lettering. Does it get more enticing than that?



The presentation began with a slideshow by Spring, the author of the biography, to acquaint us with his subject. He included historical maps, family photos, pics of famous friends and fucks, hotel postcards, a pubic hair reliquary, hotel bills, erotic paperbacks written by Steward, homemade hardcore stationery and Polaroids filled with the usual thing. There was talk of a five-hour Kinsey interview, Hell’s Angels and unwritten novels. The unwritten codes of gay flirtation, safety and safety from safety. Plus we got to see some naked men. Not only was it exciting to learn how the author pieced together Steward’s life from Steward’s meticulous file-keeping, but the Q&A focused on Spring’s relationship with his dead subject and how living with a sex obsessive in your mind changes your view on your own sexuality.

Before the visuals went up, either Spring or the cohost, Honor Moore, stated that without rescue “our [LGBT] history is lost.” This is of course true of all of our history, and each history is a part of a larger and larger one until the histories get so expansive that they come back to you, yes, you. You or I. You and I.

Are you a loser or a keeper?

It’s complicated to save other people within yourself without losing yourself. This is something I've grappled with for a long time. I'm not sure how close to an answer I've gotten.