Michael Gouker's Blog, page 3

An Endearing and Instructive Immigration Story Told With Wit and Aplomb

Funny In Farsi: A Memoir Of Growing Up Iranian In America by Firoozeh Dumas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A refreshing memoir by a talented, entertaining author who speaks in clear direct language and tells great stories, especially about her extended family. This valuable book illuminates the life of an immigrant and narrates the American dream in humorous and ever optimistic language. It's an especially important book at a time when the value of immigration is questioned by self-proclaimed patriots who would have us stick our heads in the sand. The lesson I learned from Dumas's story is how worthy she and her family are, not just to be in America, but to represent the ideal of American life.

I would have given four stars but I felt she could have elaborated on the aftermath of the revolution in Iran more, especially the plight of its people. In any case, I liked it quite a lot. It is a very good and informative read! Time well spent!



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Powerpoint Presentation for UCF Writing Class

Here is a powerpoint presentation I created depicting the writer's market in 2019 for authors to make informed choices.

PDF:

PDF Version

PPT:

Powerpoint Version

Enjoy!

Bad User on Device

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(for Damon Knight)

Though Riley awakens only two hours after falling asleep, her alarm will not negotiate peace. By the time the coffee’s aroma pervades the kitchen, she realizes she will never shake off this hangover in time to confront the office smilers where she interns at Life Inc., America’s premier self-help conglomerate. She sighs with the knowledge there are days to enjoy and others, like today, just to survive. To guarantee her survival, she gobbles some pills before stepping into the wintry city.A few seconds later, a nondescript package the size of a shoe box thuds upon the sidewalk a few steps ahead, splattering her Life uniform with street sludge. She expects to spot a Smile delivery drone above, but the sky shows nothing but a snow-threatening slate.Pedestrians step around the delivery. No one stops. Riley moves closer and hazards a glance at the label: no letters, just logograms—she assumes Chinese.It is heavier than she expects. Once she carries it back to her porch, its brown wrapping paper peels off into a neat pile to uncover a box just as anonymous. She hesitates only a moment before plunging through the flaps.Something, folded tight like an accordion, glows. Its luminous white surface becomes violet where her fingers press. She opens its plies to reveal what appears to be a diving helmet. As she studies its smooth face, it repaints itself into a looking glass with her befuddled expression prominent.This is some elaborate prank she decides. Her eyes sweep the street and the neighboring windows, hunting for telltale evidence of someone filming her, but the city has gone quiet as a cemetery: no cars, buses, trucks, or pedestrians.Riley is alone.She shudders, a visceral response, as if her body knows some secret her mind refuses to acknowledge, but such need for explanations has passed. Something not of this world, an alien artifact, lies upon her lap. Her unbridled curiosity drives her to decision before her courage fails. She raises the helmet and envelopes her head in a pleasant world of sunlight and warmth.A meadow with a multitude of flowers surrounds her. Birds sing and bees buzz. A tapestry of scents flood her consciousness. The vibrant actuality of her discovery stuns her. She cannot even gasp.Above her, a scroll unfolds from one horizon to another. In a few sentences, she confirms not only is it English, but certainly a license agreement, breaking the spell, for there is nothing alien about it. She knows how to proceed, reaching high with her hands to slide the contents across the sky, to the very end, where a black button reads, “I agree.” There is no other option, so she reaches up to heaven and presses.“Your universe is a simulation of E8-tesseracts in quasi-crystalline possibility space. Would you like a demo of the simulation controls?” a deep androgynous voice, rich in cadence, asks. Riley likes the voice but hates instructions.“Not when I’m this late for work,” she snaps.The world goes dark, but then the outline of three doors appear, painted in fluorescent colors: hot magenta, neon aqua blue, and Day-Glo green.“Pick a door,” the voice says.Riley chooses green. The sky returns but an effusion of a nearby power plant’s smokestack taints its cerulean expanse. Every flower in the brown meadow is dying. Vultures, the only birds, circle a stinking corpse on a hill of landfill, an autobiography of human waste: wrappers, cans, plastic bottles, used tires, discarded food, a rag doll, even a laptop computer. She trudges flat-footed forward, dodging trash and regretting each step, but unable to cease until her quaking feet stand before her naked smoldering flyblown flesh.“Ready to continue?” the voice chirps.“Yes,” she says.Now she stands in a village of thatched huts. The air is hot and bone dry, the sun unforgiving. A rivulet of sewage trickles down the dusty lane. Figures move in the shade. Approaching, Riley observes children suffering from marasmus, their frames emaciated, horseflies picking at scabs beneath wide hopeless pleading eyes. A starving woman about her age emerges from the hut, suckling an infant son with a deflated breast, while her daughter, little more than an animated skeleton, lifts a trembling arm towards the recoiling American.The juxtaposition of the two images, the seething landfill and this horror of need, breaks her.“Stop!!! Please stop.”The response is immediate.“To end the simulation press OK. To continue, press Cancel.”Riley presses OK.
The End

Just a Little Touch of Mojo Hand

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I haul groceries to my fourth-floor studio one landing at a time. My bottle of discounted rum, a 5 lb. sack of potatoes, and a rocket-shaped golden squash—so irresistible at the market—anchor me down like sandbags. Around me wafts the dinners of my neighbors. Sweat drips from my face and armpits. At my door, I dig for keys, but they escape, bounce off my knee, and land at the balcony’s edge. Sighing, I set my bags upon a nondescript pattern of mauve and cream tiles. Below me, a door opens, Landlady Busybody’s.“Mrs. Queen,” she says.“What now?” I sound unjustly exasperated. Busybody is not her real name—I name characters outside my books too. I snatch up my keys.“The rent…”“The rent? What about the elevator?”“It was working.” She addresses her words more to the ether than to me.“I’ll pay you next week,” I promise and ferry my groceries across the threshold. “But you better fix the damn elevator.”Inside, I lean against my door and breath once luxuriously. Because emptiness terrifies me, I fill my space to the brim. Souvenirs, photographs, posters, and piles of books cover every surface. My home cradles me a moment.After dinner, I dive into my email, a task requiring a strong medicinal component. Tonight I choose Cuba-Libras, heavy on the lime juice. Sour is appropriate for disappointment.First up is a statement of my paltry sales. My once-triumphant Eileua series became my defining defeat after my publisher and seven others passed on the third installment. Critics praised Eileua of the Meadow, but Eileua of the Castle—a much better book I swear!—they called “unsettling.” UNSETTLING?It is perhaps best I have never sold Eileua of the Skies, because I will never finish that goddamn book. I cannot remember the number of revisions, but of course… Ha! It always gets better. I grit my teeth.Another mail comes from the site selling my racier titles. They paid 300 dollars for “Alien Nurses of General Hospital” and 200 for “What Butt Elves Taught My Husband,” both novelettes. I still need rent money.I reach my agent’s answering machine and pour some more motivation before tumbling back to Eileua’s world. Two hours later, eyes glazed, I hover near the same spot, rereading my last foray, “Eileua found lovelorn Prince Al-Astra’s imploring eyes. ‘I must not,’ she cried. ‘I must never.’”This is terrible.I upload to the cloud anyhow and fire up Twitter: “Sometimes I even awake weeping,” I announce. The likes of my followers light up my screen. Pop. Pop.I am drunker than many times before. The rail wobbles as I descend to the lobby, find the street, execute a few dangerous crossings, and now I sit disoriented in a noisy bar.A lithe figure in a flowing gold sequined dress sweeps me up. We dance, swinging, twirling, and grinding. We find a corner.“Finally, I meet you,” she says. “I’ve waited so long. What a pleasure!”“Oh,” I say. This is never fun. “Are you my fan?”“You might say so. Look. We must discuss how you write Eileua.”“I, uh, write her honestly,” I begin with drunken tired phrasing. “I draw from—”“Just cut the bullshit please,” she says. “You don’t recognize me?” I shake my head. “‘I must not? I must never?’”I gasp.“Eileua?”She nods. “Seven years of celibacy?”“You are my paladin,” I explain. “It’s a geas: no men.”“What about a woman then? Someone like you.”“Me?” I cannot hide my shock. “Even old as I am?”She reaches across. Her warm silky lips yield, as I throw myself into the deep end. When we break, I catch carbuncles flickering in her fathomless pupils. They leave me spellbound. I attempt a sobering shake but find no balance.“I’m leaving you the tab,” she says standing. My eyes follow her up.“Will I ever see you again?” I despise my needfulness.“That depends on what you write.” She grins. “No pressure, but finish my book.”“I’ll do better,” I promise, flipping my empty glass and succumb, sinking to the table. When my head rises, she is gone.Everything changes. Now my head buzzes with so many ideas I cannot write fast enough. A week later, the book sells. I stay hungry, but my spirit burns hot. Of course I revisit that bar but always leave disappointed, so I still worry whether I am doing right by my muse.Am I, Eileua?

Questions of Consent

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked Autonomous. I thought Newitz’s vision of a future world with drug patent hoarding corporations and pirates willing to defy them scarily realistic. I also thoroughly enjoyed the embedded discussion of capitalism’s overreach of claiming human biological data, and the implicit criticism of how corporations gone wild will violently assert themselves to defend what they have appropriated. Newitz’s vision of information technology, an area of expertise for me, is also well-informed, and the robotic characters—whose assertion of constructed independent conscious will is a key focus in the story—are clever and subversive.

We see this patent gold rush in real life already, both in information technology, nanotech, and pharmaceuticals. Newitz pushes the phenomenon forward and hypothesizes an evolution of the same kind of white hat hacker that performs the vital service of keeping the Internet usable for the rest of us. These IP “pirates” are the heroes of the story, and Jack, Threezed, and Med all represent different aspects of the struggle. The robots, Med, Paladin, and 3z, are well depicted, and the revelation of (spoiler!) the loyalty and attachment programs running within Paladin’s “brain” (end spoiler!) also calls into question whether consent means anything in a human/machine relationship.

A number of reviews and user comments trash this book on its representation of Eliasz’s homophobia and how Paladin finds a clever workaround—without actually changing—to satisfy the other’s desire and mitigate the fear. The simple point Newitz appears to make is for robots, whose gender is essentially absent, human assumptions about gender rigidity are an obstacle to program execution, an unimportant issue, which needs to be circumvented or counteracted with as much efficiency as possible so the mission can be accomplished.

In one of those beautiful moments of life’s serendipity, I actually read the scene (as well as the somewhat--to me--unconvincing backstory) the same night I visited Stonewall for some billiards, enlightening conversation, history lesson, and (yes :-) great beer. It is a happy, vibrant place built on the ashes of actual repression and lubricated with the blood of victims. It is a simultaneously tragic and festlich testament to justice and society’s meandering and long-delayed path towards inclusion of everyone. My perspective is Newitz is making an important point, one that pushes the discussion forward, a contribution. As such, the criticism is unwarranted.

I often read science fiction in search of affirmation of my hopes for humanity, so I am saddened to contemplate dystopian societies like Newitz paints, but the author's world fairly bustles with heroes as well as ordinary people doing heroics. I would love to believe we could leap into the future without homophobic shackles still fastened to humanity’s quaking limbs, but if they remain, I would love to have heroes like Jack, Med, and 3z around to save us from being ground down by the money machine.

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“Prime Meridian” and Its Many Marses

Prime Meridian by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Prime Meridian” is about Mars, though not the red planet nor the Roman god of war. Instead, this story features a black-and-white Mars decorated with cheap studio effects, another Mars that exists only as a bond between a young couple that cannot survive the chasm of their inequity of wealth, and a third Mars that calls to Amelia’s soul from a billboard. Each Mars drives the plot and situates the story in terms of real world history, culture, and the history of science fiction.

In Moreno-Garcia’s near future, Mexico City’s wealthy exploit the despair of vast masses of disadvantaged youth in a hyper version of today’s gig economy. Amelia, our protagonist, abandoned her studies of urban agriculture to care for her ailing, dying mother and is saddled with ferrying her sister's children around in the bargain. Amelia calls herself a freelancer on her CV, noting it is a “euphemism for unemployed.” Her bleak possibilities recall Birdie’s options in Disch’s “Problems in Creativeness,” but what is at stake for Amelia is not the right of procreation but merely basic survival. At the story’s inception Amelia’s current gig is Friendrr, where lonely rich people pay her to be their friend for an hour, and her sole client is Lucía, once a “middling starlet” in 1960s Mexican cinema. From Amelia’s description, comparing her to “the core of a dead tree,” her house “artificial, too-calculated, too overdone” and her hospitality as generous as an infrequent dish of pomegranate seeds and glass of mineral water, our heroine clearly despises the ex-actress.

They watch Lucía’s second movie, dated 1965, which is set on Mars. At one point, Lucía says, “The real Mars is bland compared to the one the set designer imagined.” Amelia volunteers to the actress how she wants to go to the colonies. Amelia reinforces her wish in later conversations as well, but Moreno-Garcia underplays these exchanges, so the payoff at the story’s end is unexpected (at least to me it was.)

The author plants the story in the real world by amply seasoning the tale with Mexican culture. Lucía’s casona, for example, is plausibly placed in Coyoacán, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo lived, where she was jailed after Leon Trotsky’s assassination. A wealthy ex-actress “who got lucky and married a filthy rich politician” who lived there certainly might decorate her home with colorful talaveras. Moreno-Garcia adds other recognizable elements—pulquerias, champurrado, esquite, rebozos, huipiles, and tinacos—but in Amelia’s world the pulquerias are being replaced by fusion restaurants, the huipiles are designer brands, and the rebozos are made in China. “Folkloric bullshit,” our protagonist opines, but these references illustrate the Swanwickian large, philosophical question of the story, the postcolonial effects upon the Mexican poor. The rich are free to enjoy Nahuan tamazcal in Peru, while the poor scrape by in purposeless hand-to-mouth existence.

Moreno-Garcia also reinforces her setting by adding real world references. Alejandro Jodorowsky and Luis Buñuel were active in Mexico’s film industry. In fact, Buñuel’s film Fando y Lis caused a riot in Acapulco. The producer of Lucía’s film, however, Nahum (Eduard) Landmann, is actually an inside joke, a reference to the “legendary founder” of Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar’s (who wrote the novella’s introduction) literary journal, The Jewish Mexican Literary Review (Tidhar).

In any case, Stanley Weinbaum (“A Martian Odyssey”) and A.E. Van Vogt (“The Enchanted Village”) would recognize Lucía’s Mars, because it is not Mars but “Mars. The moons are paper and the stars are tinfoil. So, it is possible to step forward [without a spacesuit].” The Mars of Lucías heyday is only for stories. It is the same Mars early SF stories were set, one for SF but not for science.

The Mars of the colonies is the same of the tender couple’s dreams, however rich Elías is bound to Earth. A creature of privilege, when he ghosts Ameli, he blames his father. Once he finds her on Friendrr, he transforms her into a willing, if unenthusiastic, whore. When she catches him in his stalking lie, he expresses regret saying, “I should have gone to New Panyu [a Martian colony] with you… My dad wouldn’t give me the money, but I should have done something.” Amelia compassionately offers him another chance, but at the story’s end, when Amelia announces her get-out-of-squalor-free card (Lucía’s gift), he chooses instead a boring life with Anastasia, the meat exhibition virtuoso. (“No offense, Amelia, but what do you know about art?”)

Moreno-Garcia’s story of income discrepancy is well founded in Mexico's current conditions. The author just tightened the screws already present a few more turns. According to its public site, Mexico City is the “eighth-richest urban agglomeration” and produces over a fifth of Mexico’s wealth, but its distribution of income is sinfully unequal. In 2010, Reyes, Teruel, and Lopez determined the truth was worse than the official numbers, demonstrating “the richest 1% of the population receives the same amount of income as the other 90%.” These people are rich enough to pay poor workers for an hour of cuddling, friendship, or even less savory duties.

Perhaps Elías did once dream of a life with Amelia in New Panyu, but when asked to choose, he chose the dream he already lives. “Cut the shit,” he tells her. “Come with me to Monterrey. I’ll rent a place for you there. I’ll pay your expenses.” He is offering her a long-term constant side gig until he gets bored again and ghosts her. Amelia, who despite misgivings of being a bad friend (though she cleans out her life savings for Pili), deserves more, and Lucia’s “shaky words… scrawled with a black felt pen” leave her no confusion. “Do what you want, Amelia,” they say. The gift transforms Amelia into the woman on the billboard, the “confident” girl who “knew things” (in numerous asides she recites Martian facts) and “knew people” (enough of them at least.) Through Lucía’s gift, she is ready for her final Mars, her exit from Mexico City. She may struggle, but after Mexico City’s grind, she is ready. The story’s satisfying conclusion, though the gift is unexpected, feels earned.

On Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s patron page, she describes her work as “magic realism, horror, fantasy and noir.” She also won a World Fantasy Award as editor for She Walks in Shadows. “Prime Meridian,” set in a near-future Mexico City with musical tattoos and “dancing, singing, 3D hologram[s] [of] teenage avatar[s] in a skimpy French maid’s outfit who… call you “Master” and wake you up in the morning with a song” recalls Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” perfect mechanicals, albeit with spicy upgrades. Read as a tale of a collection of Marses, it fits Zelazny’s SF definition too, but the story itself feels more like literary fiction. Moreno-Garcia adds a parallel aside, told in script form, which draws attention to the prose, and despite the protagonist’s enormous efforts to change her destiny, she is ever the target rather than the instigator of events. In any case, this is a thought-provoking story by a versatile author (Zombies!) and a fulfilling end to a semester of exploration.


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My review of The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is brilliant literary science fiction. I will discuss the literary aspects of it in a moment, but first it’s important to place it squarely in the domain of science fiction.

First, under Darko Suvin's definition of sci fi, the question is whether there is cognitive strangeness and nova. They are very apparent, specifically the new assignment of gender roles, along with the reason they exist. The nova introduced are ecological disasters, an enormous rise in failure to Gileadeans to sexually reproduce, and the imposition of a fundamentalist government that divides women by their function, entirely controlling them. We know (again from the lecture) that Atwood was responding to societal changes, such as the rise of the Moral Majority, which lends a spooky plausibility to the strangeness, making it not so strange and that much scarier.

Delany's definition is wider. He asks whether the story is read as science fiction. We should first ask the author. Atwood denied this book was science fiction, or that she, in fact, writes science fiction, famously claiming, “Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space.” This has become something of a joke, and there is actually a website called http://www.talkingsquidsinouterspace.com (“The Pinnacle of Science Fiction”) that celebrates science fiction, a reappropriation of the talking squids. Ursula K. Le Guin, for her part, says, “it [is] ungrateful in a writer to write science fiction and deny that it’s science fiction” comparing seeking literary status as denial of the “ghetto of genre” in preference to the Republic of Letters, something like a visa, I suppose. Science fiction readers certainly did find The Handmaid’s Tale. Since the election of Donald Trump and the success of the series, it has become a New York Times bestseller again. The cosplay is effective for political messages.

The publishing industry has promoted the story as sff. It’s also been up for awards like 1986 Nebula Award, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. You might find the book outside the sci fi or off (because of its enormous popularity) book racks, but you’ll likely find everything else by Atwood there. It’s marketed as genre.

These are the three ways I believe The Handmaid’s Tale is great literary fiction (in addition to being great sci fi):
* Calls attention to its language, and upon inspection, the language impresses thoroughly
** Helps to articulate more about Post-Truthism, a type of literature/political-philosophy where the “truth” of societies is invented.
*** Impressive literary techniques

Note: Some of these crossover.

Let’s discuss the language first, specifically the invented language, the use of poetic language, and language about language itself, especially the Scrabble game.

The invented language includes words that carry symbolic meaning and are generally practical to a fault. Thus the van that gathers the handmaids together for a birth is the “Birthmobile,” the ceremonies of ritual prayer in stadiums, “Prayvaganza,” the “Guardians” who sound like they are there to protect the women but in reality are spying on them, and, my favorite, “Econowives,” for the poor women who have more than one role. This last actually leads to a whole color-coded set of symbolism: Marthas (wearing green for generosity), Wives (blue for royalty), Commanders (black for power), and the Handmaids themselves in Red. One other invented word that predates Gilead but was crucial in its seizure of power was the “Compunumber,” the number you scan to get access to your money, assuming you have a y-chromosome. No worries… it’s only temporary. Dear.

Atwood's invented language and all the symbolism it conveys is one of the most important aspects of her world building. At her heart, though, Atwood is a poet, and unsurprisingly, poetic language is on full display throughout the story. Let’s look at some beautiful examples:

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket. I wish I could see in the dark, better than I do.

Night has fallen, then. I feel it pressing down on me like a stone.

She takes the visual image of night’s arrival, parses it both philosophically and observationally, and then, it lands on Offred. Another heavy weight.
Here is another, this time about pearls, which we learn later are undesirable for chaste women.

A thing is valued, she [Aunt Lydia] says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. She is rich in pauses, which she savors in her mouth. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives.
I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit. This is what I will tell Moira, later; if I can.
All of us here will lick you into shape, says Aunt Lydia (ed. Note: a sadist), with satisfied good cheer.

Aunt Lydia is rich in pauses she savors in her mouth. You can feel the beats. I also enjoy the dark humor. It is never funny, not the sanitary napkin tail nor this recollection:

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went.
No, why?
You moved.
Just don’t move.

Atwood finds power in unfunny humor. Repetition is used a lot for emphasis:

Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.

And two more examples of the same technique:

Already he’s starting to patronize me. Then I thought, Already you’re starting to get paranoid. {When her Compunumber doesn’t work}
Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure.

When the narrative voice is like this, you cannot argue in between the statements. You must accept this truth, this post truth truth.

And it all helps establish the scene. It helps you to buy in.

The narrative voice, first person, minimal psychic distance, is like Aunt Lydia in one way. She has a steady beat. You hear it most when it’s not there, like when the scripture is read instead:

“I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel,” he says, “with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;

“But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.” Here he looks us over.

“All,” he repeats.

“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
“For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
“And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. “Notwithstanding she shall be saved by childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.”

Those damn pearls again. ;-)

By presenting the misogyny in terms of their sacred text, Atwood is giving every individual a blanket pardon. This is what they must believe. If they do not swear to these convictions, they will end up on the wall.

Non-verbal language is also invoked explicitly twice. Body language is the communication of Nick and his hat. Sign language is the advertisement that calls the handmaids to buy muddy farm-raised fish.

But the biggest presence of language is the Scrabble games:

The second evening began in the same way as the first. I went to the door, which was closed, knocked on it, was told to come in. Then followed the same two games, with the smooth beige counters. Prolix, quartz, quandary, sylph, rhythm, all the old tricks with consonants I could dream up or remember. My tongue felt thick with the effort of spelling. It was like using a language I’d once known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that had long before passed out of the world: café au lait at an outdoor table, with a brioche, absinthe in a tall glass, or shrimp in a cornucopia of newspaper; things I’d read about once but had never seen. It was like trying to walk without crutches, like those phony scenes in old TV movies. You can do it. I know you can. That was the way my mind lurched and stumbled, among the sharp R’s and T’s, sliding over the ovoid vowels as if on pebbles.

To play Scrabble with the Commander is an offense against Gilead where women are not supposed to read anymore. Yet here Offred is dangerously spelling. They argue about whether some words are words. The Commander offers to let her look up the word in the dictionary, another act against the state. In every way, these games themselves are Offred’s power play, one The Commander Fred invites.
When the narrator talks about “a language I’d once known but had nearly forgotten,” we become acutely aware of the gravity of Offred’s predicament. This spelling is a form of Thoughtcrime, in the rich tradition of Orwell.

Scrabble, of course, has implicit rules and relies on dictionaries to settle disputes, but one of the most interesting lines of the story means nothing at all. On the closet wall of her room, Offred finds scrawled therein “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” When she asks The Commander what it means, she gives away everything, that she knows the last handmaid also came to play. What it means is important to give Offred a reason to fight, but it’s also an important plot device.
These ovoid vowels also bring another thought to mind, one that I was keenly aware of from the offset. The text is saturated with so many pregnancy-like words. There is egg symbolism, when it rains the “smell of earth and grass [filling] the air” is gravid, and there are bellies. Bellies. BELLIES.

Or the sail of a ship. Big-bellied sails, they used to say, in poems. Bellying. Propelled forward by a swollen belly.

Bellies everywhere. Almost all the 13 occurrences of “belly” and 2 occurrences of “bellies” have to do with pregnancy. Sometimes this is literary belly comparison porn.

As a Post-Truth story, The Handmaid’s Tale extends the Stalinist ideas of 1984, merging them with religion now. It feels contemporary because of Trump’s “Fake News” diatribes on Twitter. Essentially, Post-Truth stories, whether authored in books or in social media, rely on building an illusory terrain of philosophy the target audience doesn’t question. Atwood did not invent anything here, but she did transform the state propaganda by lending it a sexist cult flavor. This feels like nova to me, though honestly, I haven’t read enough to know it’s her invention or something she borrowed. Either way, it works and is powerful.

Finally, I want to talk about her technique, not the humor, or how she uses dialogue. Actually the dialogue is noteworthy, especially the syntax:

Your mother’s neat, Moira would say, when we were at college.
Later: she’s got pizzazz. Later still: she’s cute.
She’s not cute, I would say. She’s my mother.
Jeez, said Moira, you ought to see mine.

I think of my mother, sweeping up deadly toxins; the way they used to use up old women, in Russia, sweeping dirt. Only this dirt will kill her. I can’t quite believe it. Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something.

So, it's almost indistinguishable syntactically from the rest of the narration, which makes some sense, because of how the transcript is constructed, and this leads to one of the coolest aspects of the story.
The mixed up timelines lend authenticity to the text. Throughout the story, the timeline shifts from whatever the present is to Offred reflecting on her mother or Luke in the life before or their attempted escape, and then sometimes to their training with Aunt Lydia. There are three basic threads but it is very intertwined.

At the end of the story we are offered a plausible reason for this confusion. The professors who assembled the transcript worked from a set of unordered cassettes found in a military trunk. This one illumination was worth all their bad jokes.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the story. I had read it before but too long ago to remember how skillfully she weaved the tale.

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Game of Thrones Finale

In my opinion, this is the best shot from Season 8 of Game of Thrones. Somewhat underwhelmed by the finale, because it all felt so rushed, but I'm excited for what the novels will bring. Winds/Dream. :-)

Devoured this scrumptious morsel in but a few hours and still left a little hungry.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sharp Objects is a solid first novel, to which I would have given a higher rating, were it not for the summary technique in the conclusion that robs the reader of the experience of that year of discovery. Flynn does everything else right. Her characters are evocative, and the setting of the town is lush and vivid. The murders percolate in the consciousness while the protagonist lurches absentmindedly forward into danger. You will find yourself screaming at her not to be so stupid, courting peril with such intimacy, and it's so in character. It's damn near a 5-star book until the last few chapters and I still enjoyed it a lot (3-stars means I liked it :-{) It's just not as good as it could have been, even though we are given a long, lovely tease. Sigh.

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Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time) on Matriarchies in Finn

I'm just posting this so I don't lose it. --- For Anonymous-George, long ago I saw one of the first, I believe, novels about a young woman who wasn't allowed to use magic or whatever because she was a woman, and the thought occurred to me as to how it might go if men were the ones who were denied the right to do magic. Or whatever. I hate using the word magic. From that long ago thought grew the One Power divided into saidin and saidar with the male half tainted and the reasons for and results of it being tainted. Now in most of these societies...I did not and do not view them as matriarchal. I attempted to design societies that were as near gender balanced as to rights, responsibilities and power as I could manage. It doesn't all work perfectly. People have bellybuttons. If you want to see someone who always behaves logically, never tells small lies or conceals the truth in order to put the best face for themselves on events, and never, ever tries to take advantage of any situation whatsoever, then look for somebody without a bellybutton. The real surprise to me was that while I was designing these gender balanced societies, people were seeing matriarchies. --- Jordan is often criticized for his portrayal of women and how he overcompensates by creating matriarchies. His perspective is very interesting (to me.)