[They were] known to make out while eating shepherd’s pie, which is not a euphemism[.]
— Maureen Johnson, THE NAME OF THE STAR
Wednesday Words: Is that what they’re calling it these–oh, that’s just what it’s called
November 14, 2012 — ElizabethWednesday Words: Survival of the misfitest
May 16, 2012 — ElizabethI will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now.
— Jo Walters, AMONG OTHERS
My Hunger Games movie review
April 6, 2012 — Elizabeth…is right here.
There’s a long tradition of Socialist Worker movie reviews generating major debates, so I am eagerly awaiting responses.
Sometimes I really love the internet.
March 30, 2012 — ElizabethFor reasons like this.
h/t Feminist Philosophers, a usual.
Thinking about Trayvon Martin
March 23, 2012 — ElizabethMy workout ground to a dead halt tonight when I noticed that the TV above me was covering Trayvon Martin and I watched, riveted, while mainstream news said things like, “This is a new movement.”
That’s what it feels like, even being here in Wisconsin where there isn’t yet a response despite our own local murder of a Black boy for doing what teenagers do (what I did); despite the latest vicious racism, like semester-clockwork, from our frats; despite everything. It feels like something was let out of the bottle with Troy Davis and Occupy, or maybe like something finally crawled its way out, and it’s not going back even if it hasn’t yet taken stock of itself, even if it hasn’t figured out yet what it is.
I can’t stop thinking about the picture from the CNN slideshow of three men of color on a New York City bus urgently photographing the Million Hoodie March blocking their bus’s progress. It feels like a line is being drawn, between cops and prosecutors and reporters and racists laying bare that they don’t care in the slightest about Black boys’ lives, and people shouting that we care. When I look at that picture of the bus, it feels like maybe this is the first time they ever saw someone shouting that they care. It feels tangible how much they care back. It feels like one of those moments when options change.
I hope, I hope this is a new movement. Because we really need this one.
Wednesday Words: Obvious truths newly learned
March 21, 2012 — ElizabethI whirl around to face him — again, surprised by how confident I sound, considering that my heart is rushing, tumbling. Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys — maybe you just have to be angry all the time.
— Lauren Oliver, DELIRIUM
(Side question: why is YA so full of constructions like “rushing, tumbling”? Have you ever seen this in a book for adults? Now that I think about it, I think this is even more quintessentially YA than the long-short cadence I wrote about recently. What are the other stylistic quirks of YA?)
Caletti does Dessen, or: The one rule of humiliation
March 7, 2012 — Elizabeth
I tagged this as Book vs. Book, but it’s really Book vs. Oeuvre, because Sarah Dessen, to me, is her own genre.
SimonPulse emblazoned the front cover of Deb Caletti’s THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE with an SLJ blurb comparing it to the best of Dessen, and a glance at the back shows that all of Caletti’s books have Dessen-esque covers in overall look even if they lack the emphasis on disembodied body parts.
“Their marketing strategy is to trick you into thinking you’re buying a Sarah Dessen book,” I told Emily (we were at Books of Wonder; I’d never read Caletti). “Works for me.”
And I know why the SLJ blurb said that: it’s that narrative mix of emotional over-articulation, rendered in very deliberate, almost trite, imagery, blended with quick and astringent judgment, so you understand right away that the smart girl who’s narrating is knowing and wry, but not so knowing and wry that she doesn’t think her high school experiences are worth metaphors. And it’s that cadence where the sentences come long and then short, like it’s all flowing out of that girl faster than she can control until she’s pulled up short by her own realizations. I thought nobody did sentence-level pacing like Dessen; Caletti sure comes close. Well. It’s tone and pacing and character fused, because it always adds up to a girl who is looking, looking, looking, and wanting, and there’re reasons why these books, despite their fundamental similarity, never get old for me.
So that’s all to the good, and Caletti maybe isn’t edited as well — multiple passages, especially early, feel overwritten in a way that Dessen rarely does — but at her best she’s quotable as hell in the way of Meg Rosoff or John Green.
But I actually think Caletti does the big picture better than Dessen usually does, and it’s because she lets her protagonist fail harder. Here’s the core piece of my favorite scene:
I wanted to open that smile up wider, to see the Hayden of the afternoon back again. But I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the smile was retreating. He was retreating. I could feel the moment of connectedness passing, my chance being lost. I wanted to play and volley and be back in that place we had been together before, that great place. I needed something, something quick — I grasped and caught something silly and lighthearted. Silly and lighthearted would do.
“So, Hayden Renfrew. What was your most embarrassing moment?”
It sounded workable until I said it. As soon as the words slipped out I knew I had done something horribly and terribly wrong. A humiliating misstep. I felt it all in one second of pause. The night, the cigarette smoke lingering in the air, the heaviness of his thoughts — my words were inappropriate and idiotic. Oh God, why had I said that? Why, why, why? And why couldn’t you take back a moment sometimes? One little moment? Is that asking so much? God, I suddenly sounded thirteen. My red shorts and my white tank top felt young and shameful, my feet in my flip-flops did too. I felt so ashamed of my painted toenails in the streetlight.
The rest of that scene and what comes of it is perfect. And you can see everything here: that Dessen probably would’ve written this scene better, with more economy and precision (and certainly less pleading*), but also that probably she wouldn’t have written this scene, because while each of her characters is allotted her one emotional failing to work through by the book’s end, their humiliations are never really their own. They get humiliated by their mothers or their sisters or their boyfriends’ mothers, but not by their own sudden recognition of their immaturity. That’s what Caletti gets right. She gets growing up, the way it feels to look with contempt (long before affection) at where you’re coming out of, and the way you mostly can’t see very clearly what you might become, and when you do glimpse it it might be with shame and terror.
There was that whole dust-up last year about how dark YA can be, and I always figured that books in the Dessen genre, serious subjects though they all have, were imagined as the counterpoint. But maybe if you do it right, if you let the characters fail and flounder in the humiliation that they made themselves — if you don’t just let your characters feel inadequate, but you let them actually be inadequate to what’s ahead of them — then this little corner of YA can be darker, and richer, than it seems.
* I mean, that’s really pretty awful, right?
Wednesday Words: They can add that to that?
March 6, 2012 — ElizabethShiny, overconfident clothes you could never imagine yourself wearing hung along the walls. I felt some sort of clothes-store consumer shame creeping up my insides. It was all the insincerity of high school with the added humiliation of mirrors.
–Deb Calleti, THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE
Wednesday Words: Necessity-Only Sex Ed
February 29, 2012 — Elizabeth“I don’t know many rules to live by,” he’d said. “But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles — drug or tattoo — and… no inessential penises, either.”
“Inessential penises?” Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. “Is there any such thing as an essential one?”
“When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,” he’d replied.
— Laini Taylor, DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE
By the way, I cannot recommend this book enough, but I warn you: the first couple chapters make it seem like it’s going to be a less good book than it is. Just keep going, and then thank me (and Bethany, who told me) with all appropriate effusiveness.
Fast Women
January 29, 2012 — Elizabeth
Here’s the thing: I walk faster than God. I am from New York, and we are a walking people, but even New Yorkers can’t keep up. Midwesterners barely realize what’s happening as I weave through their molassal sidewalk clumps. Mostly people find me freakish. And by that I mean, I get commentary.
I get four types of commentary. Friends, women and men: “I saw you on the street and tried to wave, but you were already on the next block!” (They recognize me in the blur of movement because I usually have a good hat.)
New friends or acquaintances, usually women: “Thank god, you’re the only one I don’t have to slow down with.” We speed and chatter and become better friends. *
Strangers, invariably black men, often older: Laughter and remarks, variants of, “Where’s the fire?!”, or sometimes just an astonished, “Damn.” These ones are my favorite. There are few regular occurrences that improve my day as much as unexpectedly having an occasion to joke around with strangers, which is why I have the best name in the world.
Acquaintances, invariably younger white guys — and this is not the gender-neutral form of guys: Competition.
They’ll hear me or someone else mention that I walk fast, and they’ll immediately respond, “I bet I can beat you to the end of the block.” Which, I bet you can; your legs are longer and I’m not a runner and it’s just that my natural gait happens to be faster than anyone’s I’ve ever met. But, dude, I find it remarkably self-revealing that this is your reaction, because I notice that it’s not that you’re like me and have a self-identity built partly on walking faster than a hungry hippo, which could justify a certain amount of defensiveness. Or even that you desire a friendly competition, in which we shit-talk each other’s walk and race and then feel fondly toward one another because what bonds you like a mutual shit-talk? Those things I would understand.
But no. That’s not what’s going on. All evidence suggests that, although you have no particular investment in walking fast, nevertheless, the idea that this woman walks faster than you offends you. You must show her up. Well.
I fly a lot through Detroit**, and this occasions a long walk in their crazy neon-lit tunnel between terminals. My airport principle is that you avoid the moving sidewalk because people are not well socialized to place themselves in such a way that you can get around them, so it’s faster to walk alongside where you have more room to maneuver.
So recently I’m strolling through that tunnel and out of the corner of my eye I see this 20-something white guy walking slowly on the moving sidewalk do a double take as I come up alongside and then pass him. And then I see him speed up.
Now, normally I do not engage these races, but something about this dude, or the neon, or the lingering resentment from having earlier had to interact with the TSA brought it out in me. So I sped up, subtly, at first. And he sped up. And then I did some more.
And we got to be moving very fast, him on the sidewalk with his head turning to stare at me, and me next to him and just ahead, much faster than I usually stroll but maintaining my stroll gait (you should feel like you’re loping) and gazing around at all the pretty lights, and this went on for quite some while before the tunnel was over. I pulled through the end (I also have walking stamina); I stepped out a few feet ahead of him and onto the escalator that carries me to my Vino Volo, where everybody knows my name and I’m always glad I came. And I never once looked at him.
Yeah, I’m fast.
* Shout-out to the guy who spent our walk analyzing why I am so fast. His take? My hips are super-twisty, which lengthens my stride and generates momentum. This seems plausible because I definitely do generate an unusual amount of momentum when I walk. I know this because when I walk with very slow people (sorry, Emily), my options are to exhaust myself walking slowly — which I presume means I’m walking in a very different way, ’cause that shit is tiring — or to direct the momentum upward instead of forward. So I bounce.
Also, can I just say that everyone makes fun of my crazy heavy backpack in which I carry everything I own (“Are you… going on an adventure?”) and which gives me an unfortunate resemblance to a fourth grader, but just imagine how much trouble we’d have walking together if I didn’t handicap myself. I’m doing this for you.
** My layover choices are unusually sensitive to the presence of a Vino Volo.
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Underage Reading 