A Slice of Beauty

I was raised Protestant. But, there are two things that cause me to cross myself in the same light as a devout Catholic: the mention of Borders, bookstore extraordinaire, and the mention of Mr. Sisters, an ephemerally exotic—and exotically ephemeral—gay nightclub between the university and downtown.

(Allow me to stop and mention here that the gay bars in Orlando are all in the general vicinity of downtown, with the exception of a leather bar off Edgewater. Meanwhile, there’s a straight bar directly across the street from the university. And, probably three more that line the pavements of the main thoroughfare that connects UCF with City Beautiful.)

These were my haunts, my loves. My brand loyalty is through the roof. And once I find a roofing company that I like, I’m sure this won’t be so disconcerting. But it was back when Borders was operational that I found this exceptional novel, Little Bee.

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave, was sitting on the shelf of the top sellers list. I was, at the time, picking out top sellers for an independent study course. (My course director said to me, “choose the books you want to read and send me the list and I’ll approve it.” I nearly fainted. I thought, This is what graduate school is supposed to be like. This is academic heaven. I have arrived.) I stared at the cover. I flipped it over to the back and saw nothing in terms of plot description. I thought, what the hell. I brought the book up to the register. The girl, about 19 and built like a highly proteined concrete wall looked down at me and said, “Have you read this yet?”

And I looked up into her acne pocked face, at her dark brown eyes, and said, “No I haven’t. I was thinking about getting it for school, but I don’t know what it’s about.”

And she said, “I just finished it. I’m not going to tell you what it’s about. It’s really good. You won’t regret buying this book.”

I had felt uncertain, up until that point. But with the fervor and the finality that she suggested I purchase Little Bee, I relented. Maybe I was afraid that if I didn’t, she would backhand me across the counter and send me flying. Maybe underneath it all I felt like she was a fellow reader suggesting a book that had changed her life and would change mine too. Maybe I was too lazy or too embarrassed to take the book back to the shelf. But one way or another, I bought it, and after reading it, I can safely say the same.

I’m not going to tell you what this book is about.
It’s definitely awesome.
You won’t regret buying this book.










R.I.P. Borders and Mr. Sisters.

You will be missed.

It Probably Had a Bump on the Model

There’s this great little second hand store on Dale Mabry back in Tampa called “New to You,” and I feel like that pretty much sums up my history with nonfiction. There’s this professor at UCF who insists that nonfiction is this great new genre—this avant garde literary frontier—and maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s sort of like the Reality TV version of cable, where we can’t help but pick up a memoir the way we flip the television stations to MTV, or Bravo, or Fox, or (etc., etc.)

Or maybe it’s just always been there and I’m just now picking it up, the way just the other day I tried espresso for the first time and that night (sometime between 2 and 3 in the morning) I cleaned and rearranged my entire room (I had been meaning to get around to it, but a delicious cup—emphasis on delicious here; I had no idea it would be so tasty—but a delicious cup later, I was all of a sudden Superman). I’ve known about espresso for a long time, but I never got around to trying it until I went to dinner with Lorri Lores, this magnificent magical realism writer, and her husband offered me some after dessert. Maybe nonfiction is just new to me.

But one way or another, someone recommended I read It Looked Different on the Model, a collection of linked essays, by Laurie Notaro. And over the winter break, I did! Get a load of this:

It was a lovely evening, a gathering of grad students and their spouses, significant others, and partners (you have to say all three). The sun was letting go of the brightest part of the day and people were chatting and having conversation when I looked up and saw a young woman several feet away ease the strap of her top down—like she was in a dirty dressing room at Ross—pull her arm through it, and then bring her boob out. Uncovered. Exposed. Unabashed. Then it flopped like a fish and hung loosely, like it had a hook through it, while she had a conversation with two other people. There it remained, exposed to the elements and accessible to anyone who needed to wipe their hands.
I don’t know where the baby was. It wasn’t on her, that’s for sure. I don’t know if the baby ever came in for a landing or what. The baby was not in the general vicinity when the incident began. Maybe the baby had a GPS device implanted and this was all prep work, but I think it would have been more considerate if she had a visual of the baby before I had a visual of her. And the boob sat there, and sat there, and sat there. It actually behaved very quietly for the ten minutes it was left to roam free in my field of vision before I could talk to someone else and face a different direction.

That was Laurie experiencing a super awkward moment at a party in Oregon. She’s hilarious. A real lighthearted read.

But, that’s sort of the thing—I thought perhaps it was a little bit too lighthearted. The entire book is funny moment after funny moment after funny moment. So much so that I think they started to lose their punch.

Maybe it’s because I gravitate towards the stand up shows of Margaret Cho, or because I devoured Kathy Griffin’s memoir Official Book Club Selection because it was equally personal and catty, but I felt like Notaro’s book didn’t have the meat of a strong piece. (My thesis director would insist that what’s she’s lacking in is conflict.) It’s kind of like watching a reality TV show—you know you’re in for a scandalous ride, but you’re not really leaving with anything of value once the show is over. That’s how I would describe Notaro’s latest essay collection out of a long line of essay collections. It’s only fairly awesome.

But, of course, maybe that’s the formula. She is, after all, a best selling author. Flip side though, Snooki does make thousands per episode she does of Jersey Shore.

Does that make her Emmy worthy?

Crotch Thought

“His Stories...pierce and leap, are always bitingly funny, and are so, so alive....Klam is telling the truth while almost no one else is.”—Dave Eggars

“A knockout.”—The Oregonian

“Ruthlessly insightful...Klam has a major bead on women.”—Harper’s Bazaar

A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

An Esquire Best Book of the Year

A New York Times Notable Book

A Kansas City Star Book of the Year

All raving reviews (I mean, sure, no one posts their rejections on their jacket covers, but this book has received notable praise). So why am I giving Matthew Klam’s Sam The Cat: And Other Stories a non-awesome review?

It goes like this: there are seven stories in Klam’s collection, six exclusively from the heterosexual male perspective, with the last story being a stab at the omniscient narrator. All of the stories revolve around the protagonist and their girlfriends/fiancees/wives; they’re cheating on them, ignoring them, trying to get them to have an abortion, or so emphatically in love with them they’re bringing fake guns to their girlfriend’s door just to scare them a little after they’ve had a fight. (Men of real caliber, am I right? Who else is really turned on right now?) They feel up other women on the beach. They eat their boss’ hooha on the ground of a construction site. This is the soon-to-be-married crowd. No wonder marriage doesn’t work; half the partnership consists of a straight guy and his penis.

Ok, ok, I guess that isn’t fair. But it does bring me to my biggest concern with Sam The Cat: And Other Stories—several of the men depicted in these stories take absolutely no responsibility for their dicks. It just gets hard on its own accord. It just inserts itself into places without their having any control over it. Oops; broke their marriage vows. Wasn’t their fault—their penis made them do it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Men can get sexually aroused against their will, same as women. But, just because the men in these stories get sexually aroused doesn’t mean they need to act upon those hormones and the blood surging to their crotches. They could go cool off. Frustrating, but a bit more responsible.

The flip side to this is the outdated concern these protagonists experience when their significant others get aroused:

She lay between the rows of corn on the bedspread and let me touch her and wanted more.

‘I like that,’ she said, pulling at me.

It terrified me when she acted like a slut. I said, ‘Let me get unbuckled.’

Because, as we all know, it’s fine when a man wants to screw some girl, but when a woman wants to get screwed? What a slut. And from another story:

At the end they’d done it so hard—Rich fucked Gynnie so hard he forgot he was marrying her.

According to this world view, you can’t fuck your wife really hard because you’re marrying her. Marriage is supposed to kill the sex life, and after the “I do”s you’re only supposed to make sweet, missionary style love to each other once every two weeks (optimally, on or after pay day). This is perhaps a truer reason for failed marriages; people who are sexually voracious don’t just lose their sexual drive once they enter a social-economical agreement. The woman who liked to be spanked will still want a good spanking after she’s married, just as the guy who liked to be tied up won’t drop his ropes in the trash once he’s found the one he wants to be with for the rest of his life. The people who believe that their sexual enjoyment has to stop once their enter marriage vows wonder why their relationship isn’t fulfilling them the way it did before. To stop doing the sexual activities that a couple performs before marriage would be to seriously maim the sex life thereafter, and considerably lead to a less fulfilling marriage. To promise wild and zany shower sex with the lover before the chapel would be to imply wild and zany shower sex after, simply because it’s something that they both enjoy. And if one of the pair doesn’t enjoy it, then they had better speak up, or expect soap in unwelcomed places until someone dies or files divorce papers.

And then gets themselves a divorce ring! I sort of want to get married and divorced, just so I could wear a one of these.

...*sigh* Jewelry. But yes. Where were we?

Sam The Cat: And Other Stories adheres to a certain group of men of which I wouldn’t be interested in obtaining entry to. Their ideals about women appear old-fashioned and tired (“major bead on women,” Harper’s Bazaar? Really? Did you not read the collection?).

Unless you’re the kind of guy who thinks about his dick and where he could stick it every six seconds, I probably wouldn’t recommend this book. Not so awesome.

--

And by the way, it took me forever to grasp the placement of the title on cover. I didn’t realize it was at that location, in that shape, for a reason. Here’s me, reading this book all over town, with people giving me off-colored sideways glances in Starbucks and Pei Wei...kind of embarrassing, really.

Seduction by Goldfish

It's completely normal to read about men who dress up in drag, complete with live goldfish swimming around in their plastic boobs, right?

Sounds normal to me. Sound normal to you?

I'm actually quite shocked at the amount of books I read before I stumbled upon the memoir category. I don't think I touched a single memoir (especially not if it was leisure reading) until graduate school. "Memoir" was synonymous with "biography," which in turn was synonymous with "old but politically important dead guy who may/may not have had venereal disease." The venereal disease was always the selling point (not to name names, Communist leader Mao Zedong). People's parents are born, they are born, they do great things, they die, a book is written. Not a record I want to reread on a Saturday afternoon. But every once in a while, someone does something interesting instead of great. In Josh Kilmer-Purcell's case, it was get perpetually trashed, dress up in drag, and date a drugged up male escort in his memoir I Am Not Myself These Days.

All of a sudden, Saturday afternoon just got a little bit more scandalous, am I right?

We follow Kilmer-Purcell through his day job at an advertising firm, and his nights as drag queen "Aquadisiac" (or Aqua for short) in the gutter laden gem that is New York City, equipped the entire way with caustic wit and a large glass of vodka on the rocks.

I think it's a little presumptuous on his part to think that I would want to talk to him anyway. I mean, sure, I went home with him, probably slept with him, ate breakfast with him, and wore his clothes to work the next day. None of this I see as necessarily flirtatious on my part. All in a night's work as far as I'm concerned. But there's something flirty/sexy about his voice that's appealing to my inner-romantic comedy actress. Then again, maybe it's just his penthouse apartment I'm hearing. My inner-gold digger frequently beats the crap out of my inner-Meg Ryan.

Instead of beginning at conception and ending at death (of either Kilmer-Purcell or his alter-egtress Aqua), the piece covers the span of time in which Kilmer-Purcell dates Jack, an escort who at times would bring his work home with him, leaving Aqua to come home at 4 or 5 in the morning after doing a round of shows at the nightclubs and finding a middle aged man hogtied in the foyer, or a trio of men having an orgy on the couch.

They say love is a many splendored thing. Whether that's a diamond these days or shattered glass, you'd have to tell me.

What makes this an interesting read is Kilmer-Purcell's treatment of the surreal quality of his life. He's not shocked by the crack den in the kitchen, but he is disturbed by the acrid smell of the fumes. He's not surprised at coming to in a train with his left boot and purse missing, but he is incredibly tense at the prospect of hosting his mother while she's in town on vacation. He grapples constantly with the balance of his current "abnormal" life and the respectable extra-credit student he was raised to be. He just wants to say the right thing. Maybe this is what makes his memoir so relatable.

It's pretty awesome.

--

Also, the TV station Bravo has announced that they're going to be turning this novel into a television series, so look for that to come out.

Dangerous Doll Dilemmas

Omg, throwback!

So, you know how there are those cultural icons that we all recognize and "get" even if we haven't checked out the original? We all know the line, "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," but was it Shakespeare or Yeats or wrote it? (It was Alfred Lord Tennyson, in case you were curious.)

Well, this month's novel is one of those. It's Valley of the Dolls, darling.

Valley of the Dolls was first published in 1966 by Jacqueline Susann. 1966. That's kind of way before my time. Super Mario didn't even exist yet. (Do you see how history can be a cruel mistress?) But people reference this novel left and right; "oh God, this is like a scene out of Valley of the Dolls," people say, especially when referencing one of those tragic soap operas. *"Nadia's Theme" starts playing in the background*

But what is Valley of the Dolls really about?

I'll tell you, so you'll know, and you can impress your friends. It's a novel about three young women, Anne, Jennifer, and Neely, who work in the arts and discover the helpfulness of little dolls (codeword for pills) that help them lose weight or sleep. Anne is the most formal of the trio, and is more or less the main character. Jennifer is a sweet girl known only for her amazing body, which causes her to question her intelligence capacity, and Neely is a young woman trying to make it big in Broadway and Hollywood.

The novel is a clear reflection on another cultural icon we have (that I won't try to explain here): the feminine mystique. All the girls really want to do (except for Anne, who feels crappy about the fact) is get married and bang out kids. That's the goal, and career comes second. Way to reach for the sky er, uterus, right? That's what makes this novel so interesting; it's Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in fiction form.

One thing that Susann does that really kind of shocked the pants off me was use the "f" word. And she used it a LOT. Not the f**k one, but the f*g one. Consider this exert from one of the secondary characters, Helen, a famous but lonely actress:

"Oh, I can always scare up someone. My designer will take me, or Bobby Eaves, my accompanist. But they're both fags. That's the trouble--no real men these days. Plenty of fags, but no men. I hate to go to an opening with a faggot. It's like wearing a sign: 'This is all I could get.'"

(Welcome to the entertainment industry, toots.)

With such a pottymouth, it's no wonder that this novel was so salacious, on top of scandalous infidelity moments, including that of one of the men sleeping around on his wife with other men. But in terms of narrative structure and social issues raised without bashing the reader across the face with them, Susann performs an excellent job. For being such an old (and therefore potentially outdatable) novel, it's certainly worth the read in one's free time to consider more than just it's cultural quote. It's rating? Totally Awesome.

--

But as a warning, totally don't skip out on the novel and only watch the film. I watched the film, and it was a bit of a disappointment. They changed the ending entirely, so, don't try to pass off as having read the novel and have just watched the film. You might get called on it. And barbiturates may get shoved down your throat.

The Little Black Dress That Could

So, I've decided that once a month, I'm going to do a book review!

What? People get paid to do this. I'm doing it for free. Be grateful. God.

Seriously though, lately I've been reading some pretty awesome books, and since I'm reading, I figure, I might as well suggest some books if I find them worth suggesting.

The first novel I'm going to review is Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is Rhoda Janzen's first novel. But fear not - the woman totally comes to bat facing the right direction. In fact, she has experience; she's a Poet Laureate (this means that if her poetry was a car, it would be a Lexus) and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California. So, as you might expect, it could help to keep a dictionary handy. I learned words that didn't even show up on the 'top 500 GRE vocabulary words study guide'.

I'd be really, really scared if Rhoda took to working for the GRE. Seriously.

But, her saving grace (besides spacing these words out so as not to make you feel incredibly stupid, as you are apt to do when reading the work of a Ph.D. - and take that little bit of advice to heart, from me to you, as a person who's studying underneath 3 or 4 of them on a weekly basis) is that she is absolutely hilarious. She's got gall, you guys. And any writer who's willing to make fun of themselves, and actually be good at it, is worth checking out.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is a fictional memoir piece - in the same style as Elizabeth Gilbert and David Sedaris - about how Rhoda falls apart and heads back to her Mennonite home after her husband Nick leaves her for a man he met on Gay.com. (Oops, right?) The quirkiness of Rhoda's crazy family stands out in stark contrast to her liberalized educational life as a college professor, with the help of Rhoda's well crafted writing. She pulls out several of the unorthodox stops to really keep you interested, and she's just insightful enough to make you smile a little bit at the end of each chapter. You won't want to put the book down. And when you do, your mom will pick it up while she's visiting, read the back, and say, "this sounds funny - I want to read it when you're done."

And then you'll have to say, "Sure mom," but hide the novel because, even though Rhoda is anything but homophobic, her husband still leaves her for a man on Gay.com. There's just no getting around that:

One day Nick came home with a pair of Yohji Yamamoto gloves that had cost $385. This was in 1996, mind you. Granted, these gloves were wondrously conceived: over an interior pebbled leather glove, a leather mitt unzipped and folded back into a gauntlet of sorts. It was just the kind of witty sartorial gesture that a dandified socialite might affect, very Oscar Wilde, if Oscar Wilde would have ditched the lily and firmed up the tummy and got full-sleeve tatts designed by the famed Los Angeles artist Bob Roberts. Nick wasn't a dandified socialite, though. He was a grad student. We were supposed to be living on the ten bucks an hour I was making as a receptionist at the law firm.

The man clearly sucks cooooooo...pper piping. *ahem*. Which he does. Metaphorically.

But my absolute favorite sentence from the novel is this: At twenty all I wanted to do was read philosophy, feminism, and fashion. Oh, didn't we all, Rhoda? Didn't we all?

That is why this novel is forthwith gaining the rating, "totally awesome." She's smart, she's classy, and she's not afraid to turn her mother down when she tells her that her very Mennonite first cousin is on the market after she gets divorced.

Her website.