On Books: Water Music by T.C. Boyle (also I stalk authors)

I’ve never been much good around celebrities. Upon meeting Ryan Benjamin, comic book artist for Batman Beyond, at Emerald City Comic Con a few years ago I practically climbed into his booth while frothing at the mouth. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that when I met the author of My Favorite Book of All Time, I was a smidge less than smooth.

 My favorite book of all time is Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle. 

 Before I tell you how I stalked this man through the streets of Seattle, finally ambushing him in a dark alley, I should tell you a little bit about My Favorite Book of All Time.

 Set in the eighteenth century, Water Music is a historical-ish fiction detailing the first white man’s travels to the Niger River in Africa. This man would be Mungo Park, one of the book’s two main characters. Boyle got his mitts on Park’s publication, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed Under the Direction and Patronage of the African Association, 
[... seventeen pages of descriptors because eighteenth century], and refashioned it into a profoundly visual, vivid, often raunchy portrayal of the explorer’s journey loosely based on his writings. Mungo Park, a genteel surgeon from Scotland, and Ned Rise, a shifty whore-mongering con man from the grungy streets of London, skirt death over and over again until finally meeting in the most unlikely of places: pre-Western influenced Nigeria. Ned Rise totally isn’t real, but there’s enough truth and solid research peppered throughout the book to make you second guess practically everything. This book smacks of the gritty action novel, and is still a subtle mockery of traditional 18th century writing style. That might be why I love it so much. This novel will make you laugh, cry, and nauseated all within a few pages, but still has enough literary depth to really sink your teeth into. 

 So. Now that I’ve gushed about My Favorite Book of All Time a bit (and trust me, I’m being mercifully brief), you might understand why my friend Savannah and I went to T. C. Boyle’s reading to promote his (at the time) new book T. C. Boyle Stories II at the Seattle Central Library. I sat enraptured through the whole thing. Finally, the reading over, a line formed to buy the new book and get it signed. I abhor lines, but for the right author I'll do it. I joined the herd, purchased the book, and then confused the hell out of him when I gleefully presented my clearly very worn copy of his first book, Water Music. That probably should have been his first clue that I was bonkers. Anyway there were a million people behind me and most of them were staring and lines make me stressed so I blurted out something stupid, gathered up my suddenly embarrassingly ratty book, and fled.

 Once outside I smoked a cigarette, gathered my wits, and informed Savannah that NO. We CANNOT go home now. Not like this. I HAVE QUESTIONS DAMMIT. The library was almost closed, so with some quick sleuthing I figured out what door he'd most likely exit through. My friend was such a good sport. We hung out in that alley and chain-smoked until finally, ages later, the frizzy-haired leather-clad punk genius emerged with his beautiful wife on his arm. Bursting from the shadows much more alarmingly than I intended, the man immediately shielded his wife from me. That should have dampened my enthusiasm, but it did no such thing. I began happily rambling about the papers I'd written on his book as both travel writing and postmodern historical fiction, how much I loved that he clearly was making fun of 18th century literature, blah-blah-blah-fangirl, and fortunately he began looking less scared and more interested. After I finally slowed down and let the man speak, he pointed out that Water Music really was more a picaresque novel than anything (holy crap how did I not notice that before), and that it was partially inspired by his studies in British lit. He mentioned how he was happy somebody wanted to talk about a book that wasn't World's End (OH but I love that book too), then we moved on to how much we both love Don DeLillo. He really was far more generous with his time than he should have been.

I glowed. 

(It's not just the crappy photo.)

On Boobs: Tinder – The Drinking Game

When I first downloaded Tinder, I didn’t intend to find my boyfriend of two years; I just wanted an amusing way to get really drunk, really fast. It worked. These rules were drafted primarily regarding the straight males on the app, but during my extensive studies (translation: drunken ramblings with fellow single people playing this game) I've learned that with a little tweaking they pretty much apply across the board. So, here are the rules:

• Drink if you can’t tell which person in the main photo is the right one. Finish your drink if none of the other pictures clear that question up.
• Drink every time you see someone with a drugged-up tiger. Seriously, there are tons of them and I don't understand. Is going to Thailand and manhandling a glorious yet wacked-out predator now a thing?
• Drink when the main picture is the person standing on top of a mountain. Huzzah you’re outdoorsy, or at least you were that one time on a sunny day two Septembers ago.
• Drink if the person has a drink in their hand for the main picture. Finish your drink if they've got a drink in their hand for every picture.
• Drink when it’s clear someone has been cropped out. 
• Drink every time the person is wearing a hat. Finish your drink if the person is hatted in every picture. Pro-tip for guys: We know why you do this.
• Drink if they don't post a single full-body shot.
• Drink if something in the picture clearly shows that this photo is out of date, e.g. an Avatar poster in the background or people planking.
• Don’t drink if the main picture is a full shot of just the one person doing something they clearly enjoy (that isn't drinking) and they don't seem concerned about their flaws. Message them about a common interest and then go on the best date of your adult life. Probably don’t tell them why you had a Tinder to begin with.

People are often smarter than we give them credit for, so if you're trying hard to hide something or project a particular image we'll know and it's kinda funny. If you're on Tinder, don't do any of these things and prepare to get giggly wasted making fun of everyone who does. 

Now that I don't have your attention...

Since your expectations are now all nice and low, I believe it is time to fire this baby back up.

I must warn you, I may deviate from the aforementioned blog topics of books, boobs, and board games. I'll try to incorporate something about these things in those posts, or at least throw up some links to reviews I've written on Good Reads, but I've got some ideas I'm testing out that I may just throw up here for shits and giggles.

P.S. I GOT AN EMAIL FROM NICK HARKAWAY. MORE TO COME.

P.P.S. If you haven't read his stuff, go do it. Like, now. 

On Books: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

So I've finished piles and piles of books since starting this blog, and have I done a review of any of them?

No. No I have not.

It seems like every time I finish a book, I feel like I should digest it a bit more, ponder the themes, and maybe brush up on a few bits before I tackle it in writing. This, it seems, is a grievous error, since I never seem to get around to the actual tackling.

So tackle I must! And Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is a great start.

I love Neil Gaiman. He's got this fantastically whimsical writing style that still manages to jar with his casual descriptions of violence and harsher realities. In Neverwhere he takes a secret, mystical underworld of London, called London Below, and throws in an extraordinarily boring and doofish businessman named Richard.

Richard meets Door (yes, that's her name) bleeding on a sidewalk and, to the chagrin of his flaming bitch of a fiance, takes her home and tries cleaning her up. The next morning, after some craziness with a bird and a rat and a mystical marquee character, Door disappears and Richard goes invisible. Taxis don't stop for him, his apartment is rented out right in front of him, his flaming bitch of a fiance barely recognizes him after he chases her down, his job doesn't exist anymore. As Richard rejoins Door and the marquee, he is drug through the sewers and the subway tunnels of the mysterious London Below, meeting strange creatures and running from psychotic killers.

It's not Neil Gaiman's best, but bear in mind I read American Gods first. That said, the main characters in this tale are multifaceted and interesting, it's hard to know for sure if you've got the good guys and the bad guys pegged until  the very end and I loved it. The protagonist, or at least that's what I'll label Richard as, is a lovable bumbling idiot who's afraid of heights; his charge is a generally terrified and mildly clueless teenage girl, and everybody else is suspect. Especially with this whole magic business, Neil can lead you by the nose for a chapter or two and then POOFfuckingmagic into a startling conclusion. There were a few moments where I thought he went a bit far with the POOFfuckingmagic but 99% of the time it was masterfully done. Amid all the action, London Below as written by Gaiman is at times carefully described and at others left as a blank canvas where you can fill in your own scary crap, making the whole backdrop of the story fraught with tension.

So yeah. Believable narrative, good flow, interesting characters, and a couple plot twists that actually twist. This one goes into the books-I-will-militarily-foist-on-my-friends pile.

On Boardgames: Hive

I've been playing the game Hive (designed by John Yianni and published in 2001) for ages, and I still love it.

With average play time lasting around 20 minutes, it's a fun game to play while you're waiting for the rest of your boardgame buddies to show up. It's also simple enough to play whilst intoxicated, and the heavy, colorful tiles seem designed around this. Or, you know, Yianni designed the game for children (although I'd like to argue that the two groups react to losing this game in similar fashions).

This is a game for two players, composed of 22 bug tiles in black and white. Each player gets three soldier ants, three grasshoppers, two beetles, two spiders, and one queen bee tile, and each type of bug tile has different rules that govern its movement. Players place tiles one at a time, with the main rules being that you cannot place your tile adjacent to your opponents' tiles, you cannot break apart the "hive," and the tiles need to be able to slide in and out of the spaces they are moving to, with a few exceptions based on the move actions available to each tile.

The goal of the game is to completely surround your opponent's queen bee. Once that happens, the game immediately ends and you may commence swearing at that punk kid who just smugly beat you at the game you've been playing for ages.

I like to think of this game as a combination of checkers and chess. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to start planning two, three, even four moves ahead, and you have to carefully balance both the defense of your queen and the harassment of your punk kid opponent's. The pieces move almost like chess pieces, such as the queen moving one space in any direction and the grasshopper moving directly over pieces in a straight line, but the options for movement can get pretty limited since all pieces must stay connected. With that in mind, it's important to plan how you'll control the board, or "hive", early in the game. The rules may be simple, but the strategies get more complex the more you play.

If you get bored with the base game, there are expansions available that add additional bug tiles to the mix, such as the ladybug, mosquito, and pill bug. Or, if you don't want to purchase or heft around the actual tiles, that stupid punk kid can stomp you at the Android or iOS version of the game.

On Books: Lexicon by Max Barry

I am a shameless lover of action novels.

There. I said it.

Now that we have that out of the way, Lexicon definitely satisfied my love of things-that-go-boom, but it also managed to tickle my inner language nerd and my mild obsession with science fiction. Not as much as I'd hoped, but also not enough to stop me from recommending it to my sci-fi loving friends.

Max Barry immediately drops the reader into an airport bathroom where Wil is having a very bad day. His very bad day involves being savagely ambushed at a urinal and having a needle rammed into his eye while fielding really random questions.

From there the book doesn't let you down for a second. It moves along two narrative arcs, one providing the background to the main "antagonist" (Emily) and the other following a seemingly random buffoon (Wil) that is thrown violently into a world he knows nothing about.

The basis for this book is that there are certain people, called Poets, who have been trained by an enigmatic secret organization to effectively hypnotize people through the neurological effects of the spoken word. The mumbo-jumbo used to explain this is a bit vague, but the premise is logical enough for sufficient suspension of disbelief. Barry also throws in a lot of catch phrases that lend his story a teeny, tiny bit of credence, such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and some basic concepts behind the Lexical Approach. But like all science fiction, don't pick at it too much or it all starts sounding ridiculous.

The two characters the book focuses on, Wil and Emily, both have intertwining stories and the way the two narratives play off of each other gives each character additional depth. They're both highly sympathetic and I was left in tears more than once as Emily's story unfolds.

Then there are car chases, subterfuge, conspiracy theories... All classic elements to an action thriller novel with a smidgen of sci-fi thrown in. If you're looking for a fast summer read, this is your book. I can't say it's a classic, despite having some masterfully crafted characters and a unique premise, which was a bit disappointing. The setting seemed to leave lots of room for speculation over the power of the spoken and written word, but the extent of it seemed to function simply as a plot device.

So yeah. Go read it.

Also I'm back blogging, so expect more regular updates.

On Boobs: The Trouble with Blurred Lines

I KNOW I KNOW.

Blogging 101: post regularly.

So I'm sorry. Won't happen again.

To apologize, here you go:

Unfortunately there is a problem with these boobs, and that is (a small) part on what stayed my hand from updating the blog. The problem with these boobs isn't the boobs themselves, or the ladies that are attached to them, or in my opinion the music video they are in, but the song the music video is for: Blurred Lines  by Robin Thicke.

Dammit but that's a catchy song, but as the internet quickly pointed out, this song has some pretty serious problems. I'm still not completely sure I've made up my mind about it, but having batted around ideas with enough smart people I can confidently say three things:

To all the people who directed their outrage at the models, you are jerks. JERKS. Who are you to tell any woman what she can and can't do with her body? Shaming beautiful women for appearing naked on camera is just reinforcing the idea that a naked woman is merely an object. The director, Diane Martel, gave an interview after the video came out regarding the controversy, and I think these models did a bang-up job fulfilling her vision:

I wanted to deal with the misogynist, funny lyrics in a way where the girls were going to overpower the men. Look at Emily Ratajkowski’s performance; it’s very, very funny and subtly ridiculing. That’s what is fresh to me. It also forces the men to feel playful and not at all like predators. I directed the girls to look into the camera, this is very intentional and they do it most of the time; they are in the power position. I don’t think the video is sexist. The lyrics are ridiculous, the guys are silly as fuck. That said, I respect women who are watching out for negative images in pop culture and who find the nudity offensive, but I find [the video] meta and playful.

The foot-slap in the face, the lack of eye contact with the men in the video, the subtle eye rolls, all these elements combine to give the women in the video an aura of power and control.

So boo-yah ladies, well done. Please spend as much time naked as you want.

That said I come to my second point: Robin Thicke is a boob. AND NOT THE GOOD KIND.

Having read the interview above, I was prepared to defend the music video until I read this quote from Robin Thicke himself:

We tried to do everything that was taboo. Bestiality, drug injections, and everything that is completely derogatory towards women. Because all three of us are happily married with children, we were like, "We're the perfect guys to make fun of this." People say, "Hey, do you think this is degrading to women?" I'm like, "Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I've never gotten to do that before. I've always respected women."

It really did inspire a moment of pure speechlessness (which for this author is a blessed rarity).  So apparently Robin missed the point on this one. Which, upon giving the lyrics a closer look, is totally understandable because the man wrote a rapey song and didn't notice.

I know coercing a taken woman is not a new thing; it's a theme that's been written and sung about for ages, and at some level I think that's all Robin was shooting for. This does not make the line "I know you want it" that is looped through the whole song any less troubling. A friend of mine put it well when he said that the song removes the woman's agency; she is being propositioned but is never given a rebuttal, and is essentially being told that the singer knows what she wants better than she does. It just smacks too much of the disgusting idea that at some level a woman wants to be raped.

And then that jerkface just straight blows smoke in one of the model's faces during the video. I'm surprised Martel kept that.

I come to my final point: The culture that this was released into negates anything good Martel put into this video.

Briefly put, we weren't ready. This music video relied too heavily on subtle satire to justify itself, and the only thing most people took away from this video was OoooO NAKED LADIES and some bizarre idea that you can argue a woman into bed. Maybe in a few years we can appreciate Martel's intent for this music video, but in the meantime too many idiots (like Robin) just aren't getting it.

Boobs are wonderful. Let's treat them well.

Screw you Robin Thicke.