Odysseus is an asshole, everybody knows that. Homer knew it, Euripides knew it, even Tennyson knew it. You know what’s a fucked up plan is pretending Odysseus is an asshole, everybody knows that. Homer knew it, Euripides knew it, even Tennyson knew it. You know what’s a fucked up plan is pretending to be a giant horse and then climbing out of its butt to slit everyone’s throats while they sleep. Fuckin� yikes, man.
Odysseus has been reexamined plenty but what’s interesting is to take a crack at Circe, because what do you remember about her? One thing, right? She definitely does one thing, and that’s turn his whole crew into pigs. Turning dudes into pigs is her signature move. How’re you going to get a new angle on that?
[image] Squeal like a piggie, she says in this anonymous woodcut from 1868
The funny thing about this whole pig-changing episode, Madeline Miller points out, is that “in The Odyssey, there's no hint of a motive. And Odysseus never asks her, which I think is really interesting,� and here we are.
About half of you are thinking this is pretty obvious. It’s, ah, it’s not that much of a change.
Madeline Miller teaches the classics to high school students, that’s her job, or anyway it was before this book blew up into every 2018 Top Ten list. Maybe she’s rich and famous now. In any case she seems to be talking to her students here: this feels like a Young Adult book. I mean that in the most positive possible way: it’s fun, it’s not boring. It gives you an angle on the Odyssey: not just the Circe bit, but all of it. Did you know Scylla is Circe’s fault? I didn’t!
[image] I don’t know who made this but I did Google “sexy Scylla� and the results were inaccurate
But Miller did, and her particular gift is to tie all these myths together and make you really feel them. The thing about the Odyssey is that it’s very old, and the storytelling style is foreign to us and we don’t feel it in a real visceral way. Dudes get turned into pigs and you’re like yeah, dudes were always doing shit like that back then, what’s next. When Miller gets her hands on it you feel it, their bones crunching into new forms and their noses splitting and their panicked squealing. It made me wonder what it was like to hear these stories told way back then by real bards. Did they act them out? Did the audience gasp?
[image] Circe by Wright Baker, 1889
I know a fair lot about this ancient stuff. I read Aeschylus for fun, man. But this book was full of surprises for me. Did you know Medea was Circe’s niece? I didn’t! Madeline Miller’s pulled off some kind of triple magic here. She’s managed to write a novel that will give you a new perspective on Greek myth, whether you’re a novice or expert. She’s made it accessible to young adult readers, and she’s written legit literature at the same time. I don’t know what kind of witch she is, but this is my favorite book of 2018....more
Sexy prison pen pals is a thing, believe me. I remember reading about it years ago. People would auction off letters they get from hopeful bachelors oSexy prison pen pals is a thing, believe me. I remember reading about it years ago. People would auction off letters they get from hopeful bachelors on the outside. Whoever bought the letter could respond to him, saying, presumably, something along the lines of "I'm so hot for you that I could light a cigarette, which reminds me." You'd see what else you could get out of him. Maybe a cake with a file in it. Maybe just a cake, cake is great.
Rachel Kushner maybe read the same article, since the same scene happens here in her Caged Heat sequel The Mars Room. It wouldn't surprise me: she's read nearly everything. She's one of our purest book nerds. Her is one of my all-time favorites. When characters in this book discuss other books, which they do constantly, she's careful not to spoil them. When asked for her favorite literary hero, she once
[image] Get it? Because....you know what, never mind.
"She's read everything, but has she tried heroin?" say my notes on this book, followed immediately by "Who cares?" There's some sort of question of legitimacy here, of who's telling whose story. This is about women in prison, and Kushner isn't one. She for what that's worth. You get this situation where the people who are trained and prepared to tell stories skillfully are often not the people who have the stories. It creates an imbalance.
Kushner's imbibed a lot of the stories, and it's thrown her a bit loopy. She's tried to fit them all in, unsuccessfully. She met a crooked cop when she went undercover in a prison (that sentence is 100% true) and she couldn't stop herself from telling his story, even though she totally failed to weave it into her main story. I get it, Doc's a terrific character, but it's not great for making this feel like a coherent novel.
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The main story is a stripper kills her stalker and now she's in jail. She's got a kid, which sucks for both of them. ("Having children complements the making of art," Kushner says, fucking up your last excuse about that novel.) She's desperate and unable to protect him. She forms a little family - Conan the transgender man, Fernandez the repeat offender. A GED instructor named Gordon, the kind of nimrod who would give an inmate Little House on the Prairie, is duly manipulated. He's not a stand-in for Kushner, who's far too self-aware to do something that obvious. But he is the sort who might believe a letter from a prison pen pal.
Little House isn't here by accident though. The novel keeps wanting to return to nature. Walden comes up a lot too, and...and the Unabomber. Gordon lives in the woods, where he spends his time wondering if that was a coyote or a woman being murdered. Romy (view spoiler)[will end up in the woods too, where she commits suicide by cop outside a redwood. (hide spoiler)] I'm not sure what to make of all these trees; it feels like Kushner's maybe lost the forest for them.
[image] Jumping the...you know what, forget it
The Flamethrowers is one of my favorite books of the decade. Mars Room is, if anything, more of a page-turner, but it's not as good of a book. It feels unfocused and rushed. It's the kind of book where, when someone needs wires cut, someone else just gives them wirecutters. You'd think they'd at least bake them into a cake.
Soundtrack: Kushner has great taste in music, on top of everything else. Romy's favorite song to strip to is by Nick Gilder. Please see the comments below to weigh in with your own personal stripper song. Mine is by Eileen Barton. ...more
This is why we don't have a nanny! No it isn't, it's because we want our kid hanging out with other kids, and also it's economically impractical unlesThis is why we don't have a nanny! No it isn't, it's because we want our kid hanging out with other kids, and also it's economically impractical unless you have at least two kids, but it's also true that the thought of knitting a person so deeply into our lives spooks us out. She would have a key! She would know where everything is!
This is based on the true story of a nanny who killed two children in New York City in 2012, and I honestly wouldn't if I were you; I found it too upsetting. Slimani may have, as well; you won't get closer to the final act than you are in the first sentence, which is "The baby is dead," in case you weren't clear on the plot.
So it's not a murder mystery, anyway. It's about class, more than anything. How invisible poor people are to the more fortunate. Myriam gets lost and, out her car window, catches a glimpse of her nanny Louise in her dingy neighborhood. She's shocked like she's peeking in the window of a strip club. Thrilling but icky. When confronted with Louise's real problems, both parents are revolted. Offended that they're forced to be aware of her sordid failures, her debt collectors.
For some reason Slimani has decided to flip the races: Myriam is brown and Louise is white. I'm not sure why - maybe she doesn't want to talk about race so she wrote it right out. In Brooklyn, where our child was born, there was a very clear and uncomfortable segregation. The parents were white or Asian. The nannies were almost universally Caribbean. It made you feel gross, like you and everyone around you are caught in a system you can in no tiny way influence.
Louise's descent into madness is carefully drawn, and I found the story believable. That's part of what you wonder when you read about some horror like this, right? Did no one notice? Couldn't they tell? You can never tell, because your brain will never allow you to say, "I think my nanny's capable of murder." It can't hold that kind of darkness. Only people who are that dark can express that darkness. You can see Louise's relationship with the family breaking down here, but you can also see how no one guessed how deep they were getting. Even the children, with their unerring sense for danger, sensed only that she was to be cautious around.
Of course you don't need a nanny for horror, parents lose their shit too. My wife won't. Neither will I. We'll just keep it between us then, right? Yikes....more
Black men can be thrown in jail for no reason at all, at any time; that's how things work in our America. James Baldwin's minor classic If Beale StreeBlack men can be thrown in jail for no reason at all, at any time; that's how things work in our America. James Baldwin's minor classic If Beale Street Could Talkdescribes a situation like that in 1974: two people meet, fall in love, start a life together, then the dude gets thrown in jail and that's the end of their happy ever after.
An American Marriage is like the sequel to Beale Street. They're young, they're in love, he's suddenly incarcerated for Living While Black. Now what? You think it'll be about a woman standing by her man or whatever, visiting him in her nicest dress weekend after weekend, but...how long would you keep that up for? And keep in mind, they'd only just gotten to the good part: their love was young. "Our marriage was a sapling graft," muses Celestial, "that didn't have time to take."
I like that about American Marriage: it's unclouded by romantic ideals. This is real life here, and Roy is fine but he's not, like, amazing. He dogged around on Celestial. She's not under the impression that she'll never find a man like this again. She's pretty clear she can find men like this anywhere, and she does. So the book isn't about Roy's incarceration and it certainly isn't about their enduring love.This is about what do you do when your old life suffers a blow it can't stand. Roy's resentful, of course; he loses almost everything, and then he loses what's left. Celestial is just trying to live. There's a third person, of course, too, the new guy. Is any of this his fault? Roy's like, sortof?
I read American Marriage and Beale Street back to back, which was a great experience but also a terrifically depressing one. Taken together they create an almost seamless story - but they're set 45 years apart. Nothing has changed: nothing. We should do something about that before our kids end up reading part three in 2063....more
Sometimes I imagine my wife dies. Not because I want her to, but because it would be so awful. I like her so much, and also it would be inconvenient iSometimes I imagine my wife dies. Not because I want her to, but because it would be so awful. I like her so much, and also it would be inconvenient in a lot of ways. But it's fun to be maudlin! I would be a widower. It would be romantic. I imagine how wrenching my eulogy would be. "Webster defines sadness as..." I would say.
Anyway so this book shows up on the NY Times and it's autofiction about this guy whose wife dies in childbirth and I basically dropped everything to read it, but have you ever heard Mount Eerie? Mount Eerie is a musician whose wife died shortly after giving birth to their daughter, and then he and it's so devastating that I've only ever listened to it twice. Here are some of
Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw, I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail A week after you died a package with your name on it came and inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret and collapsed there on the front steps I wailed A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now. You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down would not include you though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down, being swallowed into a silence that is bottomless and real
It's dumb And I don't want to learn anything from this
So listen, in the "Art About Losing Your Wife" category Tom Malmquist has competition, and if there's one thing I've learned this year it's that tragedy is not a competition, but also Mount Eerie wins.
The thing with In Every Moment We Are Still Alive is that it completely falls apart about a third of the way through. Up until then it's staggering. It starts right in the middle of the crisis, in the hospital as Tom and Karin realize that something is wrong, then wronger, then wrongest. Alarms are going off and Karin is sinking away and there's still a baby inside her. There's a Didionesque clinical quality here - as in The Year of Magical Thinking, Tom is unable to process the whole story so he focuses on understanding the events. What Tom the author has done brilliantly is express what it feels like when your life spirals away from you right before your eyes - exactly what it's like, minute to minute, to slip from "We're okay" to "We're not okay" to "We won't be okay." I've not gotten into waters this deep myself but I've stood on the shore, I know what they look like, and they look dark.
What happens next, though, is his dad is sick too, and suddenly you're...off dealing with that, and I understand that this is Tom Malquist's real life and it wasn't a good plot in real life either, but that doesn't help me get something out of this book. I felt that it was too much for one book - it's not even a long one! - to deal with. And on top of that it starts doing a lot of quick chronological skipping, back to when Karin was alive, back to when they'd first met, back to now with his dying father - I felt that it lost focus and steam.
I was occasionally distracted by his writing style too; he's one of these authors who don’t believe in quotes around speech. Or new paragraphs. A lot of run on sentences. It’s fine, it’s not hard to parse but I’m not really craving for people to mess with the mechanics of language. It’s like if someone builds you a house and they’re like check out this fancy newfangled door lock, right? I don’t care, where’s the kitchen.
We read books like this for the same reason we watch horror movies; they allow us to peek at our deepest fears from a safe place. (Or we're murderers and we're looking for ideas, I shouldn't assume things about you, who knows why you're here.) It makes me uncomfortable to rate Malmquist's real life, but the honest truth is I was bored and distracted for most of the last two thirds of this book. I don't think it really works. What I'm saying is that if my own wife died in childbirth, I would write such a novel and/or album. It would make you ugly cry. It would make you desire me. It would have a Powerpoint. None of you would be okay ever again....more
You hear that a book is about Native Americans and you think there's going to be a reservation involved, or...or horses? But here we are in Oakland, oYou hear that a book is about Native Americans and you think there's going to be a reservation involved, or...or horses? But here we are in Oakland, of all things, a town which I'd previously known of only because rappers sometimes yell that they're Maybe they were making it up. Have you ever thought about how rappers could be making everything up and you would never know? We're all walking around like oh, man, "the Crips" are mean guys.
Tommy Orange has the same taste in music I do - - and he introduced me to Tribe Called Red, who are in this book. I made don't worry.
His point is that you hear that a book is about Native Americans and you think about reservations and horses. "There’s a monolithic version of what a Native is supposed to be," "There aren’t many representations of us as modern, contemporary and living in cities." He sets out to change that with this superbuzzy debut novel that everybody can't stop yelling about and for good reason because it's very very good, and I say that even though it's a member of that most dreaded genre, "Interconnected Short Stories That This Guy Is Calling His First Novel Because He's Not Quite Comfortable Writing Novels Yet," a genre that I usually do not at all like but here we are. He's done a good job of it, weaving all of the stories together in a bit of a Pulp Fictionish way.
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There are a lot of characters! You will have trouble keeping them straight! They're on their way to a powwow, which is not a bunch of people doing peyote around a campfire, it's in a stadium. The annual Gathering of Nations gets like 72,000 attendees. It's a whole thing. Our characters are going for their own reasons. Some are trying to get in touch with their ancestry, so they can stop feeling so much like "Indians dressed as Indians." Some are going to rob the place, and the certain knowledge of an impeding violent crime looms over the book.
Each of them has their story to tell on the way. Colm Toibin I wish I'd thought of that. Some of them are related; some of them are related and don't even know it yet. The pilgrims from Canterbury Tales never do make it to Becket's shrine - Chaucer lost interest before they got there, or died, I can't remember. All of Orange's pilgrims will make it to the powwow, but not all will make it out.
Here they all are; I'll put this bit on spoiler quotes, because I'm laying out some plot points here although nothing ruinous.
(view spoiler)[ Cast of Characters Tony Loneman An aimless drug dealer with fetal alcohol syndrome. He’s to be the main robber. Dene Oxendene A budding documentarian who plans to collect Native stories at the powwow; autobiographical, since Orange got a grant to do precisely this (and never did). Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield A tween whose older sister is raped during 1970 occupation of Alcatraz Edwin An overweight kid addicted to the internet who shits his pants and then gets a job as an intern for the powwow organizing committee. Calvin Johnson Also on the planning committee; it’s his plan to rob it. This sort of sneaks up on you; you don’t realize at first how serious this is going to be. Jacqui Red Feather Years and years later, the raped sister who’s now a semirecovering alcoholic. Gave her daughter from that rape up for adoption. Second daughter killed herself. Jacqui’s sister Opal is raising three grandkids. Jacqui runs into her rapist at an AA meeting and catches a ride with him to the powwow. He’s the MC. He’s also Edwin’s father. Bill Davis Edwin's mom's new boyfriend, ex-military who works as a janitor at the stadium where the powwow's to be held. Orvil Red Feather The oldest of Jacqi's grandkids. We’re zeroing in on three scenes: this family, the criminals, and various powwow organizers. Orvil has spider legs in him. Opal did too, wtf is that? Is it magical realism? It’s so gross. Orvil is competing as an Indian dancer at the powwow - hoping to reconnect with his roots, find pride, and win money for Opal. Octavio & Daniel Gonzalez Octavio is one of the robbers; Daniel is his brother, a technical mastermind who prints the guns and also flies a drone around the whole scene. Like Tony Loneman, these are basically nice kids who are just in way over their heads. Their whole family have been killed in the line of petty criminal bullshit fire. Blue Jacquie’s daughter from the rape, adopted by a white family, leaves her abusive husband to go work for the powwow. She works with Edwin the intern. They both meet their parents for the first time at the same time in some sort of fucked up meet cute situation. Thomas Frank A janitor / powwow drummer who drinks a ton (hide spoiler)]
And here's the actual ending, in different spoiler tags because this is most definitely massive spoilers. (view spoiler)[ During the robbery Charles and Carlos attempt a double cross. Everyone gets shot. Tony switches sides at the last minute, won’t go through with the robbery; Octavio takes over: Charlos try to rob him; Tony attacks them. Thomas Frank, Orvil, Bill Davis, Edwin are all shot. I don't think we find out for sure whether any of them survive. (hide spoiler)]...more
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