metaphortunate son (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metaphortunate) wrote2012-05-30 08:17 pm
metaphortunate) wrote2012-05-30 08:17 pm
three book week
Okay so a bunch of shit happened since we last spoke including my computer died, we flew to the east coast, I went to two weddings, I lost my voice, I got pinkeye, we ended our experiment with #darkness - not in that order - and I want to write about all of it, but time is limited so first: three books by women that I read this week. Um, four actually. And a half. No spoilers, but some might show up in comments.
1. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel.
I find it funny that the pages of my copy of this book are crumpled from my baby trying to play with it while I was reading. I'm trying to read more physical books in front of him so that he can see me doing it. Because he hates it when I try to read to him. I start reading to him and he reaches out and slams the book closed. Now I read around him plenty, but it is mostly while I am nursing him and it is reading on the Kindle app on my phone. I am not sure he makes the connection between the fascinating light-up brick that I spend my time looking at and the things with all the flaps of paper that I keep trying to interest him in. And I don't want him to end up with the impression that reading is one of those virtuous things that adults inflict on children and avoid themselves. So: physical books, to be read in front of him, hopefully to intrigue him and show that it is a fun thing that the grownups keep for themselves. Comics are a good choice for that because they don't lend themselves well to my tiny phone screen anyway.
Are You My Mother? is a sequel/companion volume to Bechdel's previous memoir, Fun Home. FH was about her father, who is dead; AYMM? is about her mother, who is alive. It's a very different sort of book. I'm surprised I don't hate it, as it is, as the Slate review says, "less a portrait than a meta-memoir about trying and failing to write anything coherent about her mother." I usually hate that shit. I loathed Adaptation with a violent passion - either write your thing or shut up shut up SHUT UP, your failure to say anything interesting is not interesting. But Bechdel has plenty interesting to say, because she goes into why she can't say, she delves. God knows the book is about delving, digging, descrying.
The Slate review is a good take on its dreamlike, dream-obsessed, circling, cycling, divinatory nature; I don't need to recap that here. What I want to mention is that, as you follow Bechdel's depiction of psychoanalysis and the good it has done her, you see that some alchemy has caused these flowers of useful help to grow from just heaping wads of manure. Per her description, some really useful conclusions in psychiatry have been reached by starting from premises of the purest bullshit. AYMM? was one of the two books on childrearing I read this weekend that incorporate the work of D.W. Winnicott. (The other was The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children.) The authors of the third childrearing book I read, Nurture Shock, would probably not use the work of D.W. Winnicott to sneeze into. They are very big on scientific findings and properly conducted studies; and here is an excerpt in which Bechdel describes some of Winnicott's work:
Holy leading question, Batman! Yeah, I just bet that little girl "played out the mysteries of sex, birth, love, hate, death..." As if she had a choice!
2. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Free from Baen!)
The last 1% of this book is really good.
I understand that the first 99% of the book is needed to set up Kibou-daini's obsession and make it feel real, pervasive, universal; so that that final brutal, almost casual no brings you up like a slap. But it makes the book feel like an ancient Egyptian funeral: the time you spent reading that first 99% of the book was sacrificed only to properly honor that last one percent. Because other than that, the first 99% is crap. Seriously. It reads like Bujold is writing not particularly skilled casefic of her own work, and phoning it in at that.
The plots of all the Vorkosigan books up through A Civil Campaign are good, and tight, and fast-paced, and interesting, but they're not why I read and reread the books. It's not just the things that happen; it's that the things that happen matter. To Miles, and Mark, and Cordelia, the characters that we love. Nothing that happens in this book particularly matters to Miles, or Roic - and those are two-thirds of your narrators, and Jin's narration mostly functions to give you an outsider's view of Miles. Miles and Roic's lives are elsewhere, back on Barrayar. The closest Miles gets to an emotion is when, with Jin, we see him look momentarily angry about the WhiteChrys scheme. So if nothing in this book matters, why am I spending my time reading about it?
This is a problem that Bujold had with the previous generation: once Cordelia had Miles, she retired to being a sort of character emeritus, constantly praised, rarely participating. That was okay though because Miles was breathing and bleeding on the page, and eventually so was Mark. But now Miles has reproduced, which apparently in the Vorkosiverse means you stop being the hero of the story and start being Obi-Wan Kenobi to the next generation; only the next generation is still pooping itself in the nursery of Vorkosigan house, and for some reason we're still watching Miles go through the motions. Nothing that happened in Cryoburn or Diplomatic Immunity really threatened to change anything about Miles' life other than the possibility of ending it. Bujold had better get interested in some Barrayaran desires or goals or ambitions for Miles to strive for, or something that actually changes his society or his family or his life; or she'd better let him quietly step into the rest of his life unchronicled.
This isn't a flaw in the book, but it breaks my heart for Ekaterin - a character, unlike poor Jin, so vividly drawn that two books later I still care about her as a person - "...Lady Vorkosigan already ran an enormous household, rode herd on four children under the age of six and a teenage son from a prior marriage, played political hostess for her husband in his roles both as an Imperial Auditor and as the Count's heir, had undertaken supervisory responsibilities for agriculture and terraforming in the Vorkosigan's District, and tried desperately, in her spare seconds, to maintain a garden design business..." Poor Ekaterin! Yes, I can see her trying desperately in her spare seconds to pursue the independent dream she once had. It's not a flaw, how many women have married into a job and found out afterwards that it was not the kind of day job that would leave them time to pursue their art? Nothing wrong with depicting that. But it makes me sad.
What is a flaw is the neat wrapping up of endings between Vorlynkin and [spoiler] - the kind of romance perfectly summed up in the Avril Lavigne lyric, "He was a boy, she was a girl/ Can I make it any more obvious?" Sure, interlocking parts, what else is needed? The lady and the kids will be taken care of, happy ending type A, blah blah bleeeeeagh.
One thing I did like, though: Bujold doesn't make Kibou-daini's planetwide mistake of focusing on freezing and never on revival. Yani is there to show right from the beginning that the Kibou-daini promise of resurrection is a lie. Man, I'm not yet forty and already it's a different world out here than where I come from. And frankly trying to understand it well enough to raise a kid in it scares the crap out of me. When does a kid get their own cell phone? How much should we monitor the Junebug's internet use later? How will we teach independence when he can't wander around by himself? I keep up with my changing world and this is already hard to deal with. What would it be like if I had to catch up a hundred years? The car we rented this weekend came with XM radio. I was crushed to realize that the station I enjoyed most was "Hair Nation". It was music from the other country I was born in; I'll never get to visit it again. Poor Yani woke up a refugee, no wonder he's miserable. (If you'd be interested a more fun magical healing cock take on the same setup, see Homefront, Avengers movieverse, Steve/Tony.)
3. Among Others by Jo Walton
I'm starting to wonder if the words on the page in Jo Walton's books actually form Magic Eye pictures and I'm just not focusing properly. Everyone else loves this fucking book! I nearly expired from boredom! I had the same problem with Farthing! The idea of that one being, I think, to illustrate that the English would have been just as liable to betray their principles and strip people of their human rights and behave genocidally as the Germans under the right circumstances? Look, I'm American, I don't know much world history, but wasn't there that whole, um...India...thing? Because I thought we knew that already, from the whole India thing. Also from the fact that it seems to be an inherent trait of the species, tbh. Anyway, Among Others, maybe it's fucking hilarious if you've read more Samuel Delany. From the perspective of one who has not, my Christ was it dull. It's a British boarding school novel minus the fun and the cosy adventures, and the narrator's inner monologue was not nearly interesting enough to pull it off. I had understood from reading reviews that there was meant to be some tension about whether she actually could do magic/see fairies or whether she was just nuts, but 1) that was never resolved, or, in fact, addressed in any way, and 2)rosefox reports that Walton has said that that is because the answer is obviously magic, it says "fantasy" right there on the book cover. So there you go.
TL;DR if you feel tempted to pick this one up, try to find a copy of Very Far Away From Anywhere Else instead, you'll be glad you did.
4) Oh fine, bonus book: The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel.
The major lesson of TBOASK:UJTTRSRC seems to be that your little miracle is not all that goddamn special. No, seriously. Both parts of that. Your child is a miracle AND your child is not special. Your child is an ordinary miracle. Like all the other kids. And it is OKAY for your child to be ordinary. They are not a failure if they are ordinary and you are not a failure if they are ordinary.
Speaking as an ordinary person who was raised to believe that I had so much ~potential~ that now I will always feel like a total failure no matter what I accomplish in life from the limited subset of things that I seem able to accomplish in life despite all this supposed potential: this sounds to me like possibly quite a valuable lesson. I would like the Junebug to grow up believing that he can accomplish great things, sure. But I would also like him to grow up believing that if he only accomplishes ordinary things, and if he becomes an ordinary person, he is still a worthwhile okay person. I wonder if these two things are compatible.
Incidentally, if you would like to read some real book reviews, the kind that give you actual information about books and let you know whether you might want to read them or not instead of trailing off into unrelated parenting worries and/or recommendations for pornographic fanfiction, you could do worse than checking outwired's reviews tag. She does good stuff!
1. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel.
I find it funny that the pages of my copy of this book are crumpled from my baby trying to play with it while I was reading. I'm trying to read more physical books in front of him so that he can see me doing it. Because he hates it when I try to read to him. I start reading to him and he reaches out and slams the book closed. Now I read around him plenty, but it is mostly while I am nursing him and it is reading on the Kindle app on my phone. I am not sure he makes the connection between the fascinating light-up brick that I spend my time looking at and the things with all the flaps of paper that I keep trying to interest him in. And I don't want him to end up with the impression that reading is one of those virtuous things that adults inflict on children and avoid themselves. So: physical books, to be read in front of him, hopefully to intrigue him and show that it is a fun thing that the grownups keep for themselves. Comics are a good choice for that because they don't lend themselves well to my tiny phone screen anyway.
Are You My Mother? is a sequel/companion volume to Bechdel's previous memoir, Fun Home. FH was about her father, who is dead; AYMM? is about her mother, who is alive. It's a very different sort of book. I'm surprised I don't hate it, as it is, as the Slate review says, "less a portrait than a meta-memoir about trying and failing to write anything coherent about her mother." I usually hate that shit. I loathed Adaptation with a violent passion - either write your thing or shut up shut up SHUT UP, your failure to say anything interesting is not interesting. But Bechdel has plenty interesting to say, because she goes into why she can't say, she delves. God knows the book is about delving, digging, descrying.
The Slate review is a good take on its dreamlike, dream-obsessed, circling, cycling, divinatory nature; I don't need to recap that here. What I want to mention is that, as you follow Bechdel's depiction of psychoanalysis and the good it has done her, you see that some alchemy has caused these flowers of useful help to grow from just heaping wads of manure. Per her description, some really useful conclusions in psychiatry have been reached by starting from premises of the purest bullshit. AYMM? was one of the two books on childrearing I read this weekend that incorporate the work of D.W. Winnicott. (The other was The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children.) The authors of the third childrearing book I read, Nurture Shock, would probably not use the work of D.W. Winnicott to sneeze into. They are very big on scientific findings and properly conducted studies; and here is an excerpt in which Bechdel describes some of Winnicott's work:
Holy leading question, Batman! Yeah, I just bet that little girl "played out the mysteries of sex, birth, love, hate, death..." As if she had a choice!
2. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Free from Baen!)
The last 1% of this book is really good.
I understand that the first 99% of the book is needed to set up Kibou-daini's obsession and make it feel real, pervasive, universal; so that that final brutal, almost casual no brings you up like a slap. But it makes the book feel like an ancient Egyptian funeral: the time you spent reading that first 99% of the book was sacrificed only to properly honor that last one percent. Because other than that, the first 99% is crap. Seriously. It reads like Bujold is writing not particularly skilled casefic of her own work, and phoning it in at that.
The plots of all the Vorkosigan books up through A Civil Campaign are good, and tight, and fast-paced, and interesting, but they're not why I read and reread the books. It's not just the things that happen; it's that the things that happen matter. To Miles, and Mark, and Cordelia, the characters that we love. Nothing that happens in this book particularly matters to Miles, or Roic - and those are two-thirds of your narrators, and Jin's narration mostly functions to give you an outsider's view of Miles. Miles and Roic's lives are elsewhere, back on Barrayar. The closest Miles gets to an emotion is when, with Jin, we see him look momentarily angry about the WhiteChrys scheme. So if nothing in this book matters, why am I spending my time reading about it?
This is a problem that Bujold had with the previous generation: once Cordelia had Miles, she retired to being a sort of character emeritus, constantly praised, rarely participating. That was okay though because Miles was breathing and bleeding on the page, and eventually so was Mark. But now Miles has reproduced, which apparently in the Vorkosiverse means you stop being the hero of the story and start being Obi-Wan Kenobi to the next generation; only the next generation is still pooping itself in the nursery of Vorkosigan house, and for some reason we're still watching Miles go through the motions. Nothing that happened in Cryoburn or Diplomatic Immunity really threatened to change anything about Miles' life other than the possibility of ending it. Bujold had better get interested in some Barrayaran desires or goals or ambitions for Miles to strive for, or something that actually changes his society or his family or his life; or she'd better let him quietly step into the rest of his life unchronicled.
This isn't a flaw in the book, but it breaks my heart for Ekaterin - a character, unlike poor Jin, so vividly drawn that two books later I still care about her as a person - "...Lady Vorkosigan already ran an enormous household, rode herd on four children under the age of six and a teenage son from a prior marriage, played political hostess for her husband in his roles both as an Imperial Auditor and as the Count's heir, had undertaken supervisory responsibilities for agriculture and terraforming in the Vorkosigan's District, and tried desperately, in her spare seconds, to maintain a garden design business..." Poor Ekaterin! Yes, I can see her trying desperately in her spare seconds to pursue the independent dream she once had. It's not a flaw, how many women have married into a job and found out afterwards that it was not the kind of day job that would leave them time to pursue their art? Nothing wrong with depicting that. But it makes me sad.
What is a flaw is the neat wrapping up of endings between Vorlynkin and [spoiler] - the kind of romance perfectly summed up in the Avril Lavigne lyric, "He was a boy, she was a girl/ Can I make it any more obvious?" Sure, interlocking parts, what else is needed? The lady and the kids will be taken care of, happy ending type A, blah blah bleeeeeagh.
One thing I did like, though: Bujold doesn't make Kibou-daini's planetwide mistake of focusing on freezing and never on revival. Yani is there to show right from the beginning that the Kibou-daini promise of resurrection is a lie. Man, I'm not yet forty and already it's a different world out here than where I come from. And frankly trying to understand it well enough to raise a kid in it scares the crap out of me. When does a kid get their own cell phone? How much should we monitor the Junebug's internet use later? How will we teach independence when he can't wander around by himself? I keep up with my changing world and this is already hard to deal with. What would it be like if I had to catch up a hundred years? The car we rented this weekend came with XM radio. I was crushed to realize that the station I enjoyed most was "Hair Nation". It was music from the other country I was born in; I'll never get to visit it again. Poor Yani woke up a refugee, no wonder he's miserable. (If you'd be interested a more fun magical healing cock take on the same setup, see Homefront, Avengers movieverse, Steve/Tony.)
3. Among Others by Jo Walton
I'm starting to wonder if the words on the page in Jo Walton's books actually form Magic Eye pictures and I'm just not focusing properly. Everyone else loves this fucking book! I nearly expired from boredom! I had the same problem with Farthing! The idea of that one being, I think, to illustrate that the English would have been just as liable to betray their principles and strip people of their human rights and behave genocidally as the Germans under the right circumstances? Look, I'm American, I don't know much world history, but wasn't there that whole, um...India...thing? Because I thought we knew that already, from the whole India thing. Also from the fact that it seems to be an inherent trait of the species, tbh. Anyway, Among Others, maybe it's fucking hilarious if you've read more Samuel Delany. From the perspective of one who has not, my Christ was it dull. It's a British boarding school novel minus the fun and the cosy adventures, and the narrator's inner monologue was not nearly interesting enough to pull it off. I had understood from reading reviews that there was meant to be some tension about whether she actually could do magic/see fairies or whether she was just nuts, but 1) that was never resolved, or, in fact, addressed in any way, and 2)
rosefox reports that Walton has said that that is because the answer is obviously magic, it says "fantasy" right there on the book cover. So there you go.TL;DR if you feel tempted to pick this one up, try to find a copy of Very Far Away From Anywhere Else instead, you'll be glad you did.
4) Oh fine, bonus book: The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel.
The major lesson of TBOASK:UJTTRSRC seems to be that your little miracle is not all that goddamn special. No, seriously. Both parts of that. Your child is a miracle AND your child is not special. Your child is an ordinary miracle. Like all the other kids. And it is OKAY for your child to be ordinary. They are not a failure if they are ordinary and you are not a failure if they are ordinary.
Speaking as an ordinary person who was raised to believe that I had so much ~potential~ that now I will always feel like a total failure no matter what I accomplish in life from the limited subset of things that I seem able to accomplish in life despite all this supposed potential: this sounds to me like possibly quite a valuable lesson. I would like the Junebug to grow up believing that he can accomplish great things, sure. But I would also like him to grow up believing that if he only accomplishes ordinary things, and if he becomes an ordinary person, he is still a worthwhile okay person. I wonder if these two things are compatible.
Incidentally, if you would like to read some real book reviews, the kind that give you actual information about books and let you know whether you might want to read them or not instead of trailing off into unrelated parenting worries and/or recommendations for pornographic fanfiction, you could do worse than checking out
wired's reviews tag. She does good stuff!
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It’s remarkable that until the beginning of the 21st century, the drama of mothers and daughters remained relatively unexplored in literature
Hahahaha sorry NO. Wow. Nothing in all of literature until Woolf and Plath? And Austen and "the Brontes" (I hate that kind of lumping, as if they were the Beatles; I guess Charlotte would be Lennon, Branwell would be Ringo?) wrote about mothers, some, not a lot - not from the _POV_ of mothers, but Bechdel's book is about being a daughter. I mean, I have one word for this person - oh, Meghan O'Rourke, that explains a lot - actually two words: LITTLE. WOMEN. But anyway.
I read most of Bechdel's book (way too fast - I have to learn to slow down with graphic novels) and yeah, as a memoir "of" her mother it's frustrating, and doesn't really work, but for me it was much more about the creative process - what drives us to write, or act, or draw, how can that be carried out successfully in life, what does it mean to have an artistic parent, &c &c. Much more a meditation, an exploration, than a story. I did like it, mainly because Bechdel is so painstaking and honest, even if sometimes all the therapy stuff reminded me of Woody Allen.
I have actually read a whole bunch of Delany and OMG, Among Others was still dull. And....weirdly offputting. I also thought the narrator's inner monologue was flat, and I think I read an LJ review (rachelmanija's?) which said something like, there was no doubt in this reader's mind the story was magic because it was by Walton. I think that was it - because IIRC in Fire and Hemlock the magic is also "real," but there's a considerable amount of tension about Polly's state of mind, and her memory, and how the older people around her are using her. And there's similar stuff in Tam Lin (which is much better about growing up on books, I think). I dunno if nostalgia for reading Heinlein in the era Before Internet overwhelmed everyone or what, but I was reading Heinlein B.I. and just....I don't know. The book failed so resoundingy to click with me I thought it was a weird personal thing.
an ordinary person who was raised to believe that I had so much ~potential~ that now I will always feel like a total failure no matter what I accomplish in life from the limited subset of things that I seem able to accomplish in life despite all this supposed potential
Ahahaha, yup. (Enter Alice Miller....)
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May I recommend Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances? There's one, which looks like it installs on IE, Firefox, and Opera, that will change colors to black text on white. I just tested it on
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http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display
can you set
Journal View Style When viewing journals (including yours), use this style:
Choices are original, mine, and light.
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I actually do agree with the reviewr that compared to the amount of ink that has been spilled on daddy issues, the drama of mothers and daughters has remained relatively unexplored, relatively being the key word!
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And it's not just you. Gah, Among Others!
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(I also harbor an unending grudge that Bujold obviously never intends to write from Aral Vorkosigan's viewpoint. I think she fetishizes him from without, which tends to indicate she doesn't have the chops to write him from within. But I think the universe would be so much stronger with overt exploration of his pressure-cooker personality and the way he exemplifies-but-rejects a particular old-guard mindset of Barrayar.)
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(Anonymous) 2012-06-04 03:19 am (UTC)(link)- Harimad
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-J
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I'm not going to try to convince you of anything regarding Among Others, I'm just going to say that for me (though I surely enjoyed all the stuff about 70s SF) the decider was the quiet magic, the just-in-the-corner-of-my-eye fantasy.
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TOTALLY hear you on the WTF about early/mid-20th century psychiatry, especially for young children! Kids are suggestible and, for a long time, not very good at distinguishing fantasy from reality, so the transference can get positively palimpsest-y! Qualitative work can be amazing, useful, nuanced, even revelatory, but man, you gotta be SO careful with that stuff if you are not applying it directly to your own skin.
I liked AYYM? overall. I think Fun Home was a better book, but I can see how this one is much tougher to write because her mom is still alive - and also having feelings about Fun Home. (Yikes.) I thought Bechdel had interesting things to say about exposure and privacy, what is un-speakable in families, what can't be said, what needs to be said that hides under a torrent of unrelated words. I wish she had more explicitly addressed some stuff, like the thing where her mom stopped touching her so early in her childhood and is now super uncomfortable with her being queer. There were times when I felt like Bechdel was circling around writing An Important Breakthrough-y Thing, and I was rooting for her and quietly internally chanting, "Yes, girl, come on, speak it, TAKE that power" like I was in a '70s writing workshop - and then she wouldn't. I felt like there were moments where she really lost her nerve. She was so painstaking and still so elliptical. And it made me sad for her.
That said, the line about how she feels like her mother talks so much to keep her from talking, like if she gets a word in edgewise that word will be "cunnilingus," was worth the price of admission for me.
I SO hear you on the ordinary/extraordinary potential thing. Gaaah. Here's what I'm thinking about this nowadays: most people who do extraordinary things have to invest a massive ton of time in doing them. You have to develop expertise, acquire subject matter knowledge, build connections with others, do/read outside your field to stay fresh, push yourself to think in new ways... And something else in your life is going to suffer.
I not-infrequently work in the general proximity of people who do Great Things, and I keep noticing that often they are goddamn exhausted all the time, often their personal lives are a shambles because they don't have enough time to spend on them, and sometimes they are huge assholes in everyday life because they're so focused on their Great Things that they can't or don't bother to see the actual humans in front of them. (Ask me in person sometime how one of my favorite feminists was a giant fuckhead to me!) So I've landed at the conclusion that, to keep functioning, human society needs a lot more kind, compassionate, capable 'ordinary' people than it does people who do Great Things. If you decide you want to be a kind, compassionate, capable person who does some cool-if-not-revolutionary stuff out in the world and then goes home to have a glass of wine and watch RuPaul's Drag Race or whatever, that is a legit choice that will do the world good. Feel free to deploy my logic/rationalization if you find it useful!
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And I agree with you about Bechdel. That was a truly fabulous line. :) And I enjoyed AYMM? quite a lot, but do think Fun Home was a better book, for the reasons you say.
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(Anonymous) 2012-06-04 03:24 am (UTC)(link)