ishyface: (*beam*)
Spent the last night of 2009 in a happy haze of beer, pot, and gingerbread with some delightful people. And got a call from a very certain girl at the stroke of midnight.

2010, you are off to a good start.

Time for that meme I post every year. )
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(This entry is public because Little Brother went through all my old posts and told me in no uncertain terms to stop locking things so he can read my wordmeats again. If he is reading this right now, I would like to point out that this would not be a problem if he got his own damn LJ. Plus then the Internets would know he is real and that I did not make him up. GET ON THAT, LITTLE BROTHER.)

I don't much like making small talk. I do like to read. These two facts in combination mean that I bring books to work to read on my lunch break. This would not be a problem were it not for the fact that many of the people I work with are who Bill Hicks was talking about here and therefore totally mystified by the fact that I, like, read books. For fun! Books with long words! Books without pictures! Books that don't even have a shirtless Edward Cullen in there to make up for all that strenuous mental activity! How weird, right?

Often if you tell a meat eater that you are a vegetarian he or she will bounce back with some variation on the theme of "YEAH WELL I LOVE ME SOME DEAD COW MMM STEAK." Similarly, I find that when people find out how much I read- three or so books a week, give or take- someone usually ends up declaring that they don't read. Ever. That is not in and of itself a crime. Some people don't enjoy reading! It happens! I don't understand it,* but I... kind of accept it. What I don't accept is the way these someones say it, which is proudly. "Fuck yeah, man, I haven't read a book since fourth grade! I don't even know if I CAN read anymore! I AM AWESOME, AS IS ILLITERACY."

What the hell is wrong with these people?

You know what? If you don't read books, and you are PROUD of the fact that you don't read books, I am going to think you are stupid. That's it. Moreover, I am going to think you are a fucking ALIEN and probably won't ever be able to understand how you work or think or can stand to get up in the morning. That is not hyperbole. That is how fucking bizarre the concept of not reading (and not WANTING to read) is for me. If you don't read books you're from fucking Mars and I have no fucking clue how to talk to you. That's not me being a neurotic bookworm, either. (Well, it is a little, but not as much as you'd think.) It's because while I have very few definite thoughts on the meaning of life, the universe, and so on, one of my most definite thoughts is that stories are important. Stories are more important than almost anything, because without them life would make no fucking sense. Without stories the world would just be... things. Stuff that happens. They're as much a vital part of life as food and water. We need them to fucking live.

Not reading is not something to be goddamn proud of. Aside from its many benefits- exercises the right side of the brain, helps develop and increase the vocabulary, promotes empathy by encouraging identification outside the self, relieves stress, gives you a better chance of not ending up a junior stockboy at a third-rate grocery store forever, et cetera- what isn't there to fucking love about reading? Reading is good! Reading is fun! Didn't you watch Sesame Street as a kid? They taught this shit there, and they had dancing letters and everything. AND they showed you how to count to ten in Spanish. Now go sit down, try to remember the goddamn alphabet, and stop interrupting me while I'm reading so you can talk about your fucking girlfriend's eczema.**

While we're on the subject of books, here are some I've read lately. )

I made myself a new summer mix the other day, and I feel like uploading it even though it is pretty unfashionable. I call it Love and Television. )

Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive. NO CAPTIONS! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words. They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason. You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

Mysterious is the way to go. )
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When my little sister heard about the upcoming FOBlink-182 tourvaganza, she got very big-eyed and said:

"I want to go to that concert. More than anything in the world."

"Huh," I said, intrigued. "Do you want it even more than, say, world peace?"

She nodded solemnly.

"You do know that makes you a bad person, right?" I asked.

"No!" she replied, shaking her head. "Because that concert will make world peace happen."

I love you, Little Sister.

Guyssssss it was so WARM today! So warm there were kids out playing on the street all day! So warm I got to lie out on my back deck and absorb the sunshine like a furry purry kitty! So warm I didn't even put on socks! (I pretty much always wear socks- brightly-patterned knee socks, for preference- so this is a big deal.) I've got my window wide open and I can hear frogs somewhere out there and it is SUMMER FUCK YEAH FINALLY. \o/

I mean, it snowed again a few days ago, but whatever. SUMMER.

I have been feeling kind of ridiculously optimistic about things lately. This is partially due to FUCK YEAH SUMMER, but also because I have decided to spend this summer Being Productive, and so far I'm doing pretty well! I've been writing and practicing bass and working like a motherfucker and it feels really good to be busy because I think I've been kind of doing nothing for a while. Even during the school year.

I've also been reading a lot, which I choose to count as Being Productive because, um, reading is good for the brainmeats? I dunno. Here are some of the books I've read, complete with pocket-sized reviews!

Books, books, books. )

I'm currently reading Out by Natsuo Kirino (delightfully creepy and full of social commentary) and The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir (interesting, but it's really easy to tell she usually writes nonfiction- her style is kind of clumsy and she can never seem to decide whose head she wants to be in). Books are fab.
ishyface: (tea)
It's a bit long. )

I love how half of that list is comprised of books I feel guilty for not reading yet and the other of books I'll feel guilty for reading.

Anyway, what else should I read this summer, flist? Rec me things!

What I like: Non-shitty genre fiction, comics that do not involve superheroes (exceptions can be made if said superheroes refuse to be called superheroes, a la Runaways, or are retired, a la Watchmen), fucked up kid books, fiction that is actually interesting and not just about people trying to decide whether or not to have affairs and/or regretting that decision for twenty years afterwards, non-fiction that is about society and feminism and how badly human beings are screwing things up, biographies and memoirs about people who did things and weren't just child actors or fallen political figures, alien invasions of any kind, YA lit, books about teenagers saving the world from some impending threat (bonus points if said teenagers are also in a band and if said threat is undead in nature), historical fiction that isn't by Philippa Gregory because I find her books to be incredibly problematic and sexist (not to mention poorly written), and anything with pretty pretty illustrations.

What I don't like: Bodice-rippers, fantasy that tries to be Tolkien (partly because it's derivative, partly because I don't like Tolkien), sci fi that takes itself too seriously, fiction that tries to tackle Important Issues in a way that is clearly more about winning awards than actually saying anything, excessive irony, authors who assume their readers are stupid, gratuitous and poorly-written sex scenes, books that have "A Novel" included in the title (we KNOW it's a novel, it's IN THE FICTION SECTION), books that are thinly-veiled dramatizations of the author's own experiences (either write fiction or suck it up and call it a memoir, Christ), queer lit that is all about coming out, The Life of Pi, Canadian fiction that dwells excessively on incest, national identity, and how much it sucks to live in a small town (Margaret Laurence, you may sit down), anything that ends in someone's issues magically disappearing through the power of True Love, and Dave Eggers. FUCK YOU, DAVE EGGERS.
ishyface: (*beam*)
On the last day of 2008 I went for a drive with my sister and my father. She had a camera, I had a pen, and he had the wheel of the car.

It was a snowy day. We slipped when we walked.

There's a place called Cape Spear where you can stand on the rocks and look out across the ocean and see England if you squint. There was a high wind and spiders sleeping under the lighthouse, dreaming of summer. The fog was too thick to see the gulls, but we could hear a helicopter miles out to sea. It was a lonely happy sort of place, the kind of place that makes you want to jump off the rocks and turn into a bird.

When we got back into the car we smelt like salt and pollen and lights at night.

I tried to capture the feel of it when I was choosing songs to drive to. I don't know how well I did, though.

U2- Running To Stand Still
Joel Plaskett- Love This Town
The Arcade Fire- Keep The Car Running
Basia Bulat- I Was A Daughter
De Capulet- The Paradigm
The Decemberists- Engine Driver
Wintersleep- Jaws Of Life
Stars- Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
The Killers- Read My Mind
Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Cheated Hearts
Death Cab For Cutie- The Sound Of Settling
Tracy Chapman- Fast Cars
The Used- On My Own
Leonard Cohen- Suzanne
The Sundays- Wild Horses
Wolf Parade- Shine A Light

Later that night Older Sister and I wandered into a sketchy bar with a man playing folk songs and "Drunk Girl" on the jukebox, where they gave us free champagne as the year changed.

Goodbye, 2008. I'm not gonna fucking miss you.

Some things that make me happy right now:

This brilliant insight in John Mayer's songwriting process. I've kind of hated John Mayer ever since that fucking "Daughters" song, but it turns out he's kind of funny! And self-deprecating! "If I can't get the girl why don't I just tell her I'm John Mayer?"

This All-American Rejects sea shanty cover of "Womanizer."

Sir Terrence of Pratchett. :}

The Making Of "America's Suitehearts." Cassadee continues to charm the bejeesus out of me.

[livejournal.com profile] iamsupernova's Suicide Girls picspam. (Not safe for work for reasons of boobies.)

The fact that baby platypi are called "puggles."

Also, I'm about forty pages into House of Leaves and I already want to write something just like it.

(Random question: Does anyone have any pictures of crows, especially sketches/cartoons/paintings/etc? My Google-fu is sadly lacking tonight.)
ishyface: (*beam*)
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. I've been meaning to read this ever since I got into Poe. The singer, that is, not the writer. So... about five years? Yeah, that sounds right.

Totally Joe, by James Howe. By the guy who wrote Bunnicula! Except this book has no vampire bunnies, just a gay twelve-year-old boy named Joe who overidentifies with E.T. It's still fun times.

BITCHfest, by various angry ladies. This is another one I've been meaning to get for a while. I haven't been able to find Bitch in Newfoundland so far and even though I'm not as into that magazine as I used to be, I still need a shot of snarky feminist pop culture analysis every now and then.

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. I blame Kidston for that one. Working at Jesus camp taught me that Christian kids love three things: Coldplay, Calvin and Hobbes, and violent contact sports.

I'd like to think that if I ever met myself buying books I'd think I was a pretty cool person. I feel like I kind of am sometimes. I mean, not cool cool because I spend way too much time on the Internet for that, but I am often pretty pleased by the fact that I am myself. I like myself. It's kind of awesome.

Also awesome: Katie Kay (just in general) and this Against Me!/Tegan Quinn video.



That's my favourite song for the next five minutes.

Today is my nine-month antiversary. I feel like I should celebrate it somehow, but I'm not sure how one celebrates an antiversary- maybe with a pint of ice cream, a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, and a good cry. I don't really feel like crying, though.

As a matter of fact, I feel pretty good right now. Happy to be on my own and waiting for surprises.

Still, here's a song. )
ishyface: (*beam*)
I started my bookstore job on Tuesday.

... Guys. GUYS. THERE ARE SO MANY BOOKS IN THE WORLD AND I GET TO CHILL WITH THEM AND GET PAID FOR IT. :DDDD

(Restocking the erotica section is a little weird, though. I never knew how many people wrote sexy books about vampires. And all the titles have words like "velvet" and "forbidden" and "desire" and "seduction" in them. If I wrote a book called Velvet Seduction, Forbidden Desire: The Sensual Adventures of Horatio Ravisham, Vampire Demon-Lover I would make a bundle. A bundle I would not be able to tell my mother about, but a bundle nonetheless.)

Continuing the theme of "Things That Make Ish Ridiculously Happy," Tom Lenk came out! Which means I have an excuse to post a video full of my favourite Andrew moments, which means everybody wins. (Especially Tom Lenk.)



And while I'm at it...



... it's almost Halloween!

(IT IS ALSO ALMOST MY BIRTHDAY. JUST IN CASE YOU FORGOT.)

This morning I played around with eyeliner. I wanted to get that consumptive look. )

Whenever I list movies that make me cry I forget to put Pleasantville on there. It's Jeff Daniels' character that does me in- when he stares at the art book and says "where am I going to see colours like that?" (Little known fact: there is a town pretty close to St. John's that is named Pleasantville! It makes me laugh and laugh and then kind of want to take the bus there so I can hang out with Joan Allen.)

... This entry has no unifying theme. I mean, other than "DEAR INTERNETS: HERE ARE THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY. ALSO, IT'S MY BIRTHDAY SOON. ALSO, I'M A CAMWHORE."
ishyface: (*beam*)
From [livejournal.com profile] montrealais: Margaret Atwood is cranky and fabulous.

What's the idea here? That arts jobs should not exist because artists are naughty and might not vote for Mr. Harper? That Canadians ought not to make money from the wicked arts, but only from virtuous oil? That artists don't all live in one constituency, so who cares? Or is it that the majority of those arts jobs are located in Ontario and Quebec, and Mr. Harper is peeved at those provinces, and wants to increase his ongoing gutting of Ontario - $20-billion a year of Ontario taxpayers' money going out, a dribble grudgingly allowed back in - and spank Quebec for being so disobedient as not to appreciate his magnificence? He likes punishing, so maybe the arts-squashing is part of that: Whack the Heartland.

Or is it even worse? Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily. Of course, you can always get some tame artists to design the uniforms and flags and the documentary about you, and so forth - the only kind of art you might need - but individual voices must be silenced, because there shall be only One Voice: Our Master's Voice. Maybe that's why Mr. Harper began by shutting down funding for our artists abroad. He didn't like the competition for media space.


MARGARET ATWOOD STOP MAKING ME LOVE YOU. STOP IT RIGHT NOW.

(Just kidding, never stop.)

I just finished a book by Patrick O'Leary called The Gift, and it was the most intense, engrossing read I've had in a long while. It's kind of a fantasy, but it's not like any other fantasy I've read- sad and sharp and funny and horrifying and beautiful and painful, like all the best fairy tales distilled. It's a book about stories, and the danger of power, and the redemption of love. The kind of book that makes you feel refreshed and excited just because it exists. I'm glad I read it.

(Especially after A Song For Arbonne. I have never eyerolled so hard at a book before. Women are tender delicate nurturing moonbeams who must gentle their menfolk! You can tell that evil people are evil because they enjoy oral sex! "AMUSING" IS THE ONLY ADJECTIVE IN THE WORLD! Fuck you, Guy Gavriel Kay. Fuck. You.)

I discovered yesterday that Patrick Wolf's The Magic Position is the best album to listen to at night on the bus, when it's starting to rain and the streetlights have just turned on. (That sounds laughably specific, I know, but it's not really.)

Then, when I got home, I discovered this present from my mother on my bed:

Photobucket

Gosh, Mum, what are you trying to say exactly? YOU ARE BEING TOO SUBTLE. I DON'T UNDERSTAND.
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Some of which are pretty bad, because Kidston's book collection, she is not so premium.

Brown Girl In The Ring, by Nalo Hopkins

Voodoo! Gods! Monsters! Zombies! A dystopian Toronto! Although I found the dialogue a little confusing, this book has pretty much everything a good urban fantasy should have. Plus zombies. Did I mention the zombies? And the mean old ladies with magical powers?* And the graphic death? And the feminism? And the cases of mistaken identity? AND THE ZOMBIES?

Kindred, by Octavia Butler

This is a book about racism disguised as a book about time travel. It is utterly amazing on both levels. Read it.

Adverbs, by Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler's taken a while to really hit his stride in adult literature, I think- Watch Your Mouth was disappointing, and I can't even remember The Basic Eight- but he finally has with Adverbs. Focusing on the intertwined love lives of a few dozens people- some of whom may or may not be one another- the novel moves back and forth in time, space, and tone. Handler's style is both snappily ironic and totally earnest, and Adverbs itself is equally divided: it is about how love fails everyone and about how it's the only really important thing in the world. (Also, I think [livejournal.com profile] uncommon_crow would really like it. Just throwin' that out there.)

The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint

An artist named Jilly is seriously injured in a car accident, which throws her into Mabon, a kind of fairyland she's been trying to break into for years. Trying to lose herself in dreams, she learns to come to terms with her abusive past, her guilt over abandoning her sister, and the possibility of paralysis leaving her unable to paint again. I'm still not sure how I felt about this book. On the one hand, Charles de Lint is a really lovely writer and incorporates the fantastic into the everyday in a seamless, understated way that makes me really jealous; on the other hand, I couldn't get into Jilly as a character. Or, rather, I couldn't get into how all the other characters reacted to Jilly. A protagonist being well-liked is something I can deal with- not everyone can be a twisted anti-hero, because that would be boring as fuck- but half the city (literally) showing up to visit her in the hospital? It got to the point where I groaned every time the point of view switched to anyone who wasn't Jilly or her sister, because it meant I was in for another digression on how Jilly is such an awesome person, like, really, she's so nice, want to hear about all these selfless things she did for the poor and the homeless and the orphans and the kittens and stuff? De Lint's treatment of sexual abuse kind of bothered me as well- although it was easy to tell he empathized with Jilly and wanted his readers to identify with her and her pain, there was an undercurrent of voyeurism there that made it a very discomforting read. It was a good read in spite of that, and I certainly wouldn't encourage anyone not to read it- de Lint writes some good, meaty fantasy and has the guts to tackle subjects a lot of genre writers don't really address, or use as a cheap plot device.

Affinity, by Sarah Waters

What I got out of this book: Don't be a lesbian in Victorian England, you will go crazy/become a criminal/go crazy and then become a criminal and then kill yourself because the woman you helped to bust out of jail was using you the whole time and you'll never love again, woe, woe, etc. Okay! Thanks for that, Ms. Waters!

Soul Kitchen, by Poppy Z. Brite

Ricky and G-man, the cooks who took the world by storm in Liquor, are back and planning to open a new franchise called Soul Kitchen, which serves comfort food from around the world. After hiring on a man wrongly accused of rape and murder twelve years before things get a little tense; that tension only heightens when you add in Rickey's burgeoning addiction to prescription drugs, G-man's struggle with infidelity, and roughly a thousand other narrative threads that Brite seems eager to drop as soon as she picks them up. Remember how I loved Liquor? That was because it had a clear, concise plot, well-defined characters, and a sense of humour about itself. Soul Kitchen has none of those; on top of that, it cannot decide what kind of book it wants to be. A murder mystery? A meditation on race relations in New Orleans? A moral lesson on Why Drugs Are Bad, Use Acupuncture? A straight-up restaurant book? It tries to be all of them at the same time, and ends up being nothing much at all. Also, Brite's history of failing at characters of colour continues: not only does the only prominent black character in the book die at the end, but a good portion of the book is spent criticizing this Crazy Angry Black Guy being mean to all the Nice White Folks Just Trying To Help Him Out. I mean, what's a dozen years of wrongful imprisonment when someone offers you a job in a kitchen, man?

The Holy, by Daniel Quinn

Oh, Daniel Quinn. Please stop trying to write books with plots and characters and dialogue (and, uh, Satanic rituals) and go back to your telepathic gorillas, please.

Stardust: The David Bowie Story, by Henry Edwards and Tony Zanetta

This book taught me that David Bowie was a cockhead. And slept with a lot of drag queens. V. informative! (Hilariously, since it was written in 1986 it ends by noting that hey, David Bowie is gonna be in this movie with muppets and stuff sometime soon, he'll be wearing tight pants, it'll be awesome! TRUER WORDS, MY FRIENDS, TRUER WORDS.)

Glass, by Ellen Hopkins

Oh, God.

Okay. Remember Go Ask Alice and how it was a straight-up hoax book that was written to scare youngsters onto the straight and narrow? Imagine if someone wrote that in the aughts, in the form of a frillion calligrams, and pretended it was their daughter's experiences instead of their own, and you've got Glass. DON'T DO DRUGS, NOT EVEN ONCE, BECAUSE YOU'LL BECOME HOPELESSLY ADDICTED AND SPEND ALL YOUR BIRTHDAY MONEY ON CRYSTAL METH. ALSO DO NOT HAVE SEX, BECAUSE THEN YOU WILL HAVE A BABY AND GET FAT AND THAT WILL SUCK PRETTY HARD, RIGHT? ALSO MEXICANS ARE DANGEROUS. ALSO WHAT DO LESBIANS DO IN BED, I MEAN SERIOUSLY? ALSO REALLY GUYS, DON'T DO DRUGS, YOU'LL GO TO JAIL FOREVER. OKAY? OKAY.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Dear Mr. Kay:

If you call a vagina a "portal," I am going to laugh at you.

Love and kisses,
Ish

The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch Albom

Reading this book was like watching a movie- I enjoyed it, but I was still waiting for the credits to roll.

* Mean old ladies with magical powers make me happy. Just ask Granny Weatherwax.
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Because sometimes I read shit. Crazy, I know.

Potential, by Ariel Schrag

I think when people write about high school years after the fact, their memories are all in soft focus. Schrag's comic memoir Potential was written immediately after she graduated and describes her coming out in high school, losing her virginity, and trying to make sense of her first real relationship. Except that makes it sound stupid and Potential is actually good. Schrag's drawings are messy and scritchy and make me itch, and her writing is clumsy in the good way- it makes you realize how young she is, how earnest she is even though she's trying to defend herself with irony. This book reminded me of how awesomely terrible high school was, both the parts of it I miss and the parts of it I never want to think about again.

Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi

What I love about Marjane Satrapi is that she takes one look at the stereotype of Middle Eastern women as long-suffering submissive victims of their culture and laughs it off the face of the fucking planet. The conversations in Embroideries are the kind of conversations people across the world are having ion their living rooms- conversations about love, about sex, about money, and, more than anything, about juicy gossip. Satrapi's minimalist cartoon style scans almost like film noir at times. That combined with her snappy, raunchy dialogue makes Embroideries... hm, how do I say this without sounding like a total douche or someone reviewing a restaurant? Oh, I got it, ROCK AWESOME.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy

Sigh.

Okay. I am going to put away my distaste for Levy's prose style for just five minutes (but seriously, could she maybe try to sound neutral? just once?), and concentrate on the things I did like about the book. I found her analysis of the "Uncle Tomming" done by women to benefit from raunch culture to be spot on. (How-fucking-ever, using racial analogies and implicitly comparing oppressions? Thank you, Ms. Levy, a truckload of FAIL shall be delivered to your doorstep post-haste.) I also enjoyed her take on the relationship between raunch culture and capitalism, particularly that "[m]aking sexiness into something simple, quantifiable makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff- big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs- then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall. What is really out of commercial control is that you still can't bottle attraction." (184) But throughout the book I found myself flipping to the author's picture on the back flap and scowling at her, because a lot of her writing is fucking sloppy. For example, she writes with the unstated assumption that her readers will agree with her ideological opposition to pornography and sex work; although she claims that pornography will FUCK YOU UP MAN, she does not include statistics.* Instead she quotes Jenna Jameson's autobiography and calls it a day. She criticizes the third wave for its perceived permissiveness and acceptance of marketed sexuality and idealizes the second wave as a totally radical space, ignoring its history of excluding women by their race or sexual practice (lesbians, leatherfolk, too "feminine", whatever). And oh, that charming chapter on those mean mannish lesbians objectifying women by... uh... sleeping with lots of them! And sometimes wearing men's clothing! And even TRANSITIONING, oh noes! (Don't even get me started on her back-asswards attitude towards trans folk. Say it with me, people: If I'm NOT transgendered, I DON'T get to use the word "tranny." I don't. Get. To. Use. It.)

All in all? Glad I read it once, will never read it again.

I've also been reading Runaways, but it is too awesome for me to write a proper review. Telepathic time-traveling raptors! Goth girls leading teams of superheroes! KILLER NAZI SCIENTISTS MADE OF BEES! \o/

ETA: BABY BABY BABY.

* Just for the record: I identify primarily as a pro-sex feminist. I feel very uneasy about many of the images propagated by the porn industry, especially in relation to women and sexual assault, and I think they can be harmful, especially when it's the only way younger people can learn about sexuality; however, I think the solution to that problem is encouraging a society that is more open and honest about sexuality, not by shutting people down and censoring them. End PSA.
ishyface: (hmmm...)
A brief (considering) list of things that make me happy:

- Strawberry oil.
- My newly-discovered love for Cobra Starship.*
- The Importance of Being Earnest.**
- Striped shirts.
- The Juno version of "Anyone Else But You."
- Secretly listening to the Spice Girls.
- Talking about Victorian feminism with Dr. Grant (with bonus digressions about how much he loved 101 Dalmatians).
- My genderqueer skellington hoodie, as sort of seen here.***
- Three-in-the-morning conversations in our living room.
- Hot apple cider (with extra sugar and cinnamon).
- Frank Iero.

* I have decided that every time I am on a plane in the future, I am going to play "Snakes On A Plane" upon take-off. I have already done this once; it was fantabulous.

** In the quite unlikely event that I ever act again,**** it would be to play Algernon.

*** Okay, so it's mostly a picture of one of my cats, but he's a fuckin' adorable cat.

**** I was in The Wizard of Oz in grade four. After that I retired from the stage, aside from my dual role in twelfth grade's Who's Hamlet Again? My illustrious acting career, ladies, gents, and others.
ishyface: (Default)
Courtesy of [livejournal.com profile] elorie:

God in the dust: What Catholics attacking 'The Golden Compass' are really afraid of

This view of Dust echoes many of the theological ideas that the Catholic Church finds threatening today. The most obvious thread is liberation theology, the Marxist and socially progressive rereading of the Gospels born among Catholic theologians in Latin America in the 1960s. Liberation theology teaches that Jesus is a political revolutionary who loves all that God has created and wants all creation to flourish on this earth, not just in heaven. Liberation theology also holds that believers should disregard doctrine that leads to oppression.

I'd never interpreted His Dark Materials as theistic, but it's certainly food for thought, and I love that the books can be interpreted in so many different ways. I think that Philip Pullman and authors like him* are the only people who actually respect children- they write complex, dark, multi-faceted works and assume that children are not only capable of enjoying them, but understanding them.

I mean, I'm sure the people protesting HDM would prefer their children to read Curious George Uses The Potty, or something like it. But they're going to watch them grow up and wonder why they don't want to read, and I will point and laugh. And then buy good books for my nieces and nephews.

(I'm still not going to see the movie, though. The book's built up so much in my head I'd only be disappointed, and anyway, I can't do Nicole Kidman post-The Hours.)

* Madeleine L'Engle, Lemony Snicket, Michael Ende, Terry Pratchett when he writes kids' books, Neil Gaiman with Coraline... I definitely need to read more good, thoughtful kid books.
ishyface: (Default)
Bad thing:

I am working with a dreadful person. Her name is Effie, and she's got soulless eyes, and may in fact be Satan himself. Last night she made me cry.

Good thing:

Last night, again, a woman came to the register with her daughter, maybe three or four years old. The mother ran to the back of the store to get something she'd forgotten. The little girl squinted at me over the counter, then pointed to the Archie comics.

"Are these joking books?" she asked me, in a very critical little-kid voice.

"Sort of," I replied.

She picked one up and looked at it consideringly. "Does it have rhymes?"

I'd read a lot of Archie comics as a kid, but couldn't remember any having rhymes. "I don't think so," I said. "Just pictures."

"And words," she pointed out triumphantly as she flipped it open, giving me one of those hard, disapproving looks that children give you when they think they've caught you in a lie. She jabbed at one of the speech bubbles, in which Reggie was telling the other Riverdale boys that he didn't blame them for making a move on his girl, as she was such a doll. Or maybe peach. "What does this say?" she asked.

We stood there for a few minutes, her finger moving from one bubble to another as I read to her, feeling slightly foolish, bits of dialogue put in the mouths of teenagers with seventies vocabularies and eighties wardrobes by old men who'd forgotten both of those decades, and she nodded, very seriously, filing it all away somewhere for reference.

Her mum came back to the counter, flustered, and apologized for holding up the line. She told the little girl to scan her candy- I think it was a pushpop- and then told her to thank the nice lady.

She said "'nk you," and then asked her mother if they could buy the comic, since it had jokes in it, and I wondered what she'd be like when she learned how to read.

I hope she'll find a really good book someday, one that smells like libraries do on rainy days, one with someone else's name scrawled in pencil on the inside cover. I hope she'll fall in love with it. I hope she'll curl up on a comfy chair and get lost and won't come when dinner's ready.
ishyface: (Default)
Some books that I've read in the past few months. )

Next on the list: I Am America (And You Can, Too!), by Stephen Colbert; The Language of the Goddess, by Marija Gimbutas; Badlands by Robert Kroetsch (ugh).

Any recommendations?
ishyface: (every goddamn thing)
Every story brings the imagination and reality together in moments of what we might as well call faith. Stories give us a way to wonder how totalitarian states arise, or why cancer cells behave the way they do, or what causes people to live in the streets... and then come back again in a circle to the wonder of a song... or a supernova... or DNA. Wonder and wondering are closely related, and stories teach us that we cannot chose between them. If we try, we end up with the kind of amazement that is satisfied with the first explanation, or the kind of curiousity that is incapable of genuine surprise. Stories make the world more real, more rational, by bringing us closer to the irrational mystery at its centre. Why did my friend get sick and die? Why is there so much suffering in the world? Whose land is this we live on? How much is enough?

And where is home?

- If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, by J. Edward Chamberlin

Madeleine L'Engle died.

\D:/

On Lolita.

Jul. 7th, 2007 11:11 pm
ishyface: (Default)
"I felt really sorry for Humbert. Lolita seduced him!"

Before I ever read Lolita I used to hear people say this a lot. Since I hadn't read the book, it kind of went in one ear and out the other. I knew what the book was about, of course- I don't think there're many people who don't know what Lolita is about- but I thought that maybe I'd gotten it wrong. Maybe there was some sort of dynamic I didn't understand. Or maybe Dolores was secretly a forty-year-old Russian prison guard posing as a little girl and the book was really a jab by Nabokov at international communism.

Or maybe I was just more immune to bullshit back then.

Having read the book this year- yeah, it took me this long- and wow, those people sure were full of it, eh?

Humbert Humbert- quite aside from being an unreliable narrator- is not a nice guy. Not even a little. It's weird that I feel like I need to say that about a guy who marries one woman because she looks and acts like a prepubescent girl, marries another woman to gain access to her prepubescent daughter (all the while ripping this woman to pieces in his own mind out of some misplaced superiority complex), kidnaps and rapes said daughter, and drags her around the country after telling her that her mother is in the hospital, but apparently this all adds up to "poor innocent adult man seduced by dastardly twelve-year-old."

Buying sleeping pills so you can drug your stepdaughter and rape her for six hours does not qualify as "seduced." Neither does justifying your attraction to underage girls by telling yourself they're not really children at all, but demonic temptresses in the form of twelve-year-olds.

The weird thing is, even Humbert doesn't try to argue that Lo seduced him. In fact, he usually sets himself up as the active party, and even (sort of) acknowledges that he's hurting her- although, being Humbert, he goes about it in a particularly florid, patronizing way:

"There was the day, during our first trip- our first circle of paradise- when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn- to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on- a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face... that look I cannot exactly describe... an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration- and every limit presupposes something beyond it- hence the neutral illumination." (283)

He mentions it again a few pages later:

"But the awful point of the whole argument was this. It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif." (287)

Yeah, Lo had a crush on Humbert. Yeah, she'd experimented with other kids her own age. Yeah, she seems to be in control the first time they had sex- that is, after Humbert fed her what he thought were sleeping pills and tried to rape her in her sleep. She even uses her influence over him to get things she wants, because she is helpless and wants to gain some sort of control over her life, and to do that she needs to use the means at hand.

This does not mean she seduced him. You know, due to that whole "asswipe child molester" thing.
ishyface: (one red post-it)
Doggies.
ishyface: (Default)
The Powerbook, by Jeanette Winterson

This novel does not have a setting, or a time, or even characters, really. The Powerbook is all about a feeling, the clarity of emotion that links all stories together. The main character is a writer who creates fictions for people who want to get lost in them. As the book goes on she gets lost herself, and every story becomes about herself and her ex-lover, meeting each other again and again. I haven't read many of Winterson's books- three or four at most- but she always communicates a sense of desire and passion clearly. She does that here; it aches, and it's beautiful in that way that makes you want to throw it away.

The Book Against God, by James Wood

I like books about philosophy, and I picked up this book thinking that was what it was going to be. Instead, it turned out to be a book about philosophers; one in particular, a man named Tom Bunting, who can't seem to keep himself from lying. The son of a minister, he himself is passionately anti-religion and a militant atheist, and has been working on a project called The Book Against God, a composium of theological tidbits and theological arguments that are meant to refute the existence of God. Tom is, frankly, kind of a loser- he's been working on his PhD for years with little progress, he drives away his own wife with his compulsive dishonesty, and seems incapable of actively working against the forces driving him, opting instead to lie there and bemoan his fate. He is, however, an eloquent, intelligent, and entertaining loser, which keeps things interesting.

Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood

Whatever, it's Margaret Atwood so it's awesome by default.

Virgin Territory, by Sara Maitland

Martine found this book in a bookstore on Barrington Street, a really old one where the books are stacked in towers and staircases and the bookshelves themselves are made out of books. A nun in Central America is raped in Central America while working as a missionary, and her sister Anna deals with the fallout in a very strange way. As in, starts hearing the voices of a group of men she calls the Fathers, communicating telepathically with a brain-damaged three-year-old named Caro, and hanging out with lesbian-feminists. This is a book from the early eighties about rape, power, and religion, which means that it's intense, earnest, and would probably never be published today. It's also very emotionally honest, and explores the concept of virginity, negative power, and its revolutionary possibilities in a curious way- curious here meaning not "strange" but "intrigued." Although it can be a little didactic, it's well worth a read. Also, the main character says at one point that "Jesus Christ is not on the side of the Fathers. Jesus Christ is on the side of the lesbians." I think that, in future, I need to yell "Jesus Christ is on the side of the lesbians!" as much as possible.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

Hoo boy. So, we all know about this one, right? Girl is murdered, goes to heaven, watches her family from afar and tries to help them catch the guy who killed her. Fairly simple premise. Everyone and their dog has been telling me that I'd love this book for about... Jesus, three years, I think, so I finally caved and read it, and was completely underwhelmed. I think it might have been that she actively described heaven, and I really hate descriptions of the afterlife; maybe it takes away from the mystery, or something. Or it might have been how awful the character Ruth was; I didn't know that someone could simultaneously fulfill every stereotype for psychics, lesbians, and artists, but she does. Or maybe I'm just a damn philistine who can't appreciate good books. Regardless, this book annoyed the shit out of me and I was glad to be finished with it.

(Yeah, I could have just stopped reading it, but I do that very rarely. I can stop watching movies halfway through, but I can't stop reading books or my brain gets all itchy.)

Anyone have any suggestions for summer reading? I'm desperate for something new, and you can only reread Hairstyles of the Damned so many times.
ishyface: (Default)
There are few things more uncomfortable than having your little sister and her friend ask you interested questions about the mechanics of queer sex.

However, there are few things more satisfying than discussing the environment and politics with said little sister and friend, so I guess things balance out.

(Also, I now own this and this. And a pin that says "God is too big for one religion." It makes me sad that I always want to buy anti-capitalist buttons, though. Even if I pretended it was due to being fashionably ironic*, I'd die inside of shame.)

This week has been a little dramatic. I think the drama reached its high point tonight, when Mum discovered that my little sister's ex-best friend** posted pictures of her (the friend, not Little Sister) touching herself on the Internet. This is also the first year anniversary of Paula Gallant's murder at the local elementary.

Sometimes I wonder if this is why the suburbs are such a good place to raise your kids.

I've noticed since coming home that I feel less afraid about things. My family's noticed it, too- I'm talking more, being more social, not staring at my feet as I walk. Kerrin's theory is that since I've been amongst real strangers, socializing with people I don't know very well doesn't scare me as much anymore. My theory is that that last bout of exam panic sucked the fear clean out of me.

Aaaaaand it's another end-of-the-year meme. )

I seem to be allergic to my house. *violent sneeze*

Sometimes I want to be a warm yellow light that shines over everyone. Sometimes I want to do nothing other than twirl around in a field full of buttercups and fluffy wee kittens. Sometimes I like to listen to songs about the moon.

But mostly I just want a cup of tea.

* Subject of future journal rant: how much I hate fashionable irony. Especially if it's a person's excuse for telling racist jokes.

** They're not friends anymore because Friend- who has been consistently racist, homophobic, and destructive, so I'm not too torn up about the friend breakup- set Little Sister up with a boy from Dartmouth, who then dumped Sister and started going out with Friend.

You know, when I was thirteen the only real drama in my life was the constant "will they/won't they" situation with Best Friend and the time I nearly ruined the library's only copy of A Wrinkle In Time. I feel slightly miffed. And old.
ishyface: (Default)
"I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But, Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do. I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy."
- Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

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