Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 15
March 25, 2024
A Kinkajou on the Town, by Rutherford Montgomery
In case you're wondering, this is a kinkajou. They are related to raccoons, ringtails, coatimundis, and cacomistles.
This 1967 animal story concerns a kinkajou who starts his life in Mexico, where he gets captured at a young age because he got too caught up in eating a honeycomb. He becomes the pet of a Mexican boy, Carlos, but he's too good at escaping from his cage and steals honeycombs from a neighbor's bees. Carlos's parents tell him he has to get rid of his pet. Luckily, Carlos is able to pass him on to an American boy, Timothy, who's visiting Mexico with his father.
Timothy's mother is dead and his father's job requires him to travel a lot, so Timothy spends most of his life in boarding schools and is lonely. Because his father understands this, he lets Timothy keep the kinkajou, who he names Benny. But Benny's tendency to wreak havoc and escape starts causing Timothy the same sorts of problems he caused Carlos - and the boarding school doesn't allow pets...
This is a very sweet, well-observed, naturalistic animal story, with the point of view shifting between that of Benny and the humans around him. It becomes genuinely suspenseful at a certain point, when I became very invested in Benny and Timothy getting to stay together. (Spoiler: they do!)
For a white guy writing in 1967, it's blessedly non-racist; there's some mild of-the-times-ness but Carlos and his parents are pretty similar to Timothy and his father, and the Mexicans are all depicted as just normal people. Apart from the Mexican sections, it's set in the Santa Barbara area, where I used to live, and which apart from the Kinsey Milhone series, is a place I rarely see depicted in fiction. It was fascinating to see what it was like in the late sixties (a lot less developed, for one.) It has very nice illustrations, too.
( Read more... )
A Kinkajou on the Town is thoroughly out of print, but you can download a pdf - complete with illustrations - from Anna's Archive.
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March 22, 2024
Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus
Isn't that a great cover?
Daniel Kraus co-wrote The Shape of Water. This novel also blends fantastical elements with dramatic emotion. And water.
Jay, a seventeen-year-old with conflicted feelings about his diver father's recent death, goes scuba diving in the hope of finding his father's remains. Instead, he gets swallowed by a sperm whale. Jay has one hour to use what he has on him and what he finds in the whale's stomach to escape before his oxygen runs out. But while he's in the belly of the whale, things begin to get even stranger than one might expect given the circumstances. Jay has to grapple with his feelings about his dead asshole father - and possibly with his father's ghost - if he's going to get out alive.
A lot of people REALLY loved Whalefall and found it exremely moving. It 100% leans into its premise - all elements of its premise, not just the "swallowed by a whale" part. Someone on Goodreads who didn't like it called it "daddy issues in a whale," which is basically true, but this is undoubtedly the best "daddy issues in a whale" book you'll ever read. The inside-a-whale elements are a pleasing mix of well-researched and totally batshit. The layering of whale mythology and death/birth motifs is very well -done, as are Jay's changing feelings toward the whale itself.
I appreciated the technical accomplishments of the book more than I felt emotionally moved by it. American fiction is so dominated by sons with daddy issues that a book based on that has to really make both father and son come to life for me to get into it. Jay's dad was such an asshole that I didn't root for Jay to realize the old man had his good points. (Other readers felt that daddy was fine and Jay was a selfish jerk to him.) But for a lot of readers, the father-son relationship was extremely powerful and moving.
My other issue with the book was the prose. Especially early on, it's overwritten. A lot of his turns of phrase are good, but not all of them, and the density often feels forced. It sometimes felt like Kraus had gone over every sentence with the goal of replacing at least one straightforward word or phrase with some unusual image or metaphor.
For instance, His car sheds rust scabs as he grovels it along the cinnamon shoulder of Highway 1. I like the rust scabs and cinnamon road. But "grovels" is both one unusual turn of phrase too many, and one which stopped me dead to figure out why Jay was suddenly groveling when he'd been confident and determined the instant before. By the time I figured out that Kraus meant that the car was physically crawling in the sense of riding low rather than the emotional sense of the term, I had lost the momentum of the story.
Content notes: Gross whale anatomy. Gross descriptions of cancer. Suicide. Jay doesn't kill the whale or attempt to significantly harm it, but there is some whale harm and death in the book.
( Read more... )
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March 15, 2024
Widow's Plight, by Ruth Fenisong
This 1955 crime novel has a very strong start, vividly depicting the plight of Addie, an elderly widow fallen upon hard times. She moves to New York from Georgia to live with her son and his wife, and discovers to her dismay that they clearly don't want her around. One day, while wandering disconsolately in a park, she meets her neighbor Kate, also an elderly widow living with her daughter and his husband, who also don't want her around. Kate is a Hungarian immigrant, but despite surface differences the women hit it off.
Unfortunately, the actual story becomes a much more conventional crime drama when Kate's son-in-law is murdered; less about the widows' friendship, and more about the not-that-interesting twists and turns of the case. Though I did love one particular element.
( Read more... )
My habit of picking up completely random out of print books I never heard of from garage sales often pays off, one way or another. After a strong start, Widow's Plight ends up only okay. But it introduced me to the existence of the amazing Ruth Fenisong, Jewish lesbian leftist PUPPET PLAYWRIGHT and mystery writer.
It's unclear where Ruth went to school or what sort of employment she had in her twenties, but when during the Depression the American national government's Works Progress Administration launched the Federal Theater Project, Ruth was one of some 350 people in the project who worked with marionettes in children's puppet theater.
...
Certainly some of Ruth's plays suggest a left-liberal slant, however, like The Children of Salem, about two Puritan children who nearly provoke the killing of a purported witch (the play was billed as a "strong indictment of superstition"), and The Boiled Eggs, which has been recently reprinted.
The latter play is a mordant satire in which a ruthlessly scheming restaurant owner (Landlord) and his equally atrocious Wife. attempting to fleece a simple Farmer of $2000 for a meal of a dozen boiled (and very rotten) eggs, have the tables deftly turned on them by a wily Lawyer and a goodhearted Waiter. By the end of the play the waiter has joined a union and is picketing the Landlord's restaurant, which in a literal burst of poetic justice is destroyed when the remaining rotten eggs explode.
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Unfortunately, the actual story becomes a much more conventional crime drama when Kate's son-in-law is murdered; less about the widows' friendship, and more about the not-that-interesting twists and turns of the case. Though I did love one particular element.
( Read more... )
My habit of picking up completely random out of print books I never heard of from garage sales often pays off, one way or another. After a strong start, Widow's Plight ends up only okay. But it introduced me to the existence of the amazing Ruth Fenisong, Jewish lesbian leftist PUPPET PLAYWRIGHT and mystery writer.
It's unclear where Ruth went to school or what sort of employment she had in her twenties, but when during the Depression the American national government's Works Progress Administration launched the Federal Theater Project, Ruth was one of some 350 people in the project who worked with marionettes in children's puppet theater.
...
Certainly some of Ruth's plays suggest a left-liberal slant, however, like The Children of Salem, about two Puritan children who nearly provoke the killing of a purported witch (the play was billed as a "strong indictment of superstition"), and The Boiled Eggs, which has been recently reprinted.
The latter play is a mordant satire in which a ruthlessly scheming restaurant owner (Landlord) and his equally atrocious Wife. attempting to fleece a simple Farmer of $2000 for a meal of a dozen boiled (and very rotten) eggs, have the tables deftly turned on them by a wily Lawyer and a goodhearted Waiter. By the end of the play the waiter has joined a union and is picketing the Landlord's restaurant, which in a literal burst of poetic justice is destroyed when the remaining rotten eggs explode.
comments
March 13, 2024
In the Cut
In 2003, I ate in a restaurant where two people at the next table were earnestly discussing a movie whose title appeared to be Up the Butt. I was baffled by how seriously they were taking the acting, and also by how casual they seemed to be about saying the title in public, until the background chatter hit a lull and I realized that they were actually talking about a movie called In the Cut.
21 years later, I finally saw Up the Butt! I mean In the Cut. Having seen it, I think the former is a better title. There is no explicit butt action per se, butt but it is an amazingly horny movie. Also an amazingly bizarre one. It was directed by Jane Campion, who has since made other extremely horny - but much better - films. It was a giant flop at the time, but has since been reassessed as a slyly witty exploration of female desire and female gaze, unfairly panned by people who couldn't cope with Meg Ryan having sex.
I can cope with Meg Ryan having sex. What I could not cope with was the plot. And the screenplay.
This is the opening dialogue from In the Cut.
Pauline: "What does "broccoli" mean?
Frannie: "Depends on the context. Pubic hair or marijuana. It's a noun.
Pauline: "And 'Virginia'?"
Frannie: "Vagina. As in, 'He penetrated her Virginia with a hammer.'"
Frannie (Meg Ryan) is an English professor who's learning slang from one of her students. She's not paying him, and I suspect he's making up all the slang. Pauline is her half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who lives over a strip club and is stalking a doctor. While Frannie is going to the bathroom in the restaurant where she meets her slang coach, she sees a guy with a tattoo of the three of spades, getting a blowjob in the basement.
The next day a woman is murdered in her neighborhood. Two cops spot Frannie in the street. One of them (Mark Ruffalo) is named Giovanni Malloy, presumably because his parents wanted to make sure he'd be a cop so they gave him the most Irish and Italian name possible. They make her get in their car and interrogate her, explaining that the murder victim went to the same restaurant Frannie was at and Frannie might have seen her. Also, the dead woman's head was found in Frannie's backyard. They show her photos of the head.
Frannie: "Am I a murder suspect?"
Giovanni Malloy: "Look, I was wondering if you want to go for a beer or something."
If you're struggling to make sense of this, don't worry! Things become even more incoherent later!
Frannie and Giovanni Malloy go on an absolutely bizarre date. He informs her that his partner carries a water pistol because he's been banned from carrying a gun because he tried to murder his wife. (The partner does, in fact, carry a water pistol instead of a gun - we see him madly spraying it.)
Frannie sees that Giovanni Malloy has the three of spades tattoo. He says it means he's in a secret club. From then on, Frannie is convinced that he's the basement blowjob guy and possibly the murderer, as it never occurs to her that a secret club could have more than one member.
I'm making this scene sound more coherent than it actually is. It's mostly Malloy monologuing in non-sequitors. This is the kind of movie where you keep turning to the person you're watching it with and saying, "Did he actually say...?"
Frannie leaves the bar, gets attacked by a masked man, and, in a truly laugh-out-loud moment, is suddenly hit by a taxi. She calls Giovanni Malloy and they have sex. He sniffs her feet.
After the sex, in a tone like Jack Nicholson on the stand in A Few Good Men, she demands, "I WANT TO KNOW!!! WHO TAUGHT YOU TO DO THAT?!"
It seems like she's referring to oral sex, which I guess she never had before? ("You know nothing, Jon Snow.")
Giovanni Malloy explains that the chicken lady taught him. He delivers another batshit monologue about being molested by an older woman when delivering chickens. Frannie, grasping at some semblance of normalcy, asks him about his children. He says his oldest son wants to be a teacher, which he inexplicably finds extremely bizarre.
Frannie: "What does he want to teach?"
Giovanni Malloy: "Shmoogs." He shakes his head in disgusted astonishment. "Can you believe it??"
I watched this with![[personal profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1491408111i/22407843.png)
scioscribe
. We both heard "Shmoogs." I looked it up later. It's up the butt in the cut in the script. Urban dictionary says it means "someone who is uncool," but that can't be the meaning in this context as Frannie asks WHAT he wants to teach, not WHO he wants to teach.
If anyone has any idea what "shmoogs" means, please let us know. It sounds like it might be derived from Yiddish (a language commonly spoken by Irish-Italian cops)?
Frannie then goes to a cafe and orders "a dry latte. Very, very dry."
At this point I was just bursting out laughing at random moments, along with every time anyone actually spoke.
She's accosted by her stalker ex, who is with an adorably ugly dog. He asks her to take care of his dog. She says she's sorry but she can't. He screams, "YOU'D RATHER CUT HIS HEAD OFF!"
(The dog is fine.)
I forgot to mention that we periodically get sepia flashbacks to the meeting of Frannie's parents, who are inexplicably ice skating in some kind of period clothing, maybe Victorian, even though the movie is set in modern times so they logically would have met in the 1960s. At one point, Frannie has a hilarious nightmare where her mother has a skating accident that amputates her legs.
Also, the subways have posters of poetry that seems directed at Frannie.
( It scares me that this guy knows about drains )
comments
21 years later, I finally saw Up the Butt! I mean In the Cut. Having seen it, I think the former is a better title. There is no explicit butt action per se, butt but it is an amazingly horny movie. Also an amazingly bizarre one. It was directed by Jane Campion, who has since made other extremely horny - but much better - films. It was a giant flop at the time, but has since been reassessed as a slyly witty exploration of female desire and female gaze, unfairly panned by people who couldn't cope with Meg Ryan having sex.
I can cope with Meg Ryan having sex. What I could not cope with was the plot. And the screenplay.
This is the opening dialogue from In the Cut.
Pauline: "What does "broccoli" mean?
Frannie: "Depends on the context. Pubic hair or marijuana. It's a noun.
Pauline: "And 'Virginia'?"
Frannie: "Vagina. As in, 'He penetrated her Virginia with a hammer.'"
Frannie (Meg Ryan) is an English professor who's learning slang from one of her students. She's not paying him, and I suspect he's making up all the slang. Pauline is her half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who lives over a strip club and is stalking a doctor. While Frannie is going to the bathroom in the restaurant where she meets her slang coach, she sees a guy with a tattoo of the three of spades, getting a blowjob in the basement.
The next day a woman is murdered in her neighborhood. Two cops spot Frannie in the street. One of them (Mark Ruffalo) is named Giovanni Malloy, presumably because his parents wanted to make sure he'd be a cop so they gave him the most Irish and Italian name possible. They make her get in their car and interrogate her, explaining that the murder victim went to the same restaurant Frannie was at and Frannie might have seen her. Also, the dead woman's head was found in Frannie's backyard. They show her photos of the head.
Frannie: "Am I a murder suspect?"
Giovanni Malloy: "Look, I was wondering if you want to go for a beer or something."
If you're struggling to make sense of this, don't worry! Things become even more incoherent later!
Frannie and Giovanni Malloy go on an absolutely bizarre date. He informs her that his partner carries a water pistol because he's been banned from carrying a gun because he tried to murder his wife. (The partner does, in fact, carry a water pistol instead of a gun - we see him madly spraying it.)
Frannie sees that Giovanni Malloy has the three of spades tattoo. He says it means he's in a secret club. From then on, Frannie is convinced that he's the basement blowjob guy and possibly the murderer, as it never occurs to her that a secret club could have more than one member.
I'm making this scene sound more coherent than it actually is. It's mostly Malloy monologuing in non-sequitors. This is the kind of movie where you keep turning to the person you're watching it with and saying, "Did he actually say...?"
Frannie leaves the bar, gets attacked by a masked man, and, in a truly laugh-out-loud moment, is suddenly hit by a taxi. She calls Giovanni Malloy and they have sex. He sniffs her feet.
After the sex, in a tone like Jack Nicholson on the stand in A Few Good Men, she demands, "I WANT TO KNOW!!! WHO TAUGHT YOU TO DO THAT?!"
It seems like she's referring to oral sex, which I guess she never had before? ("You know nothing, Jon Snow.")
Giovanni Malloy explains that the chicken lady taught him. He delivers another batshit monologue about being molested by an older woman when delivering chickens. Frannie, grasping at some semblance of normalcy, asks him about his children. He says his oldest son wants to be a teacher, which he inexplicably finds extremely bizarre.
Frannie: "What does he want to teach?"
Giovanni Malloy: "Shmoogs." He shakes his head in disgusted astonishment. "Can you believe it??"
I watched this with
scioscribe
. We both heard "Shmoogs." I looked it up later. It's up the butt in the cut in the script. Urban dictionary says it means "someone who is uncool," but that can't be the meaning in this context as Frannie asks WHAT he wants to teach, not WHO he wants to teach. If anyone has any idea what "shmoogs" means, please let us know. It sounds like it might be derived from Yiddish (a language commonly spoken by Irish-Italian cops)?
Frannie then goes to a cafe and orders "a dry latte. Very, very dry."
At this point I was just bursting out laughing at random moments, along with every time anyone actually spoke.
She's accosted by her stalker ex, who is with an adorably ugly dog. He asks her to take care of his dog. She says she's sorry but she can't. He screams, "YOU'D RATHER CUT HIS HEAD OFF!"
(The dog is fine.)
I forgot to mention that we periodically get sepia flashbacks to the meeting of Frannie's parents, who are inexplicably ice skating in some kind of period clothing, maybe Victorian, even though the movie is set in modern times so they logically would have met in the 1960s. At one point, Frannie has a hilarious nightmare where her mother has a skating accident that amputates her legs.
Also, the subways have posters of poetry that seems directed at Frannie.
( It scares me that this guy knows about drains )
comments
March 11, 2024
Traitor, the final book of the Change series, is DONE!
Sherwood and I finished the first draft last night. Wheee!
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The first three books will be re-released, one per month starting in July, culminating with Traitor in October.
Can't believe we actually finished it. So many unforeseeable events made it late that I was convinced we'd get struck by lightning before we could write the final chapter.
comments
[image error]
The first three books will be re-released, one per month starting in July, culminating with Traitor in October.
Can't believe we actually finished it. So many unforeseeable events made it late that I was convinced we'd get struck by lightning before we could write the final chapter.
comments
March 4, 2024
2024 Hugos
All ballots must be received by Saturday, 9 March 2024, 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (UTC+0).
I am eligible for best fan writer for my book reviews, which can be viewed by clicking on the tag.
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I am eligible for best fan writer for my book reviews, which can be viewed by clicking on the tag.
comments
A few favorites from yesterday's kiln haul
Porcelain bowl, exterior carved and painted with underglazes, interior glazed with Niko Blue and swirls of Seaweed and Indigo Float.
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Failed to record glazes for this bowl, annoyingly.
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Iron Lustre base coat, drips and rim of Oatmeal. Oatmeal is a yellowish glaze on its own, which reacts with Iron Lustre to create that fantastic blue and pink.
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Thrown and hand-altered mini vase, glazed with assorted celadons. They REALLY don't blend - I'd intended a smooth ombre effect.
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Stripes of assorted metallic glazes from the LA studio, plus Ancient Jasper. I used thin lines of Oatmeal, a flux glaze (it runs and makes other glazes melt together) so they'd flow together.
[image error]
comments
[image error]
[image error]
Failed to record glazes for this bowl, annoyingly.
[image error]
[image error]
Iron Lustre base coat, drips and rim of Oatmeal. Oatmeal is a yellowish glaze on its own, which reacts with Iron Lustre to create that fantastic blue and pink.
[image error]
Thrown and hand-altered mini vase, glazed with assorted celadons. They REALLY don't blend - I'd intended a smooth ombre effect.
[image error]
Stripes of assorted metallic glazes from the LA studio, plus Ancient Jasper. I used thin lines of Oatmeal, a flux glaze (it runs and makes other glazes melt together) so they'd flow together.
[image error]
comments
February 26, 2024
Boy in a China Shop: Life, Clay and Everything, by Keith Brymer Jones
The memoir of an English potter, currently best-known for hosting The Great Pottery Throwdown, where he is regularly moved to literal tears by contestants' work and struggles. He's an enormous man with a very down-to-earth manner and brilliantly skilled hands who gets very emotional over art. It says something about how much men are socialized to not display emotions other than anger that people are constantly asking him if it's an act. It's not.
His memoir is unsurprisingly charming, funny, and sweet. He grew up with an alcoholic mother and cold, bitter father, (but enough about that, this isn't a misery memoir, he hastens to reassure us), has OCD and is so severely dyslexic that I am really curious how he managed to write an entire memoir (dictation? a ghost writer?), was in a somewhat successful punk band, became a professional potter, and got famous for making a video in which he dresses in drag and sings a song about pottery. Oh yeah, and while he was an apprentice his car got trashed by three lions. In England.
It's a lovely, quick-read memoir in his distinctive voice. My one criticism is that the only visual element is badly reproduced snapshots, so you may as well buy the ebook edition which is quite cheap and just look up anything you want to see.
comments
His memoir is unsurprisingly charming, funny, and sweet. He grew up with an alcoholic mother and cold, bitter father, (but enough about that, this isn't a misery memoir, he hastens to reassure us), has OCD and is so severely dyslexic that I am really curious how he managed to write an entire memoir (dictation? a ghost writer?), was in a somewhat successful punk band, became a professional potter, and got famous for making a video in which he dresses in drag and sings a song about pottery. Oh yeah, and while he was an apprentice his car got trashed by three lions. In England.
It's a lovely, quick-read memoir in his distinctive voice. My one criticism is that the only visual element is badly reproduced snapshots, so you may as well buy the ebook edition which is quite cheap and just look up anything you want to see.
comments
February 25, 2024
The Darkest Minds, by Alexandra Bracken
Normally I would be all over a book in which a pandemic kills most teenagers, leaves the survivors with psychic powers which are neatly categorized by color, and then throws them in concentration camps from which the narrator must escape and join the rebellion!
Every bit of that is my id. But this book was just meh. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. It was just okay. Though the worldbuilding around the concentration camps didn't make a lot of sense, it wasn't spectacularly batshit like say The Fourth Wing. The colors assigned to powers were mostly non-intuitive, like green for extra-smart and blue for telekinetic, so I didn't find that interesting. The characters were okay.
Basically this book just could not begin to compete with the much higher-octane, more batshit, more dramatic, more OTT version of itself, which is The X-Men and many, many other comic books and manga/anime.
comments
Every bit of that is my id. But this book was just meh. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. It was just okay. Though the worldbuilding around the concentration camps didn't make a lot of sense, it wasn't spectacularly batshit like say The Fourth Wing. The colors assigned to powers were mostly non-intuitive, like green for extra-smart and blue for telekinetic, so I didn't find that interesting. The characters were okay.
Basically this book just could not begin to compete with the much higher-octane, more batshit, more dramatic, more OTT version of itself, which is The X-Men and many, many other comic books and manga/anime.
comments
February 23, 2024
Cover Reveal & News about the Change series
Behold!
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Sherwood and I are re-releasing the Change series this year, with new covers, maps, and a few minor corrections to the text. We will release one per month, starting with Stranger in July, Hostage in August, Rebel in September, and concluding with the final book, Traitor, in October.
We will be sending out Advance Release Copies to reviewers three months ahead of the books' release dates. If you would like to review Stranger, please contact me at Rphoenix2@gmail.com with a note saying where you intend to review it (your personal blog is fine), and I will send you a copy.
We are also looking for a final proofreader for Stranger, to ensure that no new errors crept in. Please email me if you're interested.
comments
[image error]
Sherwood and I are re-releasing the Change series this year, with new covers, maps, and a few minor corrections to the text. We will release one per month, starting with Stranger in July, Hostage in August, Rebel in September, and concluding with the final book, Traitor, in October.
We will be sending out Advance Release Copies to reviewers three months ahead of the books' release dates. If you would like to review Stranger, please contact me at Rphoenix2@gmail.com with a note saying where you intend to review it (your personal blog is fine), and I will send you a copy.
We are also looking for a final proofreader for Stranger, to ensure that no new errors crept in. Please email me if you're interested.
comments
