season of the bitch

In keeping with the literary theme of my last post, I’m stealing this meme from Natalia because I love her. And because I love you, and we have good discussions about books on this here blog. So!

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you. (In the interest of staying true to the exercise, I listed the books first and then went back and wrote descriptions)

1. Les Miserables. This book more than any other has been a huge part of me. I was a kid when my parents went to see the musical and brought home the soundtrack, and I became obsessed. My grandmother, the one who always wanted me to put down the books that I read obsessively at meals and in bed, bet me that I couldn’t read the book. I was 9. She brought me a huge hardcover unabridged copy–I’m not quite sure where that copy is now–and I read it in 3 days, at meals, in bed, in every spare second. Of course at age 9, 90% of it went over my head, but I go back to it over and over. I tattooed a quote from it on my back. I find something new and beautiful every time I read it. One day I’ll learn French and read it in French. I swear.

2. Ulysses. I guess I already blogged about it once, so I don’t know if I have to say much more than it pushed the boundaries of what fiction and language could do in my mind. That said, I too have not read Finnegans Wake.

3. The Thief’s Journal I came to Jean Genet because of a silly goth magazine’s photo spread with quotes from Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is a seriously fucked-up book, and an amazingly beautiful one, but The Thief’s Journal has stuck with me longer. Genet makes the hideous and abject beautiful, and makes the beautiful abject. More people probably know his plays, but I love his fiction. Another reason I need to learn French.

4. The Savage Detectives. I read this last summer after hearing an NPR segment on Roberto Bolano. I came away from the book staggered, like I hadn’t been by an author in years. His fierce devotion to his artistic and political ideals reminded me that art is as revolutionary as politics, and writing fiction is a worthwhile occupation.

5. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Hunter S. Thompson is like Jesus, in that the man is pretty awesome, but I can’t stand most of his followers. No, seriously, I hate people who start immediately talking about the drug references in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, because they miss out on the real reason Thompson was so fucking great: the man could WRITE, and he could see through hypocrisy no matter how out of his mind he was on whatever substances he could smoke, drink, or snort. The best political journalist America’s ever seen?

6. Lolita. Is also a cliche, but I don’t care. No one should’ve ever tried to make a movie out of it: Lolita is the consummate novel, from a man who spent plenty of time messing around with the idea of a novel, stretching it to its limits and beyond (Pale Fire). The story in Lolita can’t be told properly in any other medium but the written word.

7. The Sound of Waves. I also came to Mishima from that same silly goth magazine–so my goth years were good for something. The first book of his I read was Forbidden Colors, probably his best book, but the one that hits me like a ton of bricks is this one, a deceptively simple first-love story.

8. Written on the Body. Jeannette Winterson is a whole lot of awesome as far as I’m concerned, but Written on the Body is a standout for many reasons, chief among them that it’s a love story in which you never know the gender of the main character. You know that the lover is a woman, but the “I” who speaks is so perfectly concealed that it becomes a game within the book, trying to find a clue. And yet it doesn’t compromise the story a bit.

9. Namedropper. Emma Forrest’s first novel, written when she was maybe 19; I read it when I was in college and it was the first time that I really saw myself in a character. Normally, I read books to get out of my own life, but this one was so much like me.

10. The Sound and the Fury. So Faulkner might be another cliche. So what? I still love him, and always will. I love the way this whole book revolves around Caddy and yet she is only a ghost; that everyone thinks they know her and yet it’s so immediately clear that no one does.

11. Shanghai Baby. Wei Hui’s first novel, I think, I bought because it was “banned in China.” It’s not very shocking at all, but it was the first book that I read where I thought, “I could do this.”

12. Jazz. I did not properly appreciate Toni Morrison in school, despite going through several of her books, a few of them repeatedly. It wasn’t until I took an audiobook of Jazz from my local (tiny) library for a road trip that I realized why people love her. What most of my favorite books have in common is a love for and experiment with language, and this one is no exception. It reads like music.

13. Blonde. Joyce Carol Oates does Marilyn Monroe, and I melt and want to cry just thinking about how heartwrenching this book is. Another one that someone unfortunately tried to adapt to the screen, and another one that should only be read.

14. The Sandman. Because I am me, I have comics on this list. I only have comics that were written by one person for their span, and the Sandman counts. I cannot make a list of books I love without including Neil Gaiman, and I cannot be honest and say that I like any of his prose novels more than Sandman. The Sandman comics are about stories and storytelling, about the nature of fiction and characters and myths and of course dreams, and they will change your life.

15. Local. Another comic, and my favorite since Sandman, I think. It’s a collection of short stories about one girl, and when put together (in a gorgeous hardcover that I still don’t have) it’s a story of a life told in the moments that define it. It is also the perfect comic for people who don’t read comics. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly are wonderful.

(OK, it took me a lot more than 15 minutes to write blurbs about all of these, but I did come up with the list in less than 15. Your turn, now…)

In the midst of lots of other important news, why am I taking time out to celebrate James Joyce?

Well, aside from the fact that I just like to point out that I’m a member of the august group of people who’ve not only read Ulysses, but read it more than once and ENJOYED IT. Loved it, really. I love Joyce’s willingness to play with language, to toy with its history and its future and the way it can be changed and manipulated and made to say several things at once.

There’s a dissertation in me somewhere on Joyce and Yeats and the feminization of the Irish people by their colonizers and how it impacted their writing, referencing all sorts of theorists on colonialism and feminist theorists who talked about writing. Maybe if I don’t get a job I’ll go get an MA and then a PhD in literature just to be a nerd.

But even if I never get the degree, I’ll keep writing about that last chapter in Ulysses for a long time, because among many, many other things it’s a lush celebration of female desire.

why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Molly Bloom is just a figure in the background for most of the novel, but here we dive straight into her mind and her thoughts, of course, are of sex. The building, heightening repetition of the word “Yes” is dirtier, hotter than any of the more lurid descriptions in the chapter, and I wonder if those who would have banned Ulysses were more put off by Joyce’s pleasure in prurient description or in the triumphant declaration of Molly Bloom at the end?

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And so today, June 16, is the day that Leopold Bloom took his famous walk around Dublin, and book nerds the world over celebrate. I certainly don’t have a Bloomsday party to go to, but I’m blogging it, in the midst of revolt in Iran and war supplementals here, because books have power. If they didn’t, no one would try to ban them.

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions: [I've altered these, the old ones made it messy]
1) Bold those you have read.
2) *Star the ones you loved.
3) Italicise those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
*4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (and I am not ashamed)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (this is so clearly unfair. I’ve read probably 80%)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
*27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
*46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
*62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
*98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
*********100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

30. But it is not fair to count the Complete Works of Shakespeare as one book, and then force me to be honest and admit that I have not read all of them.

I wonder if I’d have disliked the Twilight books more if I hadn’t been fully prepared by a rather irate segment of the feminist blogosphere for them to be horrifically, offensively sexist.

If I’d just stumbled onto the books and read them, would I be reacting with revulsion instead of “It’s not that bad”?

What’s really starting to get on my nerves, though, is the constant refrain of “I haven’t read the books, but here’s my take on them.” I’m a critic by trade, a rather overeducated one, and so I’ll stand by anyone’s right to read and critique a text. If you read the Twilight books and hated ‘em, great.  However, when you haven’t read the text, I think at some point you lose your right to be snotty about it.

Comic fans are quite used to others’ elitism. We get it all the time, the teasing cracks from our friends who aren’t comic folk, the people who look at you funny when you tell them you were at the comic convention or that the best book you read last year was a trade paperback (notice I didn’t use the term graphic novel).

We even get elitist with each other. I’ve been told several times that I’m not a true comic fan because I don’t really read superhero books. Others get told that they’re stupid for insisting that superhero books can be as good as indie graphic novels. We get called out for reading too much Marvel, too much DC, or too  much indie.

My post on how elitism, feminism, and romanticism interact in the response to Twilight finishes up at Blog@Newsarama.

EDIT* To add to what I said there, yes, Twilight’s “message” that your boyfriend is your be-all and end-all isn’t the greatest for teenage girls. But teenage girls are not idiots, and they’re quite aware that Twilight is not reality. No one’s claiming that teenagers shouldn’t read Romeo and Juliet, or Wuthering Heights, two texts that Meyer makes reference to many times in the Twilight books. No, she’s not Shakespeare, but I simply didn’t find anything more antifeminist in these books than many other things on the market.

It’s teen escapist fiction. Overwritten and giggle-inducing, but not nearly as terrible and offensive as I’d been led to believe.

I have a million and one things to do today, and my form of procrastination is reading academic articles that I don’t need for my thesis (necessarily) and want to apply to an unsolicited article that I don’t know where to publish.

But here:

“Yet, as we have seen, any attempt to fix meaning is illusory. Moreover, the feminist project seeks to open up definitions and identities, not to diminish them.”

-Christine Gledhill, “Pleasurable Negotiations”

(Italics mine)

If you’re at all interested in comics, comics for girls, Ryan Kelly, or Brian Wood, or just in giving me some love, my review with Janelle of The New York Four is here and my blurb on the BUST blog is here.

If you go to the one on Newsarama, hitting Recommend would be awesome–we’re currently the 5th most recommended, and I’d like to see that go up. Comments are excellent, too. Want to show the men in the industry that comics for women are a good investment, as are woman critics.

Plus, you should check out the book. It’s really cute.

Or if not that, then they want you to be something that you just aren’t, even though you might wish you could be. That’s worse.

-Kate in ‘Girl You Want’

My review of DEMO is here. Go on, read it. Then come back here and delve into this post.

I’ve mentioned Laura Mulvey’s theory on ‘the gaze’ in film before, and linked there to a good summation of her, plus some notes on reactions to her. Even more basically, she posits that film assumes a male spectator who takes pleasure in looking-at. She differentiates between “voyeuristic” looking, which asserts control over the person or thing looked at, and “fetishistic” looking, which turns the object of the gaze into something pleasing in and of itself–a fetish.

I wrote a paper deconstructing this a bit back in the day, threw some Kristeva in there, and was given a pat on the back and a department award.

But I’ve never seen a better examination of this whole theory, and how it leaves the movie theater and comes into our lives, than DEMO #5, ‘Girl You Want.’

(If you haven’t read it yet and you think you want to, go, buy the new collected edition, and then come back and read this. If you have read it, or you probably won’t but want to see what I’m on about, keep reading.) » Read the rest of this entry «

…a review of something that keeps exponentially getting more academic in my head each time I think about it. Which would be great, except the crowd I’m reviewing it for is Newsarama.

So not so much with the citing cultural theorists and talking about “The Gaze” and stuff.

Which is funny, because the commenters on the boards at the ‘Rama are always whining about our lack of analysis and such. But if I gave ‘em the analysis that I want, their little heads would probably explode. (Except, of course, for the few that would love it.) So you’ll get it all here, when I get done with the review I’m actually on deadline for.

Sometimes I think I should just get a Ph.D. and have done with it. And then write about comics and other such things, and stick my head in the sand whenever politics comes around, only coming out to vote. There is a reason I’m burying myself in comics and novels right now, and ignoring the election: Obama quickly grows more disappointing with each article I read, these days.

Change, yr doin it rong.

Yeah, today’s my Saturday. I’m still trying to decide if I give a crap about the 4th of July or if I’m going to stay home and catch up on the metric tons of work I’ve taken on (that I’m not getting paid for). So until I get through some of these articles I’ve got to write, you have to wait on my posts on patriotism and on the male and female gaze in comic books. Whet your appetite with linky goodness instead.

1. AngryBlackBitch has some background on the release of Ingrid Betancourt.

2. This is so fucked up words don’t describe it.

3. BFP links to Summer Of Our Lorde: Audre Lorde Summer Reading. And Audre Lorde rocks, so I’m linking.

4. Scott at LGM (Monday! I swear!) on Obama and same-sex marriage.

5. Lucky White Girl on the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, violence, and presidential qualifications.

6. Bint Alshamsa on why you don’t want to say “differently abled.”

7. I think Bq at Problem Chylde’s (sorry!) response to the Fourth of July is the best so far.

8. What was I saying about the death penalty? WOC PhD has more. Way more.

Yeah, still in comic-geek heaven and will be for a bit longer, anyway. And since I am, I want to point out this excellent blog on women and/in/who read comics.

This post in particular made me happy, because I just read that book (Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner’s The Pro) myself and thought about blogging it. I read it much the same way as Karen did, and it illustrated perfectly why I love Garth Ennis despite because of his gross-out humor. He manages to be shocking and broadly funny without being actually racist and sexist, and frequently uses that no-holds-barred attitude to point out actual inequities.

Go read her blog. Even if you don’t read comics.

On a related note, Pop Feminist has more wonderful on being a nerd. Love her.