October 2014 – Page 2 – meghan rose allen

so I’ll take all my story ideas and …

By meghan rose on Saturday, October 11, 2014

Make poems out of them.

I have a list of story ideas that don’t make sense or, more truthfully, I don’t want to write the background necessary for them to make sense. So I’ll turn them into poems when I can’t sleep at night. Sometime in the dim light of today’s early morning, I wrote a poem about exploding glass jars, mason or otherwise.

It doesn’t rhyme.

Rhyming poetry may be passé but there’s always something soothing about reading A.A. Milne. My goal is to get my poems to rhyme. Then I can be both a struggling author and a struggling poet so I’ll have more to talk to people about at potlucks and parties.

books

Review of 10:04 by Ben Lerner

By meghan rose on Friday, October 10, 2014

I feel like this blog has, within the last month, transitioned to a book reviewing blog as my writing stalls and I use that time to ~~play Nethack~~ read instead in search of ideas to steal.

I was sent an uncorrected proof with big letters telling me not to quote from this material without permission or without comparing it to the final book. Since I’m unclear as to whose permission I am supposed to seek and I don’t have a copy, nor am I planning on getting one, of the finished book, I guess I won’t be quoting anything. But then my review seems kind of random without examples to refer to. Such is life I suppose. Feel free to use my review as a sort of scavenger hunt through the novel if/when you read it. So here we go:

1. Ben Lerner has a much more impressive vocabulary than I do. Either that or a thesaurus. Why are there so many big words? Is he trying to impress me? Because I would have been happy with easier words for my pea brain to understand.

2. The protagonist of the novel, who I am also going to call Ben Lerner, maybe be the most white, wealthy-ish, middle-class Brooklyn-dwelling resident ever to star in a novel. In other words, Ben Lerner is so self-involved as to be the most boring person ever put forward as a novel’s central character. It is infuriating that Ben Lerner (the author) thinks that I am supposed to be deeply interested and invested in Ben Lerner (the character). I don’t need to read another Great American Masculine Novel. They are always so tedious.

3. Unless, of course, this tediousness is satire. Is Ben Lerner (the author) writing a boring novel to draw attention to how preposterous it still is that we revere the American, white male, masculine prototype as the novel that defines great literature? Is that what’s he doing? Part way through I started to feel that I was the victim of a very elaborate hoax regarding the purpose of the novel. Perhaps this is why Ben Lerner (the character) keeps mentioning how much money his advance was, to highlight the ludicrousness of traditional publishing mores?

4. Equally, Ben Lerner (character or author) could just be a jerk. My writing earns me approximately $60 per year, because I am quite an unsuccessful writer. I don’t need to know how publishing houses are just throwing money at Ben Lerner (the character) to produce half-witted detail-everything-around-me-no-matter-how-trivial novels.

5. There is a scene where a bunch of rich, white people do designer drugs at a party and everything gets fuzzy and oh my G-d is it boring and cliché and unnecessary. And boring. I really want to stress the boring part.

6. There was one point in reading where I thought that the stream of detailing all the minutiae in Ben Lerner (the character)’s life was like In Search of Lost Time. I am sure that was intentional. I should have marked where I felt this in my copy, but I’m pretty positive it was in Section Two: The Golden Vanity, which was a self-contained New Yorker story and has the ability to stand on its own outside the novel.

7. You know who was interesting and not boring and why don’t we have a book about her: Noor, the woman Ben Lerner (the character) stocks food with at the food co-op. I would totally read a book about Noor, without question.

8. Like most male-gaze novels, Ben Lerner (the character) has a lot more women willing to sleep with him than I would find necessary. I mean, there’s only really two women in the novel who sleep with him, but that’s way more than seems likely, but maybe if you’re a quirky, white, wealthy-ish Brooklynite, you’re just swimming in sexual options.

When I started typing this review, I wasn’t as down on the book as I am now. Now I’m pretty down on it. He did go to Marfa, which reminded me of The King of the Hill episode when they go to Marfa and I wished King of the Hill was still on Netflix. The novel is made up of random thoughts like this. I’m sure other white, male, authors will like it.

10:04 by Ben Lerner went on sale September 2, 2014.

I received a copy free from the publisher via a goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review.

books

Classics Club – I did it!

By meghan rose on Thursday, October 9, 2014

I did! I finished I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

So, I was whelmed. I had the same feeling as I did when I read Obasan. I don’t think one is supposed to like these books. I don’t think one is supposed to gain enjoyment from them. I think one is supposed to read them as bearing witness. Still, both are a bit joyless and bleak and probably full of symbolism that I never pick up on because I almost never pick up on symbolism. There was a distance from the narrative too that made everything seem faded rather than vibrant – like compared to another Southern memoir Bastard out of Carolina.

I don’t have any deep well of feelings towards this book. I read it. It passed the time. Now I can nod when people talk about it. Maybe I’d find Angelou’s poetry is more intense and memorable, since I think that this book is just going to fade out that I read it.

books

yet another relatively decent book ruined

By meghan rose on Wednesday, October 8, 2014

So yes, I am a bleeding heart liberal. And yes, I realize that a dragon is not a person, but when you draw what resembles very strongly a Chinese dragon in a children’s book, and then name him Ching-Chung:

I become very unhappy. And this is a reprint of an older book. Did no one think Hmmm…. this is our chance to go with a less racist sounding name?

In any case, wikipedia tells me that Tianlong is a heavenly, celestial dragon. So I got my Sharpie out and:

Stupid racist children’s books.

books

Someone must like books like these, because they keep getting published

By meghan rose on Tuesday, October 7, 2014

The wunderkind white male novelist stories where everyone lives in great apartments in Brooklyn or in Paris or somewhere else super literary and Important with a capital I. No one seems worried about money and everyone loves adjectives and long, distracting sentences full of wordplay and Cleverness, capitalized too, like Importance.

I’m only twenty-five pages in, and I purposefully read zero reviews when there was a slew of them last month, so I’m going to form my own opinion, and most books grow on me the further I get in. So I’ll persevere (especially since I got an ARC and I should finish and tell goodreads my opinion).

Maybe I’ll take a pencil to the margins of the book and edit it the way I would like to make this whole experience more palatable.

books netgalley copy

Review of Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

By meghan rose on Thursday, October 2, 2014

The compendiums. I often shy away from such collections because, to be blunt, I don’t like them very much. I love reading short story collections, but when I do, I like reading them all from one author, like a big chunk of chocolate rather than an assortment of tiny bits of candy that mixed anthologies always end up feeling to me. But the blurb for Africa39: stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who I’ve been reading since Purple Hibiscus came out) and Dinaw Mengestu (who writes about Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Diaspora, so you know I love), so I read it and these are my random thoughts regarding that decision:

The first story is Adichie’s and I’m thinking okay, this can work. I can overlook an introduction that makes liberal use of etc. etc. (it’s a pre-release; maybe the intro is still getting polished) and talks about dialectical materialism like I should know what that means more than my vague sense it has something to do with Karl Marx. So we have our amazing first story: heart rendering and true feeling and what you want a short story to be. And the second story is by an author unknown to me, Monica Arac de Nyeko and it’s also amazing, capturing class and religion and childhood and wrapping it all up in a banana leaf like a tamale.

And then the quality becomes variable and I ended up slogging through most of the other thirty-seven stories. It’s just everything I dislike about compendiums like this. The quality of the stories is variable. The style is variable. My mind gets all turned upside down as I go from stories with lazy storytelling:

…check my reflection in the glass door. [this is followed by five lines of what she looks like in the mirrored doors]

Number 9, Nadifa Mohammed

(Don’t have a character look in the mirror and tell me what they look like. I’m pretty sure that’s on page one of Writing Fiction);

to stories of rhythmic, melodic lists ending in tea:

It’s a prison of files arranged alphabetically — Assorted toiletries, Baby Foods, Body Building, Body care, Bulk Items, Confectionary and so on until Teas.

Day and Night, Mehul Gohil;

to descriptions so spot on that I’m angry I didn’t think of them myself:

He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light, she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her.

Sometime Before Maulidi, Ndinda Kioko;

to scenes I want to steal:

‘Bury me in the evening, under glittering stars from above and a sea of lit candles from among yourselves.’ … how we in our pyjamas fobbed moths which somehow understood the gravity of our collective mourning.

Rusty Bell, Nthikeng Mohlele;

and sentences I’m going to use myself somewhere, someday:

I used to like my brother’s girlfriend, until …

Echoes of Mirth, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

and then back to overwritten strained metaphors:

…it seemed that the countryside was quietly hysterical.

Hiding in Plain Sight, Mary Watson

until I’m so confused that I have no idea if

They all had penises the size of semicolons … After a while they all had to leave his loft and find another place for their semicolon parade.

No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimmy Hendrix is Playing, Clifton Gachagua

is good writing or not. Is it clever? Is it overdone. I have no idea. I’m so lost.

Then, too, these aren’t all short stories. Some are, but some are excerpts from novels or, far worse, novels in progress. So I read a fully enclosed story, followed by open ended scenes that need the rest of the novel there, that introduce characters I should have already met, and hint at situations that haven’t been resolved, and thus I feel cheated. Add to this that some of these excerpts are stream-of-consciousness and I have nothing to situate myself in, nothing at all. I am adrift.

I once took a music CD out of the library about music in Africa. It was sixty or so songs, from all over the continent, in many different languages and pretty much all styles: rap, reggae, country, rock and roll, instrumental, traditional, techno, and mash-ups of any of those and more (best song on that album Barra Barra by Rachid Taha). It seemed very much like the music company was saying Look, African music isn’t all Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba (although both were on the CD). This collection should likely be viewed as a wordy-sampler offering the same thing. Look Africa can do crime novels! Mystery! Literary! Stream of Consciousness! Didactic fables! But, at the end, after what felt like a slog, I don’t know if I needed to be convinced of all that. But it was a diversion to have a book of Africa with minimal Europeans and no lions and a cover without a picture of an acacia tree with the setting sun in the background.

So, should you read this book: Yes? No? It jumps all over the place that I can’t tell you. If you are interested in works by POC, maybe? How do you rank, or recommend, or anti-recommend, a collection of stories where some were worth it and others just made you want to [insert your least favourite chore to do here, like I really hate scrubbing the bathtub or dusting] rather than read another page? I’m new to this reviewing business so I don’t know. You spin the wheel, you take your chances, as my mother says. You’re going to have to make up your own mind.

Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey goes on sale October 28, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

this month I ...

September 2014

By meghan rose on Thursday, October 2, 2014

I read:

Thoughts:

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket: Tesfa and I are continuing to enjoy these. Perhaps me enjoying them a bit more than Tesfa, but still, I think they’re pretty clever. Plus I learned the difference between nervous and anxious, so I’m expanding my mind.

The Waking Dead Compendium Two by Robert Kirkman: I think I’m done. I’ve got my fill of male-dominated, zombie adventures where the same thing keeps happening over and over and over and over again. Maybe I’ll just read the synopsis for Compendium Three on wikipedia.

Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet: Oh my, this is an overly busy book. In three hundred pages we have high school bullying, drunk driving, infidelity, evangelical Christianity, failing family dynamics, class difference, and then because clearly that isn’t keeping enough balls in the air, there’s also a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

I’m not kidding. There is a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

Too many balls in the air.

The Wanderer by Fanny Burney: There’s a comment on this book’s goodreads page that forms a rather apt description of this book:

A book filled with good intentions and characters who made me want to climb into the book for the sole purpose of slapping them.

So 19th century melodramatic filled with enough coincidences and fainting fits to last a lifetime. That said, it was so much more engaging than Pride and Prejudice. So there! I’ve read a 19th century British book about women and marriage and middle and upper-class places in society and I enjoyed it. There is hope for me yet!

Malarky by Anakana Schofield: Like most experimental novels I read, at first I slogged, forcing myself through. But then, after a little while, when the logic of that, particular, fictional universe start to make sense, and I began to enjoy myself, as much as you can enjoy a novel about a slide into dementia and an unhappy marriage and the way reality can fracture at any second. Double bonuses too for the use of the name Philomena, which I adore. It’s so Catholic sounding, perhaps because the only people I’ve ever met with that name are Irish or Filipino Catholics.

So, if you start and aren’t sure whether to continue, my opinion is to keep going and try it out. What have you got to lose?

Such Bright Prospects: Short Stories about Asperger Syndrome, Alcohol, and God by Tessie Regan: Reviewed here.

Meatspace by Nikesh Shkula: Reviewed here.

The Unenviable by David G. Mirich, PhD: I got this book to read because I thought it would be good for me, like eating kale. But then I couldn’t put the book down and read it all in two sittings (had to go pick up Tesfa at the bus stop so I had a break).

My Real Children by Jo Walton: Being released so close to Life After Life and with similarities in plot, one can’t help but compare these two books; unfortunately My Real Children is the one that ends up lacking simply because Jo Walton cannot write as wonderfully as Kate Atkinson. Most people can’t.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy My Real Children; I’d rank it four out of five, but I had the same problem with My Real Children as I did with the other Jo Walton book I read, Among Others: it was close, but not quite.

I feel kinship with Jo Walton. Like me, she is an above average author (although Jo Walton could likely be classified as far more above average than me, like I am epsilon above average and Jo Walton is some number far larger than epsilon, like when you use $$>>$$ rather than simply $>$ in functional analysis and all that area of mathematics that I don’t like). There are times when the writing is so good. Then there are times when the writing isn’t. Maybe she (and I?) just need a really talented editor to help us out.

She’s also Welsh and I’m part Welsh so I think we could hang out. She’s probably read Dylan Thomas and How Green Was My Valley though, so maybe we’d talk about non-Welsh things.

The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: Reviewed here.

The Rescue Princesses: The Lost Gold: I’m pretty sure y’all could figure out that this was not so much a Meghan choice as a Tesfa choice. Geoff despises these books but I don’t know – they have POC princesses, the princesses are the protagonists and do things (figuring out solutions as to how to save animals), the princesses (at least in this book) stood up against adults. Sure, these books aren’t going to win any awards for writing, but I’m not going to be too down on a series of books of multiracial girls solving their own problems.

The Little Stranger: I kept thinking something more was going to happen in this book, that there’d be a big reveal like Endless Night by Agatha Christie, but it didn’t, so the novel sort of flatlined.

And now, so any of my ultra-literary readers can have a laugh: I first read Endless Night by Agatha Christie when I was in high school. In high school, I also really liked The Doors and their song End of the Night has the lyrics

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

And I thought, Wow, Agatha Christie was in her sixties when she wrote Endless Night and here she is quoting The Doors in the book and for the title. What a hip old lady Agatha Christie must have been.

Yeah, both The Doors and Agatha Christie were quoting Auguries of Innocence (1803) by William Blake. I didn’t realize that until I was like 25 years old. I’ll still assume, however, that Agatha Christie was a hip old lady.

X’ed Out: A unlikable male protagonist stumbles through dream after dream! It’s like Charles Burns put everything I hate into a graphic novel. I need to make a tumblr or something of books that have lengthy dream sequences because I hate dream sequences so much. It’s not as bad as the long, drugged out dream sequence in At Play In The Fields of the Lord but any description of a dream over three words is too long for me. And X’ed Out has pictures of dreams, so that’s just too much for me to handle.

Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great: Wow. I did not remember (a) how whiny and unlikeable Sheila is, (b) how much fat shaming this book contains, and (c) the liberal use of the word stupid to describe pretty much everything.

Favourite book of the month:

I read this book constantly when I was a kid. I was always so impressed at the chutzpah Willo Davis Roberts had that when Katie, the protagonist in The Girl With The Silver Eyes is talking about what books she likes, she lists The View From The Cherry Tree, another Willo Davis Roberts book. This blew my ten year old mind that authors could self-promote.

I read this book again in my twenties and was disappointed, but now, reading it in my thirties with Tesfa, this book is awesome. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I read it at 24. I must have been stupid that day or something.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

New David Mitchell!

I watched:

Thoughts:

The Mindy Project: I have now watched every Mindy Project episode probably like three times. I am sort of obsessed with The Mindy Project right now (and The Hunger Games movies, which I think I like better than the books).
There’s a comment on IMDB about The Mindy Project which, when I read it, realized made so much sense to me as to why I like the show. The link is here and I’ll quote the comment too, even if the spacing ends up weird and thin (ignore please the gender essentialism the commenter throws in):

There’s two things about The Mindy Project I can’t deny – one, is I can’t stop watching it. I got through season 1 in a week and it makes me laugh and ship characters and hate and love characters and it’s all the experiences you’d expect from any guilty-pleasure TV show. The other one is that it annoys the pants off me. It screams Vanity Project, it’s literally let’s watch Mindy Kaling’s savy-stylish-doctor-in-NYC fantasies, it literally feels like watching the daydreams of a part-time nursing student on a crowded 6am bus. She’s surrounded by impossibly handsome men, most of which she has slept with and/or are in love with her, she’s witty, great at her job, independent super woman who never wears the same outfit twice.

But then I realised, that’s the reason why I like this show so much. It is the female version of a geeky boy living out his fantasies through Transformers. It is a show where every single male character is defined by their relationship to Mindy, which is the most unsettling and fascinating role reversal I have EVER seen on TV. We are so used to seeing female characters defined by how men see them, we take it for granted. We are so used to having a geeky/loser/relatable MALE main characters, just think of every movie you’ve seen. Peter Parker. William Miller in Almost Famous. Heck, the dude in the Lego Movie. And they’re all surrounded by these invariably gorgeous, invariably flirty women and we just accept that. All Mindy Kaling did was turn that to HER advantage in her TV show. It strikes us as narcissistic, but boy is she catering to the fantasies of gazillions of women besides herself along the way. Including mine. Danny Castellano is the best implementation of the good-hearted grump fantasy I’ve ever seen. No it’s not realistic, but are movies ever? Why does it have to be realistic just because the main character is ‘outside traditional beauty standards’? This series is no political statement, it is a series written to get women hooked and it does just that. And I’m loving it.

American Horror Story: I’m still not done Season One. I keep getting bored and only watching for ten minutes at a time.

Bojack Horseman: The show amused me. I can’t really quantify how or why, just that I enjoyed it. Maybe because of Arrested Development associations in my mind.

Happy Endings: This is my new HIMYM show, in that I watch it and think Why am I watching this? I do know why (because Adam Pally went to The Mindy Project after this and I’m all about The Mindy Project right now) but I need to stop. A lot of internet people told me Happy Endings was a good show. It is a passable show. I’m not going to go any higher than that.

Parks and Rec: Just rewatching the old episodes on American Netflix. Mindy might be pushing Parks and Rec out of my number one position though right now. Time will tell.

I wrote: At Geoff’s suggestion, I am not working on anything in particular right now. I’m doing writing exercises and plotting the dénouement of my faerie story, trying to get better before I attack some new plans later in the season.

Month: October 2014