Maya Rushing Walker's Blog, page 4
October 24, 2019
GOOD OMENS, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was inspired to pick up this book by the Amazon mini-series last summer (2019), which featured two of my favorite British actors, David Tennant and Michael Sheen. I normally have a rule in my house that we should attempt to read books before we watch adaptations in film or television, so we all raced through the book as fast as we could in order to start watching the series. We’d all read at least one Terry Pratchett book before (Nation) and thought we knew what we were getting into.
Long story short, the book did not age well. Also, it was a cowritten project between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and we could see some of the “seams” in the book. What was great was that many things that bothered us about the book were fixed in the television production. Not all of them, but many of them. And the two lead actors were phenomenal, of course, not to mention the other wonderful cast members.
In short, do I recommend this book? I almost hate to write this, but no, I think I recommend the Amazon series over the book. There are some unfortunate racial/ethnic/other stereotypes in the book, which really does need a 21st century sensitivity edit. The television series does better, although it’s not perfect. Do watch the series and enjoy the wonderful cast, but you could be forgiven for giving the book a miss. And it’s rare that I would suggest viewing a show over reading a book, but there it is.
October 22, 2019
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, by Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
FABULOUS Agatha Christie! Probably my favorite! Exquisitely executed, leaving you guessing until the very end! What’s more, there is a fun BBC television adaptation, available on Amazon Prime, with all the familiar British actors we know and love. I don’t love all the Agatha Christies but this one is wonderful…pick it up, even if you don’t normally read murder mysteries, which I don’t. The period ambience is terrific and the complexity of the crime(s) makes me extremely happy as a writer. I wish I were half as good! If you can’t pick up the book, watch the show!
October 21, 2019
DRACULA, by Bram Stoker
Dracula by Bram Stoker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was helping edit someone’s Dracula analysis, so I needed to finally sit down and read the whole thing, cover to cover. Before I did, many people told me that it was virtually unreadable and didn’t “arc” properly after the beginning section. But I completely disagree. This is a Victorian novel; it is tailored to the tastes of the Victorian reader. I found all the things that needed to be there for the story to work, and in fact I think Bram Stoker worked hard to make sure these pieces were there. It’s just that it’s a wordy, unwieldy Victorian tale of horror, so you have to work a little harder to pull everything together and understand what Stoker is trying to tell you. Do it, it’s worth it. Read the original work that started the vampire craze. Unplug your wifi and shut down your phone, you’ll need the quiet in order to concentrate. But you’ll be able to say proudly that you read the real thing.
October 20, 2019
THE SONG OF ACHILLES, by Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This. Book. Was. Amazing. It was like a drink of water on a hot day. So refreshing, something different in the middle of a dry spell (for me) of books that were sounding the same. Ms. Miller is a classics expert, and sometimes her prose wasn’t exactly “sparkling,” but I was gripped by the story, so I didn’t mind. When the story is that good, you are racing past the words anyway, trying to get to the end. What was great was that her academic background allowed me to rest easy, knowing that she’d already done the research and that I was getting a story where I could be comfortable that the interpretation on the page was something she had thought about carefully and made deliberate decisions about. I know that the Achilles story can be taken in a number of different ways, but I was pleased to let this author tell me which one gripped her the most. Fantastic! I’m inspired! My own background is in medieval Japanese history, so maybe I’ll take a stab at a retelling myself! I would have to bury myself in the library for a couple of years, probably…sounds good!
February 18, 2019
30-day phone detox redux
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Last summer I read a great book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, by Catherine Price, and went on a 30-day phone detox by following the guidelines in the book. I can't say that I'm “addicted” to my phone the way that many people seem to be, but I definitely felt the need for more peace and separation from all things digital. I'd heard Catherine Price interviewed on my favorite meditation podcast, Dan Harris' 10% Happier Podcast. and what startled and scared me the most was her comment that the very design of phone apps is to entrap its users into not being able to resist them.
I sometimes have a hard time resisting dessert, but there isn't anything particularly sinister about a hot fudge brownie sundae. But the thought of an app designed to keep me scrolling–that was really uncomfortable to think about.
Today I read an article from tech columnist Kevin Roose,“Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain.” Great title! But it's also a great article. Since last summer, my phone usage has crept up again, mostly because I've felt compelled to attend to my book marketing activities while out and about, and it's easiest to do with my phone. I think I'm going to start the detox again, however, to see if I can improve upon my current time spent on the phone. I have maintained a strict morning routine of all-analog (paper calendar, bullet journal planner, etc.) before attending to digital communications (email, Slack, etc.), so I think I'm a little bit ahead there. But as Roose points out, constant reliance on a phone to distract you serves to train you into being unable to pay attention to books and movies, and makes you antsy when you're standing in the checkout lane or waiting for the bus. I don't want to be that person. I never used to be that person! It doesn't feel good, and now we know it really isn't good.
It's interesting that I love technology and I love how much I can do with it, but I also want to master it, rather than have it dominate me. I love electronic music, but I also spent many years learning to play instruments, and still believe that this mastery is good for the human soul. Perhaps it's simply another example of the ways in which we don't have to be tribal, all-or-nothing, either this or that. I can be both digital and analog. But I want to be in charge.
January 19, 2019
Weekend Music: Mitski
By Kenny Sun from Boston – Mitski @ Paradise Rock Club (Boston, MA), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Last summer, I saw a delightful movie, Hearts Beat Loud, about a father and daughter who (after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing) play music together. It was a bit frothy, but it was modern, it had all the right messaging, and it did everything a nice summer indie movie is supposed to do. I did a tiny little write-up here. It was a tiny write-up because there wasn't anything much for me to say. Cute movie. All the right things. Go see it.
During the movie, in which the daughter and father somehow end up with a song on one of the Spotify indie hit playlists (which I happen to listen to), there is a scene where the daughter (played by Kiersey Clemons) is listening to a song by Mitski. I don't know why I sat up in my seat and paid attention at that particular moment, but I just knew that Mitski was someone I wanted to check out. Maybe it was the Japanese name, maybe it was the interesting music, maybe it was the indie playlist, I don't know. But that afternoon I went home and looked for Mitski online. And I found the music video for her latest release, Nobody:
I dare you to watch this video and NOT end up humming it all day long. How often are indie songs earworms? Not often, I assure you. I was hooked.
However. It got complicated.
I was struck by the fact that Mitski has a Japanese mother and white American father, like myself; that she moved around a lot as a kid; that she ended up going to conservatory in New York. All of this fascinated me, and I wanted to read something into it, but I didn't know what. I googled and read some articles, but it was confusing. Hearts Beat Loud referenced Mitski as a way to show the success of the movie characters in the indie music world; in other words, Mitski was an icon, a sign of success, not a sign of a rebel. But I couldn't quite figure out who Mitski was as a person. She is private, and doesn't talk about her family story much. I wondered if she spoke Japanese, if she had gone to American high schools, if she felt as divided as I often do, in the sense that I feel neither Japanese nor white.
And the lyrics to her songs? They struck me as simple love songs. She sings about loneliness, alienation, feeling displaced. None of them sounded terribly edgy.
I bought her new album when it came out, Be the Cowboy. I had really liked Nobody, but some of her other new songs perplexed me. They sounded…angsty and discordant. In other words, they sounded like many of the other indie musicians out there. And yet, she seemed so different, someone who perhaps sits on the fringe, just outside the group.
In other words, what often gets me about indie music is that it can all sound the same. Which is kind of oxymoronic, right? How is “indie” just like everyone else? How is it that Mitski has become an indie icon, while being herself? And how has she become so beloved by people who swear they aren't included, that they sit on the fringe…and yet they are all in the same tribe?
As a tribe-less person myself, I was baffled.
We were lucky enough to grab tickets for a Mitski concert in our neck of the woods, at a small venue north of Boston. I didn't quite know what to expect. I had thought Nobody was one kind of Mitski, and then her album left me uncertain. Her performance left me even more fascinated. Here's a snippet:
It was almost a kind of performance art, with carefully choreographed moves. Here's another:
The above is from the song, Your Best American Girl:
When I first heard Your Best American Girl, I thought I knew what it was about. Loneliness, not belonging, and not being “really” American. All of that spoke to me loud and clear. When I saw the music video, I thought smugly that I'd been right. But when I saw Mitski's performance of the song, I wondered if I was overreaching. All those hand gestures! All those scripted movements! They looked like the 1970s-era Japanese pop idols that I had grown up listening to. I wondered if Mitski had been subjected to the same overly cutesy, overly choreographed pop music that I had been:
(apologies for this blast from the 70s, but this is the kind of pop music presentation I cut my teeth on!)
But then I heard the crowd singing along, a crowd that looked to me like they couldn't possibly know what lusting after the “American Boy” was like when you were definitely NOT the “American Girl,” and I realized that they were projecting all of their own feeling of sadness and despair onto a narrative that they had no way of understanding–and they didn't care, it didn't matter to them. And whatever Mitski's childhood influences had been–it didn't matter. She was telling her story, and they were grabbing onto it.
Last month, I found that The New Yorker agreed:
Wikipedia will tell you that the album is about “longing, love, depression, alienation, and racial identity,” but, to me, it still sounds like it’s mostly about Mitski. Its breakout song was “Your Best American Girl,” an instant-classic pop-rock anthem whose chorus alluded to a relationship obstructed by cultural mores: “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do / And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” The song was interpreted as a political statement. Mitski was catapulting a boulder into the moldy walls of our national bigotry! She was challenging a music industry in which Asian women were so rarely visible—and sometimes fetishized, by bands like Weezer, which the song’s chord palette cuttingly nods to—as well as a genre, rock, that ignores the women in its midst! Eventually, Mitski posted a note on Facebook explaining that, as far as she was concerned, “Your Best American Girl” was a love song. A lot of reviews had decided that she had written the song to “stick it to ‘the white boy indie rock world’,” as Mitski wrote. But “I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was writing it,” she countered. “I wasn’t trying to send a message. I was in love.”
It took a long time for me to come round. I've decided I like Mitski. I wasn't ready to say that last summer, but I'm ready now.
January 1, 2019
Out now!
the portrait, by cassandra austen
Available as an ebook at Amazon.com and available in print at Amazon and also at bookstores everywhere!
And here's the blurb!
Lady Catherine, banished to the countryside as a useless girl with a lame leg, got her revenge by playing a dangerous game. And now it will ruin her.
When the old earl dies, his only child feels no sorrow. The earldom will now revert to the crown and Lady Catherine will continue to live life exactly as she pleases. But when she learns that she is the heir to a secret family title, everything changes. Marriage had once seemed unnecessary and out of the question; now it is the only thing she wants. The two men in her life both need her influence and wealth. Whom shall she choose? The kind but secretive Captain Avebury? Or the notorious Sir Lyle, the handsome smuggler? Both men deal very differently with honor. And when Catherine's secret self-destructs, which man can be trusted to save her?
The Portrait is about a strong woman, foolish decisions, trust, and the definition of honor. Fans of Jane Austen's independent women will recognize in Catherine a voice which will not be silenced.
Here's the Amazon link: The Portrait, by Cassandra Austen
Some of you may be scratching your heads, wondering why I chose to publish my first novel under a pseudonym. You may also be wondering how I square my multicultural identity and interests with something as staid and predictable as romance set in 1800s England. The truth is, I see no real difference between Jane Austen, being caught between cultures, and myself, growing up in Honolulu and caught between cultures. In fact, the stiff, structured environment of Jane Austen resonated with me greatly as a kid. It seemed that she had so many things she wanted to say, but the only way she could venture to say them was elliptically, through fiction. I understood that at a gut level. I think that's why I've always loved historical novels.
I hope you give The Portrait a look! I loved writing this book, and the only reason I used a pseudonym was to make sure I didn't confuse the die-hard romance fan with my other varied interests. Cassandra Austen is more of a book line or an imprint, versus a pen name.
Amazon and Goodreads reviews are most welcome!
December 20, 2018
A long, bumpy road to publication
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I can hardly believe it. My first novel is finally going out into the world.
It's been a very long journey, and there were so many distractions. I wrote The Portrait many years ago, when I was a young mother at home with two children. I had recently left my job and didn't know where I was headed, both literally and figuratively. We had moved into a ramshackle farmhouse, a family property where we thought we could stay “temporarily” until we could figure out what we were doing.
“Temporarily” has become twenty years.
I have so many things to say about this journey, it doesn't make sense to try to fit it into a single blog post or newsletter. But it has occurred to me that many of you are aspiring authors, and if my journey can serve as an inspiration or reality check (or both!) to you, I'll be happy to put all of it out there for you to read and think about.
For now, I am exhausted! Putting up an ebook is not the cakewalk that people would have you think it is. There are a lot of tiny details that need to be sorted out, and what's more, the sequence for getting everything done right isn't clear. Who knew that you could mess up your Amazon author page if you tried to claim it before you had a book to claim? Who knew that you couldn't get a proof copy from Ingram in anything less than two weeks? (after my pub date!) Who knew that upload errors in Ingram are “normal” and can be ignored? Arrgh.
I'm going to hunker down for a little bit as I try to get ready for the holidays, three birthdays, and a novella that should have been done by now! I'll be back on pub day with my Amazon link and (I hope) a free novella for anyone who wants to take a look at my alter ego.
July 22, 2018
Weekend Music 2: Jake Shimabukuro
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How can anyone not love Jake Shimabukuro?
I wrote about Taimane Gardner yesterday so I'm continuing the local talent and ukulele theme just for another day. There are so many things that I could say about Jake Shimabukuro, but first, here's a taste from one of my favorite Youtube channels, Hi*Sessions:
I also posted his version of “Kawika” a few weeks ago.
I've known about Jake for years–of course! How can you be from Hawaii and not know about Jake! He's not only a virtuosic ukulele player, but he has a loyal mainland following. This past spring we discovered that he was performing at a concert venue that we love, the Flying Monkey up in Plymouth, NH. Plymouth isn't super close to where we live, but I was intrigued. Jake Shimabukuro? Playing a small venue in a northern college town? Really? So we grabbed tickets and zipped up there.
I was amazed–a sold out performance! The crowd was wild for Jake's blend of Hawaiian and contemporary ukulele, and there was a mix of old, young, and families. After the performance, Jake spent time in the lobby chatting with fans. It almost felt as if Jake were visiting friends. And I think in a manner of speaking, he was, because he returned in July to another small New Hampshire venue, although I missed that one because of a Panic! at the Disco and Hayley Kiyoko concert (more on that in a future post!).
At the end of the concert he invited the audience to pull out their phones (really? yes!) in order to find the lyrics to Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody” (my daughter said indignantly, “I don't need to look that up!”) and sing along to his rendition, which we all did, loudly!
July 21, 2018
Weekend Music 1: Taimane Gardner
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I discovered a fabulous virtuoso ukulele player: Taimane Gardner. She does amazing genre mash-ups–her style is almost classical, but she takes that way beyond expectations.
I first discovered her on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Hi Sessions. Here's the first piece I ever saw her perform, “Fire:”
Everyone, this channel is TO DIE FOR. The backdrop is spectacular and the music is superb. It's a wonderful way to showcase local Hawaii talent. I can't believe I grew up with this as “normal,” now that I've spent many years living on the mainland. The contrast is stark–in Hawaii this kind of musical activity is available everywhere, whereas here on the mainland I feel I have to be a little bit of a groupie or hobbyist in order to live my life with a music-centric focus.
Anyway, back to Taimane Gardner. Her website is beautiful, featuring video right on the home page. While she is almost goddess-like in the way she tells her musical stories, one of my very favorite music videos show cases the local Hawaii lifestyle so well, it takes me back to my days as a kid, when the most important things in life involved the beach, sunscreen, and a picnic lunch. I was never a surfer, but dang it, maybe I should correct that!
