Sarah Porter: Lost Voices

I've been reading a great deal of young adult fantasy recently, as it's the kind of work I enjoyed when I was a girl, and I've been curious to see what's out there. Overall, I've found my reading enjoyable, but nothing has really captured my imagination or really rented out space in my consciousness. With the exception of Carrie Ryan's intelligently and beautifully written zombie novels, I've been left a little cold. Don't get me wrong - I did love The Hunger Game books, but I began to feel a little emotionally beaten up by them, and I know if I had read them when I was, say, twelve, they might have been too much. But perhaps I'm projecting. I think I might be more sensitive now, than when I was actually in middle school.

Which brings me to Sarah Porter's Lost Voices. As always, my disclaimer: Sarah is a friend. But the rave you are about to read is genuine.

In this first book of what I happily understand is a trilogy, she tells the story of a girl named Luce who lives in a coastal fishing community in Alaska. Her parents are dead, her mother died years before and her father was lost at sea. After a peripatetic life with her beloved vagabond father, she lives with a drunken, brutal uncle and life is grim indeed. After a possible death (or something like it), Luce finds herself in the sea, a mermaid, along with a tribe of other young girls, all of whom have had ugly lives and even uglier deaths. They do what mermaids traditionally have always done: they sing, and they lure ships to their doom. Luce finds a place for herself with her fellow mermaids, whose queen Catarina becomes her friend, mentor and, subsequently, inadvertent rival.

There were so many things in this book that really hit me at a deep level, and I'll likely go into some of them in embarrassing detail in this post. Here's the thing: Sarah is a poet. She just is. Her prose is evocative and gorgeous, and emotionally this story just cut me to the bone. I think she pretty much did everything right. Luce felt very much like a real girl to me. In so many books for young people, the protagonist is portrayed as "loner" or an "outsider", as this is the way so many young people feel even if this wasn't so much the case. It's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine that fictional characters recover from outsiderhood with such apparent ease, their former loneliness not leaving any scars or behavior patterns. They change circumstance, suddenly find friends and they actually, like, know how. Luce is so much more herself than many fictional characters.

In school, Luce is quiet and finds herself nearly paralyzed with social awkwardness. Upon becoming a mermaid this doesn't precisely change. She is thrilled to find herself accepted and embraced by a tribe of other girls. She also finds she has a particular talent for singing: the beautiful, alluring and deeply treacherous voice of the siren. But Luce isn't particularly used to playing with others - she's a good person, just used to being alone, which as I've so often learned to my chagrin, is much, much simpler. But that's not the way the world works: there are so many complicated social nuances, and among the teenage, social rules are strict and harsh - and these mermaids are perpetually teenaged, a horror movie concept if I've ever heard one.

There are so many interesting facets to this story, and Sarah has them all covered. So many of them have to do with the very nature of both mermaidhood and femaleness and the places in which these things overlap. Essentially, mermaids are killers, mass murderers. This is monstrous and horrifying from a human point of view, but mermaids are out of the world, it doesn't mean the same thing to them. But, still. And this forms a large part of Luce's impossible dilemma. She also asks, "Why only girls?". There's also the question of outsiderhood, and damage which lies at the heart of the story. When the terrifying mermaid Anais joins the tribe, Luce's fragile place within her new family is snatched from her. Anais is an amazing creation. She might be the most realistic mean girl I've ever encountered in fiction. Just reading about her sent bolts of anxiety through me in a very deep place I didn't think even existed within me anymore.

There's a very long history of monstrous females in myth and fairy tales. Baba Yaga, Lamia, Medusa, all the wicked mothers and witches and scheming servant girls in stories like The Juniper Tree and The Goose Girl, and, of course, the sirens themselves. And there's Anderson's The Little Mermaid, a story that as a child I found so sad it was almost unbearable. This book knows all of this, and is informed and enriched by these universal tales that form so much of who we are as a people. All these strange and sometimes evil and outsider women beginning with Eve. Luce is essentially a gentle soul who is thrust into the role of siren which is heady and confusing and upsetting and, all things considered, maybe not all it's been cracked up to be.

Sarah Porter also blogs at YA Outside the Lines, and a while ago she posted a great piece about dark subject matter in young adult fiction in which she writes:

Why would I feel the need to protect kids from an awareness of that human darkness with which they are perfectly familiar already, which haunts their imaginations and in some cases their lives?

Instead I felt responsible to be as honest as I could about the ways of getting through the darkness. Young teens are often in the process of confronting the worst aspects of humanity, and of struggling to come to terms with what it means to be a part of a species that perpetrates cruelty so routinely. Only by regarding that horror directly can they begin to withstand it.

I think she answers a certain kind of critic very well. I've started to write a bit about how I've gotten tired of dystopia, but maybe what I'm tired of is how manipulated into feeling awful I am by cheap narrative tricks. I'm totally okay with the darkness, but I want it to be earned. Lost Voices isn't a dystopian novel, but it is very dark, but it feels achingly and wonderfully real, I swear I could taste the salt water as I read.

Lost Voices's official release date is July 4th. BREAKING: Lost Voices is apparently available NOW.

Her lovely website is Sarah's Watery Den.

Below, the preview video created by her publishers (fancy!)

The War Against Miss Winter

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I'm an avid reader of historical mysteries, perhaps the geekiest of genres (where's our Con??).

There are all kinds. The hard-boiled works of James Ellroy and Megan Abbott which usually aren't referred to as "historical mysteries" but are. The excellent, melancholic Maisie Dobbs books by Jacqueline Winspear, all about the repercussions of the First World War on both the living and the dead. And, the insanely popular vogue for mysteries set in New York at the turn of the last century, likely inspired by the success of (the over-rated) Alienist in the '90s.

Historical mysteries are difficult to write, as there are so many different elements. Is the mystery any good? Is the book well researched and accurate, does it wear its period lightly, or is the author subjecting you to gigantic info dumps. How about all the usual novelistic elements, such as style and character? I've read very, very few that manage to be effective at all three of the above aspects of historical mystery-making. Most often, as in Caleb Carr's two mysteries, and in Victoria Thompson's Gaslight series, it's the mystery that suffers most. And in Carr's books, his characterizations are laughably simple-minded. The historical aspects are clearly the draw, so they get the most attention.

Which brings me to The War Against Miss Winter, a mystery set in the New York City theater world in the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It comes close to succeeding on all fronts, but falls a little short. The story is told by struggling actress, Rosie Winter, who has been supplementing her income (as so many of us must) by working as a file clerk for a private detective. When her employer is offed, Rosie is drawn into the mystery surrounding his family and a strange, reclusive playwright (no, not me). What's so interesting about this book is that the elements that are so often the weakest, are truly impressive. Her mystery is terrific. A true twisty, Christie-style stumper that plays fair with the readers. That is rare beyond rare. Also, first time novelist Kathryn Miller Haines is a playwright and actor, so her understanding of how the nuts and bolts of how theater works is better than in the average novelist.

Now for the not so great parts. In some ways, I am likely Haines biggest nightmare as a reader. Haines hails from Texas and lives in Pennsylvania. As far as I can tell, she has never lived in New York, and it shows. She also uses a 1940s style slang in a way that occasionally made me cringe. There was too much of it, and it felt a little forced. I grew up around people much older than me who had spent their whole lives on the island of Manhattan and the way people spoke, and the way the city was portrayed was off. The phrase "IRT" was never once mentioned, though that was the subway line Rosie lives on, and she talks about taking the subway lots. The theater Rosie winds up working for is clearly modeled after The Group Theater, but she places it on 14th Street, which just felt - wrong. Her description of the lobby of The Waldorf-Astoria made no sense if you've spent any actual time in the lobby. The city just never came alive as it does in Thompson's Gaslight series, for example, or the way Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s does in Ellroy's books.

Kathryn Miller Haines has three subsequent entries in her Rosie Winter series, and I'll likely try at least one more. Though the city isn't very compellingly drawn, and a couple of inexcusable anachronisms jumped out at me, the ability to write a complicated mystery is rare indeed.

Mapp and Lucia and E.F. Benson

Much like with The Fountain Overflows, the covers of the most recent editions of E.F. Benson's Lucia books makes them look really boring so I won't be using them. Instead, I will be illustrating this post with Edward Gorey drawings. He never illustrated the Lucia books, but he was influenced by them and should have.

E.F. Benson is the sort of fiction writer that doesn't really exist anymore. He started off writing serious, historical novels that didn't go anywhere (and are reportedly dreadful), and then went on to write dark and witty indictments of high society, then many, many short stories in pretty much every genre imaginable. Of particular note are his ghost stories, which are still heavily anthologized and pretty easy to find. He also wrote mysteries, horror, adventure stories, comic pieces, satire and crime stories. He wrote volumes of history, too.

But, what Benson is most remembered for now are his six Lucia books. Most importantly: they are hilarious. They stand as the only books that have ever made me well and truly miss my subway stop - and they did it twice. I think the first time it happened was when I was reading about the "duel" in Miss Mapp, and the second time was when Captain Puffin drowns in his soup. But more on that later.

E.F. Benson was a member of a strange and illustrious family. His father was Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the Benson siblings were interesting and accomplished. One brother, a celebrated essayist, poet and Cambridge professor, penned the lyrics to Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory" (which is a part of his Pomp and Circumstance, which we all recognize from every graduation ceremony ever). Another was a Catholic priest and popular novelist. Their sister was an artist, writer and Egyptologist. Sadly, the Egyptologist and the professor went mad, likely suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder - their father may have suffered from it as well. After the death of the Archbishop, his wife set up housekeeping with the widow of the previous Archbishop of Canterbury in a lesbian relationship that lasted the rest of their lives. It is likely that all the Benson siblings were also homosexual (E.F. certainly was).

The six Lucia novels span the years between the wars, the last one appearing shortly before Benson's death in 1940. They all (except for the previously mentioned Miss Mapp) star Mrs. Emmeline Lucas, who calls herself Lucia. She lives in the village of Riseholme and is constantly striving for social supremacy. She is elegant and snobbish and completely insufferable. All the squabbles and issues are ludicrous and overblown. I find the books incredibly difficult to explain as, if one is asked what they are about, the only answer is "a bunch of upper middle class middle aged English people who live in a village and bicker." Which is true. But they are so, so funny in an almost Fawlty Towers-ish kind of way. Lucia and her best friend Georgie pretend they can speak Italian, so of course Benson keeps throwing actual Italians at them. It's always hilarious.

Miss Mapp is introduced in the titular novel in which Lucia doesn't appear - but when the two of them meet in Mapp and Lucia, it is like clash of the titans. Lucia moves to Tilling, where Mapp reigns supreme and it's just great. They loathe each other. All the books are filled with comic set pieces and great characters. The Vicar who speaks in a made up Scottish accent. The young female painter ("Quaint Irene") who wears knickerbockers. The great opera singer who is always inviting Italians to stay. The medium who cons everybody. The local Riseholme museum that contains a taxidermied pug and some shards of pottery that everyone optimistically has declared Roman. The pages of intrigue surrounding Georgie's hair, or the "guru" with whom everyone is entranced who makes them do yoga.

There is no sex at all ("that horrid thing which Freud calls sex") and no children. I thought, at one point that there were, but then it was subsequently revealed that the character was actually around thirty but liked to effect a childlike pose. Gorey really should have illustrated them. What the books do, is turn a bunch of very ordinary, everyday people into stars of great drama. There was no television so they all had to make their own fun with their gurus and ouidja board and theatricals. Like all great leaders, Lucia is painted as being both monstrous and heroic, but the canvas she is painted on is miniscule. Women and gay men were so often portrayed in this period as depressed and thwarted or deviant. Benson was a very old fashioned writer, but in some ways he was radical. His open mindedness towards every brand of eccentricity and oddness is one of the things that makes the books so engaging. And they are, as I keep saying, very, very funny.

How Exene Cervenka Saved My Life

Last weekend, my inamorato and I sat down to watch the 1986 documentary X: The Unheard Music which I hadn't seen in well over twenty years. Back when I was a deeply alienated teenager, I saw it many, many times.

It was the weirdest thing. Aside from how much I love the band X, it was just like stepping into a time machine to the eighties. Let me just say right up front that few things are weirder and more off-putting to me than 80s nostalgia. It must have been how lots of people viewed the 70s nostalgia of the 90s, i.e. just baffling. The 80s were kind of the worst in a way, not miles away from living in these United States under Bush II. I think most people have forgotten or never knew.

It was the time of Iran-Contra, the first implementation of trickle-down economics, ketchup is a vegetable (when feeding children and the poor - so often the same thing) and the country, as whole seemed and felt culturally dead. In other words, a fine breeding ground for punk.

Exene Cervenka moved from Florida to Los Angeles in 1976 and formed X with John Doe (her soon to be husband whom she had met at a poetry workshop), Billy Zoom and D.J Bonebreak a year later. Their first four albums are all just great, all produced by Ray Manzarek from The Doors, and I had them all and played them again and again. My favorite has always been Under A Big Black Sun, their third.

Back in high school, I didn't have anywhere near the kind of money most of my classmates did. I mean, I couldn't compete with the mean little capitalist drones who sat in bio class with me, so eventually, and relievedly, I stopped trying. I wore clothes from thrift stores and yard sales (and there was some great stuff back then, believe me), my Mom's old clothes from up in the attic and my Dad's narrow lapeled suit jackets from the late 50s. I mostly stopped listening to Madonna and Duran Duran and began listening to stuff like X and The Cramps and The Replacements. Those first few REM albums and The B-52s and The Cure and The Velvet Underground and the (early) Clash records. And I began picking through my Mom's large and varied collection of LPs, stocked with folk and country and various oddities of all sorts.

Exene is a poet and a rock star and an artist right down to her bones and I worshipped her. I used to make all kinds of collages, and watching The Unheard Music, I wonder if I first started gluing stiff to paper because I saw her doing so in the film. Maybe. You can see at right a page from a more than 20 year old notebook. I don't remember where I found that picture of Exene. From Interview Magazine maybe? Way back in the early 90s she collaborated on a book called Just Another War about the first Gulf War. Henry Rollins published it on his press and I saw her on her book tour in '92. I was so thrilled to see her.

In some ways I feel she is the last of the true believers. She still writes and sings and wears thrift store clothes. She has a son in his early 20s who she had with ex-husband Viggo Mortensen (the amount of street cred he garnered when I found out he had been married to Exene for ten years is pretty much incalculable) . I just read she's been diagnosed with MS, which is just heartbreaking, and is likely why I haven't hear much from her recently.

I realize I've been writing a lot about people who have a very particular LA folk aesthetic. If I was to classify it, I would say it's a mix of old time Hollywood, punk rock, Mexican Folk Art and The Great American West. X's aesthetic falls somewhere in this too. I can't remember off hand if they are name checked in Weetzie Bat, but I think they might be. I'm a New York girl through and through, but there's something about the myth of California that's always appealed to me. When I was growing up in suburban NY, it saved me to know there were other places out there even if they were fictional: Narnia, Middle Earth, Old Hollywood, whatever. It was mysterious and glamorous and unattainable.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if Exene Cervenka actually saved my life. But sometimes it sure as hell felt like it.

Photo: Jim Jocoy, We're Desperate

The Great and Wonderful L. Frank Baum

Yesterday, as reported elsewhere, the great and wonderful L.Frank Baum would have been 155 years old. 111 years ago, Mr. Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He devised it because he thought the world needed an American fairy tale, one for the modern age, for modern children, that would leave out both the horrors and moralizing of Grimm. As we are all aware, he succeeded marvelously. He had the great instincts of a true showman, and he pleased his audiences beyond measure. So much so, thirteen sequels followed.

It's always seemed kind of unfortunate to me that most people, if they have read any of his books, have only read the first Oz book, the one on which the movie is based, as I think it is one of the weakest. Compared to the amazing flights of imagination in (my favorite) Ozma of Oz, or in The Patchwork Girl of Oz for example, it seems a little bereft of whimsey. I've mentioned Ozma of Oz elsewhere in writing about modern steampunk, as Mr. Baum presents one of the very fist literary robots.

I don't know if there is another author who has ever been as attuned to what children want as Baum was. Something about his stories goes right to the center of childhood itself. I think it has so much to do with friendship and animals and the fact that nearly everything talks. If there's one dream shared by many, many children it's that one's toys and pets would talk back. In Baum's invented universe, they most often do. One of my favorite bits of retconning is in (I think) The Lost Princess of Oz, when all the animals ask Toto why he didn't begin talking like all the other animals from our world do upon entering the Fairy Land of Oz, and he says he just didn't feel like it.

Baum reportedly wanted to cease writing Oz books, as he had other stories to tell, so he kept on introducing elements such as the spell Glinda cast that would make Oz appear to outsiders as just a continuation of the Great Sandy Waste that surrounds it. All of this is documented in his author's notes at the beginning of each volume. Inevitably, he will end a book with Oz being cut off from us (and thus, Baum, The Royal Historian of Oz, will be unable to write any more installments). He also, inevitably, reports receiving a letter from a little girl in which she asks "What about wireless?", and his writing about Oz continues, as it did until his death in 1919.

His influence upon my life is incalculable. We had a full set of the Oz books when I was growing up and I read them all repeatedly. W.W. Denslow, who illustrated the first book, is considered one of the great illustrators of the Golden Age. But, John R. Neill, who illustrated the other thirteen books has always been more to my taste. I grew up trying to draw as much like him as I could, and his massive influence is still visible all over my work. I was a strange and lonely child, likely with an undiagnosed case of OCD, prone to list making of all sorts (I swear, I spent at least half my childhood alphabetizing). At one point, I went through all of Baum's Oz books and made a list of all the characters. I (of course) alphabetized them and then drew each one. I also remember drawing each of Princess Langwidere's thirty heads.

I haven't reread them all in years and years. I think it may be time to do so again. I will, of course, share my findings here.

Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows

Rebecca West is one of the seemingly limitless number of people who was colossally famous in the 20th century and now seems to be nearly forgotten. As you can see, she was a big enough deal to wind up as the cover story of Time Magazine in 1947. She had a truly remarkable life, living until she was 90. She was a world class journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker, a novelist, a Feminist (she's name checked in Virginia Woolf's a Room of One's Own - I mean, does it get any better than that? Chapter Two, if you're interested), political crank, an intellectual who began her adult life as an actress (her real name was Cicely Fairfield, Rebecca West was the stage name she chose, from Ibsen's Rosmersholm) and all around fascinating person.

Her personal life was equally interesting and varied. She had a decade long affair with the much older H.G. Wells and had a son with him while Wells was still married to somebody else. She feuded with her son their whole lives, one of his grievances being she pretended, in his early years, to be his "aunt". I first saw her when she served as one of the aged talking heads in Warren Beatty's John Reed biopic, Reds.

I'll likely revisit West again on this blog as I read my way through her oeuvre, but here I want to talk about her 1957 semi-autobiographical novel, The Fountain Overflows. I first read it a few years ago and I loved it so much I didn't trust myself. What I mean by that is, I loved it to such a degree I knew I was blinded as to its objective literary worth. I remember knowing after I finished the first chapter, that unless she did something very stupid indeed, this was likely to become one of my all-time favorites. Needless to say, she did nothing stupid whatsoever, so one of my favorites it remains.

If you ask me what it's about, I'd answer: It's about a musical family (The Aubreys) in the first decade of the 20th century with a father who is a political journalist and a compulsive gambler, a mother who is a former concert pianist, three young daughters (one of whom, Rose, is the narrator) and a young son who is some sort of genius and is little more than a baby when the book begins. It is set in the very first years of the 20th century as the Aubrey family moves from Edinburgh to London, and the girls begin to grow up.

I realize this makes The Fountain Overflows sound like the most conventional novel, but it really isn't. If you ask me again what it's about, I would respond: It's about the difference between children and adults and childhood and adulthood, about art and what makes good art and bad art. It's about poverty and how children respond to it differently from each other. It's about women and how they function in a world in which they have very little autonomy, and about how some optimistically make do and how others flail and nearly drown. It's about what it means if one is a real artist and if one isn't. And how hard it is for each. It's about the uncanny and about how men can sometimes simultaneously knowingly destroy their own lives and unknowingly destroy the lives of those who love them. It might be the funniest and smartest book about what people are like that I've ever read.

The twins, Mary and our narrator Rose, are budding concert pianists. Their elder sister, Cordelia plays the violin, and the great tragedy of the Aubrey family is that Cordelia is a terrible musician and does not know it. This is viewed by Rose and Mary as a far worse tragedy than their poverty or their father's inability to hold onto a job. The worst of it is, though she is a competent musician, she just isn't any good. A distinction that is lost on most people, and Cordelia is a pretty little girl who looks charming when she plays, so she receives heaps of praise. This is simultaneously hilarious and awful and is one of the main threads of the story.

Their father is also both wonderful and monstrous. He's a political journalist of very great repute, who gambles and borrows money, who alienates his followers and friends, who cannot suffer fools. His children are all in awe of him and think him the most wonderful man, but there is a thread of nihilism and self-destruction that also frightens them. Near the beginning of the book, when they are all still small, he gives the children a remarkable and magical Christmas in which they receive elaborate toys he's made himself. They love hearing the stories from his childhood, and they watch as strange men come to the house and demand money from their mother for debts unpaid. There is a remarkable passage in which we find out that public opinion has swung against him, and his friends in Parliament think him mad because of a pamphlet he's written in which all the ills of the 20th century are laid out in black and white. It's full of extraordinary passages as Mr. Aubrey's MP friend shares his dismay and horror with Mrs. Aubrey - who knows nothing about politics but everything about music. She tells him that it's possible her husband is a seer because:

"'I am a musician, you know. We find that in the great composers. Much of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven is much more comprehensible than it was when it was first written, or even than it was when I was young. My teachers found Beethoven's later quartets quite baffling. That can only mean he wrote with a full knowledge of a musical universe that was still chaos while he lived.'"

There is a sequence in which Rose visits her cousin Rosamund and her mother in their shabby house and she and her mother discover them besieged by poltergeists. The ghosts or demons or spirits or whatever they are real and awful. But they are immediately and permanently dispelled once the two little girls and their mothers are finally in the same room as each other. Rose's mother, Clare, calls the supernatural a "dirty business" and is not something to be played with. Everyone in the Aubrey family can prognosticate to some degree or another, but it is not viewed as something that should be indulged, and if one does so the after-effects are never good.

Among all the remarkable set pieces in the book is a good old fashioned, Victorian murder. A school friend of the girls' mother poisons her husband and the Aubrey family wind up taking in the little girl and her aunt. The murderess's family are rich, uneducated Cockneys (while the Aubrey's are, of course, painfully over-educated upper class paupers), and West's descriptions of Aunt Lily are very funny. But what's remarkable is that while they are funny, they are neither condescending or sentimental. West manages throughout the book a combination of uncompromising truth telling and extreme kindness that I've never really encountered before. She's never, ever cruel to her characters, though many do awful things or behave badly.

It's really the oddest book. In some ways it's like the books one reads when one is a child, about a family of (mostly) girls, growing up in genteel poverty, who want to be brilliant musicians. I mean, I know that when one describes it, it sounds like a Noel Streatfeild book. And in a surface way it is like that, and I think if I had read it when I was eleven I would have loved it, too, and it's likely one of the reasons for my loving it (and I use that word literally - the things or people I love more than this book I can count on one hand). But as is so often the case when one reads very well at a young age, one misses nearly everything, and I would have loved it without understanding it - which in some ways is so much of what the book is about, as it is as much about being a girl as it is about anything. It has the shape in some ways of a very traditional sort of book written for young people. But, at its core, its a modernist masterpiece with all the pleasures of Victorian fiction. It's not a book for children, but it's very much about what it's like to be a child, and the child narrator is one of the most extraordinary voices I've read. West manages to make her sound the way children feel in their heads, rather than how they are heard by adults. It's often unclear how much time has gone by or how old the children are, it all flows seamlessly without the traditional markers used in more conventional fiction.

Also unconventional is that the book is entirely about the Aubrey family and their home. There are very few scenes which take place at school. There is no romance of a traditional sort in the book. The more I think about it, the more I think The Fountain Overflows might be an extraordinarily complicated, 400 page character study of Clare Aubrey, the girls' mother. Again, in some ways she resembles that perfect mother of our dreams, Marmee from Little Women. He love is what keeps their family from falling into irreparable chaos and misery, and her love and kindness is on offer to pretty much everybody who enters her home, or is swept up in her wake - including a discarded mistress of Mr. Aubrey's and the mistress's husband (meeting whom, causes her to reread Madame Bovary, which makes her forget to be angry at her husband). We see her through her children's eyes and they are fiercely protective of her, as they think they are tougher then she is, as their childhood was far more difficult, but like children reading a grownup novel - they miss the point a bit.

There is a thread of politics that runs through the book, but West is wise enough, or perhaps I only think she is wise as she thinks as I do, that people are more important than politics. And this is book that is about people and about art and about family. Rebecca West writes as well as anybody I've ever read, and better than nearly everyone. Her prose is so clear, so sane and so sharp. Her sentences and paragraphs are long, and like the novel itself, perfectly constructed. As she writes about the Aubrey family and their friends it's as if she's wielding a sharp paring knife, cutting deeper and deeper into the truth of who these people are. Her criticism could be vicious when she was young. Shaw said of her: "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely." And here she cuts very deeply indeed, but never thoughtlessly, never unkindly.

In her author's note at the end of the book West writes:

"The main theme of the book might be said to be the way human beings look at each other inquisitively, trying to make out what is inside the opaque human frame. Piers and Clare Aubrey loved each other but never really knew how the other one thought and felt. Mary and Rose were divided from Cordelia and watched each other in irritated misapprehension, and were divided from Richard Quinn and looked at him in hope of comprehension. They were all looking for clues to understanding... But I only wrote this book, which is not to say that I am the best authority on what it means."

Whatever it means, I can say I love the Aubrey family and maybe that's enough meaning, really. West wrote two sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, both still unfinished at her death in 1983. She apparently spent years tinkering with them and never thought them ready for publication. However, they have both been published posthumously, and they both sit on my shelf waiting to be read.

Ghosts and Fairies and Witches and Books: Jo Walton's Among Others

I think I've pretty much decided that the idea of dividing various books up into genres is essentially the work of marketers and not something that artists or writers should have to worry about. As one of my favorite and most world defining quotes puts it: "Humans like categories, nature likes a spectrum". That pretty much sums up my opinions on nearly everything. Taxonomy has taken over the world. Why does everything have to be one thing or another?

Which curmudgeonly paragraph brings me to Jo Walton. She's published by Tor, who publish SciFi and some fantasy. Walton's books include Tooth and Claw, a book about dragons that was greatly inspired by Trollope, and a trilogy of cozy mystery novels set in a alternative history dystopia. In other words, she's pretty much my sort of writer. Her most recent book, Among Others, is just as difficult to pin down. It's an autobiographical coming of age story. It's a boarding school book. It's about grief and loss. It's about fairies. It's about magic. It's about family. But more than anything else, it's about books. Books, books and more books.

The book is told through a series of journal entries (we are told they are written backwards, to keep people from reading them, something I used to occasionally do), written by Mor, fifteen. Her twin sister has recently died (either in a car crash or during a cataclysmic battle between good fairies and their evil witch mother or both - take your pick) and she's been sent to her father and his family who are essentially strangers to her. She misses her extended family and the Welsh valley in which she was raised. She's sent to boarding school, where she is bullied for her less than posh accent and for the cane she must walk with after the accident.

The narration is essentially unreliable and Walton's preamble just muddies the water further:

"So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red busses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though."

And there are fairies, at least Mor can see them, or Mor writes that she sees them. I've seen one or two reviews of this book complaining about the magic. That they aren't able to tell what is real and what isn't. Does it matter? Or, possibly, that's the entire point. Walton has been awfully cagey in interviews (casting doubt on parts of her wikipedia bio, too), not giving much away, and good for her. It's funny, the parts that are about Mor going to school and dealing with her family (about whom we get a full but gloriously muddled history), and reading and making friends smack of complete documentary truth. They are immediate and detailed and interesting. The parts about magic and seeing fairies sometimes feel a little uncomfortable. But, the caginess feels intratextual. Mor worries people will think she's crazy or make fun of her more. She doesn't want something that means so much to her ridiculed. Or maybe she is making it up. But I don't think so. I think we should take Walton at her word: The fairies are real.

More about the books. Mor reads science fiction and fantasy with untrammeled abandon and concentration. She writes about what she reads constantly, and she longs for someone to talk about books with. This is a particular kind of loneliness that the existence of the internet has somewhat alleviated. No matter what you are a fan of, you can plug a few searches into google and likely find a few likeminded individuals. But back in the analog past it wasn't so easy. Mor slowly makes friends with her school librarian, finds a science fiction reading group at the local library, and the books are one of the few things she and her father have to talk about. Books are so important to lots of young people, more so to them than anybody. I remember so vividly the ache of it. She writes about reading Tolkien so eloquently and about the problem of Susan and about Heinlein and others. She picks up a copy of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and then four pages later apropos of nothing she says, "Who would have thought Richard the Third didn't actually kill the princes in the tower?", and I fear if you hadn't read Tey's book you wouldn't know what she was talking about.

But I haven't read much SciFi and I didn't miss alot I don't think (but I think I may have read more than I realize, particularly of the pre-80s books that Mor is reading). But Tolkien, I get. And lots more. It's a book about the lonliness of a particular sort of adolescence. An alienated book reading one, not the most original premise as so may of that sort of young person grow up to be authors, but they so rarely actually write about the books themselves and entwine it with the life stuff. Add that to the supernatural and there's something special afoot.

Among Others isn't perfect. It feels a bit unresolved and cagy to the very last. I have a feeling, upon reflection, this might be intentional. Mor is so smart and thinks about everything, maybe not giving feeling much of a chance. I think that might be because of the terrors inherent in feeling, maybe feeling is somehow akin to magic. There are tantalizing hints and bits of information about her mother's madness and about what happened, I mean with the devastation of Mor's sister's death. It almost feels unfinished, but I'm fairly certain Walton doesn't want us to know more. It's one of the strangest choices I've encountered in a book in this age of easy pleasures, I don't know whether it was very, very brave, or a complete failing of nerve. I actually don't know what to think. I really liked this book and so much of it made emotional sense to me with it's strange shying away from larger issues in favor of literature. The more I think about it, the more I think that may have been the point. Now all of you must read it so I have someone to talk about it with.

(This is my 300th post! Whee!)

Charles de Lint: The Newford Stories

I really have no business writing this at all.

I've barely dipped into Charles de Lint's loosely connected Newford stories, but having just finished his early short story collection, Dreams Underfoot, I thought "Why not"?

The phrase "urban fantasy" is being tossed around all over the place in these vampire ridden times, so I think the original impulse that created the genre has been somewhat diluted, or lost. To the point where I think the Wikipedia entry on the genre is kind of off. Currently, when the genre is talked about, what is usually meant is paranormal mystery or romance. Something like the Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire books or the Anita Blake series. That is to say, fairly traditional genre books (mystery, crime, romance, whatever) that just happen to have a vampire or a werewolf included. As most everyone knows, these books are unbelievably popular, but I'll leave looking at that particular phenomenon for another day. Some are very entertaining, and some are just awful. But, honestly, most just aren't very good or creative and special.

These aren't the books I'm much interested in writing about.

In the Wikipedia entry on the genre neither John Crowley or Charles de Lint are mentioned - which I think invalidates the whole thing. In 1981, Crowley's Little, Big was published. I have to re-read it before I write about it properly, but it's a book that I didn't precisely love when I first read it, but bits and pieces of it have been gnawing away it my brain ever since. It's a family saga and a fairy tale and part of it is set in a strange post-apocalyptic New York. It's not really like much else, and is one of those books (along with lots of Angela Carter, for example) that make you realize how deeply conservative most stories are. To leave him off any sort of list of Urban Fantasy authors is unforgivable, as he likely invented the genre. Of course, his book contains no vampire romance, so why would anyone care?

The other omission, that of Charles de Lint, is particularly shocking to me as I was under the impression that is was the absolute king of this genre. But, again, his books and stories sorely lack the vampire romance element, so I am clearly wrong.

For the past 20 years or so, de Lint has been writing books and stories about the fictional city of Newford. I'm not sure where it is, but I'm guessing somewhere in Canada, on one of the Great Lakes (de Lint hails from the great nation to our North). I'd read a smattering of short stories set in Newford over the years when I came across them in various anthologies, but I hadn't read any of the novels or collections. I had read his non-Newford novel, The Little Country, which I liked very much. As I have total completion mania, and like to begin things at the beginning, I'm finding the list of over twenty books somewhat daunting. I started with the early short story collection, Dreams Underfoot and I loved it.

He writes about poets and street kids and artists and buskers and musicians. He's not very interested in the middle class and the ordinary. He has a particular interest in traditional forms of music and in all sorts of folk tradition. Music has played a huge part in everything by him that I've read, and this anthology is no different (de Lint has recorded a couple of albums of folk and traditional music himself). The stories vary greatly in subject and tone, but there is a great deal of magic in all of them. There are fairies and mermaids and monsters. He intertwines these supernatural elements with the ordinary lives of the people who populate his city seamlessly. Some characters appear again and again, Jilly a former street kid turned painter most often. Many of the stories are romantic, in the old fashioned sense of the word, including a gorgeous mermaid story spun from the Anderson original. Like it (and unlike the Disney version), things end tragically. Though there is magic and one wishes with all one's being that Newford was real, he doesn't whitewash the horrors of poverty and runaways. Their lives are brutal, and the only reason anyone winds up on the street is because of poverty and abuse. His magic stories, like in the older fairy tales, are ways of showing and explaining people's lives, making something out of them, and as with lots of old tales, most often the lives of women or the poor.

Not to make his stories sound unbearably grim, because they're not. Even when they're sad (and at least three of them made me cry on the subway), there's always some sort of catharsis, nothing's ever a complete waste. He also has at least one or two horror stories. But, I think, it's his deep knowledge and love of folk traditions, both narrative and in music that give his stories their very special feeling. He knows what he's writing about and he rarely overplays his hand.

I'm trying to decide which one I should read next. It will likely be The Onion Girl as I already own it, and it's supposed to be something of a classic. But if anyone - human, fairy or vampire - has any other suggestions, I'll gladly listen.

The Art of Stage Dancing (or, How To Be A Follies Dancer By Following These Easy Steps)

Most people know that Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest and best things the internet hath wrought. Anticipating the digital book revolution, they have proved themselves ahead of the curve in every way, and their files are full of wonders indeed. All those new releases on Amazon never tempt me to fork over my hard earned cash for a Kindle, but what I am about to share with you just might.

The man who calls himself Trav S.D. alerted me of the existence of Ned Wayburn: dancer, dance school major domo and Ziegfeld Follies choreographer also penned an instructional book, The Art of Stage Dancing, first published in 1925. I haven't yet read most of it, but was so thrilled with what it does contain, I felt the need to immediately report.

It begins with the following disclaimer: "As a writer of books, I confess myself to be a good stage craftsman." But from what I've seen, it is a book full of charm and anecdotes. And pictures. Pictures from editions of the Follies he has choreographed, pictures of his classes in session, and pictures of former students (including the bother/sister dance team at left.) Apparently, she was the real talent of the two, but no film of her dancing exists. The mind reels. This is what he has to say about them:

"Two of my most famous pupils in Musical Comedy dancing are Fred and Adele Astaire, brother and sister. They came to me to study from Omaha, Nebraska, as little tots of about six and seven years of age. Adele was always fond of coming to her classes; but Fred says that he just "followed on" through brotherly association rather than from any preconceived ambition to become a professional dancer. Then, through reverses of family fortunes, the time came when they felt that they should be supporting themselves. They continued to study under me, and I was very happy to be able to place them in vaudeville in a singing and dancing act, which I had prepared for them. This started them on their career, which has led them to Europe and back again."

The caption describes them as being featured in "Lady, Be Good!". There's a short description of their routine from that show in my favorite novel, Wise Children by Angela Carter, as it's the very first show the Chance sisters are taken to see (at which they aso first see their elusive father, a matinee idol on his way to becoming a Great Shakespearean).

"Up went the curtain; there were Fred and Adèle, evicted, out on the street with all their bits and pieces. She set out the chairs, she straightened the sofa, she hung a sign on the lamppost: "Bless This House". We thought that we would die of pleasure. We clung to one another's hands like grim death, we thought we might wake up and find out we had been dreaming. Nora liked Adèle best; she liked it when she dressed up like a Mexican widow and did her Spanish dance, but it was old Fred for me, then and forever, with his funny little nutcracker face and the Eton crop that looked painted on it shone so, and not a hair ever moved...But 'Lady Be Good' showed us the way. It was the Damascus road for us. We spent hours at home afterwards, in the ground floor front, rolling back the rug, getting the numbers off pat. That finale, she in her Tyrolean costume, him like a little sailor doll. We took it in turns to be the lady."

It's so funny, because when one reads novels you have no way of knowing what is real. Another character in Wise Children is Dan Leno, who I didn't know was real until I read my inamorato's book. I'm no intellectual. I've been utterly enchanted by show business and dancing and the stage since I was three. The aching post adolescent pretension came later. The work is hard and needs to be trusted. Theater is a good thing, don't you know, it doesn't need to be destroyed to be made interesting, but more on that at a later date.

Back to Mr. Wayburn's opus.

He explains in great detail the basics all sorts of dancing: Musical Comedy, Acrobatic, Tap, Specialty, Character and what he calls Ned Wayburn's Modern Americanized Ballet Technique. He has chapters on Stage Make-up and diet. I discovered that to lose weight (though I am 20 pounds underweight by 1925 standards, apparently) one must under no circumstances drink any liquid with meals! There is an equally extensive section on gaining weight. He gives sample menus. One of the weight loss lunches includes macaroni and cheese. I love Ned Wayburn. In fact here is Thursday's reducing menu in its entirety:

BREAKFAST

1 apple; 1 egg omelet; 1 bran muffin; small pat butter; coffee with hot skimmed milk.

LUNCHEON

Macaroni and cheese; lettuce with French dressing; fruit gelatine pudding (clear).

DINNER

Beef or lamb stew with vegetables; 2 thin slices whole wheat bread; small pat butter; tapioca cream pudding; black coffee.

I chose the photo of the dancer at left because her last name is "Bacon". I know, I know.

Mr. Wayburn also goes on to explain how show business works. What does a Stage Manager do? Interestingly, he sounds much more like what we would call a "director". Who is the prop man? What is he responsible for? The Chief Electrician, the Company Manager, The Press Rep? And all as it stood in 1925. This book is freaking invaluable.

In true Show Biz fashion, the book is essentially an elaborate advertisement for Wayburn's school and private coaching services. There's a lot of "These people were completely at sea until they came to me and then they shot to stardom after taking my advice". But the thing is 300+ pages long. It's full of anecdotes, advice, lovely photographs of Follies luminaries and black and white illustrations. He has advice about how to overcome stage fright, how to communicate your personality through dance, how to exercise, how to ensure a creative and magical atmosphere, what shoes to wear and on and on.

If you want to be one of Mr. Ziegfeld's specialty dancers (c.1925), this is an excellent place to start.

The Aching Romanticism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fourteen years ago this month, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on the (now defunct) WB. I was going to let the anniversary slide by without notice, but then something Fuzzy Bastard wrote in his excellent review of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood (which I haven't yet seen), got me thinking:

"The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing..."

Well, it didn't start me thinking exactly, as this is something I think about more or less all the time, but I thought this would be a nice time to revisit. What I mean is, in discussion of genre fiction - whether it be books, movies or television - the world at large is incredibly forgiving of all nature of violent stupidity. Tired superhero tropes, even the dumbest and most unforgivable, while not necessarily liked, are viewed as an individual aberration and not used as an indictment of the entire genre. These same people flip out about romance, as Fuzzy Bastard says above, and deride all of it as awful. And don't give me some bullshit rubric about "geek culture". I'm so over it. When there are enough fans to constantly populate gigantic conventions, and the films of a genre are consistently number one at the box office, a line has been crossed: it's just plain old every day "culture", and it's become a bullying one at that.

I think we're going though a bad patch in which mainstream culture isn't particularly welcoming to women. The reasons for this are vast and varied and something that certainly deserves its own blog post, so I'm going to leave that alone for now and talk about a television show that aired its finale almost eight years ago. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was best described as a Horror Comedy Romance, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that the Buffy/Angel storyline is the greatest romance in the history of the medium. Sorry Spike enthusiasts. Sorry Dave and Maddie fans. Sam and Diane? Please. Luke and Laura? Ew. Kelly and Dylan? Don't make me laugh.

You are simply wrong.

Rewatching Buffy, though some parts feel dated, the story is still fresh. A great deal of this is because like all truly good art, the show isn't really about vampires or magic or a Hellmouth or a superhero, but about people. And a big part of that is - as it is with so many coming of age stories - romance. Seasons Two and Three of Buffy contained romantic episodes that felt like nothing I've ever seen on television. They felt like opera or like myth. I've written a bit about the glorious episode in which Buffy loses her virginity, Angel loses his soul, and all kinds of hell breaks loose. The lead up to this pivotal episode, and the way in which the story is shaped through to the end of the season is a complete fucking master class in story structure.

Angel is evil and killing people, and Buffy feels as if she is responsible as, like all over-conscientious control freaks, Buffy feels responsible for everything and usually reacts by shutting down emotionally. Buffy hesitates, like Hamlet before her, in killing Angel. So he, in the episode Passion, kills Giles's girlfriend Jenny Calendar (undercover gypsy and computer science teacher), and Buffy is shaken to the core. The episode contains that gloriously edited sequence in which Giles finds Jenny's dead body on his bed, strewn with rose petals, as an aria from La Bohème surges on the soundtrack. You so rarely see that kind of gothic romanticism played straight anymore.

Which I guess is what I'm getting at. Buffy manages the tonal shift from comedy to horror to romance so well by taking them all equally seriously. Romance is played straight and worked out creatively, and not as an afterthought. I've seen so many people all over the internet make it very clear that they like the horror and fantasy and comedy aspects of Buffy, but have no interest in the romantic story lines - as if that would be somehow embarrassing. Romance novels are given equally short shrift. And, yes, many romance genre novels aren't very good. But many, many fantasy or science fiction novels aren't very good either, and one rarely sees the bad ones as causing critics or those that blather on the internet to dismiss the entire genre as a whole. I've made it fairly clear that fiction that is aimed at or primarily enjoyed by women is rarely afforded much respect. Most often male critics of genre sneer. It's completely tiresome and the reasons for this have a few causes. One of the big ones, which I don't think is spoken of very often, is that men and women are conditioned to respond to books and media a little differently. The typical (and lazy) critical thought (male) as opposed to emotional reactions (female) is far too simplistic.

A few years ago, I conducted a survey in which I asked a simple question: "What did you read when you were growing up?". I left the question purposefully vague in order to have people interpret the question as they chose, which I thought would be illuminating (it was). First, men were far more likely to question me about what I wanted to hear, i.e. what was the "right" answer. They were also five times as likely as the female responders to mention a learning disability, or a reading disorder. They were six times as likely to respond that they "didn't read much". They also were far more likely to mention being bullied or made fun of for reading (zero women reported this). My raw data makes absolutely fascinating reading.

Reading fiction of any sort used to be referred to as a "feminine vice". Still, many men read mostly non-fiction or maybe for relaxation, Stephen King or Tom Clancy. Other men read widely and well. But, over all, more women read fiction then do men. Another gender difference in my survey response was in the language used - three times as many women than men used the word "loved" to describe a book (27 - 9). Women were also more likely to send me email after email, adding books they had forgotten to list. But the thing that surprised me the most was how much commonality there was in the lists from women, as opposed to the lists from men. Many, many women listed Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, the Little House books, the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sweet Valley High, the Bontes, Baby Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, All of a Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy and the works of Dr. Seuss.

There is very little overlap in the books the men cited, which as not something I expected at all. Part of this is that the average male responder listed so many fewer books than the average female one. The following books were listed by multiple men, and by equal numbers of women: Narnia, Tolkien, A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl and The Phantom Tollbooth. The only books citied in great numbers by men and not women are The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. Men mentioned genre far more often, though, saying they read science fiction, history and comics. It's all so interesting, and I've been sitting on all of it for ages, as I'm not sure what to make of it all. There were many impassioned responses from both men and woman, which is thrilling. But - the results were kind of overwhelming. I don't think I need to say that my sampling skewed ridiculously toward college graduate, East Coast artistic/educator types, so I really didn't expect there to be as large a gender divide as there was. I expected it to be far more subtle.

One thing I gleaned that didn't at all occur to me before I read the responses was that women have very little shame in admitting they liked things that could be perceived as silly or childish. Several men responded with something along the lines of,"I read a lot of comic books and spy novels and stuff, but that's not what you want to hear about" and then proceded to list a bunch of "school" books. Their lists also skewed far more grown up with far fewer mentions of picture books like Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss (and I'm pretty certain that these books were read and enjoyed by both boys and girls equally). There was a subtle feeling that the men were a little bit more concerned with how they would be perceived - as exhibited by the worry about answering the question "correctly". Women, by and large, didn't seem to care. They answered with gusto, making few apologies for anything they read and liked when they were young. In other words, the women came off as being far more confident than the men, which was (embarrassing for me) completely unexpected. On average, women enjoy fiction more than men do, I think. They also have so much common ground with each other in terms of what they (or, I should say, we) read. The women responders seem to lap up enjoyment without worrying as much about how these choices would be viewed.

I think one of the big reasons for this is because if you're a girl growing up, your options for watching stories about other girls has always been limited. That's far less true for boys. Girls like Star Wars too, of course, but it's not the same. Movies, television shows and plays are overwhelmingly by and about men. Girls mostly have had to look elsewhere for challenging and entertaining stories about girls, and that elsewhere is often in books. So, there are an awful lot of books that are geared towards girls and women. The fiction stacks of Barnes and Noble (and certainly in the Young Adult section) may be one of the very few places where boys and men aren't top dogs.

Which brings me back to Buffy. More than any other show I can think of, it was about women. And not just one women surrounded by men, but about a female protagonist surrounded by lots of other women. That's one of the reasons lots of women also like the much mocked Sex and the City (of which the first couple of seasons were pretty interesting) and Gray's Anatomy (which I think is a nightmare). But, really, in these post-Roseanne times, there's not much - and even less that can be construed as feminist (my long awaited 30 Rock post is on its way, I promise). I mean, we live in a world in which Two and a Half Men can last for nearly 10 seasons! There are so few women on TV shows who bear any sort of similarity to human women as I've encountered them here on Earth, and Joss Whedon, in a show about high school kids and vampires managed it better than nearly anybody.

There is over the top gothic romance at every turn, which I found thrilling. But Whedon always manages to ground all of it in recognizable human feelings. So, I'll leave you with a flashback musical number in which Anya, the 1100 year old ex-vengeance demon sings of her love for Xander. Of course, as it is a flashback, we know, though she doesn't, that he will leave her at the altar and she will go back to being a vengeance demon, and as the song is played, Anya has a sword through her chest that has been thrust there by Buffy as Xander watched.

Ah, romance.

Who Decided That Books Should Be Square?

Okay. I know. If they were oval or rhomboid they would be far more difficult to shelve. Unless, of course, the shelves themselves were completely and utterly different.

This year, for Dutch Book Week, which is focusing on the autobiography, a design company has created these lovely little book sculptures. Anne Frank is at left. You can see more images here. Maybe this should replace the author photo. Instead of one of those little self-consciously posed headshots, the entire book can be carved in a likeness of the author. Obviously this is a little problematic when dealing with authors like Aristotle or Aesop, but it would possibly put to rest that recent upset about the physical attractiveness of some current authors. The bulbous of nose would look just as striking in this format as, say. Marisha Pessl. But, like all interesting ideas, I suppose it is too expensive a one to carry out.

Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

Francesca Lia Block has an entry in the modern fairy tale book I'm still in the midst of reading. I haven't gotten to it yet, but with all this thinking about fairy tales, I've been thinking lots ablout Block's masterwork, the five short novels that are collected in the one volume omnibus, Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books.

I don't see them brought up in discussions of fairy tales particularly often, which I think is a shame. I really believe they are some of the best YA books of the past few decades and I think in these dark and doomy times we are living in they need to be brought up more often. Sadly, I've seen them mentioned in the paper usually when these delightful and positive books are being challenged by some religious nut job. But, nut jobs aside, I know they're not to everyone's taste.

With the first book, Weetzie Bat, in 1989, Block invented a new literary genre: Los Angeles Fairy Tale Magic Realism. I know some people find them too twee, too glittery, too Californian and I have a tough time disagreeing, as they are all these things. I guess, as with all art, it comes down to whether they speak to you in a deep and real place.

I truly believe they are some of the few modern books that contain real magic. I first heard of them about a dozen years ago and looked at Dangerous Angels in Barnes & Nobel, but didn't have the money to buy it new. The very next day I was walking down Prospect Park West, and someone was having a stoop sale, and there it was with that pretty winged figure on the cover, on sale for $1 (my weird fixation on the image of pretty winged women is a discussion for a different day). I started reading right away.

The five Weetzie Bat books were originally published individually (Block subsequently published a sixth, which I have not read), but I think of them all as parts of a whole. The first book serves as an introduction of sorts. Weetzie is a teen girl living in a magical, now mostly lost, 1980s Los Angeles. Block's prose is simple and glittery, and it tells how Weetzie becomes best friends with Dirk, and cobbles together a family in her magical house (inherited from Dirk's Grandma Fifi) in the Hollywood Hills. The title comes from something Dirk says: "Love is a dangerous angel" (which, of course, it is). In it, all the main (and most of the subsidiary) characters are introduced: Weetzie's great love and life partner, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk's boyfriend Duck, Their children Cherokee and Witch Baby, and Weetzie's parents: Charlie Bat and Brandy-Lynn (who met on the set of a Monster Movie in the '50s).

The books are filled with events, much in the way a fairy tale or an opera is. And like in all fairy tales the happy endings must be earned. The trials the characters go through are dark indeed: some people are dangerous and violent and not to be trusted, AIDS ravages the gay community, drugs dim the beauty and fire of some characters and destroy others: Charlie Bat, Weetzie's junky, ex-screenwriter New Yorker father finally takes too many pills and never comes back (except as a ghost). Depression and despair in the the face of the world's ills plague the characters occasionally. But, the most important thing in the book, and the thing that has gotten the religious nut jobs in such an uproar, is Block's magical vision of family.

Beautiful blonde Cherokee was conceived by Weetzie because she wanted a baby desperately, and so she Dirk and Duck all sleep together so that they would all be her parents. My Secret Agent Lover Man fathered Witch Baby with the wicked Vixanne. But she too was happily absorbed by Weetzie into he household. All of the above happens in the 70 pages that comprise the first book. It's all embedded deeply in Los Angeles with echoes of Marilyn and Jayne Mansfield and the Monster Movies of the '50s and especially of Charlie Chaplin. The soundtrack is likely X and The Blasters and The Cramps.

In subsequent books, Cherokee and Witch Baby become teenagers themselves and have to forge their own paths. We travel to NYC with Witch Baby as she is helped to find her beloved Angel Juan by the ghost of Charlie Bat, we learn more about Dirk and his Grandma Fifi and a genie in a bottle.

They're all pure magic.

I'm beginning to realize more and more, that when it comes to art I live in a place of metaphor. I don't feel super confident writing about the literal in my fiction. And sometimes naturalistic stories feel over-specific to me and therefore unrelatable. Most times they leave me cold. I think fairy tales tell a more truthful story.

The following are the final two paragraphs of The Weetzie Bat books, and they serve well as yet another light in the defense of stories as an essential part of the human psyche:

"Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.

Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free."

The Arrival: The Genius of Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan's The Arrival is simply one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen.

I think I've been pretty clear elsewhere in expressing my admiration for the wordless graphic novel. There are so many things the pictures do better, or at least differently from text. For me anyway, pictures are a straighter shot into my cerebellum than words, and I am more likely to have an emotional reaction to the work.

Shaun Tan is a very successful illustrator from Australia. He did the lovely cover for Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters, and has illustrated many, many picture books. He has a wonderful essay on his website in defense of what I often refer to as the "grown up picture book". Nearly everything used to be illustrated. How pictures became (nearly) purely associated with works for children I find somewhat baffling. One of the wonderful side effects of the current popularity of graphic novels, is that it has managed to chip away at at least some of that prejudice.

The Arrival is for everyone. There's no particular reason why children wouldn't enjoy it, but I have a feeling it will mean more to adults. It's a simple, classic, immigrant story. The city a family lives in has become impossible. The father leaves his wife and young daughter and travels to a new city where there will (hopefully) be more opportunity. He travels far and long. He has to find a place to live and navigate a place where everything - the food, the language, how things are done, are different. He has to find a job, which after a few false starts, he does. He meets some other immigrants to the city and hears their stories of diaspora and hope. He sends money home and worries that it won't reach his family. A year passes. He and his wife and daughter are reunited. Simple.

It's how Tan portrays this often told story that is so extraordinary. The hero leaves his home because of encroaching dragons. We see what the city he emigrates to looks like through his eyes. The alphabet used is unrecognizable to us. The animals are strange. The jobs he is asked to perform are as baffling to us, the readers, as they are to the man in the story. Unlike with many classic immigrant tales, we are unable to sit and read of the greenhorn's journey, safely cocooned by a comforting knowledge of the culture in which the immigrant is trying to navigate. In The Arrival we are exactly where he is. The city looks as wondrous and strange to us as New York must have looked to my grandmother when she arrived from rural Albania.

Shaun Tan's parents emigrated from Malaysia to Sydney in 1960. I think the fact that Tan is Australian and used images from Australia's archives, as well as the more familiar ones from Ellis Island, lends The Arrival a sense of newness and specificity. His pictures eschew boring literalism and take on a kind of surreal longing that I haven't seem in many other places. After finding a room to live in, the man opens his suitcase and we see him looking at the table in his old home, and as he looks at the tiny images of his family the measure of his loneliness is incalculable. Some pages are nearly cinematic. As at left, he uses series of small drawings to portray a sequence in great detail, but then the whole book will open up into a giant panorama.

My favorite thing perhaps about The Arrival, is it's utter lack of cynicism. War and dragons and misery of all sorts are seen in the stories of the various immigrants pasts. And the world they have landed themselves in is confusing and scary and not always fair. But it's essentially a gentle story, full of new beginnings and family and making friends and making the best of a scary new world. It's funny, gorgeous and incredibly moving. Language sometimes gets in the way. In The Arrival it would be an unwanted intrusion indeed.

Miss Pamela by Miss Caviglia

When I was a kid growing up in West Egg, I wanted more than anything to be an artist. I wanted to grow up and do interesting things and meet interesting people.

Like girls all over America, I knew that none of those things were going to happen in my little corner of suburbia, so I got the hell out. But before that illustrious day, I spent lots of time reading biographies and looking at the many books of photographs my mother had. I spent hours looking at pictures of artists and writers and performers in Paris between the wars. I read Edie: an American Biography and loved it, but Warhol had just died, so that was no help. And, of course, part of the problem was that I wasn't precisely sure what it was I wanted to do exactly. It all seemed so complicated (and, honestly, so it remains).

Then, when I was 17, I read Pamela Des Barres's I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, which, while deeply problematic in many ways, I loved, and honestly still do. Des Barres (Bless her!) is a pack rat who saved all her high school journals, letters and notes from friends. She quotes extensively from them throughout the book and they are priceless. She writes a lot about her early teen years of Beatlemania, and about her friends and her boyfriend. It's all very recognizable and candid and relatable. Then, she meets a boy at school named Victor, whose hair is too long and wears corduroy pants and likes the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. She began wearing her hair straight and her suburban friends all freaked out on her for liking "filthy" Mick Jagger. Then:

My new best friend, Victor, had a real-life rock and roll cousin who lived in a trailer in the desert, with the outrageous name of Captain Beefheart. Vic titillated me with this information more than once before inviting me to see his group, The Magic Band, perform at the Teen Fair at the Hollywood Palladium...Don Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, was a wildly intimidating crazy genius who was so far ahead of his time, people are still trying to catch up with him. He was just a wee bit out of place at the Fourth Annual Teen Fair, where the big thing was Knudsen's new fruit-flavored yogurt.

This was when she was 16 in 1965. She writes about how she started hanging around in Hollywood and meeting people like Kim Fowley (of later Runaways fame) and The Byrds. She had a huge crush on their bassist, but he totally ignored her. She met lots of boys and made friends and saw lots and lots of bands play. Des Barres has a a nice self-deprecating sense of humor, and brings vividly to life what it must have been like to be a teen whose world was suddenly exploding in all these exciting new directions.

She started hanging out with artists and poets and musicians. She visited San Francisco (she didn't like it much. She liked her lipgloss more than dirt and lentils, a sentiment with which I enthusiastically agree), and wound up hanging out with Bobby Beausoleil (this was years before the Tate-LaBianca murders). One of my favorite things about Des Barres's book is the gleeful enthusiasm with which she tells of her exploits. It's funny, in the current state of memoir writing, nearly everyone writes of all the miseries and horrors of their youth. It's in fashion. But Des Barres sounds like she had a blast. Sure, there's heartbreak a-plenty, but she knows she has a terrific story to tell and does it justice. I think it's also important to remember how very, very young she was when all this was going on. I mean, she was a kid. As she says at some point, (I'm paraphrasing) she'd rather sleep with rock stars than creepy frat boys like the girls she grew up with.

Which is a little problematic, but it sounds as if she was a willing and enthusiastic participant with few regrets. Another thing I've always liked about Miss Pamela is that she has never been one of those awful women who have no girl friends. She writes just as much about the interesting girls she befriends as the boys. Eventually, she joined forces with a group of freaky, like-minded young women. They would go to shows and clubs and dance, blurring the lines between audience member and performance art. They met Frank Zappa through a mutual friend and he named them the GTOs (standing for Girls Together Only - but the girls themselves decided the O could stand for anything: Outrageously, Outlandishly, Openly, etc.). Eventually, he decided they should be an actual band and they recorded an incredibly strange album with the Mothers of Invention backing them (with Jeff Beck and various other luminaries sitting in as guests), but the girls wrote their own songs.

They performed in a musical, performance art extravaganza that sounds kind of awesome. Alice Cooper played, as did the Mothers, the GTOs sang their weird songs, danced and did some other bits. Opening, was a homeless man named Wild Man Fisher. I think Tiny Tim may have been on hand as well.

The book follows Miss Pamela through her mid-twenties when she marries Michael Des Barres. It's really clear that she was on a mission to find romance and adventure and stardom, and doing a better job at finding all three than most people. She was still married when she wrote this book, but got divorced (amicably) shortly after its publication. One wonders how the subsequent twenty years or so have colored her perceptions of her interesting life. One of the delightful things about I'm With the Band is it's immediacy, but it also makes me wonder how the events she portrays would look to an older Pamela who has a little more distance on her life. Her journal entries all make fascinating reading. She is so clearly torn down the middle, wanting a new sort of artistic and exciting life, and a desire to an almost 1950s-style freaky rock and roll house wife. She was writing at the cusp of the sexual revolution, in the last pre-feminist moment.

There's been some noise that Zooey Deschenel is trying to adapt the book for HBO, and I'm cautiously optimistic. There are a lot of different ways this material can be treated, but with Miss Pamela very much alive (she's 62 and looks both fantastic and unsurgeried), the possibilities are likely somewhat limited. But, you know, I would watch every second of it if it were to happen.

And Miss Pamela is still a very busy lady, writing and making appearances. I recently saw a documentary in which she drove around the country interviewing other former groupies (likely in support of her book Let's Spend The Night Together), including a fantastic one with the late, lamented Tura Satana who spoke of her romance with Elvis. She was so charming and showed some of her old burlesque photos. I've searched, and searched and it is posted nowhere, which is tragic. So, the point is, being a former groupie at this point is Miss Pamela's business, which I think might be impairing her critical acumen.

Whenever writing about women whose principal claim to notoriety was sexual, it's difficult to parse. The world she inhabited was essentially unfair, and she gave the young men she devoted so much of her energy toward so much power. She talks and writes endlessly about the music, certainly, but the boys who made that wonderful music weren't terribly nice to her. The system that (still) tells men that one of the rewards of success is women causes so much unhappiness. I don't feel super comfortable judging her, as Miss Pamela seems so willing to truthfully document her experiences, warts and all, which is rare. As one of the editors of Bitch recently wrote: I have a feminist blind spot where this book is concerned. And she always had her own artistic pursuits, which should not be discounted. She's an awfully likable person, and I think what I liked so much about her book when I was a teenager was the vision she had of Romance. She doesn't write much about just bedding rock stars, she writes of her pursuit of love and art and a different sort of life from the one she was brought up to value in her middle class suburb.