Huesitos

One time in high school we were doing that awful thing that you've probably seen on teen dramas if you didn't experience it yourself: picking for teams. Some of you have seen me play ultimate frisbee and thought that I was quite the athlete. You'd be incorrect. Once, when it was down to the usual few of us who actively brought down whatever team we were on, I was picked. This great victory was dampened somewhat by the name by which I was called. That name was Kid in the Corner.

For a brief amount of time afterwards I was referred to by my "friends" as Kid in the Corner. This is about as bad as it got for me as a kid.

When people talk about reading as escapism, I think escaping from what? When I read I want to wallow. "Remind me what a pleasure my life is," I shout at the books. The librarian glowers. I look embarrassed for shouting at books until he looks away. "Tell me something horrible!" I whisper-shout. The librarian is not hearing it. I mean he is literally hearing it, because a whisper-shout is really more like a shout than a whisper. Metaphorically, though, he is not. Hearing. It.

That last story took some creative licenses. I am not aware of glowering librarians aside from the one in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Glower. When you write it by itself it looks like it means "one who glows." I do not mean that. Rhymes with shower.

Anyway, if the following book doesn't make you feel better about your life, I'm awful sorry. Come by my house at <address redacted> and I'll make you some Mexican food and we'll cry together.

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

That's Esch from Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. She lives in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi and what a life it is. Mother died in childbirth, alcoholic father, poor poor poor. Some reviewers on Goodreads, when they decided to briefly crawl out of the gaping maw of Abaddon to type mewling vitriol before being dragged back to their deserved suffering by Old Scratch, The Prince of the Power and Air, even The Accuser Belial, had a problem with the way Esch talked:

On top of this, the first-person narration of an under-educated, cliché, pregnant black-teen feels wildly inconsistent. Forget about the fact that this narrator has no business using words like “detritus,” dialogue like “And we wasn’t fixing to drown it in no bucket” just doesn’t mesh with prose like “In the woods, animals dart between the valleys of shadow, birds trill up through pathways of sunlight,” when it is supposed to be come from the same voice.

I need my kitten pic.

Here's an idea, Mr. White Guy. Is it so hard to think that an author who grew up in a town similar to the one in the story would understand the terror of being ostracized by the uneducated poor who surrounded her if she even hinted at aspiring to something more? Whose brother sold crack out of his mom's house? Do you think she wouldn't learn very early to talk like her neighbors when she's at home and like her fellow students at the boarding school her mom's employer paid for? Even though she was relentlessly bullied by both groups?

My goodness. Give an author the benefit of the doubt that she knows what she's talking about and that you don't know crap. Socrates said that. Well, he said "I know one thing: that I know nothing" but you get the point. I love it when people say a character's actions are unbelievable because said character doesn't do what he would do when. As far as I can tell all he would do in any situation is not write and publish an award-winning novel.

Is Esch pregnant and black? Yes. Is she cliched? No. Is she under-educated? NO. DUH, YOU DUMB GUY SHE IS OBSESSED WITH BOOKS. Listen to one rap album (if your mom isn't home) and pay attention. Listen as they weave together simile and vocabulary in a way you never will. And when they talk in between the tracks they sound like they're from the streets because you can be from the streets and STILL BE SMART.

I hate him so bad.

Salvage the Bones is raw and horrifying and beautiful.

Rapiers, book fairs, and endless childhood nightmares.

Hey guys let's lighten the mood a little. Last post was, like all trash bags now, pretty heavy-duty. What do you say we talk a little young adult fiction, yeah? What if, instead of talking about domestic violence and military coups, we talked about ghosts for a little bit?

Well. First let's talk about book fair. That magical day when the school library or gym or boiler room or whatever was temporarily converted into a book store. And how, for whatever reason, you just got to buy books during this time. You could go to a hundred real book stores during that year and ask nicely for books and then get a "what are you talking about is it Christmas? Did you get an A on something? No I'm not buying you a book" but then on book fair it's fair game.

Here's a fun thing about book fair, though. Some of those books are pretty inappropriate for kids! I got Jurassic Park in the frickin 5th grade. You guys maybe don't remember that in Jurassic Park a guy gets his intestines spilled and he just looks at it. Also there are like a hundred pages about math.

But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the unholy pairing of one Alvin Schwartz and one Stephen Gammel. Let's talk about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

I will NOT "say that we did," hypothetical reader. If there's one thing we do here at the Howies Book Club Worldwide Headquarters it's look for truth. The truth we look for is in fiction. It's complicated. Read that last post. Anyway, I'm not going to make up some nonsense just because you're afraid to look at a rat that some idiot tourists thought was a chihuahua.

Speaking of ghosts, I read the first two books of the Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud. I know, you guys. I know. I've posted on various forms of social media that I won't read any more books that have the GALL to call themselves "Book 1" when there's only the one dang book out. I don't mind sequels. If a book turns out to be good enough to justify dipping back into that universe, let's do it, I say. Here's the contract I make with authors who don't know who I am: you write a complete story, I'll read it. You give me a third of a book and charge me 20 bux and we've got a problem.

Luckily, I've read the Bartimaeus trilogy by the same author and was pretty sure he wouldn't let me down. If you like young adult fantasy stuff (which I don't) you'll like those (which I did even still). If you like ghost hunters who use dang rapiers to fight ghosts than you're probably in for a good time with The Screaming Staircase and The Whispering Skull.

The guy on the left there is Anthony Lockwood, the owner of a tiny ghost-fighting outfit in a world where ghost hunting is big business. There are giant corporations and Lockwood's just trying to carve out his bit o' the capitalist pie. Gal on the left with the adorable pixie cut? Lucy Carlyle. She's new. Anthony can see the ghosts best. Lucy can hear them. Together with George, who seems like he might be the bumbling comic relief but ends up being the very competent and sharp-witted comic relief, is the researcher.

Lucy's no pushover:

This was classic Lockwood. Friendly, considerate, empathetic. My personal impulse would have been to slap the girl soundly around the face and boot her moaning backside out into the night. Which is why he's the leader, and I'm not. Also why I have no female friends.

Here's a spoiler: so far each book has been a complete story. No dumb cliffhangers. No Stephen Gammel. You're welcome.

The meaning of helplessness

"Finally she lets herself think about how it feels:
to be so frightened that you almost can't breathe
to speed so fast and be so completely out of control
to know the meaning of helplessness
to spin across a shining space knowing any moment you might end up hurt, but likewise, all the same, like plus wise you just might not."

Ali Smith, How to be Both

Reading is FUNdamental

Last Tuesday, three Idaho legislators refused to step onto the floor while a Hindu chaplain said a prayer. Senator Sheryl Nuxoll said it's because the United States is "a Christian nation."

"Hindu is a false faith with false gods," she said. "I think it's great that Hindu people can practice their religion but since we're the Senate, we're setting an example of what we, Idaho, believe."
Well I think you're great, Sheryl. Because you gave me something to write about. You reminded me why I read. I imagine that you do not read often.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2015/03/03/3674609/idaho-senate-opens-with-hindu.html#storylink=cpy

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

The story of Margeret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale shows (through flashback) the gradual and terrifying descent of a free society's decline into an oppressive nightmare. It's so believable, you think while reading, so prescient. It's like it could actually happen.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus we see that it actually does. Constantly. All over the world.

Here. Try this. In Purple Hibiscus a child sees and feels the terror of living in an abusive household. The main character, Kambili, lives in Nigeria. I know, right? It's such a patriarchal culture. Women are treated as second-class. Possessions. What a nightmare. The only way out was something very drastic. Thank goodness we're not like that. Right?

Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of an animal. Back home that night, Papa told Mama that it was sinful. You did not bow to another human being. It was an ungodly tradition, bowing to an Igwe. So, a few days later, when we went to see the bishop at Awka, I did not kneel to kiss his ring. I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have the spirit of discernment: the bishop was a man of God; the Igwe was merely a traditional ruler.

In my experience, there has been no better way to get the perspective Atwood talks about than reading good fiction. Nonfiction is good, too, but rarely gets in the head of the protagonists. We don't have the access to their minds that fiction gives us. We see their actions, but not the motivations. Even autobiographies are filtered and censored based on what the author wants us to know. Fiction, when done well, has no varnish.

Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1986. It's as insightful, prophetic, and scary as Orwell's 1984. Not ten years earlier, female college students in Iran looked and dressed like this:

At the time of the writing, Atwood and the world had watched as a theocracy turned Iran into something unrecognizable:

In today’s Iran, homosexual behavior and adultery (for women only) are illegal and can carry the death penalty. If a Muslim woman engages in a relationship with a non-Muslim man, she may be sentenced to be whipped. Men (and only men) can contract multiple marriages at a time (up to four permanently and as many temporarily as desired) and can terminate each marriage at will. As for custody, under Iranian law, the children always go to the father—even if the father is not present, the children go to his parents over the mother herself. (from cited article)

In The Handmaid's Tale, America has become her own homegrown theocracy, with many of these same traits. Only based on a different holy book. Offret is a handmaid, like Zilpah from the Bible. Given to Jacob when his wife could not conceive. Handmaids are wombs provided to the aging elite when their wives can no longer bear children. Offret is the first generation of these women, and remembers clearly a more free time, and the process by which women lost their rights and voices. Her gradual telling of how it came about makes her current situation even more unbearable. New bodies hang from a great wall that everyone walks past daily. Their sins are posted as a warning to the rest.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. There were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.

In Purple Hibiscus, 15-year-old Kambili lives through one of many military coups that took place in Nigeria in the 1990s. Her father, a miserable abuser of women and children and also one of the great philanthropists of the region, uses his newspaper to vocally criticize the new government. Her aunt, a liberally-minded college professor, seeks to take Kambili and her brother away from the abuse, even for short durations. If you've ever known an abused woman, you may have asked "why doesn't she just walk away?"

Why doesn't Kambili's aunt leave Nigeria? Pressures on her mount as the new regime scrutinizes what's being taught in the university. Her livelihood and maybe her life is at risk. Her country is an abusive spouse/parent. And yet she stays. We all stay. Part fear of the unknown. Part love. Part pride.

The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?

Idaho's a big place, Sheryl. The world's a big place. Read some fiction.