Girl Detective

It took me a little while to finally meet Nick Drake’s song “Pink Moon” properly. Our relationship started with a case of mistaken identity.

Many years ago, there was a Volkswagen commercial that had a song I really liked. The next time I was CD shopping (something my husband and I used to do, in those Double Income No Kid days) I saw a CD with a starry blue cover and a sticker that said it contained music featured in a Volkswagen commercial.

I listened to the CD on the ride home, but was disappointed. Nothing on this new Hooverphonic CD sounded as good as the song I remembered. Maybe I just need to listen to it more, I thought. Listening more made things worse. The discrepancy between the haunting melody in my memory and that album only grew. What a whiny, boring album, I thought. Alas, my husband really liked it, and played it often. To this day the opening moans of that album send me lunging for the off button.

Some months later, knocked up with my first child and browsing my comic shop, I heard the strains of THAT song. The original song. The song I wanted. The song I thought I’d found in Hooverphonic, but had not. I rushed to the counter.

“Who sings this song?” I demanded.

My friend the Big Brain looked at me as if he were sorry that I did not know the answer. He looked at me a lot like that back then because I didn’t know much about music or film. He had good recommendations for me in both areas that were the building blocks of some of my favorites today. Interestingly, though, he was less helpful with comics advice. Except for Hicksville. And Goodbye Chunky Rice.

“It’s Nick Drake. He’s dead.”

“Can I borrow it?”

Not only did he let me borrow it, he let me borrow the other CDs that came in the really cool limited set he had. I took them home and listened to them over and over. Unlike with Hooverphonic, repeat listening only endeared them to me more. Months later, as I was packing my pregnancy bag for the hospital, those CDs were one of the first things in the bag. I imagined giving birth listening to the calming strains of poor-dead Nick Drake’s voice. And then I put a whole bunch more stupid sh1t in the bag, like the video of Pride and Prejudice, about twenty other CDs, makeup, makeup remover that I’d made a special trip to the store to buy a travel size of, and a pretty nightgown.

Out of all that, the only useful item was the Pink Moon cd. Nothing went according to how I imagined it. The classes said that water breaking first was a dramatic fib perpetuated by Hollywood. My water broke first. At midnight. After I’d just fallen asleep after an exhausting day. I spent the next twelve hours having irregular contractions that made me throw up anything I put in my mouth. Even melted ice cubes came back up. Finally the hospital grudgingly agreed it was time for me to come in. I was still leaking a little, so we put a black trashbag over the back seat of the car. I got in, but had a hard time sitting upright. My husband knew that Pink Moon made me feel better, so he put that in. After the song finished he asked if I wanted to listen to something else.

“Pink Moon!” I called out, desperate, like it was a life raft I was hanging onto. “Pink Moon!”

The bat$hit crazy edge to my voice was in direct contrast to the soothing sound of the song. My husband wisely snatched his hand away from the controls, letting the CD play on.

Long story short: long labor with healthy baby boy. Gave up playing music after the first couple Nick Drake ones. Figured out it was ridiculous to think that I’d be in labor and up for a video, as if I were home, sick in bed. Never wore the nightgown. If I was going to gush messily all over the place, I was happy to do it in hospital supply. Touched neither the makeup or the remover and was suitably embarrassed for having thought I might.

Those Nick Drake cds, especially Pink Moon, were about the only useful thing I took to the hospital. Every time I hear Pink Moon on the radio, I hear my own voice in my head, screech-moaning, “Pink Moon! Pink Moon!” in a violent tone that does not match the song at all. It’s not a bad memory, though, in fact it makes me laugh.

With the annoying announcement that Google Reader is going away, I’m trying to break up with it before it breaks up with me. I’ve whittled my list of “must-read” feeds to a baker’s dozen. We’ll see if this helps with my time management and distraction issues as I move closer to the timesucks of a big writing deadline and a school fundraiser that I’m helping with.

My husband and I have been buying far too many Blu rays. Shameful, really. There’s no way we can watch them as fast as we buy them. Like books, our appetite exceeds our capacity.

I lamented that we’d had some duds after doing an enjoyable run of B movies. Then Admission disappointed. Things do seem to be on the upswing, though.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Directed by a woman, with a strong woman main character. Too long, but worthwhile.

Blood Simple. The Coen Brothers first movie, and still just so, so good. Part of the Coen Bros Blu ray set I got my husband for his birthday.

Raising Arizona. No sophomore slump for the Coen Brothers here. Interestingly, I’d never had the white hot love for this movie that others did, but I thoroughly enjoyed it this time. “Son, you’ve got a panty on your head.” Hilarious, yet touching.

Harry Potter 5 The Order of the Phoenix. With the boys. Great work by Imelda Taunton and fun to see the kids grow up with each movie. A good enough adaptation of a too-long book.

Looper. Hard to follow because of its timey-wimey wibbly wobbly-ness. A decent action movie with some great bits and ideas, and a surprise big plot twist toward the end. Joseph Gordon Levitt is great per usual, Bruce Willis is good as a bad guy, Emily Blunt’s American accept is faultless. Some nice nods to Terminator, but that’s still the gold standard of time travel action flicks. My expectations were too high, and I found the movie’s take on time travel hard to follow–it chooses alternate timelines rather than a linear one.

Nobody Else but You. French noir murder mystery. An enjoyable and visually impressive riff on the Marilyn myth.

The men of Bravo are not cold. It’s a chilly and windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar. Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby, where overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampolined right down the middle of his hangover. (1)

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books. Though it went down early, the fans of it were ardent enough to make me still want to read it. And oh, I loved this book.

Billy Lynn is one of a handful of soldiers who survived a brutal and famous skirmish in Iraq. They’re brought back to America for a “victory” tour, which ends with the Thanksgiving football game just before they’re supposed to ship back out.

Billy is such a sympathetic narrator, and one who skewers the ironies of war and yet is somehow compassionate. One of the last war books I read I can barely remember. This, though, is going to stay with me.

I am one of the few people who didn’t love Wolf Hall. I found the story boring and the use of ambiguous ‘he’ pronouns annoying. Does this reaction make me a philistine? Perhaps. So I was understandably reluctant to approach the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Trusted friends like Amy and Kate assured me it was better than the original. Nonetheless, I put it off over all the other Tournament of Books contenders that I wanted to read. Left it for dead last.

I liked the opening. There’s some gorgeous writing. Henry the VIII’s court should be fascinating. Yet I found this book far too easy to put down. I told myself I’d give it 50 pages, yet when I got to 45, I couldn’t even see the point of forcing down those last five pages. It was non-compelling for me, and still with deliberately awkward use of ‘he.’ I read so many ToB books this year that I just loved and raced through; this one left me cold. I returned it unread, and am on to the next book. Life’s too short.

I finished Bleak House, y’all! Thanks mostly to my friend Amy at New Century Reading, who did a readalong where we did one of the serialized chunks a week, so it took us 20 weeks. I really enjoyed having a longer reading project alongside the books I read one at a time, and looked forward to reading my 40 or so pages of Bleak House every week on Sunday. I think I’m going to try to keep up the habit of one big reading project for books that I continually don’t feel I have the gumption to finish in one sitting. I’ll be doing Brothers Karamazov this summer with one of my book groups, but some other candidates are the short story collections of Alice Munro and Angela Carter, or other Dickens books.

Bleak House is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Sprawling with both funny and sad parts, a huge cast of characters (rather too many of whom die, in my opinion, yet it IS called Bleak House, so not like I wasn’t warned). Esther Summerson is our main character, a young woman told since she was young that she’s tainted with the sin of her illegitimate birth. At first, Esther seems too kind, too nice, but she becomes more complex and interesting over the course of the book, especially as we’re slowly shown that she’s not exactly a reliable narrator.

This book has something for everyone. Romance, mystery, tragedy, lost love, murder, humor, social commentary and I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I had only a few minor concerns by the end–the over-romantic portrait of the domestic angel accompanied strangely by the condescension of others for Esther in this role, and the lonely end for one of my favorite characters, Mr. George.

Fair warning: do NOT read a character list as you go, or follow links. Spoilers abound, and there are some good ones in here.

I thought Building Stories by Chris Ware was going to be one of the books I skipped in this year’s Tournament of Books. I don’t care for Ware’s precise and ultra-iconic art style, and no matter how many times I tried to read Jimmy Corrigan, I couldn’t get into it. Ware seemed like one of those chilly, distant writers who disdain their subjects. Also, it costs $50 retail. It comes shrink wrapped, and so couldn’t be tried before the buy. When I did finally ask about it at my comic shop, they were out of stock and it was between printings. But then trusted friends like Amy and Kate said it was worthwhile, and I was in a socialist bookstore where they had it back in stock, so I took the leap.

There are 14 elements in the box, in book, strip, newspaper, and other forms. The main character is perhaps a young woman, since most of the stories center on her and her life from childhood to old age. But the conceit is that the brownstone building she lives in as a young woman tells some of the stories, so we also see into the lives of others in the building, and even into some of the local bees. It’s clever and engaging, and its also spookily insightful at times, with the main character sometimes saying things that are true but so ugly that most don’t even write them into journals. There were complex interesting women in this story and their lives were treated with compassion and respect. So while Ware’s style is chilly and distant, his storytelling was not.

Many of the commenters at the ToB advised against ending with the Bee book (NB not the Bee newspaper, but the book; they’re different.) That was good advice. I read it early, and found it amusing. Some readers speculated that there is an advised order of reading printed on the back of the box. I don’t think this is so–there’s a diagram showing where such items appear in the brownstone, but no order, which I think is the point. You can peek into and slip out of these lives, the stories go back and forward in time, there’s no exact beginning and end.

I would have preferred if the contents of the stories would have match the form of the object–like one of the old woman’s letters, the journal of the young woman, a children’s book that told the bee story. As it was, with its seemingly random pairing of story and object, this felt more to me like a “look at me, look at me, look at me now!” trick. And it IS worth looking at, and spending time with. But I was fatigued as I approached the end, and was glad to be done with it. My eyes were burning and tired from the tiny type, even though I have bifocals AND used a magnifying glass. (which would have been a useful addition to the box.) The $50 price tag is steep for a book, though perhaps just a fraction of what such an art object is worth. It does smack of white elitism to me. One of the judges enraged the commenters by belittling the work, but I did like this:

its elaborate packaging allows the thing to double as an oversized merit badge of taste and sensitivity to be displayed on the coffee tables of the McSweeney’s set.

Worthwhile, and I own it, so anyone who wants to borrow it can.

A selection for this year’s Tournament of Books, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was so hard to find for free/cheap that I chose to rent it from the library for $.25 a day. Even then it was hard to find a rental copy. But once started, it sucked me in and pulled me along like a riptide till I closed the book, very satisfied.

It’s told in alternating viewpoints and alternating times, yet was easy to follow. There’s a film exec, his young assistant, an aspiring screenwriter, an old Italian man who met a movie star in his youth, and that’s just in the beginning. This is a romance, Hollywood history, and mystery. The relationship between the young woman and the movie exec reminded me a great deal of Sasha and Benny in A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s well written escapism. Loved it. Not as much as Orphan Master’s Son, but still, a lot.

I’m 45. I wondered recently if because my Granny is almost 99, if this didn’t make me less than middle aged. Alas, it was a joke, and I’m recently butting up against trying to dress my aging self. I’m thinking wistfully of the time my yoga instructor said to me, “Your abs look aMAzing!”

To which I responded, “Not for long, I’m 6 weeks pregnant.” And that was the last we saw of my flat belly, though I suppose I should take some consolation that it went out at the top of its game.

Now, though, it’s a definite bulge, and my current challenge is that I can’t find a clothing layer that covers both my belly and my boobs. If it’s long enough at the bottom, it’s plunging, often below the edge of my bra at the top. If it covers my (admittedly scanty) cleavage (aka Cleave-land) then it hits about my belly button.

So I’m desperately seeking something–a tank, a camisole–that can meet both needs. I have one Bordeaux top that a friend gave me that does pretty well, though new ones are price-y (or spendy as we say here in MN) at $55. I picked up some Alfani camis (no longer available on their site) from the Macy’s sale rack shopping with my sister last week.

I also ordered a couple things online, and was reminded of the problem with online purchases–easy to buy, hard to return. So I think I’m back to shopping in person. And yet, shopping isn’t exactly the best use of my time. Sigh.

But my prey is elusive, and I suspect this is EXACTLY the kind of silly quest that distracts me from things I really should be doing, like writing, some volunteer work at the boys’ school, exercising, and cleaning house. I do so love silly quests.

I really, really wanted to like Admission, the new movie with Tina Fey, Paul Rudd and directed by Paul Weitze, who did About a Boy.

But it’s just not very good. I was glad I saw it for free. Even matinee prices would be too much. Trite, uninvolving. A huge waste of huge talents.

A.M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven May We Be Forgiven was a selection in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. Though friends have recommended Home’s books to me over the years, I hadn’t gotten around to reading her. But when I glanced at reviews, they seemed to say, eh, kinda bugged me, not her best. So as March went on, and as time to “catch up” on Tourney books became slight, I wondered if I should even bother with this 480-page tome. But since kind friend Amy lent it to me, a book in hand was better than one I’d have to pay to rent from the library, so I started it anyway. Then, I couldn’t put it down.

It’s told in short spurts with many breaks; this helps make a book more devour-able to me. I have two little boys and often have to put down my book to yell at them to stop fighting. Or, more rarely, compliment them on how well they’re playing together/practicing piano, doing homework, etc. The main character is Harold, whose bully of a younger brother, George (e.g., he insists he’s the older brother) gets in a good amount of legal trouble, is institutionalized, then gets in A GREAT DEAL of legal trouble, and Harold is left to take care of the house, kids, pets, and anything else that comes along. And a great deal comes along.

From the beginning, the excessive nature of George’s actions gave the novel a heightened feeling of reality that read to me as farce, not realism. That’s why I have trouble with the critiques of the novel that say it’s unrealistic. I think the author was pretty clear that it’s supposed to be hyper-real and weird. Beyond that, though, it’s funny while also being touching, and I found it just plain intriguing. Harry is a Nixon scholar who amused by by continuing to insist that “the story keeps unfolding.” I wanted to know what happened to these characters, and I was happy when some of them got their stuff together, including Harry.

However, it is hard to ignore the presence of a magical Negro, the white male savior, and the mythical man that every woman wants to sleep with. Was Homes using these cliches with irony? I did find it interesting that this was what a commenter in the ToB identified as a White Male EFF Up novel (WMFU), but is written by a woman, unlike other WMFU stories I can think of, like This is Where I Leave You, High Fidelity, Harry Revised, and more.

Edited to add: Also, what was with all the scat stuff? Nearly every character had an incident of uncontrollable diarrhea at some point. I wondered if this was a graphic allusion to a Jewish myth that claims the universe is something that God shat out, and our job as people in it is to create beauty in the midst of messy broken-ness.

The book didn’t make it far in the Tourney. It beat Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk but went down to Building Stories (which I’m reading, or rather, squinting at, now). Apparently I’m the only person who sort of loved it, but now I’m excited to go read other books by Homes. And lucky me, there are a lot of them.

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is the lovely story of Father Jean Marie Latour in the mid 1800’s going to New Mexico and the western territory. The book is told more in impressionistic standalone stories than in chapters. I had to re-read passages sometimes for them to “stick”.

Father Jean and his right-hand man Father Joseph minister to an ever-increasing territory. One of the surprises to me was how much and often these characters traveled. Back and forth to France and all across the west from Colorado to Mexico?

Joseph was more vibrant to me than Jean, so it seemed odd he was the secondary character. In its mix of Catholicism and Native American culture, I was often reminded of one of my favorite books, Louise Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse. Father Jean was lovely, but he’s no Father Damien. But then, what character possibly could be?

Reading this is part of my auto-didactic, self edu-ma-cating project. I don’t think I’ve ever read Cather before. Now I’ve got My Antonia and O, Pioneers on my radar. Filling in the gaps of my reading education is like spitting in the ocean, but oh, I do love it.

Oh, I am filled with anticipatory geek joy. There is a Kickstarter campaign for a Veronica Mars movie!

I know there are Veronica Mars fans out there. Rob Thomas couldn’t get his project greenlit the traditional way, so he’s doing a kickstarter, with potential prizes. You only pay if the goal is reached and the movie will be made.

My husband and I pledged this morning. Please consider doing so. I’d so love to see this cast reunited!

I’m obsessing nerdishly over what books from the Tournament of Books to read and which to skip. Here are the ones I haven’t read but am interested in:

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
May We Be Forgiven
Bring Up the Bodies
Beautiful Ruins

Might read sometime but not now: Dear Life, Building Stories,

Probably (or in the case of the Heti, mos. def.) not: Yellow Birds, Fobbit, How Should a Person Be, Ivyland

So, what should I read next? I was leaning to Beautiful Ruins, but it’s hard to lay hands on, and Bring Up the Bodies just came in for me, but I didn’t really care for Wolf Hall. And Billy Lynn just got eliminated, and doesn’t sound like a zombie contender.

So, what next: Bring Up Bodies, Beautiful Ruins or May We Be Forgiven?

Any on the maybe or no list that I should reconsider?

I was sort of afraid to read Gone Girl. Except for one or two dissenting voices, all the reviews I’d read, and all the things I’d heard from friends were “It’s great!” I wanted to read it, sure, but had not yet got around to it, and the longer it went on, the more the hype filled me with dread. Then when it was chosen as a contender for this year’s Tournament of Books, and when it went on to be the odds-on favorite (now I can’t find the betting site, but it’s out there somewhere), I knew it was time. Of course, by this time, the library list was a gazillion people long. (OK, exaggerating a bit. Only 1000+). Then my kind husband got it for me for my birthday, and it was finally TIME. Yippee, I thought, time for a thumping good read! (with just a whisper of “I hope” after that.)

Then I began to read, and as you may know, it’s structured in alternating points of view between the husband and his missing wife. And their marriage is a train wreck, and as the chapters go on I can’t believe their marriage lasted this long, and reading about it is sort of entertaining, but also painful, and I couldn’t really be said to be enjoying myself.

Stay with it, said friends when I griped on Facebook. Then on page 219, when the book goes into its second section, things changed up. I knew something wacky was going on in those first 200 pages, but not exactly what, and then things shift, and at that point, I may have resented breathing because it interfered with me finding out how this author was going to pull off the end of the book. And she did, which is saying a lot, because this is one whacked-out book.

So to sum up (feeling v. pleased with self at lack of spoilers): first half was like a car wreck–messy, ugly but rather fascinating. Second half was like going downhill on a roller coaster. Psychological characterizations were very good–we knew why these characters behaved in certain ways. Plot was very good, especially in the 2nd half. So it reminded me of the best parts of the Tana French novels (the psyche stuff) combined with the best part of Laura Lippmann’s books (un-put-downable).

That said, I’m not sure I’d recommend it far and wide. Not everyone wants to spend time with a psychopath. Both The Fault in Our Stars and Where’d You Go, Bernadette have a wider appeal, I think. Not sure I’d pick it for the ToB win, either. I continue to hope The Orphan Master’s Son goes all the way. BUT, entertaining as all get out and well executed on many levels, and with intriguing questions about male/female dynamics. So, highly recommended.

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. She’s a local writer, I’ve admired and enjoyed the other books I’ve read by her (particularly The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse). It won the National Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award. And it’s a contender for the Morning News Tournament of Books. Was there any way I wouldn’t read it? Nope.

As with most of her novels, this one is set on the reservation in North Dakota. It has both new characters and ones from previous books. Unlike most of her other books, it is narrated only from the point of view of one character, 13yo Joe, though told from an adult vantage point. In this way and many others, it reminded me a great deal of the film Stand by Me. It’s a coming of age novel, centering on a group of four boys, one who comes from a happy but injured family, another who is good hearted by bad reputed.

Joe’s world is upended when his mother is attacked, and what follows is something of a conventional mystery–who did it and why?–but also has the added element of Law and Order of how the crime is discovered and prosecuted (or not).

I found Joe and his friends engaging main characters, I was delighted to hear about Father Damien and Nanapush again. I was pulled along by the story, and felt for the surrounding characters of Joe’s parents, his uncle’s girlfriend Sonja, and Linda Wishkob.

What underlies this book, and elevates it in my opinion, is its foundation of social justice, and the way it highlights how powerless women on a reservation are in the face of certain crimes. Erdrich wrote an op-ed on this in the New York Times, and the recently signed Violence Against Women Act, a move in the right direction.

Opinion on Round House is mixed. Some, like me, loved it. Others think it’s middling, not engaging enough, with an uncompelling protagonist, and a preachy tone. There was a lot of contention after its match in the The Tournament of Books. To each her own. But this book will stay with me for some time, especially the ending, and the questions raised by Joe’s actions and decisions, and whether I agree with them or not.

So I have a head cold, and am resting, and back to blogging about books, movies, food, and family, and what happens? I get slammed by spam. 75+ just this morning. Compliments, insults, randomness, vagaries.

I heard this morning that the unemployment rate was down. Apparently, a lot of people are now working in spam.

I think my B-movie bender is coming to a close. While I still can’t quite motivate myself to go see Lincoln, I think the quality of my movie watching is going to pick up because of TV reruns post-February sweeps (except for FX’s The Americans, which is amazing and you should watch it then email me so we can obsess nerdishly over it.) and because the last movie I watched, A Dangerous Method, was so disappointing.

A Dangerous Method by Cronenberg with Viggo, and my boyfriend Fassbender. And yet, less than the sum of its parts. As with most Cronenberg films, its about violence, desire, and what are acceptable boundaries, to whom. It came across more salacious than his other movies I’ve liked, though, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, and seemed more of a snapshot of the relationship between Jung and Freud instead of a story with a beginning middle and end. Not for me.

Then there was Soderberg’s Contagion, which was a solid but unremarkable thriller that played nicely by making Gwyneth unsympathetic, unattractive and then outright disgusting. But I got sick right after and have been since, so my appreciation waned quickly. Maybe watching that movie was like the opposite of the panacea effect?

Guppy couldn’t remember having watched My Neighbor Totoro, so I watched it with him and 9yo Drake, who both laughed and smiled throughout. I love that film.

And then my husband G. Grod and I watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid last night. Still great, after all these years. I’m not a big fan of remakes, but I do wonder what Pitt and Clooney might do with it if given the change.

I think our quality of movies is on the upswing. We shall see.

I would not have read HHhH, written in French by Laurent Binet and translated by Sam Taylor, except it’s a contender in The Morning News Tournament of Books, and I’m so glad I did. This is a head-tippingly original and thought-provoking book.

It’s billed as a novel, but it’s not, exactly. It’s Binet’s attempt to tell the history of Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi villain I’d never even heard of but will now never forget. It’s the true story of how two men, one a Czech, another a Slovak, were tasked to assassinate Heydrich, also known as The Butcher of Prague. Taylor pieces together documents, his own reactions, some fictionalizations, which he then identifies as fictional, into a mesmerizing taken on historical fiction. It’s unapologetically subjective, with Binet and his biases appearing regularly. He’ll write something early on, and revise it later. Perhaps my favorite example of this is how, as the story is coming to an end, he notes how difficult it is to write, and includes the dates, so we can see how long it took the author to bring this story to a close.

I could include exemplary bits, but I am tired of typing, and really, you should just go read this book. Especially if you’re a writer. Or you like historical fiction. Or WWII. Oh, just read it.

Can this series really be on its 18th collection with Fables: Cubs in Toyland? I continue to enjoy this comic-book series about a group of fairy tale characters who exist alongside the real world, disguised from it. This tale focuses again on the several “cubs” or children of Snow White and Bigby Wolf, spending most of its time with Therese (the princess-y one) and Darien (her brother the pack leader.) It is spooky, creepy, sad, and involving. As usual, the ending leaves me wanting to tear right into the next volume. Good stuff still.