0593187733
9780593187739
0593187733
3.17
1,649
Nov 17, 2020
Nov 17, 2020
it was ok
Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know.
The Lady Ups Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know.
The Lady Upstairs is the debut novel by Halley Sutton, a frequent contributor to the CrimeReads website. Published in 2020, I had high hopes for this due to its terrific cover design (by Erika Verbeck) and promise of a noir-soaked thriller about a blackmail agency in L.A.
First-person narrative, while not a dealbreaker, signaled trouble. Even when a narrator is delightfully peculiar, or wields snark like a superpower, first-person often runs its course by the 30% mark. A novel is a long time to spend in someone else's thoughts or opinions, if the author isn't bringing much else to the potluck. Sutton's narrator, Jo, is about a tenth as witty or clever as most narrators.
Jo spends most of the novel drinking with her gal pal Lou, who works with her in an employment agency that serves as a front for "the Lady Upstairs," their mysterious boss who runs a blackmail ring and who Jo has never met. A blackmail ring should inspire a harrowing paranoid filled thriller or mystery, but Sutton doesn't offer the reader much in the way of an exciting plot. Jo talks. And drinks. And haphazardly puts together honeypot schemes using other women. And it's all very boring.
The novel's irreparable flaw is telling instead of showing. An incessant amount of dialogue is accompanied by what Jo thinks this means or that indicates or what might be going on here. This overwriting completely kills whatever tension might be building in the scene. There is entirely too much editorial aside, too much of the Writer, for a novel that has a handful of characters and isn't complex.
Two stars for some well-written description and enough sleaziness to keep me engaged, though I skimmed often. I did want to find out what tragedy might befall Jo. Neither the climax or the ending are satisfying. ...more
The Lady Ups Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know.
The Lady Upstairs is the debut novel by Halley Sutton, a frequent contributor to the CrimeReads website. Published in 2020, I had high hopes for this due to its terrific cover design (by Erika Verbeck) and promise of a noir-soaked thriller about a blackmail agency in L.A.
First-person narrative, while not a dealbreaker, signaled trouble. Even when a narrator is delightfully peculiar, or wields snark like a superpower, first-person often runs its course by the 30% mark. A novel is a long time to spend in someone else's thoughts or opinions, if the author isn't bringing much else to the potluck. Sutton's narrator, Jo, is about a tenth as witty or clever as most narrators.
Jo spends most of the novel drinking with her gal pal Lou, who works with her in an employment agency that serves as a front for "the Lady Upstairs," their mysterious boss who runs a blackmail ring and who Jo has never met. A blackmail ring should inspire a harrowing paranoid filled thriller or mystery, but Sutton doesn't offer the reader much in the way of an exciting plot. Jo talks. And drinks. And haphazardly puts together honeypot schemes using other women. And it's all very boring.
The novel's irreparable flaw is telling instead of showing. An incessant amount of dialogue is accompanied by what Jo thinks this means or that indicates or what might be going on here. This overwriting completely kills whatever tension might be building in the scene. There is entirely too much editorial aside, too much of the Writer, for a novel that has a handful of characters and isn't complex.
Two stars for some well-written description and enough sleaziness to keep me engaged, though I skimmed often. I did want to find out what tragedy might befall Jo. Neither the climax or the ending are satisfying. ...more
Notes are private!
7
1
Dec 20, 2023
Dec 25, 2023
Dec 15, 2023
Paperback
4.08
43,762
Jul 14, 2020
Jul 14, 2020
really liked it
My introduction to the fiction of S. A. Cosby is Blacktop Wasteland. Published in 2020, this novel jumped off to a strong start with the things I savo
My introduction to the fiction of S. A. Cosby is Blacktop Wasteland. Published in 2020, this novel jumped off to a strong start with the things I savor in crime fiction: a strong protagonist with a unique skills set, a distinctive location, punchy writing and a propulsive story. While I rarely if ever read blurbs, the accolades by every crime writer from Dennis Lehane to Craig Johnson seem genuine for once. I thought the story settled into inevitable tropes with an ending never in question for a second, but Cosby writes some of the sharpest, most amusing similes I've read this side of Raymond Chandler and overall, I enjoyed the novel.
Set in present day, Beauregard "Bug" Montage is owner/ operator of Montage Motors, a shop in fictional Red Hill, Virginia. Times are lean after a larger (and white owned) mechanic moves in and is able to underbid Beauregard. To help support his wife Kia and three children (his grown daughter is by another woman), Bug picks up quick cash street racing the customized '71 Plymouth Duster he inherited from his father, a notorious wheelman. Having spent five years in juvenile detention for mowing down three men with the Duster, men who were shaking down his father, as well as a close call driving in a heist that went sour, Beauregard has pledged to Kia to stay clean.
Between a child who needs college money, another who needs braces, a toxic mother requiring hospice care and less money coming in than ever, Beauregard accepts work from a former partner, a redneck named Ronnie Sessions who has information that a jewelry store is expecting a shipment of uncut diamonds. Ronnie boned their previous job, in which a racehorse they stole died in transit because dumbshit Ronnie didn't know the animal required special medication. Beauregard refuses to sell the Duster, the last piece of his father he feels that he has left, and finds no other way but resorting to a life of crime to pay the bills.
The mountain of bills on the desk had gotten higher. It was like financial plate tectonics. He sat down and began going through them. He divided them into two different piles. Thirty days past due and final notice. He had a credit card with about $200 left on it. He could use that to pay the light bill. But that would burn up his budget for supplies. He wasn't robbing Peter to pay Paul. They had both ganged up on him and were mugging him.
Blacktop Wasteland is Cosby's second published novel and is pure crime fiction, like Michael Crichton was pure science fiction. Unlike Crichton who trafficked in high concept thrillers helped along by some characters, Cosby writes vivid characters helped along by some plot. His protagonist is Black, rooted in a meager existence if not poverty, born and raised in the South, in a culture where cars--gasoline-powered American cars--still signify power, and how men drive offers freedom or escape. If Cosby is a gearhead, I didn't get that impression from the novel, which moves at a professional clip without descending into a user's manual.
My only complaint is how routine the second half of the novel became, adhering to genre expectations and the inevitable introduction of a crime boss who the protagonist has no choice but work one last job for. This boss doesn't feed people to pigs, which I've seen on film more times than I needed to, but he's along those same despicable lines and is as unbelievable as Bug is believable. Daniel Woodrell writes crime fiction that while at times hazy, is also more believable, deeply rooted in rural culture. Cosby's direction seems more like a deliberate choice and not a defect in the book, though.
Blacktop Wasteland succeeds because of how unique it is compared to recent rural crime thrillers I've read. Instead of colorful locals, the focus is on a person of color whose experiences as a Black man have shaped his experiences and his view of the world. More than his race, Beauregard is a prisoner to his skills set, which offers his family a possible escape from poverty but also sets him down the same road that doomed his father. There was a lot more for me to chomp on here than the standard crime thriller and to genre fans, I highly recommend it. ...more
Set in present day, Beauregard "Bug" Montage is owner/ operator of Montage Motors, a shop in fictional Red Hill, Virginia. Times are lean after a larger (and white owned) mechanic moves in and is able to underbid Beauregard. To help support his wife Kia and three children (his grown daughter is by another woman), Bug picks up quick cash street racing the customized '71 Plymouth Duster he inherited from his father, a notorious wheelman. Having spent five years in juvenile detention for mowing down three men with the Duster, men who were shaking down his father, as well as a close call driving in a heist that went sour, Beauregard has pledged to Kia to stay clean.
Between a child who needs college money, another who needs braces, a toxic mother requiring hospice care and less money coming in than ever, Beauregard accepts work from a former partner, a redneck named Ronnie Sessions who has information that a jewelry store is expecting a shipment of uncut diamonds. Ronnie boned their previous job, in which a racehorse they stole died in transit because dumbshit Ronnie didn't know the animal required special medication. Beauregard refuses to sell the Duster, the last piece of his father he feels that he has left, and finds no other way but resorting to a life of crime to pay the bills.
The mountain of bills on the desk had gotten higher. It was like financial plate tectonics. He sat down and began going through them. He divided them into two different piles. Thirty days past due and final notice. He had a credit card with about $200 left on it. He could use that to pay the light bill. But that would burn up his budget for supplies. He wasn't robbing Peter to pay Paul. They had both ganged up on him and were mugging him.
Blacktop Wasteland is Cosby's second published novel and is pure crime fiction, like Michael Crichton was pure science fiction. Unlike Crichton who trafficked in high concept thrillers helped along by some characters, Cosby writes vivid characters helped along by some plot. His protagonist is Black, rooted in a meager existence if not poverty, born and raised in the South, in a culture where cars--gasoline-powered American cars--still signify power, and how men drive offers freedom or escape. If Cosby is a gearhead, I didn't get that impression from the novel, which moves at a professional clip without descending into a user's manual.
My only complaint is how routine the second half of the novel became, adhering to genre expectations and the inevitable introduction of a crime boss who the protagonist has no choice but work one last job for. This boss doesn't feed people to pigs, which I've seen on film more times than I needed to, but he's along those same despicable lines and is as unbelievable as Bug is believable. Daniel Woodrell writes crime fiction that while at times hazy, is also more believable, deeply rooted in rural culture. Cosby's direction seems more like a deliberate choice and not a defect in the book, though.
Blacktop Wasteland succeeds because of how unique it is compared to recent rural crime thrillers I've read. Instead of colorful locals, the focus is on a person of color whose experiences as a Black man have shaped his experiences and his view of the world. More than his race, Beauregard is a prisoner to his skills set, which offers his family a possible escape from poverty but also sets him down the same road that doomed his father. There was a lot more for me to chomp on here than the standard crime thriller and to genre fans, I highly recommend it. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 10, 2023
Mar 21, 2023
Dec 22, 2022
Hardcover
1641293454
9781641293457
1641293454
3.66
3,326
Mar 22, 2022
Mar 22, 2022
did not like it
My introduction to the fiction of Eli Cranor is Don't Know Tough. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the be
My introduction to the fiction of Eli Cranor is Don't Know Tough. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. Set in the fictional Arkansas town of Denton, as near as I can tell, the story involves a deeply troubled high school star football player environmentally, culturally and lots of other ways predisposed to violence standing up to his mother's abusive boyfriend, who lives with them in their trailer, and the efforts of the new football coach to cover up the boy's crime.
I abandoned this at the 20% mark.
In his ten rules of writing, Elmore Leonard cautioned against overdosing on patois and Cranor demonstrates why, including chapters in which the football player tells his story in his own dialect. His vernacular reads like rural Black but it's soon clarified that the boy and his family are white, hailing from a part of Arkansas closer to Memphis where the poor white folks speak the same as the poor Black folks. Whatever the dialect is or who's using it, I quickly grew exhausted by it. This is the sort of thing that gets tiring in between quotation marks, much less entire chapters.
Now it game time, and Coach still letting me run through the tunnel and the paper the cheerleaders spent all day coloring. Even say he gonna let me walk out on the field at halftime for Senior Night. But I ain't told Momma. He'd wanna walk too, and I'll be damned if He get to walk out there like He my daddy. I stay in the back. The band blow they horns, but they ain't blowing them for me. Used to blow them loud and sing the fight song when Billy Lowe run across the goal line.
There’s a wide gulf between despicable characters I need to keep an eye on and despicable characters I can ignore. This novel is full of the latter. I did not like the characters, not because I disapproved of them, but because their problems weren’t compelling. The football player is a menace, despised by his teammates for assaulting them in practice or during games. The coach is a doormat who was fired for posting a losing record at his previous job and has lost the locker room of his new one. The kids he wants to mentor think he’s a joke and so did I. He's under the thumb of his manipulative wife, who hates Arkansas and wants to win at all costs so they can find opportunity elsewhere.
I also didn't get the sense that any of these characters lived and breathed or even knew a lot about football. Not that I want a book to read like a John Madden play-by-play but based on their preparation or performance on the gridiron, they don't seem very competent at football. These characters could just as well been a wrestler and wrestling coach and wrestling coach's wife for all the football IQ they muster.
The description from the publisher compares the novel to the work of Megan Abbott, but in Abbott's expertly tailored noir fiction, where immortality is afoot in gymnastics or drill team or high school STEM programs, I learn something about those activities and the psychologies of those competing in them at the highest levels. I didn't feel this author had done his homework enough to competently place me in the world of small town football or invest me in his characters. ...more
I abandoned this at the 20% mark.
In his ten rules of writing, Elmore Leonard cautioned against overdosing on patois and Cranor demonstrates why, including chapters in which the football player tells his story in his own dialect. His vernacular reads like rural Black but it's soon clarified that the boy and his family are white, hailing from a part of Arkansas closer to Memphis where the poor white folks speak the same as the poor Black folks. Whatever the dialect is or who's using it, I quickly grew exhausted by it. This is the sort of thing that gets tiring in between quotation marks, much less entire chapters.
Now it game time, and Coach still letting me run through the tunnel and the paper the cheerleaders spent all day coloring. Even say he gonna let me walk out on the field at halftime for Senior Night. But I ain't told Momma. He'd wanna walk too, and I'll be damned if He get to walk out there like He my daddy. I stay in the back. The band blow they horns, but they ain't blowing them for me. Used to blow them loud and sing the fight song when Billy Lowe run across the goal line.
There’s a wide gulf between despicable characters I need to keep an eye on and despicable characters I can ignore. This novel is full of the latter. I did not like the characters, not because I disapproved of them, but because their problems weren’t compelling. The football player is a menace, despised by his teammates for assaulting them in practice or during games. The coach is a doormat who was fired for posting a losing record at his previous job and has lost the locker room of his new one. The kids he wants to mentor think he’s a joke and so did I. He's under the thumb of his manipulative wife, who hates Arkansas and wants to win at all costs so they can find opportunity elsewhere.
I also didn't get the sense that any of these characters lived and breathed or even knew a lot about football. Not that I want a book to read like a John Madden play-by-play but based on their preparation or performance on the gridiron, they don't seem very competent at football. These characters could just as well been a wrestler and wrestling coach and wrestling coach's wife for all the football IQ they muster.
The description from the publisher compares the novel to the work of Megan Abbott, but in Abbott's expertly tailored noir fiction, where immortality is afoot in gymnastics or drill team or high school STEM programs, I learn something about those activities and the psychologies of those competing in them at the highest levels. I didn't feel this author had done his homework enough to competently place me in the world of small town football or invest me in his characters. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Dec 25, 2022
Dec 25, 2022
Dec 15, 2022
Hardcover
1250301831
9781250301833
B07QSPPLQQ
4.09
3,389
Feb 04, 2020
Feb 04, 2020
really liked it
My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making
My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making of Chinatown, cited by many as the greatest screenplay ever written. Even more so than Peter Biskind's supreme account of 1970s Hollywood (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), Wasson recreates entire conversations. I found that approach a little dubious, got accustomed to it and most enjoyed the chapters devoted to author Robert Towne's writing process and the genesis of his script, particularly the help he received from his friend Edward Taylor, girlfriend Julie Payne, dog Hira and director Roman Polanski, uncredited for his work on the script.
-- "You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in the 60s," said record producer Kim Fowley. "And you wanted to get there because these places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there." L.A.'s music scene, Fowley added, was so hungry for talent that "anybody who had charisma or a line of bullshit could walk into any record label and get a deal--maybe just one record, but that's how it worked."
-- Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before--his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader--it was the loss that got him. Chandler's detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. "I used to like this town," Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either."
"In reading these words and looking at these pictures," Towne said, "I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left: the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost."
-- Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones' when Towne first proposed the idea.
"Look," Towne said. "We can't get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It'll be L.A. in the thirties."
"Sure. Sounds great. What's it about?"
"I don't know." Then: "Water."
Jack would be Towne's detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clothes horse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. "Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils," he would say, smiling. Towne's detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective--gruff, high-minded, ascetic--all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, "[In] most detectives I have ever seen--[and] in Chandler and even Hammett--all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. 'If you want someone for that go down the block.' But I knew in fact that that's mostly what they did." For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Towne's hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. "I thought that taking someone like that," Towne said, "maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting." He decided, whenever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. "So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were," he said, "because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn't want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective."
[image]
-- Under Towne's desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with.
Distraction--this was how it always started. "So much of writing," he said, "is trying to avoid facing it."
-- For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn't know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn't know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn't start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn't outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn't he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slow, one short inch at a time.
-- By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily.
"'Chinatown' by Towne'" one began:
"Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.'s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings on in Chinatown." If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, "do as little as possible."
-- Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write--and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets--but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them--that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would ever make such a movie?
-- "To say Edward Taylor was Robert's 'editor' was an understatement," said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed."
[image]
-- By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. "In those days," Payne said, "you could not pay Robert to write if he didn't want to write. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote only for love."
Warren Beatty would call Payne: "How's it going?"
"Slow. Robert won't put a word on the page until he thinks it's perfect."
"If he ever asks you what you think, don't say anything, because he'll stop."
And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages.
"What do you think?"
Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made. "Shorter."
She hocked her diamond earrings.
-- Julie exiled him to Catalina Island to get it done once and for all. It was the cheapest place she could find. At sixty-four dollars, she could rent an entire seaplane--room enough for Robert, Eddie, Hira, two IBM Selectric IIs, and provisions--and a room at the Banning Lodge, a funky bed-and-breakfast between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, wasn't much more. The trouble was the restaurant, the only place to eat in the area. It wasn't open on Sundays, so Julie would have to fly out on the seventh day, every week, with food for all purchased, in part, with money Jack Nicholson delivered to Payne while Towne was away. Money was that scarce.
On Catalina: Towne sat in his bungalow, before his Selectric, before his window before the sea.
-- "They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island," Koepf said, "and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages."
-- "It's a sucker's game," Towne said of his profession. "But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that's exciting. Nothing can match that." "Sometimes"--a dreamer's word.
-- Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. "Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything," Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, it not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding a universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. "Initially," Towne said, "I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous--a humiliation--and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn't want to be specific about it." But the more detail Towne revealed Gittes' first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes' tragedy--and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. "My own feeling," Towne said, "is if a scene is relentlessly bleak ... it isn't as powerful as it can be if there's a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what's bad almost worse ... In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil--if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified."
This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. "You have to show violence the way it is," he said. "If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That's life.
Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist.
[image] ...more
-- "You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in the 60s," said record producer Kim Fowley. "And you wanted to get there because these places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there." L.A.'s music scene, Fowley added, was so hungry for talent that "anybody who had charisma or a line of bullshit could walk into any record label and get a deal--maybe just one record, but that's how it worked."
-- Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before--his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader--it was the loss that got him. Chandler's detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. "I used to like this town," Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either."
"In reading these words and looking at these pictures," Towne said, "I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left: the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost."
-- Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones' when Towne first proposed the idea.
"Look," Towne said. "We can't get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It'll be L.A. in the thirties."
"Sure. Sounds great. What's it about?"
"I don't know." Then: "Water."
Jack would be Towne's detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clothes horse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. "Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils," he would say, smiling. Towne's detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective--gruff, high-minded, ascetic--all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, "[In] most detectives I have ever seen--[and] in Chandler and even Hammett--all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. 'If you want someone for that go down the block.' But I knew in fact that that's mostly what they did." For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Towne's hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. "I thought that taking someone like that," Towne said, "maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting." He decided, whenever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. "So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were," he said, "because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn't want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective."
[image]
-- Under Towne's desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with.
Distraction--this was how it always started. "So much of writing," he said, "is trying to avoid facing it."
-- For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn't know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn't know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn't start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn't outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn't he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slow, one short inch at a time.
-- By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily.
"'Chinatown' by Towne'" one began:
"Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.'s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings on in Chinatown." If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, "do as little as possible."
-- Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write--and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets--but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them--that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would ever make such a movie?
-- "To say Edward Taylor was Robert's 'editor' was an understatement," said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed."
[image]
-- By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. "In those days," Payne said, "you could not pay Robert to write if he didn't want to write. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote only for love."
Warren Beatty would call Payne: "How's it going?"
"Slow. Robert won't put a word on the page until he thinks it's perfect."
"If he ever asks you what you think, don't say anything, because he'll stop."
And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages.
"What do you think?"
Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made. "Shorter."
She hocked her diamond earrings.
-- Julie exiled him to Catalina Island to get it done once and for all. It was the cheapest place she could find. At sixty-four dollars, she could rent an entire seaplane--room enough for Robert, Eddie, Hira, two IBM Selectric IIs, and provisions--and a room at the Banning Lodge, a funky bed-and-breakfast between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, wasn't much more. The trouble was the restaurant, the only place to eat in the area. It wasn't open on Sundays, so Julie would have to fly out on the seventh day, every week, with food for all purchased, in part, with money Jack Nicholson delivered to Payne while Towne was away. Money was that scarce.
On Catalina: Towne sat in his bungalow, before his Selectric, before his window before the sea.
-- "They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island," Koepf said, "and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages."
-- "It's a sucker's game," Towne said of his profession. "But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that's exciting. Nothing can match that." "Sometimes"--a dreamer's word.
-- Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. "Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything," Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, it not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding a universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. "Initially," Towne said, "I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous--a humiliation--and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn't want to be specific about it." But the more detail Towne revealed Gittes' first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes' tragedy--and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. "My own feeling," Towne said, "is if a scene is relentlessly bleak ... it isn't as powerful as it can be if there's a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what's bad almost worse ... In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil--if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified."
This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. "You have to show violence the way it is," he said. "If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That's life.
Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist.
[image] ...more
Notes are private!
1
May 10, 2023
May 27, 2023
Dec 12, 2022
Kindle Edition
0525620788
3.67
379,065
Jun 30, 2020
Jun 30, 2020
really liked it
My introduction to the fiction of Silvia Moreno-Garcia is Mexican Gothic. Author of an awesome number of short stories, Moreno-Garcia (who lives in Va
My introduction to the fiction of Silvia Moreno-Garcia is Mexican Gothic. Author of an awesome number of short stories, Moreno-Garcia (who lives in Vancouver, Canada) has published eight novels in the last eight years, each with beguiling titles and sophisticated story descriptions. Published in 2020, Mexican Gothic is her take on gothic suspense, known by their book covers as "beautiful ladies running from spooky houses," always in a dress, sometimes holding a lantern or candelabra. I admired this novel for its refreshing take on a dusty genre. The writing is excellent. Characters and story are "pretty good" to "fair."
[image]
The story begins in Mexico City, 1949. Noemi Taboada is 22 years old and considering graduate school to study anthropology. Of immediate concern to her is her social calendar, which she's allowed to fill with parties and dresses and suitors by the generosity of her father, who turned a small chemical dye business into a fortune. Noemi is hastily summoned from a costume party by Father, who's received an odd letter from his recently married niece Catalina. To confirm that Catalina's musings may be simple newlywed melodrama, Noemi has been invited to visit her cousin in the mountain village of El Triunfo and report back.
Noemi arrives by train and is greeted by Francis, the meekly cousin of Catalina's virile husband Virgil Doyle. The Doyles once prospered from a local silver mine, but the Mexican Revolution and an epidemic robbed the mine of its workers, which then flooded. The Doyle estate, High Place, is a cheerless place isolated both on the mountain and in time. Virgil maintains that the sickly Catalina suffers from tuberculosis and scoffs that she needs psychiatric care in Mexico City. The family doctor confirms this. Virgil's widowed sister Florence keeps a strict hold on the house. The family's decrepit patriarch Mr. Howard Doyle rarely leaves his room except to harass Noemi with his pet theories on eugenics. She explores the house.
There certainly was a lot of gloom. Daylight did not improve High Place. When she walked the ground floor and opened a couple of creaky doors she was inevitably greeted by the ghostly sight of furniture covered with white sheets and draperies shut tight. Wherever the odd ray of sun slipped into a room, one could see dust motes dancing in the air. In the hallways, for every electrified sconce with a bulb there were three that were bare. It was obvious most of the house was not in use.
She had assumed the Doyles would have a piano, even if it was out of tune, but there was none, and neither could she find a radio or even an old gramophone. And how she loved music. Anything from Lara to Ravel. Dancing too. What a pity that she'd be left without music.
She wandered into a library. A narrow wooden frieze with a repeating pattern of acanthus leaves, divided by pilasters, encircled the room, which was lined with tall, built-in bookcases stuffed with leather-bound volumes. She reached out for a book at random and opened it to see it had been ravaged by mold and was perfumed with a sweet scent of rot. She clapped the book shut and and returned it to its place.
Beyond their lurid covers in the 1970s, gothic suspense expires my attention quickly. Most seem tailored for junior high school girls. Mexican Gothic is pitched with greater ambition than that. Any stale genre improves with a change in era or location and transplanting her story to postwar Mexico, Moreno-Garcia includes revolution and worker exploitation to add a touch of realism. Her supernatural elements aren't as unsettling as they are in a great horror novel like Let the Right One In, but they get appropriately weird without sending the story off the deep end. Connecting this is wonderfully delectable writing.
Catalina sat by the window again that morning. She seemed remote, like the last time Noemi had seen her. Noemi thought of a drawing of Ophelia that used to hang in their house. Ophelia dragged by the current, glimpsed through a wall of reeds. This was Catalina that morning. Yet it was good to see her, to sit together and update her cousin on the people and things in Mexico City. She detailed an exhibit she had been to three weeks prior, knowing Catalina would be interested in such things, and then imitated a couple of friends of theirs with such accuracy a smile formed on her cousin's lips, and Catalina laughed.
"You re so good when you do impressions. Tell me, are you still bent on those theater classes?" Catalina asked.
"No. I have been thinking about anthropology. A master's degree. Doesn't that sound interesting?"
"Always with a new idea, Noemi. Always a new pursuit."
Moreno-Garcia does a good job developing Noemi from an inquisitive child who's never been given much responsibility to an independent adult left completely to her own devices to work out a problem. It's a Nancy Drew problem but that's what the genre calls for. There's not much in the corridors or grounds of High Place that I haven't seen before, which the genre also calls for. Instead of writing down for a Young Adult audience, though, Moreno-Garcia writes up, and if the line at her book signing was any indication, her young audience embraced the book just fine.
The content is much better served by a terrific alternate book cover just inside the primary one, but even the primary is more lush and enticing than most cover designs I find. I was 90% sold on this due to its title and its cover design.
[image] ...more
[image]
The story begins in Mexico City, 1949. Noemi Taboada is 22 years old and considering graduate school to study anthropology. Of immediate concern to her is her social calendar, which she's allowed to fill with parties and dresses and suitors by the generosity of her father, who turned a small chemical dye business into a fortune. Noemi is hastily summoned from a costume party by Father, who's received an odd letter from his recently married niece Catalina. To confirm that Catalina's musings may be simple newlywed melodrama, Noemi has been invited to visit her cousin in the mountain village of El Triunfo and report back.
Noemi arrives by train and is greeted by Francis, the meekly cousin of Catalina's virile husband Virgil Doyle. The Doyles once prospered from a local silver mine, but the Mexican Revolution and an epidemic robbed the mine of its workers, which then flooded. The Doyle estate, High Place, is a cheerless place isolated both on the mountain and in time. Virgil maintains that the sickly Catalina suffers from tuberculosis and scoffs that she needs psychiatric care in Mexico City. The family doctor confirms this. Virgil's widowed sister Florence keeps a strict hold on the house. The family's decrepit patriarch Mr. Howard Doyle rarely leaves his room except to harass Noemi with his pet theories on eugenics. She explores the house.
There certainly was a lot of gloom. Daylight did not improve High Place. When she walked the ground floor and opened a couple of creaky doors she was inevitably greeted by the ghostly sight of furniture covered with white sheets and draperies shut tight. Wherever the odd ray of sun slipped into a room, one could see dust motes dancing in the air. In the hallways, for every electrified sconce with a bulb there were three that were bare. It was obvious most of the house was not in use.
She had assumed the Doyles would have a piano, even if it was out of tune, but there was none, and neither could she find a radio or even an old gramophone. And how she loved music. Anything from Lara to Ravel. Dancing too. What a pity that she'd be left without music.
She wandered into a library. A narrow wooden frieze with a repeating pattern of acanthus leaves, divided by pilasters, encircled the room, which was lined with tall, built-in bookcases stuffed with leather-bound volumes. She reached out for a book at random and opened it to see it had been ravaged by mold and was perfumed with a sweet scent of rot. She clapped the book shut and and returned it to its place.
Beyond their lurid covers in the 1970s, gothic suspense expires my attention quickly. Most seem tailored for junior high school girls. Mexican Gothic is pitched with greater ambition than that. Any stale genre improves with a change in era or location and transplanting her story to postwar Mexico, Moreno-Garcia includes revolution and worker exploitation to add a touch of realism. Her supernatural elements aren't as unsettling as they are in a great horror novel like Let the Right One In, but they get appropriately weird without sending the story off the deep end. Connecting this is wonderfully delectable writing.
Catalina sat by the window again that morning. She seemed remote, like the last time Noemi had seen her. Noemi thought of a drawing of Ophelia that used to hang in their house. Ophelia dragged by the current, glimpsed through a wall of reeds. This was Catalina that morning. Yet it was good to see her, to sit together and update her cousin on the people and things in Mexico City. She detailed an exhibit she had been to three weeks prior, knowing Catalina would be interested in such things, and then imitated a couple of friends of theirs with such accuracy a smile formed on her cousin's lips, and Catalina laughed.
"You re so good when you do impressions. Tell me, are you still bent on those theater classes?" Catalina asked.
"No. I have been thinking about anthropology. A master's degree. Doesn't that sound interesting?"
"Always with a new idea, Noemi. Always a new pursuit."
Moreno-Garcia does a good job developing Noemi from an inquisitive child who's never been given much responsibility to an independent adult left completely to her own devices to work out a problem. It's a Nancy Drew problem but that's what the genre calls for. There's not much in the corridors or grounds of High Place that I haven't seen before, which the genre also calls for. Instead of writing down for a Young Adult audience, though, Moreno-Garcia writes up, and if the line at her book signing was any indication, her young audience embraced the book just fine.
The content is much better served by a terrific alternate book cover just inside the primary one, but even the primary is more lush and enticing than most cover designs I find. I was 90% sold on this due to its title and its cover design.
[image] ...more
Notes are private!
1
May 30, 2022
Jun 09, 2022
Apr 23, 2022
Hardcover
0525576258
9780525576259
0525576258
4.12
2,755
Aug 18, 2020
Aug 18, 2020
it was amazing
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of m
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to read about a contemporary woman in the male-dominated field of astronomy. A compelling story would have to come from that. The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir is by Sara Seager, exoplanet hunter and MIT professor who among her professional honors has been profiled by the New York Times with the headline "The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth."
I was hesitant because the book (published in 2020) deals with grief and Dr. Seager's recovery following the death of her husband in 2011. I wanted to read about space exploration, not sadness or support groups. I'm so glad I did. This memoir one of the best books I've read in the year of women. Not only did Dr. Seager offer an incredible amount of detail about what an astronomer knows and what she experiences, but she's a fantastic writer, weaving the fascinating story of her professional life with the surprisingly intimate story of her love life and how she's survived in both.
-- I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters. Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own. Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers.
But there's more to my love than that. When I think of the stars I feel an almost physical pull. I don't just want to look at them. I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth. I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone. Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me--but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new.
-- Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him. He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month. I rejected him exactly as often. I thought I understood what he saw in me--I really was a pretty good skier--and maybe a little of what he saw in us. We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both loved the outdoors. That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together? The truth was, the highest register on the human-companionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didn’t bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason.
-- I would be studying something a large percentage of the community thought didn’t exist or didn’t care to know about, and doing so in a way that made the impossible seem even less likely--like trying to prove that Bigfoot exists not by finding him or even his footprints, but by seeing his breath. How could we see the thin envelope of alien atmospheres when we couldn’t even find the world themselves? I was at a conference when a student from another school approached me in a whisper, asking if I wanted to talk to his adviser. He could explain to me why the Swiss signal couldn't possibly be a planet. A professor from Harvard, my own school, radiated a similar skepticism. We would never be able to detect many exoplanets, let alone their atmospheres. I remember feeling as though people were trying to rescue me from a cult.
-- All the while, Mike and I continued our simple shared existence. I would go to school and get lost in space and code. I would come home to boats and piles of paper. Mike grounded my life, long stretches of brain peace. We never raised our voices at each other; I think back on that time and remember the quiet. We spent our evenings and summers in the near-silence of our canoe, making several more long trips north, and at home we lived together the way we paddled: It wasn’t always easy, because in some ways we remained two people who were built to be alone, but we worked to find a natural rhythm. We spent weeks at our respective work and weekends at our shared kind of play. We hiked and cross-country skied and paddled our way across stretches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont. There was still something almost accidental about our connection, and the increasing seriousness of it all sometimes daunted us both. But our pauses never became breaks. Within a year, we had really started to set up camp.
-- “So, Sara, what do you do?”
“I teach at MIT.”
“What do you teach?”
“Planetary physics.”
“Wow. Um … what?”
“I’m looking for planets outside our solar system. Other stars presumably have planets. I’m looking for them.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d like to find other life in the universe.”
“You mean aliens? You’re looking for aliens?”
“Scientists don’t call them aliens. Other life.”
“Right. So … Aliens?"
-- The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end. Even among some astrophysicists, there can be such a thing as too much stargazing. A few dismissed finding exoplanets as "stamp collecting," an endless, meaningless search for new lights just so that we might name them. I couldn't convince the cynics otherwise. Despite the growing number of known exoplanets--by then about 150--people told me that I would never be able to achieve what I said I would. We would never see enough planets in transit to reach meaningful conclusions about them. The challenges would always be too great. My breakthroughs were mirages; my discoveries were flukes.
-- Near the one-year anniversary of Mike’s death, Melissa came over to my house. She led me into the kitchen, made sure we were alone, and told me that I had to pretend, at least, to be interested in men again. Until I started dating, until I looked at a man with the intention of putting my mouth on his, my grieving would remain incomplete. I would always be looking behind me, taking stock of what was missing. I needed to see what else was out there.
I knew what was out there. Thousands of billions of planets, orbiting hundreds of billions of stars.
What enthralled me about The Smallest Lights in the Universe is how Seager wove her professional and love lives into one compelling story. What surprised me is how strong a writer she is. She communicates astronomy very well and with a certain wit attached. She compares the best pictures of distant objects to the earliest video games: pixels in different shades of white. Contrary to what I thought, astronomers don't gaze through equipment and see objects in deep space. Their targets are too far away for anything we've invented yet to "see." The workarounds are as much art as science. Much like this great book.
Sara Seager was born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. Her father was a family doctor who went on to pioneer hair transplants for men. Her mother was a writer and poet. They divorced when Seager was young and she grew up avoiding the temper of her emotionally abusive stepfather. Diagnosed as an adult as being on the autism spectrum, Seager was socially withdrawn but gifted academically. She earned her BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1994 and her PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1999. Her research is focused on the discovery and analysis of exoplanets.
Her husband and father of her two sons was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and eighteen months later, in 2011, died. With the help of a group she referred to as The Widows of Concord, Seager recovered and ultimately met an amateur astronomer at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's annual general assembly. They married in 2015. Dr. Seager is Professor of Planetary Science, Professor of Physics, and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in space (below is the photo they shot for the issue).
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling
-- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque ...more
I was hesitant because the book (published in 2020) deals with grief and Dr. Seager's recovery following the death of her husband in 2011. I wanted to read about space exploration, not sadness or support groups. I'm so glad I did. This memoir one of the best books I've read in the year of women. Not only did Dr. Seager offer an incredible amount of detail about what an astronomer knows and what she experiences, but she's a fantastic writer, weaving the fascinating story of her professional life with the surprisingly intimate story of her love life and how she's survived in both.
-- I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters. Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own. Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers.
But there's more to my love than that. When I think of the stars I feel an almost physical pull. I don't just want to look at them. I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth. I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone. Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me--but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new.
-- Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him. He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month. I rejected him exactly as often. I thought I understood what he saw in me--I really was a pretty good skier--and maybe a little of what he saw in us. We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both loved the outdoors. That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together? The truth was, the highest register on the human-companionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didn’t bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason.
-- I would be studying something a large percentage of the community thought didn’t exist or didn’t care to know about, and doing so in a way that made the impossible seem even less likely--like trying to prove that Bigfoot exists not by finding him or even his footprints, but by seeing his breath. How could we see the thin envelope of alien atmospheres when we couldn’t even find the world themselves? I was at a conference when a student from another school approached me in a whisper, asking if I wanted to talk to his adviser. He could explain to me why the Swiss signal couldn't possibly be a planet. A professor from Harvard, my own school, radiated a similar skepticism. We would never be able to detect many exoplanets, let alone their atmospheres. I remember feeling as though people were trying to rescue me from a cult.
-- All the while, Mike and I continued our simple shared existence. I would go to school and get lost in space and code. I would come home to boats and piles of paper. Mike grounded my life, long stretches of brain peace. We never raised our voices at each other; I think back on that time and remember the quiet. We spent our evenings and summers in the near-silence of our canoe, making several more long trips north, and at home we lived together the way we paddled: It wasn’t always easy, because in some ways we remained two people who were built to be alone, but we worked to find a natural rhythm. We spent weeks at our respective work and weekends at our shared kind of play. We hiked and cross-country skied and paddled our way across stretches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont. There was still something almost accidental about our connection, and the increasing seriousness of it all sometimes daunted us both. But our pauses never became breaks. Within a year, we had really started to set up camp.
-- “So, Sara, what do you do?”
“I teach at MIT.”
“What do you teach?”
“Planetary physics.”
“Wow. Um … what?”
“I’m looking for planets outside our solar system. Other stars presumably have planets. I’m looking for them.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d like to find other life in the universe.”
“You mean aliens? You’re looking for aliens?”
“Scientists don’t call them aliens. Other life.”
“Right. So … Aliens?"
-- The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end. Even among some astrophysicists, there can be such a thing as too much stargazing. A few dismissed finding exoplanets as "stamp collecting," an endless, meaningless search for new lights just so that we might name them. I couldn't convince the cynics otherwise. Despite the growing number of known exoplanets--by then about 150--people told me that I would never be able to achieve what I said I would. We would never see enough planets in transit to reach meaningful conclusions about them. The challenges would always be too great. My breakthroughs were mirages; my discoveries were flukes.
-- Near the one-year anniversary of Mike’s death, Melissa came over to my house. She led me into the kitchen, made sure we were alone, and told me that I had to pretend, at least, to be interested in men again. Until I started dating, until I looked at a man with the intention of putting my mouth on his, my grieving would remain incomplete. I would always be looking behind me, taking stock of what was missing. I needed to see what else was out there.
I knew what was out there. Thousands of billions of planets, orbiting hundreds of billions of stars.
What enthralled me about The Smallest Lights in the Universe is how Seager wove her professional and love lives into one compelling story. What surprised me is how strong a writer she is. She communicates astronomy very well and with a certain wit attached. She compares the best pictures of distant objects to the earliest video games: pixels in different shades of white. Contrary to what I thought, astronomers don't gaze through equipment and see objects in deep space. Their targets are too far away for anything we've invented yet to "see." The workarounds are as much art as science. Much like this great book.
Sara Seager was born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. Her father was a family doctor who went on to pioneer hair transplants for men. Her mother was a writer and poet. They divorced when Seager was young and she grew up avoiding the temper of her emotionally abusive stepfather. Diagnosed as an adult as being on the autism spectrum, Seager was socially withdrawn but gifted academically. She earned her BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1994 and her PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1999. Her research is focused on the discovery and analysis of exoplanets.
Her husband and father of her two sons was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and eighteen months later, in 2011, died. With the help of a group she referred to as The Widows of Concord, Seager recovered and ultimately met an amateur astronomer at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's annual general assembly. They married in 2015. Dr. Seager is Professor of Planetary Science, Professor of Physics, and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in space (below is the photo they shot for the issue).
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling
-- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque ...more
Notes are private!
1
Sep 02, 2021
Sep 02, 2021
Aug 25, 2021
Hardcover
1492681083
B088P55BM2
4.14
1,279
Aug 04, 2020
Aug 04, 2020
it was amazing
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of m
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to know from a woman what an astrophysicist does, why she wanted to go into this field and what experiences she's had there. A compelling story would have to come from that, a woman in a male-dominated scientific field. On this basis, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque surpassed all my expectations. Published in 2020, I finished this memoir with close to 10,000 words of notes, i.e. material. Here's a sample:
-- The love of astronomy stuck in a way that my love of braces didn't. I was an early and voracious reader, and a few years after Haley's Comet, I was learning about star clusters and black holes and the speed of light thanks to Geoffrey T. Williams' Planetron books, which chronicle the adventures of a little boy with a toy that transforms into a magical spaceship and sweeps him off to explore the heavens. I have a strong memory of being five, reading about how fast the speed of light was, and repeatedly flicking the light switch on and off in my room to convince myself that yep, once I flipped it on, the light arrived pretty much instantly. That seemed pretty fast to me.
Later, I inhaled every astronomy book I could get my hands on, watched Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye on TV, and went to every movie about scientists and space that came along. I remember particularly enjoying the movie Twister because it gave me an encouraging look at what scientists themselves might actually be like. The fictional tornado researchers on screen were doing cool and exciting research and having fun along the way, and the main character was a woman who rolled around in the mud and was obsessed with science but still managed to end the movie with a great kiss (a combination I'd already been warned might not be tenable in the long run thanks to plenty of other movies featuring women who Had to Choose between Careers and Men).
[image]
-- My dorm in particular was the stuff of anarchic counterculture geek dreams. When I turned up as a freshman, the residents were busy constructing a gigantic wooden tower that would ultimately stand more than four stories tall. As it turned out, this violated Cambridge building codes, so after a couple of days of climbing all over the thing and hurling water balloons from the top (it was impressively structurally sound; these were MIT engineers building it, after all), the tower was carefully lowered with much fanfare. In the next four years, I'd help my dormmates built giant catapults, human-sized hamster wheels, and even a roller coaster, all purely for entertainment and made primarily out of two-by-fours and optimism. MIT was my first real indication that the road to brilliance sometimes took a few turns that steered well clear of common sense.
Through all of this, I remained convinced that despite my battles with coursework, MIT was the place for me. I wanted to be a professional astronomer, despite having only the vaguest sense of what the job actually entailed. I'd worked out early on that it meant being in school for the long haul--most astronomers I'd heard of had PhDs--and that I'd probably be using some very large telescopes at some point, but the details were unclear. I'd seen astronomers on PBS or in movies and imagined people sitting behind some enormous telescope situated inside a dome so they could ... do something. It looked fun, and I'd liked our backyard telescope, so I filed this away as something I'd surely figure out when the time came.
-- It took just one night of observing for me to get hooked. I loved it. Loved gearing up and heading out into the cold clear autumn nights, loved juggling a log book and old computer and flashlight with frozen fingers, loved climbing a ladder and wrestling one of those fourteen-inch telescopes to point it perfectly toward a star of my choice. I loved the thrill that came when everything was working and I could leap back off the ladder to peer at some brand-new data and my own hastily scribbled notes, all under the dim red lights of the shed. (Many observatories used deep-red lighting at night to help preserve observers' dark-adapted vision).
I have an abiding memory of standing in the November midnight cold, reveling in every perk of my teenaged metabolism as I downed Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful, and peering through the viewfinder of my telescope at the exact moment that a meteorite went streaking through its field of view from top to bottom. I was pointed at a miniscule area of the sky, and the odds of a meteor passing through that tiny spot at the very moment when I’d pressed my eye to the eyepiece were vanishingly small. I don’t remember crying out or saying anything or even moving. I just stood there, perched on a ladder, eye pointed through the telescope, knowing what I’d just seen.
Yes, I thought. This is a good job.
[image]
-- One colleague has lucky observing socks she dons for every run; another swears eating a banana at roughly the same time every afternoon staves off clouds. People have lucky cookies, lucky snacks, even lucky tables in the dining room they’ll sit at before runs. I’ve developed the strict habit of refusing to check the weather until the day of the run itself. I tell myself that this forces me to always plan for a clear and productive evening, but deep down, it’s just as about not jinxing the night as anything else. Some astronomers also seem to have famously bad luck on observing runs. In a few cases, it’s gotten to the point where colleagues on the mountain will groan if they see one of their supposedly cursed colleagues on the schedule, convinced their mere presence will summon clouds or rain or high winds and extend their bad luck to every telescope unlucky enough to be nearby.
-- I’ve disappointed plenty of people who have asked for the name of a random star only to be met with an “um …” or friends who have asked “Hey, what planet is that?” and gotten back “Er … I dunno … Jupiter, probably?” In astronomers’ defense, telescope computers are literally light-years better than we are, combining orbital dynamics and lengthy equations to pinpoint exact sky positions with a precision far exceeding anything we can distinguish with the naked eye. Still, it comes as a surprise to most people that many astronomers can’t really find that much in the naked-eye sky.
-- The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around.
-- If astronomers as a community were asked to pick a favorite observatory animal, it would likely be the viscacha. Viscachas are relatives of chinchillas but resemble wise rabbit grandfathers with tall ears, long curled tails, sleepy eyes, and long, drooping whiskers. They frequent many Chilean observatories, and their steady presence over the years has alerted astronomers to a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. They’re always there, always sitting stock-still, and always gazing directly at the sinking sun on the horizon.
[image]
Levesque discloses enough about her childhood and her academic and professional career for The Last Stargazers to be considered a memoir, but she also reaches out to a large number of her peers with questions like, Have you ever seen a UFO, or, for women, have you ever been harassed or made uncomfortable by men at work. She looks ahead to where her field is headed and how studying the physical nature of stars is changing. This would be a wonderful book to share with students interested in astrophysics (hint: take as many math classes as you can) or those like me curious about what an astrophysicist does and the adventures they have.
Emily Levesque was born in 1984 and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. She received her S.B. in physics from MIT in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. She is professor in the University of Washington's astronomy department. Her research focuses on improving our overall understanding of how massive stars evolve and die. She's written two academic books: a professional text on red supergiants and a graduate textbook on stellar interiors and evolution. The Last Stargazers is her first book for everyone. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling ...more
-- The love of astronomy stuck in a way that my love of braces didn't. I was an early and voracious reader, and a few years after Haley's Comet, I was learning about star clusters and black holes and the speed of light thanks to Geoffrey T. Williams' Planetron books, which chronicle the adventures of a little boy with a toy that transforms into a magical spaceship and sweeps him off to explore the heavens. I have a strong memory of being five, reading about how fast the speed of light was, and repeatedly flicking the light switch on and off in my room to convince myself that yep, once I flipped it on, the light arrived pretty much instantly. That seemed pretty fast to me.
Later, I inhaled every astronomy book I could get my hands on, watched Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye on TV, and went to every movie about scientists and space that came along. I remember particularly enjoying the movie Twister because it gave me an encouraging look at what scientists themselves might actually be like. The fictional tornado researchers on screen were doing cool and exciting research and having fun along the way, and the main character was a woman who rolled around in the mud and was obsessed with science but still managed to end the movie with a great kiss (a combination I'd already been warned might not be tenable in the long run thanks to plenty of other movies featuring women who Had to Choose between Careers and Men).
[image]
-- My dorm in particular was the stuff of anarchic counterculture geek dreams. When I turned up as a freshman, the residents were busy constructing a gigantic wooden tower that would ultimately stand more than four stories tall. As it turned out, this violated Cambridge building codes, so after a couple of days of climbing all over the thing and hurling water balloons from the top (it was impressively structurally sound; these were MIT engineers building it, after all), the tower was carefully lowered with much fanfare. In the next four years, I'd help my dormmates built giant catapults, human-sized hamster wheels, and even a roller coaster, all purely for entertainment and made primarily out of two-by-fours and optimism. MIT was my first real indication that the road to brilliance sometimes took a few turns that steered well clear of common sense.
Through all of this, I remained convinced that despite my battles with coursework, MIT was the place for me. I wanted to be a professional astronomer, despite having only the vaguest sense of what the job actually entailed. I'd worked out early on that it meant being in school for the long haul--most astronomers I'd heard of had PhDs--and that I'd probably be using some very large telescopes at some point, but the details were unclear. I'd seen astronomers on PBS or in movies and imagined people sitting behind some enormous telescope situated inside a dome so they could ... do something. It looked fun, and I'd liked our backyard telescope, so I filed this away as something I'd surely figure out when the time came.
-- It took just one night of observing for me to get hooked. I loved it. Loved gearing up and heading out into the cold clear autumn nights, loved juggling a log book and old computer and flashlight with frozen fingers, loved climbing a ladder and wrestling one of those fourteen-inch telescopes to point it perfectly toward a star of my choice. I loved the thrill that came when everything was working and I could leap back off the ladder to peer at some brand-new data and my own hastily scribbled notes, all under the dim red lights of the shed. (Many observatories used deep-red lighting at night to help preserve observers' dark-adapted vision).
I have an abiding memory of standing in the November midnight cold, reveling in every perk of my teenaged metabolism as I downed Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful, and peering through the viewfinder of my telescope at the exact moment that a meteorite went streaking through its field of view from top to bottom. I was pointed at a miniscule area of the sky, and the odds of a meteor passing through that tiny spot at the very moment when I’d pressed my eye to the eyepiece were vanishingly small. I don’t remember crying out or saying anything or even moving. I just stood there, perched on a ladder, eye pointed through the telescope, knowing what I’d just seen.
Yes, I thought. This is a good job.
[image]
-- One colleague has lucky observing socks she dons for every run; another swears eating a banana at roughly the same time every afternoon staves off clouds. People have lucky cookies, lucky snacks, even lucky tables in the dining room they’ll sit at before runs. I’ve developed the strict habit of refusing to check the weather until the day of the run itself. I tell myself that this forces me to always plan for a clear and productive evening, but deep down, it’s just as about not jinxing the night as anything else. Some astronomers also seem to have famously bad luck on observing runs. In a few cases, it’s gotten to the point where colleagues on the mountain will groan if they see one of their supposedly cursed colleagues on the schedule, convinced their mere presence will summon clouds or rain or high winds and extend their bad luck to every telescope unlucky enough to be nearby.
-- I’ve disappointed plenty of people who have asked for the name of a random star only to be met with an “um …” or friends who have asked “Hey, what planet is that?” and gotten back “Er … I dunno … Jupiter, probably?” In astronomers’ defense, telescope computers are literally light-years better than we are, combining orbital dynamics and lengthy equations to pinpoint exact sky positions with a precision far exceeding anything we can distinguish with the naked eye. Still, it comes as a surprise to most people that many astronomers can’t really find that much in the naked-eye sky.
-- The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around.
-- If astronomers as a community were asked to pick a favorite observatory animal, it would likely be the viscacha. Viscachas are relatives of chinchillas but resemble wise rabbit grandfathers with tall ears, long curled tails, sleepy eyes, and long, drooping whiskers. They frequent many Chilean observatories, and their steady presence over the years has alerted astronomers to a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. They’re always there, always sitting stock-still, and always gazing directly at the sinking sun on the horizon.
[image]
Levesque discloses enough about her childhood and her academic and professional career for The Last Stargazers to be considered a memoir, but she also reaches out to a large number of her peers with questions like, Have you ever seen a UFO, or, for women, have you ever been harassed or made uncomfortable by men at work. She looks ahead to where her field is headed and how studying the physical nature of stars is changing. This would be a wonderful book to share with students interested in astrophysics (hint: take as many math classes as you can) or those like me curious about what an astrophysicist does and the adventures they have.
Emily Levesque was born in 1984 and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. She received her S.B. in physics from MIT in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. She is professor in the University of Washington's astronomy department. Her research focuses on improving our overall understanding of how massive stars evolve and die. She's written two academic books: a professional text on red supergiants and a graduate textbook on stellar interiors and evolution. The Last Stargazers is her first book for everyone. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling ...more
Notes are private!
1
Aug 29, 2021
Aug 30, 2021
Aug 25, 2021
Kindle Edition
1510751769
9781510751767
B07TH9N3X2
3.87
314
unknown
Feb 18, 2020
did not like it
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with The Science of Women In Horror: The Special Effects, Stun
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with The Science of Women In Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films by Meg Hafdahl. & Kelly Florence. I snapped this up on Kindle by virtue of the magnificent title and the fact that I am the demographic for this book. I never skip an opportunity to learn something about women in the horror genre, but I abandoned this book at the 15% mark.
The writing is abnormally poor, hurling facts at the reader that are readily available on Wikipedia (like the Webster's definition of post-traumatic stress syndrome). The authors explore no film at any depth, skirting through plot and sprinkling in some quotes from the filmmaker, which anyone could read online. Those hoping for a book that documents the making of films like Carrie (not included), The Howling (not included), The Craft (not included), Jennifer's Body (not included) or Midsommar (not included) will be disappointed.
Please do not buy this book sight unseen like I did. Read the first chapters before parting with your mad money. This subject matter deserves far more thought and effort than the writers gave it. Hafdahl & Florence have "written" two other books, one on Stephen King and one on monsters, all with "The Science of" in the title. This book certainly has the feeling of something that was cranked out to bring in a revenue stream. As a genre fan I was highly disappointed.
Moving on, I'll share a few thoughts on the film that's not only my favorite Women In Horror but my favorite film of all time: Alien (1979). I've seen Alien in theaters every five years or so since the age of 14. I've studied the 177-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, The Beast Within, which you can watch on YouTube. YouTube also features Millennials or Gen Z recording their reaction to movies they're watching for the first time and Alien is a top selection for most of them. Men and women alike remain on edge for the entire film. And this is a so-called old movie from the '70s. It looks like it could've been made a few years ago.
[image]
Alien was so far ahead of its time that it's still out in front of how movies are written today. This can be best expressed by Helen Mirren, who in her MasterClass isn't discussing horror films or any film in particular but how actors can transcend traditional casting choices when she brings up Alien. She gives writing credit to the film's director Ridley Scott instead of the original screenwriters Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett, but her observations are on point:
The first time I understood what was possible was I was privileged enough to read the script of Alien. I was up for a role in it, which I didn’t get, sadly. But I was privileged to read the original script, Ridley Scott’s script of Alien. And it was brilliant, because the way it was written, all the characters had names like Ripley, or, I don’t know, Tonn, they had these weird names that could be male or female. There was not a single direction in the script that said whether this was a man or a woman. It didn’t say, "Ripley is a tall, athletic woman with a fierce determination in her eyes," that sort of stage direction which you often get. So annoying.
There were no stage directions at all for any of the characters, so any of the characters could have been played by a man or a woman. And that was such a liberating idea for me. I had never thought of that before. Thought that was possible. And there it was, laid out for me in this wonderful script of Alien. And from that moment on, it really transformed my thinking about who could play what and why. And Alien was quite a long time ago and it’s taken us all--and especially the world of producers and writers and directors--to catch up, and indeed the audience, to catch up.
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling
-- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque
-- The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager ...more
The writing is abnormally poor, hurling facts at the reader that are readily available on Wikipedia (like the Webster's definition of post-traumatic stress syndrome). The authors explore no film at any depth, skirting through plot and sprinkling in some quotes from the filmmaker, which anyone could read online. Those hoping for a book that documents the making of films like Carrie (not included), The Howling (not included), The Craft (not included), Jennifer's Body (not included) or Midsommar (not included) will be disappointed.
Please do not buy this book sight unseen like I did. Read the first chapters before parting with your mad money. This subject matter deserves far more thought and effort than the writers gave it. Hafdahl & Florence have "written" two other books, one on Stephen King and one on monsters, all with "The Science of" in the title. This book certainly has the feeling of something that was cranked out to bring in a revenue stream. As a genre fan I was highly disappointed.
Moving on, I'll share a few thoughts on the film that's not only my favorite Women In Horror but my favorite film of all time: Alien (1979). I've seen Alien in theaters every five years or so since the age of 14. I've studied the 177-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, The Beast Within, which you can watch on YouTube. YouTube also features Millennials or Gen Z recording their reaction to movies they're watching for the first time and Alien is a top selection for most of them. Men and women alike remain on edge for the entire film. And this is a so-called old movie from the '70s. It looks like it could've been made a few years ago.
[image]
Alien was so far ahead of its time that it's still out in front of how movies are written today. This can be best expressed by Helen Mirren, who in her MasterClass isn't discussing horror films or any film in particular but how actors can transcend traditional casting choices when she brings up Alien. She gives writing credit to the film's director Ridley Scott instead of the original screenwriters Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett, but her observations are on point:
The first time I understood what was possible was I was privileged enough to read the script of Alien. I was up for a role in it, which I didn’t get, sadly. But I was privileged to read the original script, Ridley Scott’s script of Alien. And it was brilliant, because the way it was written, all the characters had names like Ripley, or, I don’t know, Tonn, they had these weird names that could be male or female. There was not a single direction in the script that said whether this was a man or a woman. It didn’t say, "Ripley is a tall, athletic woman with a fierce determination in her eyes," that sort of stage direction which you often get. So annoying.
There were no stage directions at all for any of the characters, so any of the characters could have been played by a man or a woman. And that was such a liberating idea for me. I had never thought of that before. Thought that was possible. And there it was, laid out for me in this wonderful script of Alien. And from that moment on, it really transformed my thinking about who could play what and why. And Alien was quite a long time ago and it’s taken us all--and especially the world of producers and writers and directors--to catch up, and indeed the audience, to catch up.
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling
-- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque
-- The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager ...more
Notes are private!
1
Oct 11, 2021
Oct 13, 2021
May 07, 2021
ebook
1949199746
9781949199741
B08C7ZQ55M
4.17
36,766
Sep 01, 2020
Sep 01, 2020
really liked it
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Deesha Philyaw and her debut short sto
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Deesha Philyaw and her debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Published in 2020, this is a book that grows in richness with each entry. A lot of collections slot the best story first, sometimes using it as the title for the book. My favorite of Philyaw's nine stories were the last, then second to last, then third to last. Each involves a Black woman in America exploring her precarious relationship with the church. Her stories progress from okay to good to great.
In Eula, 40-year-old Caroletta rings in New Year’s Eve 1999 in a hotel two towns over with her childhood friend Eula, who definitely does not think of herself as gay and clings to the Christian ideal of saving herself for a good husband, a life goal Caroletta gave up on long ago, much to her lover’s surprise.
In Not-Daniel, a daughter visiting her ailing mother in hospice carries on an affair in the parking lot with a married man she meets visiting his terminally ill mother at the same facility. The affair sparked when she initially mistook him for a boy she attended junior high school with named Daniel McMurray.
In Dear Sister, a woman writes a letter to her half-sister to notify her that Wallace “Stet” Brown, the wayward father they share with three other sisters, has passed away.
In Peach Cobbler, a bright high school senior named Olivia accepts a job tutoring a classmate, the athlete son of the town pastor. Olivia knows the pastor well, having come home for many years to find him eating the prized peach cobbler her hardened mother bakes and listening to her mother entertain the married pastor in bed.
In Snowfall, Arletha has relocated from Florida to an inhospitably colder climate up north with her girlfriend Rhonda. Despite being rejected and nearly disowned by her churchgoing mother due to her sexuality, Arletha’s thoughts turn to home.
We miss their blue crabs, the shells boiled to a blood red in wash tubs atop bricks over makeshift fires built in the yard. The wash tubs reminded us of cauldrons, full of rock salt-and-cayenne-drenched water bubbling and rolling, mesh bag of seasonings and halved onions and peppers floating on top, along with potatoes and ears of corn. We miss how they stood over those cauldrons like witches, stirring a potion. With sweat beading the tips of their noses and smoke swirling around their hands and wrists, they wielded long-handled spoons to press the frantic, flailing crabs toward their deaths.
We miss how they made our Easter dresses and pound cakes and a way out of no way.
In How To Make Love To a Physicist, middle school arts teacher Lyra James meets a physicist at a STEAM conference. Naturally compatible except for living on opposite sides of the country, her relationship with her mother and upbringing in the church stoke fears of intimacy and keep her aloof from him.
In Jael, a tough, independent 14-year-old named Jael covets the glamourous young wife of their aging preacher, recording her thoughts about this and other personal matters in a diary. Her great-grandmother discovers the diary and is lost in thoughts of what to do with the “wicked’ child she’s responsible for raising.
In Instructions For Married Christian Husbands, a bakery owner offers a blunt, no-dicking-around how-to guide for married Christian men on how to conduct themselves in an extramarital affair with her.
In When Eddie Levert Comes, a dutiful daughter known to everyone as “Daughter” navigates care for her dementia stricken, born again Christian mother, who seems to not even remember who she is and treats her like a nurse while lavishing affection on her youngest son, who can barely stand to visit.
Unfortunately the zeal of the newly converted is bewildering to the children of the newly converted. One Saturday night, you’ve got every blanket in the house draped over your head to drown out the sound of your mother’s headboard banging against your bedroom wall as she hollers her soon-to-be-ex-best friend’s husband’s name. And the next Saturday night, she’s snatching the softened deck of playing cards from your hands because “Games of chance are from the devil.”
Daughter, with the logic of a ten-year-old, thought she could understand how gin rummy might be from the devil, seeing as how the name of the game had gin in it. But what was wrong with “Knuckles” or “I Declare War,” her and her brothers’ other favorite games?
Some things changed about Mama A.C. (After Church, as Daughter thought of her). Like banning cards and men from the house. But some things didn’t change. She still told Bruce and Rico to shut their mouths—and Daughter to shut her Black mouth—if they talked too loudly when her stories were on.
And the church was no match for Eddie Levert. The O’Jays were still Mama’s favorite group, and Eddie Levert was still her favorite in the group. Mama B.C. (Before Church) would tell her girlfriends Miss Nancy and Miss Lajene, “Eddie Levert can have me anytime, anywhere, and anyway he want it, honey! You hear me?” And they would all fall out laughing.
Mama B.C. played O’Jay albums on Friday nights after dinner, if she didn’t have a date or a card party to go to. She’d close her eyes, swing her hips, and sing along with the music. Her dance partners—a Kool cigarette and a glass of whiskey, on the rocks. Johnnie Walker Red was her drink of choice.
What I loved about The Secret Lives of Church Ladies--beyond its enticing title, which came after Philyaw published four of these stories with small presses over four years and her editor pointed out a recurring feature—is how no two stories are the same. Her narrators tend to be single, childless women in their thirties or forties attending if not abiding by the church, but each have different educational backgrounds and careers, express themselves differently, have varying attitudes towards sex and face different challenges. Philyaw’s confidence seems to grow with each story and she hits her stride two-thirds of the way in.
I think the pastor’s wife was a freak before she got into the church. She real dark-skin with long, thick hair that she wear in a bun under a black church hat, the wide kind with feathers. Sometimes the hat is dark blue, or white on Easter. But I bet when she was 14 like me, she used to have a big Afro and wear tight bellbottoms, like Thelma on Good Times. Like she’s remembering something from a long time ago. And that half-smile of hers. Like her secrets got secrets. And she got them big dick-sucking lips. Twan said that I got them too. But fuck him. Anyway. Everyone calls the preacher’s wife “Sister Sadie.” In my head, I call her “Sweet Sadie” like that song Kachelle’s mama used to play all the time when we were little. But there ain’t nothing sweet about that lady. She dress all proper in a buttoned-up suit when she standing up there with the old as dirt Reverend collecting that love offering. Sweet Sadie ain’t old-old. Her husband probably 105. She probably 40. Her body reminds me of the album covers Kachelle uncle have in his room. Ohio Players, Lakeside, The Gap Band, Parliament-Funkadelic. They got all these ladies, some real, some cartoons, with big titties, big booties, and dick-sucking lips. Sweet Sadie try to hide all that under them churchy suits. But I bet she used to wear coochie-cutter shorts before she met Old Reverend. She might be fooling the church people, but she ain’t fooling me. I know her body is beautiful underneath them suits. I wish I could see it.
Before reading this book, I was likely to perceive “church ladies” as women who use the Bible to control or punish others, or who think of themselves as better than those Jesus is still working on. Philyaw portrays “church ladies” as real people struggling with morality like the rest of us, some for better, some for worse, but all human beings. Published by West Virginia University Press, the book became an unlikely finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Tessa Thompson and HBO Max have optioned it for a planned film, with Philyaw writing the adaptation. I'm looking forward to it and her first novel.
Deesha Philyaw was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. She received a BA in economics from Yale University and an MA in teaching from Manhattanville College. She settled in Pittsburgh as an adjunct professor at Chatham University and worked as a freelance writer and editor, publishing a book with her ex-husband, Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce in 2013. Philyaw quit her corporate communications job in 2019 to expand her writing consultant service and pursue a writing career full time. She lives in Pittsburgh with her two daughters.
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman ...more
In Eula, 40-year-old Caroletta rings in New Year’s Eve 1999 in a hotel two towns over with her childhood friend Eula, who definitely does not think of herself as gay and clings to the Christian ideal of saving herself for a good husband, a life goal Caroletta gave up on long ago, much to her lover’s surprise.
In Not-Daniel, a daughter visiting her ailing mother in hospice carries on an affair in the parking lot with a married man she meets visiting his terminally ill mother at the same facility. The affair sparked when she initially mistook him for a boy she attended junior high school with named Daniel McMurray.
In Dear Sister, a woman writes a letter to her half-sister to notify her that Wallace “Stet” Brown, the wayward father they share with three other sisters, has passed away.
In Peach Cobbler, a bright high school senior named Olivia accepts a job tutoring a classmate, the athlete son of the town pastor. Olivia knows the pastor well, having come home for many years to find him eating the prized peach cobbler her hardened mother bakes and listening to her mother entertain the married pastor in bed.
In Snowfall, Arletha has relocated from Florida to an inhospitably colder climate up north with her girlfriend Rhonda. Despite being rejected and nearly disowned by her churchgoing mother due to her sexuality, Arletha’s thoughts turn to home.
We miss their blue crabs, the shells boiled to a blood red in wash tubs atop bricks over makeshift fires built in the yard. The wash tubs reminded us of cauldrons, full of rock salt-and-cayenne-drenched water bubbling and rolling, mesh bag of seasonings and halved onions and peppers floating on top, along with potatoes and ears of corn. We miss how they stood over those cauldrons like witches, stirring a potion. With sweat beading the tips of their noses and smoke swirling around their hands and wrists, they wielded long-handled spoons to press the frantic, flailing crabs toward their deaths.
We miss how they made our Easter dresses and pound cakes and a way out of no way.
In How To Make Love To a Physicist, middle school arts teacher Lyra James meets a physicist at a STEAM conference. Naturally compatible except for living on opposite sides of the country, her relationship with her mother and upbringing in the church stoke fears of intimacy and keep her aloof from him.
In Jael, a tough, independent 14-year-old named Jael covets the glamourous young wife of their aging preacher, recording her thoughts about this and other personal matters in a diary. Her great-grandmother discovers the diary and is lost in thoughts of what to do with the “wicked’ child she’s responsible for raising.
In Instructions For Married Christian Husbands, a bakery owner offers a blunt, no-dicking-around how-to guide for married Christian men on how to conduct themselves in an extramarital affair with her.
In When Eddie Levert Comes, a dutiful daughter known to everyone as “Daughter” navigates care for her dementia stricken, born again Christian mother, who seems to not even remember who she is and treats her like a nurse while lavishing affection on her youngest son, who can barely stand to visit.
Unfortunately the zeal of the newly converted is bewildering to the children of the newly converted. One Saturday night, you’ve got every blanket in the house draped over your head to drown out the sound of your mother’s headboard banging against your bedroom wall as she hollers her soon-to-be-ex-best friend’s husband’s name. And the next Saturday night, she’s snatching the softened deck of playing cards from your hands because “Games of chance are from the devil.”
Daughter, with the logic of a ten-year-old, thought she could understand how gin rummy might be from the devil, seeing as how the name of the game had gin in it. But what was wrong with “Knuckles” or “I Declare War,” her and her brothers’ other favorite games?
Some things changed about Mama A.C. (After Church, as Daughter thought of her). Like banning cards and men from the house. But some things didn’t change. She still told Bruce and Rico to shut their mouths—and Daughter to shut her Black mouth—if they talked too loudly when her stories were on.
And the church was no match for Eddie Levert. The O’Jays were still Mama’s favorite group, and Eddie Levert was still her favorite in the group. Mama B.C. (Before Church) would tell her girlfriends Miss Nancy and Miss Lajene, “Eddie Levert can have me anytime, anywhere, and anyway he want it, honey! You hear me?” And they would all fall out laughing.
Mama B.C. played O’Jay albums on Friday nights after dinner, if she didn’t have a date or a card party to go to. She’d close her eyes, swing her hips, and sing along with the music. Her dance partners—a Kool cigarette and a glass of whiskey, on the rocks. Johnnie Walker Red was her drink of choice.
What I loved about The Secret Lives of Church Ladies--beyond its enticing title, which came after Philyaw published four of these stories with small presses over four years and her editor pointed out a recurring feature—is how no two stories are the same. Her narrators tend to be single, childless women in their thirties or forties attending if not abiding by the church, but each have different educational backgrounds and careers, express themselves differently, have varying attitudes towards sex and face different challenges. Philyaw’s confidence seems to grow with each story and she hits her stride two-thirds of the way in.
I think the pastor’s wife was a freak before she got into the church. She real dark-skin with long, thick hair that she wear in a bun under a black church hat, the wide kind with feathers. Sometimes the hat is dark blue, or white on Easter. But I bet when she was 14 like me, she used to have a big Afro and wear tight bellbottoms, like Thelma on Good Times. Like she’s remembering something from a long time ago. And that half-smile of hers. Like her secrets got secrets. And she got them big dick-sucking lips. Twan said that I got them too. But fuck him. Anyway. Everyone calls the preacher’s wife “Sister Sadie.” In my head, I call her “Sweet Sadie” like that song Kachelle’s mama used to play all the time when we were little. But there ain’t nothing sweet about that lady. She dress all proper in a buttoned-up suit when she standing up there with the old as dirt Reverend collecting that love offering. Sweet Sadie ain’t old-old. Her husband probably 105. She probably 40. Her body reminds me of the album covers Kachelle uncle have in his room. Ohio Players, Lakeside, The Gap Band, Parliament-Funkadelic. They got all these ladies, some real, some cartoons, with big titties, big booties, and dick-sucking lips. Sweet Sadie try to hide all that under them churchy suits. But I bet she used to wear coochie-cutter shorts before she met Old Reverend. She might be fooling the church people, but she ain’t fooling me. I know her body is beautiful underneath them suits. I wish I could see it.
Before reading this book, I was likely to perceive “church ladies” as women who use the Bible to control or punish others, or who think of themselves as better than those Jesus is still working on. Philyaw portrays “church ladies” as real people struggling with morality like the rest of us, some for better, some for worse, but all human beings. Published by West Virginia University Press, the book became an unlikely finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Tessa Thompson and HBO Max have optioned it for a planned film, with Philyaw writing the adaptation. I'm looking forward to it and her first novel.
Deesha Philyaw was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. She received a BA in economics from Yale University and an MA in teaching from Manhattanville College. She settled in Pittsburgh as an adjunct professor at Chatham University and worked as a freelance writer and editor, publishing a book with her ex-husband, Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce in 2013. Philyaw quit her corporate communications job in 2019 to expand her writing consultant service and pursue a writing career full time. She lives in Pittsburgh with her two daughters.
[image]
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman ...more
Notes are private!
1
May 10, 2021
May 13, 2021
Mar 06, 2021
Kindle Edition
0374194327
9780374194321
0374194327
3.52
102,773
Aug 04, 2020
Aug 04, 2020
really liked it
My introduction to the fiction of Raven Leilani is Luster. Published in 2020, the novel is the first person account of Edie, a twenty-three-year-old w
My introduction to the fiction of Raven Leilani is Luster. Published in 2020, the novel is the first person account of Edie, a twenty-three-year-old who stumbles through an affair with a much older married man. The experience of reading this novel might be similar to being out with a friend who is falling apart and puking his or her guts out in an alley or restroom, except that Edie doesn't have friends, so none of us would be on a pub crawl with her to begin with. The writing is vomited onto the page and while my first reaction was to shake my head and walk away, I found the novel forcefully expressive and able to pull me in. We all want to see how a runaway train comes to a stop.
Edie is the managing editorial assistant for a children's book imprint. Saddled with student debt and low-paying work, she neither enjoys her job or conceals her ennui. She lives in a roach and rodent infested two bedroom apartment in Bushwick with a roommate. She has difficulty making friends. On some weekends, she lays still until she has to eat or use the bathroom. She's had sex with close to a dozen male co-workers, hardly any of which have been fulfilling in any way. She is an orphan. She hasn't painted since she was 21 and those she shows her work to have a very low opinion of it.
Then Edie starts messaging an art conservator named Eric, who points out the typos in her profile and offers that he's married. Unlike her office flings, Eric does not abandon Edie once she opens up about herself. Despite the twenty-three-year age gap, she finds him attractive. A month passes before he's available to meet, for an afternoon at a Six Flags amusement park. Many dates follow, with Edie starving herself in anticipation of sex that never comes, be it his inexperience with infidelity or Black women. Morbid curiosity ultimately lead Edie to his house in New Jersey. There, she meets Eric's wife Rebecca, who knows who she is and invites her to stay for their anniversary party.
The prose comes like a fire hydrant that a city dweller has wrenched open to keep cool in the sweltering summer.
I take the sandwich and stop at a Duane Reade. I buy a Snapple and small bottle of Dr. Schulze’s Intestinal Formula #2, which boasts thirty-five million active cultures, and I ask for cash back. I checked my email and there is a message from Panera Bread that reads, While there are currently no open positions as this time, we encourage you to apply in the future, a message from the Department of Education, from Bank of America, from my landlord, who has bad news about the security deposit, from a Nigerian prince, and from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which would like to remind me that per my firing, I will be uninsured in eleven days. On the bus back, I watch the road. The rain is heavy and there is a man running along the shoulder with a gas can in his hand. I think of my mother, who was sympathetic to a lot of things, to brown spider plants, to cats with alopecia, and most especially to car trouble. There was no hitchhiker she did not indulge, no man with a smoking Saab she was unwilling to help. Whenever I was in the car, I pleaded with her to keep going. I felt anxious around these men, and I struggled with what to say. But during her time as a dealer, an addict, and then a fervent Seventh-Day Adventist, she was mellowed by the cosmic and by her prolonged chemical abuse, brimming with the grade of charisma you see in septuagenarian rock stars whose tepid late-career albums remind everyone they’re still alive, charisma that exists at the end of a liver, that has to do with acceptance, which incidentally is a tenet of Narcotics Anonymous and the SDA faith, wherein death is inevitable and complete. Except as a pious child, I could not feel casual about death. I have read Ecclesiastes and the idea of death as nothingness terrified me. We picked up a man and he had a Bible in his hands. My mom was thrilled by the synchrony, but a mile away from the exit, I looked in the back seat and he was touching himself.
Luster isn't a terrific novel because Edie is a fun character to be around. The novel is terrific because I couldn't put it down. As Edie's life spirals out of control, rather than be annoyed, I was fascinated to see when the law of averages would go into effect. At one point, I misread Eric peered for Eric peed and thought, Of course, Edie can't catch a break with men. Of course he's peeing on her. What else? In other novels, adults work or play well together, usually for the sake of moving a plot forward. That seems out of reach for Leilani's characters, who are finger painting when it comes to relationships. Slowly, Edie starts moving toward something like adulthood.
He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.
Most authors draw characters like a puzzle that's missing a piece or two, just enough to give readers the impression that these characters are imperfect. Authors like Mary Gaitskill leave so many pieces out that the character is barely recognizable from anyone or anything I've ever encountered on earth, to the point her stories fluctuate between the weird and the disturbing. Raven Leilani reminded me of Gaitskill. In reality, it seems like more young women enter into affairs with married men with pieces missing than connected. Luster has the fearlessness to show it. ...more
Edie is the managing editorial assistant for a children's book imprint. Saddled with student debt and low-paying work, she neither enjoys her job or conceals her ennui. She lives in a roach and rodent infested two bedroom apartment in Bushwick with a roommate. She has difficulty making friends. On some weekends, she lays still until she has to eat or use the bathroom. She's had sex with close to a dozen male co-workers, hardly any of which have been fulfilling in any way. She is an orphan. She hasn't painted since she was 21 and those she shows her work to have a very low opinion of it.
Then Edie starts messaging an art conservator named Eric, who points out the typos in her profile and offers that he's married. Unlike her office flings, Eric does not abandon Edie once she opens up about herself. Despite the twenty-three-year age gap, she finds him attractive. A month passes before he's available to meet, for an afternoon at a Six Flags amusement park. Many dates follow, with Edie starving herself in anticipation of sex that never comes, be it his inexperience with infidelity or Black women. Morbid curiosity ultimately lead Edie to his house in New Jersey. There, she meets Eric's wife Rebecca, who knows who she is and invites her to stay for their anniversary party.
The prose comes like a fire hydrant that a city dweller has wrenched open to keep cool in the sweltering summer.
I take the sandwich and stop at a Duane Reade. I buy a Snapple and small bottle of Dr. Schulze’s Intestinal Formula #2, which boasts thirty-five million active cultures, and I ask for cash back. I checked my email and there is a message from Panera Bread that reads, While there are currently no open positions as this time, we encourage you to apply in the future, a message from the Department of Education, from Bank of America, from my landlord, who has bad news about the security deposit, from a Nigerian prince, and from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which would like to remind me that per my firing, I will be uninsured in eleven days. On the bus back, I watch the road. The rain is heavy and there is a man running along the shoulder with a gas can in his hand. I think of my mother, who was sympathetic to a lot of things, to brown spider plants, to cats with alopecia, and most especially to car trouble. There was no hitchhiker she did not indulge, no man with a smoking Saab she was unwilling to help. Whenever I was in the car, I pleaded with her to keep going. I felt anxious around these men, and I struggled with what to say. But during her time as a dealer, an addict, and then a fervent Seventh-Day Adventist, she was mellowed by the cosmic and by her prolonged chemical abuse, brimming with the grade of charisma you see in septuagenarian rock stars whose tepid late-career albums remind everyone they’re still alive, charisma that exists at the end of a liver, that has to do with acceptance, which incidentally is a tenet of Narcotics Anonymous and the SDA faith, wherein death is inevitable and complete. Except as a pious child, I could not feel casual about death. I have read Ecclesiastes and the idea of death as nothingness terrified me. We picked up a man and he had a Bible in his hands. My mom was thrilled by the synchrony, but a mile away from the exit, I looked in the back seat and he was touching himself.
Luster isn't a terrific novel because Edie is a fun character to be around. The novel is terrific because I couldn't put it down. As Edie's life spirals out of control, rather than be annoyed, I was fascinated to see when the law of averages would go into effect. At one point, I misread Eric peered for Eric peed and thought, Of course, Edie can't catch a break with men. Of course he's peeing on her. What else? In other novels, adults work or play well together, usually for the sake of moving a plot forward. That seems out of reach for Leilani's characters, who are finger painting when it comes to relationships. Slowly, Edie starts moving toward something like adulthood.
He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.
Most authors draw characters like a puzzle that's missing a piece or two, just enough to give readers the impression that these characters are imperfect. Authors like Mary Gaitskill leave so many pieces out that the character is barely recognizable from anyone or anything I've ever encountered on earth, to the point her stories fluctuate between the weird and the disturbing. Raven Leilani reminded me of Gaitskill. In reality, it seems like more young women enter into affairs with married men with pieces missing than connected. Luster has the fearlessness to show it. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jul 13, 2023
Jul 17, 2023
Dec 09, 2020
Hardcover
0062908502
9780062908506
0062908502
4.40
2,651
Nov 17, 2020
Nov 17, 2020
it was amazing
"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed
"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused illustrates all too well what life imitating art means. Published in 2020, Melissa Maerz chronicles filmmaker Richard Linklater, a huge cast of then unknowns and crew members from L.A. and Austin as they dramatized the last day of the 1976 school year for a movie. In doing so, Maerz chronicles what high school is: friendships, rivalries, tests, confrontations with authority, drugs, alcohol, romances, breakups, music, clothes, classmates who graduate to enviable success, classmates who disappear, life, death and the passage of time.
This book was poignant for me because Richard Linklater split his childhood with his mom in Huntsville, Texas and father in Houston in the 1970s and I grew up in Houston in the 1980s. When Dazed and Confused was being shot in Austin in the summer of 1992, I'd just finished my freshman year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to magically visit the set of a classic movie as it was being created but here was a seminal film that literally shot around the corner from me at a time where I might've actually been hired to work on it. Part of me thinks I'm way too introverted to run cable and made better use of my time reading and writing, while another part of me wishes for a do-over. This book was that do-over.
-- Gary Price: Austin was so cheap. Everybody I knew at the time was living in a house where it was like $300, total--to rent the entire house! That's why Austin had so many musicians and artists. It has the University of Texas, which elevates the intellectual pursuits, but it's still a lazy place, because you don't have to make money to live there. People said Stevie Ray Vaughan could play like that because he only had to pay $60 a month in rent. How could he not come up with great songs when he could just play guitar all day and not work?
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-- Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, "You're going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You're going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?" And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time.
-- Marisa Ribisi: In film, it's always like, "What's your big moment? What's the catalyst? What's it about?" And I think Rick was like, "It's not about anything. It's about people existing." If you look at Dazed and Confused, there was the A-story, which is, "Is Pink gonna take the pledge with the football team?" But really, they're just hanging out. How do you pitch that film? "It's the 1970s, it's the bicentennial, the music is gonna be great"? "Here, let me give you millions of dollars!"
-- Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn't feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, "Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!" And you're just like, "Huh?"
It didn't feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That's the thing that's so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it.
[image]
- Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren't the '70s sexist? Aren't we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. The pitting against. It's constant and it's catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to interesting and human?
-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we're going to sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you're gonna try to break Wooderson down, you're already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve--yeah, he doesn't fit in that. He's on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance.
Wooderson is not the kind of guy who's gonna get conscious of, "Oh, this is creepy." He's just the kind of guy that goes, "I'm sorry you see it that way. Whatever's going on in your life, I hope you get through it." I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand.
-- Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times-type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie.
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I'm one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that's what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren't. This set a template that I've gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It's really not something you can control--it's out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn't spelled out.
-- Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, "I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn't realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we're going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow." That's when I started to realize, this could be big.
-- Mark Duplass: There's this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you're creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn't exist. It's the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now.
[image]
Melissa Maerz was a founding editor of Vulture (the website of New York Magazine) and has served stints as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone. One of the things I loved about how she compiled this book was letting subjects respond to someone else's versions of events, which don't always correlate when people with egos who enjoyed having a good time try to recall things that happened 25 years ago. An entire chapter is devoted to the legend surrounding the discovery of Matthew McConaughey (at a bar atop the Hyatt Regency in Austin.) See Dazed and Confused if you haven't already. Buy this book if you have.
[image] ...more
This book was poignant for me because Richard Linklater split his childhood with his mom in Huntsville, Texas and father in Houston in the 1970s and I grew up in Houston in the 1980s. When Dazed and Confused was being shot in Austin in the summer of 1992, I'd just finished my freshman year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to magically visit the set of a classic movie as it was being created but here was a seminal film that literally shot around the corner from me at a time where I might've actually been hired to work on it. Part of me thinks I'm way too introverted to run cable and made better use of my time reading and writing, while another part of me wishes for a do-over. This book was that do-over.
-- Gary Price: Austin was so cheap. Everybody I knew at the time was living in a house where it was like $300, total--to rent the entire house! That's why Austin had so many musicians and artists. It has the University of Texas, which elevates the intellectual pursuits, but it's still a lazy place, because you don't have to make money to live there. People said Stevie Ray Vaughan could play like that because he only had to pay $60 a month in rent. How could he not come up with great songs when he could just play guitar all day and not work?
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, "You're going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You're going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?" And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time.
-- Marisa Ribisi: In film, it's always like, "What's your big moment? What's the catalyst? What's it about?" And I think Rick was like, "It's not about anything. It's about people existing." If you look at Dazed and Confused, there was the A-story, which is, "Is Pink gonna take the pledge with the football team?" But really, they're just hanging out. How do you pitch that film? "It's the 1970s, it's the bicentennial, the music is gonna be great"? "Here, let me give you millions of dollars!"
-- Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn't feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, "Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!" And you're just like, "Huh?"
It didn't feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That's the thing that's so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it.
[image]
- Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren't the '70s sexist? Aren't we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. The pitting against. It's constant and it's catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to interesting and human?
-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we're going to sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you're gonna try to break Wooderson down, you're already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve--yeah, he doesn't fit in that. He's on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance.
Wooderson is not the kind of guy who's gonna get conscious of, "Oh, this is creepy." He's just the kind of guy that goes, "I'm sorry you see it that way. Whatever's going on in your life, I hope you get through it." I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand.
-- Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times-type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie.
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I'm one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that's what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren't. This set a template that I've gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It's really not something you can control--it's out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn't spelled out.
-- Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, "I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn't realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we're going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow." That's when I started to realize, this could be big.
-- Mark Duplass: There's this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you're creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn't exist. It's the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now.
[image]
Melissa Maerz was a founding editor of Vulture (the website of New York Magazine) and has served stints as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone. One of the things I loved about how she compiled this book was letting subjects respond to someone else's versions of events, which don't always correlate when people with egos who enjoyed having a good time try to recall things that happened 25 years ago. An entire chapter is devoted to the legend surrounding the discovery of Matthew McConaughey (at a bar atop the Hyatt Regency in Austin.) See Dazed and Confused if you haven't already. Buy this book if you have.
[image] ...more
Notes are private!
1
Dec 13, 2020
Dec 16, 2020
Dec 08, 2020
Hardcover
B07X16MWK9
3.79
2,932
Aug 04, 2020
Aug 04, 2020
really liked it
As antidote to a shitty apocalyptic book I'd read, I ran for cover with The Living Dead by Daniel Kraus, based on material by George A. Romero. Publis
As antidote to a shitty apocalyptic book I'd read, I ran for cover with The Living Dead by Daniel Kraus, based on material by George A. Romero. Published in 2020, this is a long novel, inspired by notes that Kraus combed through to complete the book Romero had nibbled around for over 30 years, Romero being the filmmaker who made the original Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and spent intervening years hustling for financing for his next film (Dawn of the Dead in 1979 and Day of the Dead in 1985 are also classics). A novel would be pure unbridled 100% Romero, without budgetary restraints, but he never wrote it.
Did I mention this is a long novel? There's no such thing as a surplus of zombie activity, you might say, like there being no such thing as too much cheese, too much wine or too much Halle Berry. I beg to differ (sorry Ms. Berry!). I started flipping through the many character backstories and racing to see where the story would go. Once I realized that Kraus was memorializing Romero by fleshing out and exploring every scrap of paper his idol had left behind after his death in 2017, I decided to reread the book. I made it to the 20% mark, when a new year and new books tantalized more than a reread of this one did.
It's really good, though. There are several competing storylines here beginning on October 24 when the dead rise from eternal slumber to stalk after the living. Infected blood or saliva from a ghoul can kill a fresh victim in minutes or hours, after which they too rise from the dead to take up the extermination of the human race.
-- Statistician Etta Hoffman, nicknamed The Poet after Emily Dickinson by her co-workers at the U.S. Census Bureau, stays behind in the bunker-like building in D.C. to catalog the fall of civilization for whoever, or whatever, comes along next. Etta's aversion to social activity make her the best adapted to deal with the apocalypse and she cherishes her solitude, quickly tracing Patient Zero back to San Diego.
-- San Diego assistant medical examiner Luis Acocella witnesses the shooting death of a homeless man. Certain that the man's bullet wounds were non-fatal and the lead detective's pursuit of a murder case resulted in the vagrant's death, Acocella and his diener Charlene Rutkowski begin an autopsy.
-- High school student Greer Morgan watches the residents of Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort (The Last Resort) in a Missouri shithole begin to attack each other in the morning fog. She barricades herself in her trailer and manages to escape with the help of a Syrian immigrant. All alone in the world, Greer encounters a musician who calls himself "Muse King" and becomes deadly with a bow and arrow. Muse King does not have the stomach to kill the living dead. Greer shows no such remorse.
-- At Atlanta-based WWN News, a bleeding heart news director named Nathan Baseman bids on video out of Chicago of a massacre in which the dead rise. His colleagues believe it to be gang related, but Baseman senses this is a 9/11 magnitude event. The only other person at the network who agrees is Chuck Corso, aka "The Face," a stoic, old school anchor who pledges to stay on the air, informing the public as long as he can.
-- Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Olympia, Master Chief Boatswain's Mate Karl Nishimura and a rookie pilot on her first deployment named Jenny Angelys Pagan survive the initial wave of living dead absorbing the crew only to face a cult that rises around the ship's chaplain Father Bill.
-- Etta Hoffman's office crush is the senior statistician, an athletic Brit named Annie Teller. Annie flees D.C. when the emergency becomes widespread, hoping to catch a flight to Los Angeles to reunite with her love at the La Brea Tar Pits. Annie makes it to Atlanta, where she's bitten by an infected woman. Rising from the dead, Annie is compelled by hunger and loneliness to pursue the living but also driven by a strange urge to keep heading west, to the La Brea Tar Pits.
There's a lot to like in The Living Dead:
-- Rather than monsters chasing thinly sketched victims around as we bop from one kill to the next, Kraus and Romero are fascinated by the people, their insecurities, their jobs, their moral dilemmas, how they react under pressure. Each character has a compelling job--working in a morgue, on an aircraft carrier, at a news station--or background. Main characters are women or Black or Asian or gay, so there are diverse points of view expressed here as opposed to the white male perspective only.
-- Kraus is also a terrific writer. His prose quite often blew me away. I really felt as if I was trapped living in a shithole trailer park with trashy neighbors and holes in the roof, or stationed on an aircraft carrier. I'm pretty sure I could perform an autopsy based on the many paragraphs devoted to vital organs and tools of the trade. I really appreciated the efforts Kraus took to get inside the "mind" of the living dead, which is an area that zombie movies or TV shows can't delve into beyond some grunting or growling.
You are hungry. You wake up. In that order.
This hunger is different from any you knew before. This hunger is a lack. Something has been taken away from you. You do not know what. This hunger is everywhere. Hunger, the fist. Hunger, the bones. Hunger, the flesh. Hunger, the brain. Hunger, in all the between places. It is your reason for waking up. It is the reason you move. It is the reason.
You look. Your eyesight is poor. There is a body next to yours. You smell it. It smells strong. You have a faint recollection of booze. You recognize the body. It used to be called Jean Cobb. Was Jean Cobb important? You do not know. Jean Cobb called you Scud. You remember this now. Here is the curious thing: Jean Cobb is no longer Jean Cobb. She is you. You are also you. You feel the hunger in both of you. The hunger is a thing that stretches outward. Feels around for more of you. But finds nothing. Only the Scud-you and the Jean-you. Only you you.
-- The Living Dead has details that will stay with me awhile. Greer is bitten, like most victims, very early in the outbreak as confusion reigns, but she lucks out that her attacker is an elderly park resident with toothless gums! I'd never seen that before. I also liked how condoms become second in value only to food and water as Greer wants to have a lot of sex with her traveling partner Muse King but hardly wants to end up with an STD or pregnant with all the hospitals closed. A subtle Planned Parenthood PSA. I approve.
-- On a personal note, it was invigorating to discover that even a talent like George A. Romero struggled for 30 years to write a novel and couldn't get more than a couple of chapters on paper. It makes my writing process look like Le Mans. In the afterword, Kraus dives into the legend surrounding Romero's unpublished novel and how in 2000, he experimented with publishing a chapter at a time on the web, but quickly ran out of resolve to see that through. I wasn't rooting for the man to fail but it was validating to see how difficult it is for any novelist to take the ideas or aspirations racing through them and fashion them into a coherent narrative on paper.
I'm docking The Living Dead one star because Kraus never truly brings his characters together to have them face anything as compelling as their mere survival did up to that point. There's a fifteen year time jump, which disrupts the narrative and I tend to dislike. I started ripping through the last 25% of the book, needing it to be over. Sometimes, less is best. It seemed to me that the Etta Hoffman character, maybe the Greer Morgan character and possibly the undead Annie Teller deserved their own novels. The Stand was a doorstopper but The Living Dead is hoarded stuff piled all the way to the ceiling.
Trivia: The original distributor of Night of the Living Dead, the Walter Reade Organization, was so bush league that when they changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, they forgot to copyright the new title. This immediately entered the movie into public domain! Romero lost millions of dollars over the years. That was the bad news. The good news is that it costs nothing for other filmmakers to license his film. Thus, when another movie or TV series needs to have something playing on a screen, there's a good chance it'll be Night of the Living Dead.
[image] ...more
Did I mention this is a long novel? There's no such thing as a surplus of zombie activity, you might say, like there being no such thing as too much cheese, too much wine or too much Halle Berry. I beg to differ (sorry Ms. Berry!). I started flipping through the many character backstories and racing to see where the story would go. Once I realized that Kraus was memorializing Romero by fleshing out and exploring every scrap of paper his idol had left behind after his death in 2017, I decided to reread the book. I made it to the 20% mark, when a new year and new books tantalized more than a reread of this one did.
It's really good, though. There are several competing storylines here beginning on October 24 when the dead rise from eternal slumber to stalk after the living. Infected blood or saliva from a ghoul can kill a fresh victim in minutes or hours, after which they too rise from the dead to take up the extermination of the human race.
-- Statistician Etta Hoffman, nicknamed The Poet after Emily Dickinson by her co-workers at the U.S. Census Bureau, stays behind in the bunker-like building in D.C. to catalog the fall of civilization for whoever, or whatever, comes along next. Etta's aversion to social activity make her the best adapted to deal with the apocalypse and she cherishes her solitude, quickly tracing Patient Zero back to San Diego.
-- San Diego assistant medical examiner Luis Acocella witnesses the shooting death of a homeless man. Certain that the man's bullet wounds were non-fatal and the lead detective's pursuit of a murder case resulted in the vagrant's death, Acocella and his diener Charlene Rutkowski begin an autopsy.
-- High school student Greer Morgan watches the residents of Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort (The Last Resort) in a Missouri shithole begin to attack each other in the morning fog. She barricades herself in her trailer and manages to escape with the help of a Syrian immigrant. All alone in the world, Greer encounters a musician who calls himself "Muse King" and becomes deadly with a bow and arrow. Muse King does not have the stomach to kill the living dead. Greer shows no such remorse.
-- At Atlanta-based WWN News, a bleeding heart news director named Nathan Baseman bids on video out of Chicago of a massacre in which the dead rise. His colleagues believe it to be gang related, but Baseman senses this is a 9/11 magnitude event. The only other person at the network who agrees is Chuck Corso, aka "The Face," a stoic, old school anchor who pledges to stay on the air, informing the public as long as he can.
-- Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Olympia, Master Chief Boatswain's Mate Karl Nishimura and a rookie pilot on her first deployment named Jenny Angelys Pagan survive the initial wave of living dead absorbing the crew only to face a cult that rises around the ship's chaplain Father Bill.
-- Etta Hoffman's office crush is the senior statistician, an athletic Brit named Annie Teller. Annie flees D.C. when the emergency becomes widespread, hoping to catch a flight to Los Angeles to reunite with her love at the La Brea Tar Pits. Annie makes it to Atlanta, where she's bitten by an infected woman. Rising from the dead, Annie is compelled by hunger and loneliness to pursue the living but also driven by a strange urge to keep heading west, to the La Brea Tar Pits.
There's a lot to like in The Living Dead:
-- Rather than monsters chasing thinly sketched victims around as we bop from one kill to the next, Kraus and Romero are fascinated by the people, their insecurities, their jobs, their moral dilemmas, how they react under pressure. Each character has a compelling job--working in a morgue, on an aircraft carrier, at a news station--or background. Main characters are women or Black or Asian or gay, so there are diverse points of view expressed here as opposed to the white male perspective only.
-- Kraus is also a terrific writer. His prose quite often blew me away. I really felt as if I was trapped living in a shithole trailer park with trashy neighbors and holes in the roof, or stationed on an aircraft carrier. I'm pretty sure I could perform an autopsy based on the many paragraphs devoted to vital organs and tools of the trade. I really appreciated the efforts Kraus took to get inside the "mind" of the living dead, which is an area that zombie movies or TV shows can't delve into beyond some grunting or growling.
You are hungry. You wake up. In that order.
This hunger is different from any you knew before. This hunger is a lack. Something has been taken away from you. You do not know what. This hunger is everywhere. Hunger, the fist. Hunger, the bones. Hunger, the flesh. Hunger, the brain. Hunger, in all the between places. It is your reason for waking up. It is the reason you move. It is the reason.
You look. Your eyesight is poor. There is a body next to yours. You smell it. It smells strong. You have a faint recollection of booze. You recognize the body. It used to be called Jean Cobb. Was Jean Cobb important? You do not know. Jean Cobb called you Scud. You remember this now. Here is the curious thing: Jean Cobb is no longer Jean Cobb. She is you. You are also you. You feel the hunger in both of you. The hunger is a thing that stretches outward. Feels around for more of you. But finds nothing. Only the Scud-you and the Jean-you. Only you you.
-- The Living Dead has details that will stay with me awhile. Greer is bitten, like most victims, very early in the outbreak as confusion reigns, but she lucks out that her attacker is an elderly park resident with toothless gums! I'd never seen that before. I also liked how condoms become second in value only to food and water as Greer wants to have a lot of sex with her traveling partner Muse King but hardly wants to end up with an STD or pregnant with all the hospitals closed. A subtle Planned Parenthood PSA. I approve.
-- On a personal note, it was invigorating to discover that even a talent like George A. Romero struggled for 30 years to write a novel and couldn't get more than a couple of chapters on paper. It makes my writing process look like Le Mans. In the afterword, Kraus dives into the legend surrounding Romero's unpublished novel and how in 2000, he experimented with publishing a chapter at a time on the web, but quickly ran out of resolve to see that through. I wasn't rooting for the man to fail but it was validating to see how difficult it is for any novelist to take the ideas or aspirations racing through them and fashion them into a coherent narrative on paper.
I'm docking The Living Dead one star because Kraus never truly brings his characters together to have them face anything as compelling as their mere survival did up to that point. There's a fifteen year time jump, which disrupts the narrative and I tend to dislike. I started ripping through the last 25% of the book, needing it to be over. Sometimes, less is best. It seemed to me that the Etta Hoffman character, maybe the Greer Morgan character and possibly the undead Annie Teller deserved their own novels. The Stand was a doorstopper but The Living Dead is hoarded stuff piled all the way to the ceiling.
Trivia: The original distributor of Night of the Living Dead, the Walter Reade Organization, was so bush league that when they changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, they forgot to copyright the new title. This immediately entered the movie into public domain! Romero lost millions of dollars over the years. That was the bad news. The good news is that it costs nothing for other filmmakers to license his film. Thus, when another movie or TV series needs to have something playing on a screen, there's a good chance it'll be Night of the Living Dead.
[image] ...more
Notes are private!
1
Dec 21, 2020
Dec 31, 2020
Nov 15, 2020
Kindle Edition
0525561935
9780525561934
0525561935
3.55
121
Aug 11, 2020
Aug 11, 2020
really liked it
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but all the books I can get my hands on about Los Angeles. Published in 20
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but all the books I can get my hands on about Los Angeles. Published in 2020, City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimainged by Paul Lunenfeld was pretty good. Neither definitive nor voluminous, I did learn a lot about the city I didn't know. By virtue of most everyone being sealed inside a car, this metropolis holds secrets that cities with pedestrian traffic give up to anyone with a curious nature as they stroll by landmarks. Lunenfeld has a meandering writing style that I actually grew fond of as he somehow segueways from Gidget to Austrian emigrees.
I Often Take Out Of Town Guests Here
-- Like so many drawn to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, William Mulholland came in search of a new world, and so he created one. The place that he made possible is crowned by a road that snakes atop the Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills. Just above the Hollywood Bowl, there's a vantage point from which, on a clear day, Hollywood, downtown, the Valley, the surrounding mountains, and even the Pacific Ocean are all visible simultaneously--one of the few places where Los Angeles coheres as a whole. The road is appropriately named Mulholland Drive, and when you look out from that point, you see, manifested in the city's present, the future toward which its greatest engineer pointed in the past.
I'd Bet She Didn't Really Write This
-- But people with brains (often from New York) kept streaming west regardless. In the thirties, Dorothy Parker traded Manhattan's legendary Algonquin Round Table for Hollywood's writers' table, snagging two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting along the way to ever-greater consumption of alcohol and a place on the blacklist for her leftist politics. Parker is reputed to have dismissed her new hometown of LA as "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city," a nasty little dig that resonated for generations with Angelenos in her wake.
Biopic Please
-- Unlike the beach bunnies who were already hopping along the shore, Kathy decided that she wanted to join the men in the water and brought sandwiches with her to trade for time on their boards. The "boys" all had nicknames--from the Big Kahuna to Tubesteak to Da Cat (more on him later). Kathy--just under five feet tall and ninety-five pounds when wet--was a girl and, evidently to the rest of the surfers, midget-sized: hence, Girl-Midget or Gidget, a fusion that reeks of both schoolyard taunts and what Sigmund Freud called "condensation." Kathy/Gidget bought a board and taught herself to surf.
Biopic Please II
-- As much as demographics changed, so too, did the entertainments. With jobs aplenty, production lines running day and night, and soldiers, sailors, and airmen on three-day leaves, there was money in people's pockets, and they wanted to spend it on more than movies and malteds. That's where Central Avenue came in. Central, also known as the Stem, had been the heart of black LA since the 1920s, and the Dunbar Hotel had been the beating muscle of that heart. African Americans were excluded from most hotels in Los Angeles, and from all the better ones. A black entrepreneur, John Somerville, decided to build an establishment to surpass any other that catered to African Americans.
Riot on the Strip
-- On the Strip, the ultimate answer is a poisonous combination of money, real estate and taste. The Riot on Sunset Strip was a conflict ignited by shifting demographics and economics, pitting the new scensters against the Strip's established clientele. Journalist Kirk Silsbee reminisced about the moment of transition in the midsixties: "The Old School Hollywood Supper Clubs--Ciro's, the Mocambo, the Trocadero, the Moulin Rouge--had a steep profit margin that they had to maintain. They relied on the patronage of moneyed Hollywood that could pay for dinner and a show every night. Kids couldn't do that. They could go to Ben Frank's or Canter's or The Fifth Estate and nurse a cup of coffee all night long or hang out in the parking lot."
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story Should've Been This:
-- Just as diet didn't save Father Yod from the force of gravity, food alone didn't remake Lee's body. That metamorphosis took working out with a group of American marital artists, mostly vets, that Lee had met in Long Beach, among them a marine vet and kickboxing champion named Joe Lewis; a former soldier, Mike "The Animal" Stone; and a former airman named Chuck Norris, who went on to fame in film, television and Internet memes, but only after filming a fight with his old friend Lee at the conclusion of The Way of the Dragon, considered one of the great battles in the history of marital arts films. What Lee took from them were bodybuilding techniques that allowed him to add muscle and definition to his body, not only focusing on his biceps and chest but also strengthening and defining the connective tissue, tendons and ligaments.
Alien, Time Traveler or Robot?
-- Three of the central themes of speculative media--time travel, interstellar voyaging, and lifelike robots--are the least likely aspects of the genre to ever "come true." How these themes intersect in one of the most iconic films ever made about a Los Angeles that doesn't exist demonstrates the usefulness of speculative thinking about the city. The film centers o a policeman from a squad of "blade runners" who track down runaway lifelike androids called "replicants" in order to "retire" them, an act indistinguishable in physical and moral terms from murder. The three impossibles of speculative fiction were all present. ...more
I Often Take Out Of Town Guests Here
-- Like so many drawn to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, William Mulholland came in search of a new world, and so he created one. The place that he made possible is crowned by a road that snakes atop the Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills. Just above the Hollywood Bowl, there's a vantage point from which, on a clear day, Hollywood, downtown, the Valley, the surrounding mountains, and even the Pacific Ocean are all visible simultaneously--one of the few places where Los Angeles coheres as a whole. The road is appropriately named Mulholland Drive, and when you look out from that point, you see, manifested in the city's present, the future toward which its greatest engineer pointed in the past.
I'd Bet She Didn't Really Write This
-- But people with brains (often from New York) kept streaming west regardless. In the thirties, Dorothy Parker traded Manhattan's legendary Algonquin Round Table for Hollywood's writers' table, snagging two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting along the way to ever-greater consumption of alcohol and a place on the blacklist for her leftist politics. Parker is reputed to have dismissed her new hometown of LA as "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city," a nasty little dig that resonated for generations with Angelenos in her wake.
Biopic Please
-- Unlike the beach bunnies who were already hopping along the shore, Kathy decided that she wanted to join the men in the water and brought sandwiches with her to trade for time on their boards. The "boys" all had nicknames--from the Big Kahuna to Tubesteak to Da Cat (more on him later). Kathy--just under five feet tall and ninety-five pounds when wet--was a girl and, evidently to the rest of the surfers, midget-sized: hence, Girl-Midget or Gidget, a fusion that reeks of both schoolyard taunts and what Sigmund Freud called "condensation." Kathy/Gidget bought a board and taught herself to surf.
Biopic Please II
-- As much as demographics changed, so too, did the entertainments. With jobs aplenty, production lines running day and night, and soldiers, sailors, and airmen on three-day leaves, there was money in people's pockets, and they wanted to spend it on more than movies and malteds. That's where Central Avenue came in. Central, also known as the Stem, had been the heart of black LA since the 1920s, and the Dunbar Hotel had been the beating muscle of that heart. African Americans were excluded from most hotels in Los Angeles, and from all the better ones. A black entrepreneur, John Somerville, decided to build an establishment to surpass any other that catered to African Americans.
Riot on the Strip
-- On the Strip, the ultimate answer is a poisonous combination of money, real estate and taste. The Riot on Sunset Strip was a conflict ignited by shifting demographics and economics, pitting the new scensters against the Strip's established clientele. Journalist Kirk Silsbee reminisced about the moment of transition in the midsixties: "The Old School Hollywood Supper Clubs--Ciro's, the Mocambo, the Trocadero, the Moulin Rouge--had a steep profit margin that they had to maintain. They relied on the patronage of moneyed Hollywood that could pay for dinner and a show every night. Kids couldn't do that. They could go to Ben Frank's or Canter's or The Fifth Estate and nurse a cup of coffee all night long or hang out in the parking lot."
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story Should've Been This:
-- Just as diet didn't save Father Yod from the force of gravity, food alone didn't remake Lee's body. That metamorphosis took working out with a group of American marital artists, mostly vets, that Lee had met in Long Beach, among them a marine vet and kickboxing champion named Joe Lewis; a former soldier, Mike "The Animal" Stone; and a former airman named Chuck Norris, who went on to fame in film, television and Internet memes, but only after filming a fight with his old friend Lee at the conclusion of The Way of the Dragon, considered one of the great battles in the history of marital arts films. What Lee took from them were bodybuilding techniques that allowed him to add muscle and definition to his body, not only focusing on his biceps and chest but also strengthening and defining the connective tissue, tendons and ligaments.
Alien, Time Traveler or Robot?
-- Three of the central themes of speculative media--time travel, interstellar voyaging, and lifelike robots--are the least likely aspects of the genre to ever "come true." How these themes intersect in one of the most iconic films ever made about a Los Angeles that doesn't exist demonstrates the usefulness of speculative thinking about the city. The film centers o a policeman from a squad of "blade runners" who track down runaway lifelike androids called "replicants" in order to "retire" them, an act indistinguishable in physical and moral terms from murder. The three impossibles of speculative fiction were all present. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Aug 24, 2020
Sep 02, 2020
Aug 23, 2020
Hardcover
0385545738
9780385545730
B07YRWHGYD
3.37
26,357
Jun 09, 2020
Jun 09, 2020
really liked it
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Published in 2020, eve
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Published in 2020, everything I can really say about this wonderfully droll debut is said on the cover, designed by Emily Mahon and illustrated by Chris Coulon. Most book covers would be more compelling covered with a brown paper bag. Not only is this one awesome, but along with the title, perfectly conveys the irreverent sensibilities of the novelist. A quick read, I grinned throughout and admired how Kyoung took familiar dramatic situations and made them specific to her generation.
[image]
The novel is the first person account of our eighteen-year-old narrator, whose name remains undisclosed until the climax. She recounts the summer of 2011 and her tenure as a delivery driver for Eddie's, a Los Angeles pizza joint. She's eleven weeks pregnant by her boyfriend Billy, a classmate orphaned during their senior year of high school. The young couple live with her doting Mom, a first generation immigrant from South Korea. Her recently deceased father was a charismatic but destitute alcoholic who left his heir little more than bad memories and a '99 Ford Festiva that she wheels around on her deliveries.
Trying to forget her past and avoid her future, her life gets exciting when she receives an impassioned call from a new customer requesting a large pepperoni-and-pickles pizza. The woman, Jenny Hauser, needs this for her son, who is adjusting none too well to Los Angeles or the local pizzerias. Something in the woman's manic desperation breaks through the ennui of our narrator. She not only purchases pickles and gets the special order made, but delivers it. Enamored by the contradictions she witnesses in Jenny as well as the attention the desperate housewife basks on her, she begins to fantasize about her new customer, who refers to her only as "Pizza Girl."
It was a blessing I didn't get into a car accident. I spent the rest of my shift in a daze. My hands and feet felt and behaved like bricks. I knocked over a stack of boxes and dropped a napkin dispenser I was trying to refill. As Darryl bent down to help me clean up, he asked me if I'd taken pulls from his Bacardi.
I mixed up orders. Drew Herold got Patty Johnston's Meat Lovers, extra bacon. Patty Johnston got Drew Herold's Very Veggie, no sauce. "You might as well just get a salad," she said, shaking her head, inspecting a mushroom between her fingers. She was nice, an older mom type who looked like she was used to dealing with youthful incompetence. She didn't mind having to wait while I drove back to retrieve her pizza, just told me to include garlic bread sticks for free next time she called in. Drew Herold was less nice, told me that meat was murder, he'd be calling Domino's in the future.
When I got back to the shop, I went to the bathroom and didn't notice the seat was up. There was toilet water on my pants as Peter yelled at me. Driving home, I missed the turn for my street three times. I kept getting distracted by lamppost lights--I saw Jenny standing underneath each one. She was still lovely, even under their harsh orange glow.
Pizza Girl buzzes along on an extra high voltage line with the the voice of its protagonist, an Asian American who was an average student, is pregnant at 18 and on her way to surpassing her late father as a drunk. Frazier recognizes how thin the line is between happiness and despair, success and failure, freedom and a minimum prison sentence. One decision makes or breaks a life. Sometimes, luck intervenes either way. I was caught up in following Pizza Girl to the end of her high wire act, to see whether she made it or split her head open. Frazier's prose is awesomely detailed. I felt like I'd delivered pizzas for the summer by the end.
A man with six chihuahuas in an unmoving row behind him, one with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. A woman in scrubs with a large stain on the pants that was either blood or coffee. Three girls with braces wearing their moms' clothing and heels, face masks, curlers in their hair, drying fingernails all the same shade of alligator green. A guy who took ten minutes of knocking before he answered the door, yelled at me that I should've knocked louder, the pizza was probably cold now. A grandma type who tipped me a single dime. A small party, door answered by two dudes in sombreros. They offered me a can of PBR, icy cold, beautiful condensation, and I hesitated, but turned them down. A motel off the freeway, a dark parking lot that made me nervous, so I laced my keys between my knuckles, in 411 a guy in a robe that barely covered anything, a pair of crossed legs on the bed behind him. Several nondescript men and woman in quiet apartments, every movement--the knocking, the lock clicking open, bills being pulled from wallets, change from pockets, cardboard shifting, that final slam, lock back in place--sounding unbearably loud.
It was an average night.
Being in the head of Pizza Girl was such a invigorating experience that I felt the novel drag in the middle when she had to interact with an adult. Jenny walks her own tightrope, but is established in the grown-up world and her troubles weren't as compelling. Toward the end, I could see Pizza Girl as a fresh take on one of my favorite movies, Taxi Driver (1976). Whereas cab companies have never been part of the fabric of L.A., pizza delivery has and is. It fit that a lonely soul desperately searching for some outlet for her desire would drive pizzas around town. Pizza Girl chooses a much different outlet than Travis Bickle, but they share the same angst.
Jean Kyoung Frazier was born (in 1993) and raised in Torrance, California.
[image]
In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
Come Closer, Sara Gran
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine ...more
[image]
The novel is the first person account of our eighteen-year-old narrator, whose name remains undisclosed until the climax. She recounts the summer of 2011 and her tenure as a delivery driver for Eddie's, a Los Angeles pizza joint. She's eleven weeks pregnant by her boyfriend Billy, a classmate orphaned during their senior year of high school. The young couple live with her doting Mom, a first generation immigrant from South Korea. Her recently deceased father was a charismatic but destitute alcoholic who left his heir little more than bad memories and a '99 Ford Festiva that she wheels around on her deliveries.
Trying to forget her past and avoid her future, her life gets exciting when she receives an impassioned call from a new customer requesting a large pepperoni-and-pickles pizza. The woman, Jenny Hauser, needs this for her son, who is adjusting none too well to Los Angeles or the local pizzerias. Something in the woman's manic desperation breaks through the ennui of our narrator. She not only purchases pickles and gets the special order made, but delivers it. Enamored by the contradictions she witnesses in Jenny as well as the attention the desperate housewife basks on her, she begins to fantasize about her new customer, who refers to her only as "Pizza Girl."
It was a blessing I didn't get into a car accident. I spent the rest of my shift in a daze. My hands and feet felt and behaved like bricks. I knocked over a stack of boxes and dropped a napkin dispenser I was trying to refill. As Darryl bent down to help me clean up, he asked me if I'd taken pulls from his Bacardi.
I mixed up orders. Drew Herold got Patty Johnston's Meat Lovers, extra bacon. Patty Johnston got Drew Herold's Very Veggie, no sauce. "You might as well just get a salad," she said, shaking her head, inspecting a mushroom between her fingers. She was nice, an older mom type who looked like she was used to dealing with youthful incompetence. She didn't mind having to wait while I drove back to retrieve her pizza, just told me to include garlic bread sticks for free next time she called in. Drew Herold was less nice, told me that meat was murder, he'd be calling Domino's in the future.
When I got back to the shop, I went to the bathroom and didn't notice the seat was up. There was toilet water on my pants as Peter yelled at me. Driving home, I missed the turn for my street three times. I kept getting distracted by lamppost lights--I saw Jenny standing underneath each one. She was still lovely, even under their harsh orange glow.
Pizza Girl buzzes along on an extra high voltage line with the the voice of its protagonist, an Asian American who was an average student, is pregnant at 18 and on her way to surpassing her late father as a drunk. Frazier recognizes how thin the line is between happiness and despair, success and failure, freedom and a minimum prison sentence. One decision makes or breaks a life. Sometimes, luck intervenes either way. I was caught up in following Pizza Girl to the end of her high wire act, to see whether she made it or split her head open. Frazier's prose is awesomely detailed. I felt like I'd delivered pizzas for the summer by the end.
A man with six chihuahuas in an unmoving row behind him, one with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. A woman in scrubs with a large stain on the pants that was either blood or coffee. Three girls with braces wearing their moms' clothing and heels, face masks, curlers in their hair, drying fingernails all the same shade of alligator green. A guy who took ten minutes of knocking before he answered the door, yelled at me that I should've knocked louder, the pizza was probably cold now. A grandma type who tipped me a single dime. A small party, door answered by two dudes in sombreros. They offered me a can of PBR, icy cold, beautiful condensation, and I hesitated, but turned them down. A motel off the freeway, a dark parking lot that made me nervous, so I laced my keys between my knuckles, in 411 a guy in a robe that barely covered anything, a pair of crossed legs on the bed behind him. Several nondescript men and woman in quiet apartments, every movement--the knocking, the lock clicking open, bills being pulled from wallets, change from pockets, cardboard shifting, that final slam, lock back in place--sounding unbearably loud.
It was an average night.
Being in the head of Pizza Girl was such a invigorating experience that I felt the novel drag in the middle when she had to interact with an adult. Jenny walks her own tightrope, but is established in the grown-up world and her troubles weren't as compelling. Toward the end, I could see Pizza Girl as a fresh take on one of my favorite movies, Taxi Driver (1976). Whereas cab companies have never been part of the fabric of L.A., pizza delivery has and is. It fit that a lonely soul desperately searching for some outlet for her desire would drive pizzas around town. Pizza Girl chooses a much different outlet than Travis Bickle, but they share the same angst.
Jean Kyoung Frazier was born (in 1993) and raised in Torrance, California.
[image]
In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
Come Closer, Sara Gran
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jan 19, 2021
Jan 22, 2021
Jul 14, 2020
Kindle Edition
006289059X
9780062890597
006289059X
4.31
855
Jun 30, 2020
Jun 30, 2020
really liked it
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for l
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for looks at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in culture. Next up is my introduction to Shayla Lawson. This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope caught my eye on Goodreads. I curate a good title almost as much as I do a book cover. Reading this book I felt like I was dating someone who's eighteen years younger than me. That might not be everyone's ideal and certainly isn't my preference. I was often lost here but also learned a lot and enjoyed my time with a talented writer.
My favorite essays were easily those in which Lawson recounts or dramatizes her experiences as the only black employee at the advertising agency, or the only black person on her Tinder date. These are great stories with antagonists, obstacles and perhaps lessons learned, certainly for me as a reader. My least favorite essays were dedicated to celebrities, playwright Ntozake Shange and musical artist SZA in particular. Having never heard of either and unable to see their play or listen to their music in the essay, I was as lost as I would be if someone from Gen Z were trying to describe a DJ or an app that came out two minutes ago to me.
When I was able to relate to what Lawson was interested in exploring, her writing took off for me.
-- From Tammy From HR:
Becky has not had the time to come up with any ideas. She has been too busy. You say you understand this, this project being a less-important part of her workflow (it's not) than the obviously rigorous schedule she's been maintaining (she hasn't). She grunts, knowing you have seen her empty Google Calendar. She blurts a half-assed idea off the top of her head. You think, that's a stupid idea, and agree it's a great idea, directing her toward the list of reasonably executable advertising campaigns you spent most of the night working up, looking for the thought most similar to hers. She says if you'd been in creative longer, you would know why your idea wouldn't work. That may be so. You ask her if the two of you can keep cracking at hers. You tighten up your smile face and pull out a new piece of blank paper, diving in to her piece of an idea with a preschool teacher's enthusiasm. You know you sound pedantic, but past Beckys have made it clear to you that Beckys like to be spoken to this way. It reminds them of The Help. You have spoken to Beckys other ways in offices and it was always resulted in You made Becky feel like she knows less than you do with her associate's degree and your graduate school education and her previous service customer service job at Macy's and your more senior position in this company and so you bob up and down on the pink carousel horse of Becky's preferred communication style, holding close to its spiral pole.
-- From No, My First Name Ain't Whoopi:
I've spent enough time living around European and Americans to know that white people, especially white men, tend to think that by pointing out black women in public, they're doing us a favor. Aside from Whoopi, I have been called Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Macy Gray. I have been called Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, Serena Williams, Kelly Rowland, and Gabrielle Union. I have been called "that black woman from Mr. Robot." I have been called a number of black women who look nothing like me or each other. And yet, a few weeks after my Realtor "Whoopi Goldberg" encounter, I was at the Red Bull Crashed Ice Valkenburg games and could identify my husband in a crowd of tall, twenty-something white men, from the back. How do I do it? With a little effort and self awareness, it is quite easy to recognize anybody. The reason why so many white men misidentify me is because they consider black women generic. One dark blob of a face.
-- From "Black Lives Matter" Yard Signs Matter:
Despite my having grown up in the south, Portland is the most racist place I have ever lived. This is because being anti-racist isn't about using politically correct buzzwords and giving lip-service to sensitive conservation topics. Being anti-racist is about constructing a landscape that is safe for dark people to inhabit. It is not about white people trying to prove they are "woke" by putting up yard signs. That is not even what "woke" means. "Woke" is a territory of open-eyed, unsuperficial, cultural awareness white people are nowhere close to occupying; they are not even in the neighborhood. But being anti-racist in this dangerous era is something they can do, by going out of their way to make non-white people feel safe.
-- From Diana Ross Is Major:
But casting a thirty-three-year-old in the role of Dorothy was not a foregone conclusion. At fifteen, Stephanie Mills was receiving stellar reviews in the Broadway musical and a lot of people couldn't see how a thirty-something like Ms. Ross could compete with the young ingenue for the role. One of those skeptics was Berry Gordy Jr., the head of Motown, whom Diana Ross had worked with ever since she was a teenager, the man who helped make her a star.
Up until then, Gordy had been one of Ms. Ross' biggest advocates; Diana Ross, Gordy's muse. A few years before The Wiz, the two had had huge success on the big screen with her Oscar-nominated film debut as Billie Holiday in the 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues. But Gordy did not see Diana Ross as Dorothy, he thought she was too old.
What Gordy didn't understand is that Diana Ross is from the future. Diana Ross couldn't have predicted this, but her portrayal of Dorothy as a single adult who can't seem to move out of her family's house is a pretty accurate forecast of black girl millennials. We've grown up in an era where the space between 18-35 has looked less like adulthood and much more like an extended adolescence. Many of us, like Diana/Dorothy, have had to move back home into our childhood bedrooms, as we take inventory of our college degrees, career goals, and the constantly rising cost of living, while we try to figure stuff out. When I watch The Wiz now, I see a twenty-something school teacher living with her aunt and uncle and understand this Dorothy so much better. She is much more relevant to use than any other Dorothy could be.
Lawson seems to emphasize her own evolution and observations she's made about being a black woman along the way, both from self-analysis and her analysis of art that impacted her. I couldn't readily follow her references or share her interest in a topic like Black Twitter, but the writing took me out of my suburban white television culture raised background and made me see how it would feel to be made invisible by that culture. ...more
My favorite essays were easily those in which Lawson recounts or dramatizes her experiences as the only black employee at the advertising agency, or the only black person on her Tinder date. These are great stories with antagonists, obstacles and perhaps lessons learned, certainly for me as a reader. My least favorite essays were dedicated to celebrities, playwright Ntozake Shange and musical artist SZA in particular. Having never heard of either and unable to see their play or listen to their music in the essay, I was as lost as I would be if someone from Gen Z were trying to describe a DJ or an app that came out two minutes ago to me.
When I was able to relate to what Lawson was interested in exploring, her writing took off for me.
-- From Tammy From HR:
Becky has not had the time to come up with any ideas. She has been too busy. You say you understand this, this project being a less-important part of her workflow (it's not) than the obviously rigorous schedule she's been maintaining (she hasn't). She grunts, knowing you have seen her empty Google Calendar. She blurts a half-assed idea off the top of her head. You think, that's a stupid idea, and agree it's a great idea, directing her toward the list of reasonably executable advertising campaigns you spent most of the night working up, looking for the thought most similar to hers. She says if you'd been in creative longer, you would know why your idea wouldn't work. That may be so. You ask her if the two of you can keep cracking at hers. You tighten up your smile face and pull out a new piece of blank paper, diving in to her piece of an idea with a preschool teacher's enthusiasm. You know you sound pedantic, but past Beckys have made it clear to you that Beckys like to be spoken to this way. It reminds them of The Help. You have spoken to Beckys other ways in offices and it was always resulted in You made Becky feel like she knows less than you do with her associate's degree and your graduate school education and her previous service customer service job at Macy's and your more senior position in this company and so you bob up and down on the pink carousel horse of Becky's preferred communication style, holding close to its spiral pole.
-- From No, My First Name Ain't Whoopi:
I've spent enough time living around European and Americans to know that white people, especially white men, tend to think that by pointing out black women in public, they're doing us a favor. Aside from Whoopi, I have been called Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Macy Gray. I have been called Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, Serena Williams, Kelly Rowland, and Gabrielle Union. I have been called "that black woman from Mr. Robot." I have been called a number of black women who look nothing like me or each other. And yet, a few weeks after my Realtor "Whoopi Goldberg" encounter, I was at the Red Bull Crashed Ice Valkenburg games and could identify my husband in a crowd of tall, twenty-something white men, from the back. How do I do it? With a little effort and self awareness, it is quite easy to recognize anybody. The reason why so many white men misidentify me is because they consider black women generic. One dark blob of a face.
-- From "Black Lives Matter" Yard Signs Matter:
Despite my having grown up in the south, Portland is the most racist place I have ever lived. This is because being anti-racist isn't about using politically correct buzzwords and giving lip-service to sensitive conservation topics. Being anti-racist is about constructing a landscape that is safe for dark people to inhabit. It is not about white people trying to prove they are "woke" by putting up yard signs. That is not even what "woke" means. "Woke" is a territory of open-eyed, unsuperficial, cultural awareness white people are nowhere close to occupying; they are not even in the neighborhood. But being anti-racist in this dangerous era is something they can do, by going out of their way to make non-white people feel safe.
-- From Diana Ross Is Major:
But casting a thirty-three-year-old in the role of Dorothy was not a foregone conclusion. At fifteen, Stephanie Mills was receiving stellar reviews in the Broadway musical and a lot of people couldn't see how a thirty-something like Ms. Ross could compete with the young ingenue for the role. One of those skeptics was Berry Gordy Jr., the head of Motown, whom Diana Ross had worked with ever since she was a teenager, the man who helped make her a star.
Up until then, Gordy had been one of Ms. Ross' biggest advocates; Diana Ross, Gordy's muse. A few years before The Wiz, the two had had huge success on the big screen with her Oscar-nominated film debut as Billie Holiday in the 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues. But Gordy did not see Diana Ross as Dorothy, he thought she was too old.
What Gordy didn't understand is that Diana Ross is from the future. Diana Ross couldn't have predicted this, but her portrayal of Dorothy as a single adult who can't seem to move out of her family's house is a pretty accurate forecast of black girl millennials. We've grown up in an era where the space between 18-35 has looked less like adulthood and much more like an extended adolescence. Many of us, like Diana/Dorothy, have had to move back home into our childhood bedrooms, as we take inventory of our college degrees, career goals, and the constantly rising cost of living, while we try to figure stuff out. When I watch The Wiz now, I see a twenty-something school teacher living with her aunt and uncle and understand this Dorothy so much better. She is much more relevant to use than any other Dorothy could be.
Lawson seems to emphasize her own evolution and observations she's made about being a black woman along the way, both from self-analysis and her analysis of art that impacted her. I couldn't readily follow her references or share her interest in a topic like Black Twitter, but the writing took me out of my suburban white television culture raised background and made me see how it would feel to be made invisible by that culture. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Aug 02, 2020
Aug 06, 2020
Jun 27, 2020
Paperback
1250194725
9781250194725
B07QPHS1YH
4.30
9,118
Apr 21, 2020
Apr 21, 2020
it was amazing
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but reading memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for view
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but reading memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for views at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in popular culture. Last on my list is Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran. Published in April 2020, I was surprised not only to discover that I'm exactly the same age as Tran and went through public school at the same time he did, but how much I related to his experiences growing up a second generation American, like several of my childhood friends, who were Indian or Vietnamese.
Punk rock, skateboarding and brushes with rednecks and the law do factor into Tran's account of his teenage years, but so does fleeing Saigon with his father and mother in 1975 before his first memory, growing up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania against his will and most impressively, books. Alfred Camus is the first author Tran discovers, his freshman year of high school, after a skateboarding buddy named Philip who perplexed him by valuing education suggests that if he likes The Cure he should read The Stranger. Laced through is Tran's desire to fit in, which goes beyond being a weird teenage boy and is embedded in his name, his ethnicity and his very different life at home.
There was tremendous amount about Tran's memories that I related to as he took me through his adolescence. Phuc covets wristbands like the cool kid in 2nd grade. Denied by his mother due to their cost, he makes his own out of a pair of socks, which not only gets him mocked at school but beaten so badly by his father that he can't sit. His teacher Mrs Boose pays a visit to his parents, which makes Phuc fear she'll be beaten too. His childhood was filled with such episodes, feeling like he didn't fit in out there or in here, always related through pop culture and trends that I recall from growing up in the 1980s.
Do kids know whether they're rich or poor? Do rich kids know that they grow up without any wants or needs? That they get everything they desire? What about poor kids?
I can tell you that I knew we were poor early on. I knew that I was wearing discarded clothing that someone had donated us. I knew what no meant when I asked for a two-dollar Han Solo action figure at the store--it meant we didn't have enough money for it. Like the violence I lived in, our poverty had no contest. Adults like to say that kids are resilient, and that's true, but it's because they don't know anything different. Kids are kids, and their ignorance allows them to accept things as they are. That's their difference.
Maybe if I read more non-fiction I wouldn't have been as surprised to see my thoughts or concerns reflected so accurately by an author. Lately, I've been wondering what it might be like to wander through the huge house I spent 1976-1979 in, the place of my very first memories, of when my mother and father were still together. Finding out I had to go to a place called school with people I didn't know, working on things I didn't want to, where people judged you because you didn't know how to tie your shoes yet, used words you weren't familiar with. Like, what the hell was that all about? And how did I survive?
I didn't pray for my father to be different or kinder or more loving, because I couldn't imagine him that way. He never spoke to us with affection or tenderness. His anger and his violence shaped how I saw him, and I wasn't sure he would even be my father without the anger and violence. But I didn't want him as he was--"as is" was the terms of sale for parents and children.
The wish for different parents fuels the archetypal fairy tales about evil stepmothers and children left in the woods. These fairy tales pivot around the wish that our parents, irascible and imperfect, aren't even our real parents, that a fairy godmother will reveal to us our true royal bloodline or magical lineage. Whether you're Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Cinderella, the fantasy is that the adults who are raising you aren't even your real parents, that your real parents are kinder and magical. The fantasy is that you have a destiny that is greater and more splendid than your current fate's contours.
On that car ride home, I dismissed that unbridled fantasy with stiff, sobering logic: if this was the worst that could transpire , I would be okay because I had known worse. My father hadn't beaten me or Lou in months--that was already an improvement, and I could live through the punishment of getting kicked out of the car. My past was worse than my present, and if my present indicated my future, I could live with that.
Tran pens a Pulitzer-worthy account of his first sexual experience, at age 14 with Charlotte, one of his school's two "vampire chicks," later to be known as goth girls when "goth" reached the popular vernacular. We should all have been so lucky with our first time. I loved Tran's account of trying to convince his mother that he wanted to go back-to-school shopping for high school at Goodwill, rather than the department stores where the family finally had money to spend on nice, new things. Highly recommend for those amazed that they survived childhood as a perpetual outsider. ...more
Punk rock, skateboarding and brushes with rednecks and the law do factor into Tran's account of his teenage years, but so does fleeing Saigon with his father and mother in 1975 before his first memory, growing up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania against his will and most impressively, books. Alfred Camus is the first author Tran discovers, his freshman year of high school, after a skateboarding buddy named Philip who perplexed him by valuing education suggests that if he likes The Cure he should read The Stranger. Laced through is Tran's desire to fit in, which goes beyond being a weird teenage boy and is embedded in his name, his ethnicity and his very different life at home.
There was tremendous amount about Tran's memories that I related to as he took me through his adolescence. Phuc covets wristbands like the cool kid in 2nd grade. Denied by his mother due to their cost, he makes his own out of a pair of socks, which not only gets him mocked at school but beaten so badly by his father that he can't sit. His teacher Mrs Boose pays a visit to his parents, which makes Phuc fear she'll be beaten too. His childhood was filled with such episodes, feeling like he didn't fit in out there or in here, always related through pop culture and trends that I recall from growing up in the 1980s.
Do kids know whether they're rich or poor? Do rich kids know that they grow up without any wants or needs? That they get everything they desire? What about poor kids?
I can tell you that I knew we were poor early on. I knew that I was wearing discarded clothing that someone had donated us. I knew what no meant when I asked for a two-dollar Han Solo action figure at the store--it meant we didn't have enough money for it. Like the violence I lived in, our poverty had no contest. Adults like to say that kids are resilient, and that's true, but it's because they don't know anything different. Kids are kids, and their ignorance allows them to accept things as they are. That's their difference.
Maybe if I read more non-fiction I wouldn't have been as surprised to see my thoughts or concerns reflected so accurately by an author. Lately, I've been wondering what it might be like to wander through the huge house I spent 1976-1979 in, the place of my very first memories, of when my mother and father were still together. Finding out I had to go to a place called school with people I didn't know, working on things I didn't want to, where people judged you because you didn't know how to tie your shoes yet, used words you weren't familiar with. Like, what the hell was that all about? And how did I survive?
I didn't pray for my father to be different or kinder or more loving, because I couldn't imagine him that way. He never spoke to us with affection or tenderness. His anger and his violence shaped how I saw him, and I wasn't sure he would even be my father without the anger and violence. But I didn't want him as he was--"as is" was the terms of sale for parents and children.
The wish for different parents fuels the archetypal fairy tales about evil stepmothers and children left in the woods. These fairy tales pivot around the wish that our parents, irascible and imperfect, aren't even our real parents, that a fairy godmother will reveal to us our true royal bloodline or magical lineage. Whether you're Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Cinderella, the fantasy is that the adults who are raising you aren't even your real parents, that your real parents are kinder and magical. The fantasy is that you have a destiny that is greater and more splendid than your current fate's contours.
On that car ride home, I dismissed that unbridled fantasy with stiff, sobering logic: if this was the worst that could transpire , I would be okay because I had known worse. My father hadn't beaten me or Lou in months--that was already an improvement, and I could live through the punishment of getting kicked out of the car. My past was worse than my present, and if my present indicated my future, I could live with that.
Tran pens a Pulitzer-worthy account of his first sexual experience, at age 14 with Charlotte, one of his school's two "vampire chicks," later to be known as goth girls when "goth" reached the popular vernacular. We should all have been so lucky with our first time. I loved Tran's account of trying to convince his mother that he wanted to go back-to-school shopping for high school at Goodwill, rather than the department stores where the family finally had money to spend on nice, new things. Highly recommend for those amazed that they survived childhood as a perpetual outsider. ...more
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Aug 13, 2020
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