Oh Papa

Figure 1: How I Feel While Reading Hemingway

So I'm slogging through this Hemingway for graduate school and it's not going well. It's very boring to me, which makes me avoid it. It's The Sun Also Rises.

I have to finish it by April 25 so I can write a paper about how Hemingway informs my own writing - I know, I know! - and it's just murder. All this drinking and fishing and descriptions of the landscape. All these people talking to Jake Barnes and Jake Barnes being rather tight-lipped. He has some broken-dick thing from a war injury, you see, which makes him taciturn and quite the drunk.

ANYWAY.

I'm noodling along through this particularly boring passage about fishing in Spain ("I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water..."), when comes this part, a conversation between Jake and this guy Bill (who's Bill supposed to be? I dunno. People come in and out and more wine is ordered and then they leave or go dancing and it's swell and everyone gets 'tight' and people say 'Don't be sore' and maybe it's F. Scott Fitzgerald and who cares):

"You're right there, old classmate," Bill said. "The saloon must go, and I will take it with me."
"You're cock-eyed."
"On wine?"
"On wine."
"Well, maybe I am."
"Want to take a nap?"

FREEZE. Okay, who else is getting a super duper huge gay vibe here? Also, there are no dialogue tags which make me want to scream, because the dialogue's so opaque. Also, yes, you can get drunk on wine, Jesus. Just because it's girly doesn't mean two bottles don't have alcohol in them. Back to the excerpt:

"All right."
We lay with our heads in the shade and looked up into the trees.
"You asleep?"
"No," Bill said. "I was thinking."
I shut my eyes. It felt good lying on the ground.

AGAIN! Couldn't we totally segue into some prime, manly gay sex here? It would be so natural. Smelling of fish and wine and the basket lunch they'd had. Right? Wouldn't that be great? Didn't F. Scott once show Hemingway his wang to ask if it was the proper size to please Zelda? It all flows like the Irati River!

But no. The passage moves into Bill asking some questions about Jake's English lovahhhh Lady Brett Ashley, whom he cannot, er, love properly, because of his unspeakable-dick-problem, which, naturally, is the only thing in this book I can give a shit about. Jake's dick problem is the main suspense driver in a book about drinking and fishing. Is that right?

I feel that I must be pawing on well-traveled ground here. That digging on Hemingway this late in the game is probably a bit lame. But I'm SUFFERING through this so hard! I have no context for respecting the story. And I've seen bullfights and they're horrible, so that part holds little thrill. I'm just at the part before the unleashing of the Pamplona bulls. I'm betting they'll watch the bulls and drink. Scintillating.

Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me it'll be worth it. Make me a YouTube video called Hemingway: It Gets Better.

from Under The Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

I don't know what my deal is. I get so GUSHY about books sometimes. Like, if I read them and then feel sad when they have to go the library, then I know I need to buy them and allow them into my home which is tiny and already has too many books.

Then I sit and pine until my copy arrives. Check UPS tracking constantly. When it finally arrives, I carry it around with  me during all my various life errands. I've always got a book with me in any case where I might get stuck waiting, but when one of these gushy books arrives, I tote it about like a good luck charm. It feels a little crazy, to be honest. A little superstitious and fetishy.

(LET'S NOT ANALYZE THIS FURTHER, OKAY? OKAY.)

Anyway, my current Literary Fetish is Veronica Rossi's Under The Never Sky.

I have to admit, at first I was all weirded out by the name of the main character boy. His name is Peregrine, but he goes by Perry. Which, if you have an 8-year-old cartoon-watching child, you think of this, naturally:

So, Perry the Platypus is highly awesome, obviously. Just look at him. He's a platypus fighting evil - it's a no-brainer. But I don't really want to get all easy and naked with a platypus, see.

(CAN'T BELIEVE I JUST TYPED THAT)

ANYWAY. So, Perry The Character isn't terribly attractive either, at first. He's sort of a dick to Aria, our Main Character Girl. But then he's such a rugged survivalist type that you forget all this cartoon nonsense and become a fangirl. Perry's primal. He has all these powers. He doesn't like words. Perry's a driver, not a thinker.

This is the longest intro to an excerpt I've ever done. Sorry. But the writing is beautiful and I love how Rossi's 3rd person split narrative allows for descriptive beauty that isn't always practical when you have a teenaged protagonist narrating in first person.

Under the jump is one of my favorite passages. JUST GO READ THE WHOLE BOOK, THOUGH!

Hell Yeah Scarleteen

Figure 1: You should totally buy Heather Corinna's book.

Based on the Google hits that bring people to my blog (hot-guy-shirtless, my-boner-in-sweatpants, etc.), it's probably not surprising that I'd endorse Scarleteen, the teen sex education site that has somehow managed to deliver excellent content in a social climate that seems to only want to use sex for political or commercial purposes.

A recent Q & A with a reader asking about his premature ejaculation problem was particularly good. I feel like laminating it and passing it out on street corners. However, I hate people who do things like that. Luckily I have a blog.

Go read it here. 

And psst...pass it on: Scarleteen is the best sex ed site around, and it's not just for teenagers.You're never too old to learn about how to knock boots, you know.

YA Greek Gods Time Traveling Into Dystopic Futures of Horror Full of Ghosts

Figure 1: my current preoccupations

I'm all up into a bunch of fantasy/paranormal/dystopian ya lit at the moment and while it's lovely and supremely entertaining, it also just makes me feel kinda bland.

I don't have any wild concepts in me.
I don't have any zesty science fiction extrapolative chops in me.
I don't have any spirituality so making up stuff about witches or angels or the immaterial is terribly hard.

Reading these books' jacket copy makes me feel like my book is kinda, yanno, tepid. Like, my own jacket copy should just say, "It's about this boy Evan and all this junk that happens to him and what he thinks about that junk. I dunno. Maybe you could read it out in a cemetary while wearing 3-D glasses and pretend he's Apollo for a better effect?"

/insecurity

High School Is A Serious Thing...

Sid was telling me the other day about this geometry test he took, because he had a bunch of formulas written up on his arm. I didn't even want to know if that's cheating because I secretly think it doesn't matter because I hated my geometry teacher and have used geometry about four times since 10th grade myself and I know Sid will never be an engineer or a nuclear physicist but probably a phy ed teacher or a police officer or join the Marines, so who gives a shit about geometry? Certainly not me.

And I'm not alone, clearly. But that's not the point of the story.

"There was this kid during the test who was sitting there, leaning back with nothing on his desk," Sid explains. "And the teacher comes up and says, 'Where's your test?' And the kid goes, 'Oh, it's in the garbage.'"

This pleases me so much, I almost wish I taught in a high school again. Except for then, I'd have to give a shit about the kid's failure and lack of STEM education and the tyranny of low expectations and his dumb parents calling me to bug me and what does that say about The Youth Today and before you know it, all the goodness is sucked right out a situation where a kid saying something so balls-out and brazenly is really quite amazing and humorous and don't you want to know that kid? Don't you want to know how he got to that point, where he could say that to a teacher's face and smile?

But I can't think that and be a good role model at the same time. So it's no high school teaching for me.

The Point of Having Kids

My friend Carolyn is pregnant and all people can do is give her dire horrible  warnings about how her life is going to suck the second her baby boy pops out. I hate that shit. There are so many good things about having a baby, the least of which being that babies are cute (though they are). The key good thing about having kids? Kids are so damn funny.

I had to take Sid, Owen and Ollie to school today, which I sometimes do; the high school and middle school they attend are minutes away from Matilda's elementary school. I was in a pretty foul mood, as The Matilda is STILL sick and her being home tends to screw with my life's groove.

The boys all pile into the car; I take Sid to his high school first. While we're in the queue behind cars and buses, we see a kid walk by that makes me say, "Oh my." Not in a good way. Because he's all in black and has this terrible long greasy hair. Okay, maybe it wasn't greasy. Maybe it was still wet from the shower. I don't know. Anyway, he looked like the kind of guy who works in a sub shop and sells weed out the back door.

Sid laughed, and said, "Yeah, that's Dirty Dave." Then he gets out of the car and says bye and I'm now instantly happy. Because I'm thinking about what the backstory is, how you get to be the guy called "Dirty Dave" in your high school. Does he like being called "Dirty Dave?" Does he get any chicks? Is he actually dirty?

These are the crucial questions my mind likes to moodle over.

We head down the road to the middle school. We get stuck at the million-year-long light so I get to stare at the bashed-in bumper of a mini van with expired tabs and those family stick figure stickers on the back.  You know, the kind where it has the mom and dad stickers and you buy as many kid stickers in the appropriate gender and age for your family? You can also buy pet stickers. Then you line them up on the back of your shitty minivan and continue on with your crappy life, I guess.

Anyway, while we're sitting there waiting for the million-year light, Owen and Ollie start talking about how they'd like to buy a shitty minivan so they could put their own stickers up.

"Like, just 20 babies, nothing else," Owen says.

"No, I'd do one man and three women and no kids at all," Ollie says.

"What about 30 cats and one lady?" I suggest.

You see how this went. Needless to say by the time I got back home, I felt a lot happier about spending the day with my coughing, miserable child.

The Dictionary of American Slang, Ctd.

commfu: n. Complete monumental military fuck-up. W.W.II Armed Forces use; euphemistic acronym formed by analogy with "snafu"


(I thought this was appropriate given the latest news from Afghanistan.)

On The Traditional Sex Talk

Matilda found out about sex from The Dave Chappelle Show. Which she had been watching with her older boy cousins one Saturday night when I came to collect her (we live two doors down from my sister's house).

Matilda watches a lot of suspect television with her cousins but I don't really care about this because:
a) I really don't care
b) watching South Park with her older cousins isn't about the prurience of South Park, most of which is beyond her, but about getting to hang with her older cousins who she adores

It might not have happened had Matilda moved her ass a little faster. I was standing there, my boots dripping snow on the rug and she was taking her sweet time getting her stuff on with her eyes still glued to the TV show, the last bit of which was something about a condom getting chucked in the trash, which made her cousins laugh. So, of course Till was like, "What's a condom?"

So we went outside and I told her.

"It's this thing men put on their wangs so when they have sex with women they don't get the women pregnant."

Yes, Reader - I said wangs. Or maybe dinks? Or dicks? I don't know. This is standard in our house - I'm not big on medical terminology. I'm somewhat casual, if you haven't noticed.

"Where do they put their wangs when they have sex?" she asked.

"In the woman's girlina."

Girlina = Matilda's word since she was 3 for her own girl bits.

"Oh..."

Reader, I was not alarmed or hesitant. Not because I'm just that progressive and amazing. Mostly because I was being honest like usual and the first thing that sprang to mind was the truth. Also, luckily, one of my friends had recently told me a tip: Just answer the question they are asking. 

This is good advice, because then you won't overwhelm them and give them more information than they need. I mean, kids don't care about sperm and ovaries. That's all some magical, invisible world inside their bodies - it's about as real to them as String Theory is to me.

Of course, I was aware that there were multiple vectors in this situation into which I could insert a fuck-up (elegant metaphor, yeah?) but I didn't let it stop me from opening up my big trap and spilling out the data, nonetheless.

"Does Dad wear one of those things?"

I thought about it. Occam's razor is a good rule also when discussing sex with kids.

"Not anymore," I said. Omitting the years of condom use and the mysterious workings of the IUD and why there would be no brothers and sisters for her. All my neuroses about reproduction.

But then she was done asking and we were home, taking off our coats and boots. Dee dee dee.

So that was the first time we talked about sex. There have been more talks since. Not really talks. Just Matilda asking questions and me answering them. I think having that big stagey, singular Sex Talk is unnatural and weird. Which makes the kid feels unnatural and weird.

I remember reading in a book while I was pregnant that our response to babies crying was panic, because we recall our own tears, our own panic in those situations, and so we assume that's the case with the baby. But since babies can't talk, this book suggested parents view crying as a form of communication, not panic.

Similarly, I think the Traditional Sex Talk persists because the topic yanks parents automatically back to their own first cruddy sexual fumblings, when they knew zero and the circumstances tended toward the dingy and poorly-lit. To compensate for this shame, parents strive to paint a really optimal, glorious position on sex, which causes them to say earnest things like, "Sex is a beautiful, special thing that you'll do when you grow up and the time is right."

All the while knowing damn well that's not even the half of it. Because it's a beautiful special thing when you're not all grown, too. And because sex is also dirty and sleazy and wretched and painful and gory and awkward and funny and embarrassing and gut-wrenching and euphoric and profound and spiritual and emotional and delicious and weird and dull and ordinary and comfortable and a million other adjectives. Too many adjectives to account for and explain.

No matter how open and sex-positive we say we are, I think maybe we fall back on this sunny, content-free bullshit because of the residual shame over our own uninformed gropings. We want our children to fast-forward past that horror. Want to zip them past the backseats of parked cars or basements with parents upstairs or the woods behind the grocery store or the back of the bus on the way home from a field trip. Want to give them a heroic, dignified place in which to cop their first feel, instead of the sleazy, temporary interstices that teenaged life offers up. Want to spare them the indignity inherent in having no space, no privacy, no stylized setting in which to relax and figure this very complicated shit out.

But since we can't follow them into this wilderness of sexual experimentation - and if we've got decent boundaries, we shouldn't even want to - we freeze and tense. Give a big speech heavy with good intentions but low on graphics. A phony, sugar-coated, data-free statement that somehow manages to be true: "Sex is a very important thing...Sex is wonderful...Sex is something you do when you love someone..." 

Neither party wants to have the thoughts that invade at the moment of the Big Talk - the concept of the other being sexual in any context - and so the Big Phony Sex Talk glosses over both realities at once.

There has to be a third way, right?

On Scenery

I'm not a big fan of scenery. Like, I don't care about mountain views and ocean vistas and stuff. Mountains, in general, are useless to me. They make me think of huffing and puffing and disturbing creatures that would prefer more personal space than they are given and my strong desire to not be eaten by a bear. Oceans: pretty. But again, going on that treacherous stuff in boats doesn't really appeal. I read The Perfect Storm; I'm no idiot.

Maybe this is why I never question staying in Minnesota for the rest of my life. It doesn't really matter, where I live, I guess. I don't have some gasping yearning for a certain type of life backdrop. And Minnesota scenery does a nice job of being aloof and unobtrusive.It's scenery built for roads, really. What does a farm care if there's a road in the middle of it?

When I traveled in South America, this usually involved taking a rickety 1970's bus on brutal mountain switchbacks at high speeds. Once the luggage rack of one of these buses flung itself down the side of the cliff as we screeched past. We spent an hour watching the driver and passengers collecting their belongings from the relative unsafety of the guard-rail-free perch.

Once when I was dumb and in love, I drove through the mountains in Colorado in a terrible rainstorm in my boyfriend's car which had a history of breaking down when some little bit in the engine got wet. This was before cell phones.

(So, mountains. You can have them.)

In the class I taught yesterday, we discussed descriptive writing in the age of cinema and video games. Will writers growing up on video games lose track of this need of readers, to be geographically situated in a specific place and time? I dislike writing descriptions of scenery; I often skip over these passages in books, to my peril; sometimes I have no sense of where a book is situated and have to return to the boring skipped part to figure it out. Dummy.

The class I taught was in Brainerd, Minnesota, 2+ hours away from me. It seemed like a long drive on paper, but it flew by. I spent the entire time not having to pay homage to the scenery on either side of the road and instead just enjoyed a stream of thinky thoughts about my fake people and their fake journeys and fake problems. Even in ugly grey winter, Minnesota scenery is nice. Polite. Not getting in anyone's way.

Pablo In Charge Of My Days And My Nights

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ~ Annie Dillard

Which means I spend my life talking to this dog and getting no answers beyond wags and licks.

Not so bad, right?

AWP: This Does Not Apply

When I'm negative about a situation, it's usually not the situation's fault. It's me. I need to be far from the situation. I'm not being fed by the situation. I don't need whatever the situation's offering. You see how this is going.

So I went to the Association of Writers and Writing Program's annual conference in Chicago this year. It was my first time.

I returned home yesterday after a few days of panels and discussions and lunches and dinners and searching for friends and catching up and blah. I've been spinning all morning about what I want to say about it.

Mostly, I just felt like none of it really applied to me.

Look, I'm not a poet. So there goes 50% of the panels and readings.

And I never want to write nonfiction. That shit sounds harder to get right than fiction.

I'm in a graduate program already. Goodbye, 75% of the expo booths.

I'm guessing most literary journals don't take YA submissions. So fuck that, too.

And I'm not shopping a book to a small press publisher. So. Yeah. I'll take one of your lollipops, though, Small Press Publisher. And sign up for your email list because I feel sorry for you having to plow through the sales pitch on Uninterested Old Me.

I only went to a handful of panels. I couldn't sit and listen that long on that level of discourse. I would stare at people's exteriors and wonder why they made various sartorial choices. Wonder what they wrote and why it made them harrumph and cross their legs just so. Wonder why all the women (myself included) felt the need to wear very tall boots all the time. Wonder why there were mostly brunette women and very few blonds. Wonder why all the men had the same thick black glasses that remind me of the ones they give you at 3-D movies. (Adrian calls those 'birth control glasses' because when he was in the Navy, that's what you got issued in boot camp if you wore glasses. Boot camp's about breaking down your sense of individuality, and even lowly spectacles must be uniform. And they're called 'birth control glasses' because, well, you're probably not getting laid while you're having to wear them, right? How times have changed.)

Sometimes the audience's questions made me want to choke someone.

Sometimes I couldn't hear the audience's questions.

Sometimes I would feel that I already knew all this stuff but merely needed to go home and fucking work on it already.

Sometimes I would think, "That's Ta-Nehisi Coates five feet away from me, reading from his novel-in-progress! How cool is that!" 

Sometimes I would be hungry for something but unable to secure it because it was Chicago and what did I know about where anything was? Plus, my phone got no coverage in the Hilton. Stupid The Hilton.

The best parts were hanging with my friends. Seeing people I don't normally get to see but once a year. Not being in my house. Getting excited about an adventure. Walking around a new city. Hailing a taxi successfully. Eating Greek and Italian food.

I don't know. Maybe next year I'll know what to expect and I won't feel so weird. Maybe there won't be as many people making snobbish comments about 'genre' fiction. Maybe I will be different, in my brain, someone present and ready and happy to receive all this information. Maybe I'll be less snobbish myself.