A Caress of Twilight

A Caress of Twilight

Laurell K. Hamilton

Reading this series is sort of the literary equivalent of eating Annie’s boxed mac and cheese instead of the neon orange powdered stuff, or peanut butter Puffins instead of Cocoa Puffs. 

I’m perfectly aware that if you didn’t have hippie parents, that comparison means nothing.  You’ve probably never heard of Annie’s or Puffins.  I don’t so much care…I did have hippie parents, and I ate homemade yogurt and unsweetened oatmeal.  If I had to eat it, you can handle hearing about it.

My point it…it’s literary junk food.  It may have some redeeming qualities, but it’s junk food nonetheless.  Whatever.  I happen to like Annie’s mac and cheese and peanut butter Puffins.

I also like this series, for one big reason: the open, structured, functional polyamory of the Unseelie sidhe culture.

It’s very different from the open, structured, functional orgy culture found in Anne Rice’s work and in so many other fantasy-genre authors.  (Not that I’m opposed to functional orgies.  Literary porn is the bestest porn ever).  Hamilton’s work reads like it comes from a place of knowing how polyamory works in the real world.  It’s not a two guys for every girl kind of thing, it’s a tonight is my night, tomorrow is your night, and we will deal with the rest of it as it comes.

It’s unusual that fiction involving polyamory addresses jealousy.  And it’s unusual that it’s unusual, because that’s a cornerstone issue in those relationships.  “I tried to be hurt, jealous or even miffed that he might have been playing slap and tickle with Marie, and I just wasn’t.  Maybe it was because I was sleeping with the other men.  Maybe to be truly jealous you have to have some pretense of monogamy.  I didn’t know why, but it simply didn’t bother me.”

The book occasionally brushes past group sex, which it does as truthfully as possible, given that the main character, Meredith, is literally a faerie princess.  It’s not cop-out, bullshit two-on-one masquerading as group that some people cling to.  (Yeah, boys, that’s directed squarely at you.  If you want the girl+girl(s) to play in a girl+girl+guy scenario, you have to be willing to help out with the other guy when the ratios are reversed.)  I love this part, simply because the men are interacting with each other: “Doyle moved from beside me to put his back to Rhys…As if they’d arranged it, Rhys rose from the pillows to his knees and showed clearly that he was nude.  He rolled Doyle’s long braid in his arms until he came to the end and began to undo the ribbon that bound it…Rhys was working Doyle’s hair free of the braid.  I’d seen Doyle with his hair free of that braid only once.  Only once had it been like some dark living cloak to shroud his body.”  

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Tucker Max

This book is alternately horrible and hysterical, and it often turns on a dime between the two.  Tucker Max is, straight up, an asshole.  Much of the book serves to illustrate this.  I’m fairly sure that the suggestion to read this book was made sarcastically, since I’m a proud femmenist…yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose, the image of modern feminists is decidedly butch and I am most decidedly femme…and I don’t like douchebags.  (My last zillion boyfriends notwithstanding, I don’t like them.)  The image of Holden Caulfield just popped into my brain, with his entitled jackassery.  (I’m possibly the only English literature snob in existence who can’t stand Catcher in the Rye.  I’ve tried many times, and I can’t get through it.  It’s excruciating to read.)  The girl-power side of me didn’t have much of a problem with this book, which I’ll explain shortly. 

I have nothing against assholes as long as they’re honest about it.  Quite a few of the earlier stories in this collection deal with the consequences of not being honest about your intentions, and he’s self-aware enough to realize that those consequences were predictable outcomes of his behavior.  Telling a girl “I love you” when you just want a fuck buddy is a dickish thing to do, and he openly admits that it contributed to being stalked by girls who bought the line and now love him back. 

I’ll admit that I hate the use of the words “slut” and “whore” and how often they appear.  It’s they way that he describes the girls who act like he does, and the double standard makes me want to spit.  On him.  A lot.

One of my favorite stories is about a girl who comes over and gives him a blowjob before going on a date with another guy, and he realizes he’s probably been the second guy at some point.  He’s completely losing his shit over girls who act like he does, and it makes me happy.  (Another one of my favorite stories is about someone telling him that he’s probably slept with a post-op transsexual at least once.  I like when people get slapped in the face with their own closed-mindedness). 

This passage struck me as absolute truth, albeit in a “he stumbled across it, idiot-savantly” kind of way: “Ladies, let me give you some advice.  You can throw all your stupid fucking chick-lit, self-help, why-doesn’t-he-love-me books out, because this is all you need to know: Men will treat you the way you let them.  There is no such thing as ‘deserving’ respect; you get what you demand from people.”  This is a zillion percent gospel truth, and it was missing from a lot of 2^nd-wave feminist thought.  Having equal capability with men means that we should be held to the same standards as men.  Assuming that women “deserve” some extra measure of anything suggests that we’re frail or delicate or easily broken.  Fuck that.  He says later, “…if you demand respect, he will either respect you or he won’t associate with you.  It really is that simple.”  Also a zillion percent true, and something we all probably needed to hear in high school.  And college.  And last week. 

Quite randomly, there were quotes that convinced me that he and I know the same people:

“If you EVER speak ill of the McGriddle again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth.”  (I know two people who talk like this.  It’s terrifying when the two of them are in the same room.)

I have wanted to say this to people: “It stops talking to its intellectual superior or it gets the hose.”

And finally, I would put this bumper sticker on my car: “The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the vagina is stronger than both.”

Love and the Eye

Love and the Eye

Laura Newburn

I typically don’t like narrative poetry.  I don’t “get” it, in an emotional, visceral sense.  This really is just personal prejudice, a function of my OCD that says things need to be observed, analyzed, broken down and then consumed in order to understand them.  I look for detail, I want to know what the world smells like, tastes like, before I feel like I can enter it.  (To be fair, I know a few narrative poets who can capture that sense of place, but not many). 

I read through Love and the Eye quickly, but mostly because I didn’t linger in the world.  Newbern’s writing often felt myopic, like she was looking at an object or a scene in a dark room without context.  In Apartment Elegy, “A table, a blue / glass pitcher. Flat // black of the table, / forget. The roundest // of blues, forgive. / Then a small rain; // then silence, silence / like earthenware.”  I follow her connection between the black of the table and the verb “forget,” and also the connection between the blue curve of the pitcher and the verb “forgive,” but those connections are intellectual rather than emotional. 

Similarly, in “Motel, I have difficulty emotionally attaching to the descriptions: “Flat motel bed. / Flat brown / expanse. Car // outside and yet / another new life / doing its tanta- // lizing dance on the / ceiling.”  In this case, “flat” doesn’t seem expansive to me, in the way that the Texas landscape is flat; it seems small, insignificant, defeated.  I understand it, but I don’t know whether I care.

However, I find her line and stanza breaks delicious.  It’s hard to see the impact of the stanza break between “tanta-“ and “lizing” in the paragraph above, so here’s how it appears on the page:

“outside and yet

another new life

doing its tanta-

lizing dance on the

ceiling.”

The break in the middle of the word becomes onomatopoeic; the word sounds the way it means.  (“Pop” and “squish” are textbook examples, when you say them, you feel what they mean.  I learned that from Reading Rainbow when I was like 5.  PBS fucking rocks!)  “Tantalizing” evokes a sense of eager anticipation, an intake of breath, which is exactly what the stanza break forces you to do. 

I’ve always connected very short lines with imagistic poetry; I didn’t connect short lines with narrative work.  In the poem Death, Fifth Avenue, her use of short lines, often hanging at the end, serve the motion of the story in a very interesting way: “I saw two old women / moving through time / through the huge // lobby of the building / I work in, through / the gold doors too / heavy to ever truly / open, or close. They were moving” Leaving “through” to hang at the end of the line pauses the reader for a split second on that action, reinforcing the transitory feeling of moving from one place to the next. 

Like any other poetry reader, I am a collector of lines I love.  I’m simultaneously jealous and greedy; I want to steal the lines and live inside them.  My favorite lines in this collection appear in Little Bird: “What is a child but dark. / What is a child, if not a pocket of dark.” 

52 Books

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

…Groucho Marx

I was one of those little girls who consumed books like air.  I once decided I wanted to read every book in my elementary school library; I didn’t finish, but I made a sizable dent.  I used to spend my birthdays at Changing Hands…this amazing indie bookstore in Tempe…back when it was on Mill and you really could get lost in the stacks. 

I used to literally walk around with my nose in a book and, given that we’re now afraid to let kids leave the house for fear of UV rays, strangers with vans and candy, and death by lack-of-elbow -pads, I was probably one of the last kids every told to go outside and play, goddammit!  (Okay, maybe my mom didn’t say the last part, but I bet she wanted to). 

I put inappropriate books in different jackets.  I’d find where my parents hid my books so I could sneak them back when I was finished reading them. 

Books were such a huge part of my life, but I haven’t read as much lately and I hate that.  Because I’m about to turn 30 and I haven’t yet turned into the person I want to be when I grow up, and because I still have an irrational and quite possibly unhealthy love for deadlines and homework, I’m giving myself an assignment.

One year.  52 new books. 

I want to read them, then discuss them.  And by discuss, I mean say something that may or may not be at all related to the book.  I’m fairly associative and tangential when writing in my own voice.  Non-linear, even.  I’ve decided that, while writing This Sucks in crayon on a napkin does not constitute a book review, writing it and publishing it in my own little corner of the digital ‘verse does. 

If I had a list of 52 books in mind that I wanted to read, I’m hoping I would’ve read them already.  I don’t, so I’m asking my well-educated and literate friends to help.  (If I have any undereducated, illiterate friends, they’re are probably not reading this anyway.  I have faith in my friend group…we’re all smart-as-hell-type people).  So…please give me suggestions!  I’ll add to my list along the way, but I’d really love help filling out my list. 

My rules and requests:

*The list is more of a suggestion, kind of the way I used to think about syllabi for classes I didn’t really want to take.  They’re not numbered in anything resembling a relevant order.

*I want to read new books I’ve never read before.  Books I pretended to read in college but didn’t actually read…like Moby Dick…count as new.

*I’m not reading Moby Dick.    

*I prefer fiction to non, although I’m also partial to biography.

*I love old school, Bradbury-style sci-fi, but have found that most modern sci-fi writers spend more time defining their worlds than playing in them.

*I love magical realism.  Love love love it.  Neil Gaiman, Francesca Lia Block, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

*I prefer my fantasy in the J.K. Rowling, modern magic vein, not so much with the swords and the dragons.

*Did I mention I love Neil Gaiman?  I also love John Steinbeck, but I’ve read almost everything from both of them.

And here’s the list…

1. The Volcano, Norman Dubie
2. Some Nights No Cars At All, Josh Rathkamp
3. Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
4. Love and the Eye, Laura Newbern
5. A Caress of Twilight, Laurell K. Hamilton
6. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
7. Seduced by Moonlight, Laurell K. Hamilton
8. Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
9. The Prophet, Kalil Gibran
10. I Heard God Laughing, Hafiz
11. Norse Code
12. The Doomsday Book
13. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max
14. Fault Lines, Nancy Huston
15. The Confession, John Grisham
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Manly

So it's been kind of a theme around here lately, me trying to figure out what manly means to me. It's gone along with me trying to figure out what it means to be feminine, because I know that running around like a crazy person and making myself sick isn't what being a woman is supposed to be about, no matter how much the 80s feminist superwomen I was raised by tried to convince me it was.

Here's one of the things that I am very clear on...the ability to make decisions reads as very manly to me. I don't want a puppy dog to follow me around, carrying my purse. "Whatever you want to do" should really never come out of a guy's mouth. It's a a trick to find out what I want to do and then tell me to do exactly that, but it's one of the hottest things that a guy can do.

I'm a bit of a control enthusiast, in the sense that George Lucas is probably a bit of a control enthusiast. I have more than enough responsibility to be getting on with. I'm usually running scared, a half second ahead of things blowing up, but I get my shit done. My job gets done, my contracts get fulfilled, my mortgage gets paid. Always. But after that, I have zero desire to make another freaking decision. I'd rather kick a puppy than tell another guy what to do. I'm not your friggin mommy, and I don't want to be.

Pick the movie. Plan the restaurant. Choose my outfit. If you're confident enough to go for it, order me dinner. Let me relax and not have to do everything. Lesson one in being manly around me.

Tired

I'm freaking tired. 

Exhausted, actually. To the point where I'm craving sleep the way I crave chocolate. Did you know that your body shivers, it trembles, when it is asking for sleep? It gets colder than anything, and your teeth chatter. 

Bristol has always been a revelation place for me. I show up broken and it fixes me. Two years in a row, I spent time there when I was unable to function, and while I was there I broke through into somewhere better. This has not yet been the case this year.

This year, I have things that I know I need to learn that I am refusing to. My lesson is supposed to be to let myself rest. When I've done that, things have gotten better. Some people have not been able to understand this, and a smaller number of people have tried to make me feel like shit when I draw my lines, however shaky they may be. It makes me boring, or selfish, or flat-out a bad friend. Those people have never worked 80 hours, 7 days a week, for 6 weeks in a row. What I need to remember is that it's not about the numbers. It's not about the fact that I have a full-time job and, at the moment, an equally full-time small business. I get stuck on the justifications and miss the point. 

The point is that I'm tired. That's really and truly the point. I wish I were equipped to give everyone what they need, without taking things away from myself, but it doesn't work that way. I want what I want, and what I want is a quiet room with a couch and a stack of movies. I need to find that before the quiet room becomes a padded room. When I was running around trying to tend to everyone else's needs, that padded room wasn't far off. 

I am working on knowing that I am important enough to put my needs first. Some days, I know that more than other days. At this point, it's still intellectual knowledge, not bone-and-breath knowing that I am important. I'll be happier when it gets to that point. 

MonoBoys

I always forget that the boys in Wisco are different from the boys everywhere else. I'm sure that someone will jump down my throat for saying this...like I haven't met enough midwestern boys or something...but they're different. Special different. They're wholesomer. More traditional. They give off a more monogamous vibe. Something about them says traditional, but not in a retro, ironic way like my western boys. In a more serious, no-bullshit way that confuses me. 


Opie's like that. He really actually wants a minivan and a dog, a white picket fence and someone making him dinner. It's why I knew after the first date that we weren't going to end up together. (Why we dated for another 9 months after that is a different story. A much dumber story). 


These boy scouts make me feel evil, and guilty, like I'm going to break them. I feel like a cat playing catch-and-release with a mouse. I can usually tell pretty quickly if I'm talking to a MonoBoy, but I never know when I should let him go. And let him go isn't even the right phrase to use, because they never believe me when I tell them I'm not what they want. It's more that I should push him out of the way and tell him to run for it. I should drive them out to the desert blindfolded so that they can't follow when I leave. 


So if a guy is looking at me like I'm potential GF material...which is laughable on many, many levels...and I'm looking at him like he's a snack, what am I supposed to do? When am I supposed to do it? Dropping hints and being passive-aggressive never works, and usually results in me texting Damaged to ask him to ghost-write my breakup email. (That's a fucked-up sentence right there, but it is what happens). I don't want to give up being faire flirty, but I don't want puppy dogs trying to follow me home anymore, either. It hurts too much, which possibly proves that I have a little bit of a soul left in there after all. I need a way to say this is just pretend, a way to say you're cute, but you still live in the pet store.