Solitaire Book Club: FAME

FAME by Justine Bateman.I finished this book a few days ago but it has taken me some time to sit down and write this post, perhaps because the book is a bit confounding and I had a hard time getting a handle on my response. In fact, FAME is pretty much a hot mess, but in the best way, if that makes any sense. It's partly a memoir of a famous person, although Bateman opens by saying she  "fucking hate[s] memoirs". It's partly an analysis of how being famous affects an individual, complete with citations from scholarly sources. It's partly a cultural study of the role fame plays in modern (western, although this is left unspecified) society. And it seems it is partly a visceral, foul-mouthed, vibrant catharsis of a life fraught with challenges that are all artifice but nonetheless real. 

All I can say is that I was never bored and Bateman's self-assessment that she became a more interesting person as her "fame temperature" came down is spot on. I'll be reading her next book.

Solitaire Book Club: The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions

The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kerry Greenwood. I have watched a few of the Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on some some streaming service or other, so I thought this collection of short stories about the Twenties-era Australian flapper-sleuth would be a nice way to dip into the written version of Phryne Fisher.

Greenwood clearly distinguishes between TV-Phryne and Book-Phryne, but I found that difference mostly in the supporting cast and continuity details; the spirit of Phryne herself seemed to carry very well from the page to the screen: self-assured, competent, stylish, and unapologetically libidinous. Greenwood describes creating her as a sort-of female version of Simon Templar or James Bond, with the same verve and drive, and in that she has succeeded. Phryne Fisher is a woman to be reckoned with, for sure.

What is less successful is the short-short mystery genre (the 17 stories in the volume average 14 pages). The mysteries are either too easy, leaving one to wonder why Phyrne was needed to solve them, or too oblique and relying on a bit of information not revealed to the reader. But I guess it was not really about the well-crafted whodunit it here - it was more a chance to spend some time with this formidable woman and be immersed in the Melbourne of  century ago. And that was a delight.

 

Solitaire Book Club: Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I am usually not a big fan of the horror genre, but I was captivated by this novel's protagonist, a sort-of mid-century Mexican Miss Fisher. Instead of investigating mundane murders,  Noemi Taboada is trying to uncover the secrets of her cousin's illness, her cousin's charming but vaguely menacing new husband, and his family home, which resonates with a history of acts that are perhaps both unnatural and supernatural. Although it threatens to veer into literary territory from time to time, it is mostly a straight-ahead melodrama, peppered with moldy rooms, misty graveyards, taciturn servants, a sympathetic but weak mycologist, and ancient rituals. Good stuff.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is that I intend to look up Moreno-Garcia's other fiction.

Solitaire Book Club: The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse

The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse by Charlie Mackesy. I have never understood folks who spend a lot of their time writing negative pieces about stuff from art or popular culture that they don't like. I mean, if you don't like it, just put it aside and move on to something else. With the exception of my exploration of Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, these book reports (do you remember doing book reports?) have concerned books which I liked well enough to finish and so are generally pretty positive. I am going to break that streak here.

I got The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse because one of the blurbs on The Council of Animals referred to it. It is a short fable of a boy who keeps company with the three eponymous animals, but beyond that superficial structural resemblance there is little similarity between the two books. The Council of Animals was complex and sophisticated and it raised as many questions as it answered; The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse is naive, simplistic, and full of vapid observations and empty exhortations, about as deep as All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. If that's your thing, well, you do you, but for me it was all fluff and no substance.

It is almost a graphic novel with many wonderful gestural drawings in ink that were a pleasure to look at, which is why I finished the thing; if only one could ignore the words.

Starting to fall

So, I looked at the weather page today and the extended forecast takes us right up to the equinox.

It looks like we're going to have one last gasp of summer weather and then the long slide into the gray season begins.

I am trying to not be regretful and to just appreciate the good summer that we had - reliably good weather, no heat domes, and no smoke emergencies. We need the wet to keep in green, right? But besides the weather, we also have the change in daylight looming.

As I write this, it's about 5:40 am. I have been up for an hour - a bit of an early start, thanks to Selkie, but not that much. I have been doing my usual first-thing-in-the-morning business at the computer and just went back into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. It looked like this:

I was honesty surprised at just how dark it was, so I checked and sunrise was still almost a full hour away.

Now, I am not going to rail against the astronomical inevitability of the seasonal change in the LOD (length of day), although it does seem to surprise us every year; rather, I am beginning to wonder whether I need to be getting up this early. When I started my work day at 7:00 or 7:30 am, it was nice to have a couple hours beforehand for the aforementioned business as well as breakfast and whatnot. But I no longer start work at 7:30... or at any specific time. So why am I still getting up early?

The cat? He certainly contributes, but I could probably figure out a way to manage that. Habit? That certainly plays into it, but I am not sure whether it is just psychological accustomedness or if it is actually a circadian rhythm thing. I do get a lot done while Coco is asleep, but I get plenty done while she is up as well - over the pandemic, we've have gotten pretty good at staying out of each other's work-from-home way.

So, I dunno. I do know I need to start leaving some lights on.

Laboring

 

So, growing up I can remember reading copies of The Butcher Workman. This newsletter / magazine was in our home because my father was a proud member of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.

In my own working life, I have literally sat on both sides of the table as both labor and management, and as a long-time public employee I have been a union member in several of my jobs.

It's easy to look at the numbers and see that since the eighties, with the ascendance of neo-liberalism, American workers have been losing ground constantly. The current increase in pro-unionism seems to be an enough-is-enough response to that.

Today is Labor Day, the one day set aside for capitalists to pretend they care and to honor the American worker. But we would do well to remember this:  the holiday was established by unions. 

You could look it up.

So maybe instead of just saying Happy Labor Day...

... we could remember the source...

... and continue to support the struggle.

Solitaire Book Club: Portait of an Unknown Lady

Portrait of an Unknown Lady by Maria Gainza, translated form the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. A quirky art aficionado, inspired by tales from her eccentric art appraiser friend and mentor, investigates the life of a mysterious art forger, who copied the works of a legendary painter. As the story unfolds, the measure of desire and the texture of the ineffable is revealed through the lives of these four exceptional women. Magical realism without any magic, the book is lyrical and poetical in its celebration of both the sublime and mundane.