the primrose path

I've finally read Fay Weldon's controversial What Makes Women Happy and I rather liked it. Aunt Fay weighs in on moral reasoning with her trademark wicked wry (rye!) and wit. The last chapters on 'Saints & Sinners' were particularly moving:

Death, bereavement, loneliness and shame: these are the four horses of the modern apocalypse. They circle our new reality, now we are people of the city and not the cave. Their riders, the horsemen, are a fearful lot: they are called despair, depression, isolation and self-doubt. But being so fearful they are easily unhorsed and its simple enough to get out of there way. It's just not nice to find them champing the grasses in your back garden. You need to do something.

What follows is a pragmatic guide to surviving inevitable mortal decay and moral contagion. If being good makes you happy and being happy makes you good a little solipsistic roll in the hay will not go amiss.

( Read more... )

Brother and I went to the mall to get a strip of photos from one of those instant photo machines. It's all digital now, which means the 'development' is almost instantaneous, but the process is still fun. You get two strips for $3. I seem to remember these being $1 for one strip when I was a kid, which means it's held its value. We sent a jokey card about 'family resemblance' with the pictures. Mom didn't get the joke, she commented on how much we looked like each other rather than our reference that our gawps and grimaces are a genetic legacy from her. But it was still very fun and appreciated and avoided some of the heavy sentimentality that often comes with the day. I sent her a book of poems about famous mothers and daughters (I also wrote a review to go with it, but for some reason they did not see fit to post it yet!) which touched her. Her FB update today was "To all of you who have mothers: remember to thank them for their strength and courage; their determination and audaciousness; and for their love for you! They did the best they could with what they had."

( Fay Weldon's Rhode Island Blues )

( Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman )

Splitting by Fay Weldon - Not sure what made me decide it was time for another dose of Weldon, (usually she's the antidote to overt sentimentalism) but this book about a divorced woman whose multiple personalities help her get through the crisis, bored me. Weldon is one of those writers who rewrites the same book over and over throughout her career. I love her sarcasmic wit and biting insight; but in the case of this particular book I recommend reading her autobiography Auto da Fay, instead. It's pretty much the same material, but worked over in a more interesting way. (Complete with narratorial split from those portions of her life that require psychological distance.)

Catherynne M. Valente: The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden - I've heard so many good things about this book, I read through my initial disgust at the overly adjective-laden style (purplish prose being one of my main objections to fantasy) and discovered I liked it. It was the Bear's Tale that won me over. I was kind of annoyed that there weren't more bears in the book total. I loved the idea of Bears-as-Astrologers. I enjoyed the nested tales. I liked Valente's pro-female read on fairytales. I liked the transformative element and focus on monsters. I would highly recommend the book to some of you (ashfae), but probably not mention it to others. I will definitely read the second volume, The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, which is due out Tuesday.

But I'm also a little disappointed that this seems to be the only way that fairy tales can now be published. The nesting at times seemed a little contrived, and I wondered if I'd like the tales more or less if they stood slightly more independently. I guess I'll have to wait until finishing the second volume to make up my mind. Recommended for those who enjoyed the fantastical elements of Sharon Shinn's The Shapechanger's Wife, an elegant little volume that I recommended to a great many of you.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale - This 'true crime' book about the murder of a three-year-old in mid-19C England was interesting because of everything that was NOT the murder. Summerscale covers the inner-workings (and inventories) of a Victorian home, the emergence of the detective, and the influences of this case had on literature.

Needless to say I adored the trivia in this book including the extremely high statistics on child murders in this era and how many people got away with it, weird legal proceedings, outrageous newspaper reports, and generally the sense that life then was not any better then it is now and was in many cases a heck of a lot worse.

But the best part of the book is the author's discussion of the impact this case had on literature from the period. (And of course early rumblings of what was to become the birth of psychology. I need to learn more about 'alienists.') This is one of those books that is the payoff for being a well-read person. I couldn't be written or read by anyone who didn't have some passing familiarity of 19C literature and it opened up some of those global connections I like to explore.

It also gave me nightmares about being a nanny in a household where children had been repeatedly murdered or disappeared. My job was to protect my charges from murder or vanishment; but as no one knew WHY the previous children had been harmed (or by whom) it turned me into a paranoid wreck. It was not unlike Turn of the Screw... I was afraid to sleep or let the children out of my sight for a second; but the dream offered one aspect of humor: Russell Crowe played some kind of visiting somebody who's always turning up at these country homes. The question was whether he was a sympathetic ear intended to soothe the nerves of a restless and over-imaginative governess, or a MURDERER!

Okay, guess how I spent my day? Doing absolutely nothing and absorbed in the nasty world of Fay Weldon.

( She May Not Leave by Fay Weldon )

( Abandoning Erica Jong's 'Fear of Flying' )

( A partial list of least-liked books. )

And if that weren't enough criticism for one day, now I have to go find a way to find a way to write a positive book review about a crappy book by an author I like. For some reason I don't find British Imperialism amusing on a solar system level. We are supposed to root for the Queen, and boo for the spiders, while the other alien civilizations are given status with Nesbit's Irish cooks and cannibals. At least she was LIVING in the British Empire when she wrote it. There is no excuse for creating this imperialist nonsense in this day and age. It seems especially dangerous when it's cute-ified for children to read.

Oh well, I didn't find Pullman's anti-religious rants easy to take either, but I still liked elements of His Dark Materials, though as an answer to Paradise Lost it was still a stretch. Why can't anyone understand that the key to Paradise is Lucifer's longing?