It's a magical world

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.

This is a really, really excellent book, clearly the exception that proves the rule that the Pulitzer Prize often goes to the totally undeserving.

Probably everyone knows by now that this book is about the eponymous overweight Dominican nerd from New Jersey of the title. Let me tell you, if you haven't read this book--particularly if you're in a position to get the genre, and particularly Tolkien, references--you really, really should. As the late skywardprodigal pointed out, Oscar's very existence is a rebuke to a lot of the nastier myths about (the lack of) SFF fans of color, and if only for that reason, it's worth reading. But there's a lot more going on here than that, and I don't want to overlook any of it.

The book tells the story of Oscar from the perspective of his one friend, Yunior, but Oscar's story isn't just his own--it's the story of his sister Lola, of his mother Beli, of his grandmother La Inca, of their family, of Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic itself. Unlike many other readers, I did get about a microsecond of Dominican history through reading Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, whose protagonists the Maribal sisters are also frequently name-checked in the footnotes.[1] Díaz goes deeper and much more explicitly into all the ways that Dominican history is fucked up, and it was interesting getting a comparative perspective on the Trujillo era, to say the least. More to the point, words fail at the sheer verve and pleasure of Díaz's writing, even when he's describing some of the most horrific practices of a horrific regime, and a horrific history. (Sidenote: I don't suppose it surprises anyone that Oscar's New Jersey and mine are almost totally different, but let me assure you, this is New Jersey, and Oscar and his sister are indisputably of New Jersey, and I could recognize New Jersey in their lives and even some of the places they spend those lives, and I really enjoyed that.)

Having skimmed most of the enthusiastic blurbs on the covers and endpapers, I actually suspect that most mainstream literary critics didn't get the real point of this book. ( No, I don't think riffing on Kurtz means the world has been saved. )

I think I dreamed about the hurricane this morning - not a nightmare, but definitely a dream. (I also dreamed about fighting as a Jedi in the Clone Wars on Sunday morning, so I also just haven't been sleeping well.)

My dad and our bird still had power and were fine as of about 9pm - high tide - tonight. Ditto my friends in South Jersey that I've checked in with, though I've not heard from all of them yet, and ditto my friends in New York on the Upper West Side, though again, I have friends in Brooklyn and elswehere I haven't heard from yet. I'm worried about my friends in Toms River, where the hurricane made landfall around 8pm - I talked to them at 3:45 their time today, and they were packing to go into the basement for the night to avoid the tropical storm-force winds and preparing to lose power. Their street abuts the bay, and it's never flooded, but this has been an event out of all proportion to past experiences. I could tell this morning when all of Atlantic City was flooded after the morning high tide that it was going to be categorically worse than anything anybody could remember, and that looks about right. I'm going to text them first thing tomorrow. (This is the problem with making decisions based on past experiences: they're of no use in the face of a path-breaking event, whether it be a hurricane or a genocide, but that's another post.) Currently viewing with concern the situation at Oyster Creek, though with any luck the tide will recede and avert this particular potential catastrophe.

I feel like I should be there, though I couldn't do anything else if I were. Stay safe, everyone, and let us know that you're okay.

I was lazy this break and didn't get to any of my intended destinations in Old City--I did stop by my old orchestra and see some people, and I saw my friend J for lunch in between her interviews at the APA conference, and I also wound up hanging out withshveta_writes and solanine at the launch party for K.M. Walton's novel Cracked in Chester. I couldn't even tell you the last time I've been that far down the Blue Route; it has to be high school, when we played away field hockey games at Westtown.

But I did go to the best gelato place in the States, Capogiro, and my friend M and I had sushi at Raw, which I really like, dodging Mummers straggling back from the parade all day, and I did see snow flurries in between getting a $76 parking ticket (thank you, Philadelphia). I'm still not sure what the best coffee shop in Philly might be--I like Old City Coffee and La Colombe a lot, but I'm also a fan of Ultimo Coffee down in South Philly. I finally got down to the place in South Jersey on the espresso map, Crescent Moon Coffee and Tea Company, for a writing date with shveta_writes. I haven't been to Mullica Hill since elementary school, so of course I thought, oh, the indie coffee shop will be in one of these lovely converted Victorian homes on Main Street! No, it being South Jersey, the excellent indie coffee shop is in the strip mall a mile outside of town. Let that be a lesson to you, young Jedi.

You can't find a whole head of lettuce in supermarkets in Jersey in winter to save your life, but it's home.

The peerless saxophonist and key member of The E Street Band, Clarence Clemons, has died at the age of 69.

Fuck. Just, fuck. I grew up on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to the extent that I tried to deny it and only realized just how awesome they were and how much I loved them when I moved out of Jersey to college in Minnesota. Clarence Clemons is an irreplacable talent, and we're all poorer without him.

ETA: Appreciations from The NY Times and The New Yorker. The New Yorker's is better. /eta

His last performance is probably in Lady Gaga's newest video, "The Edge of Glory," which I embed below.

Black, Holly. White Cat. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010.

So I heard Holly Black talk about the genesis of this book and this series, The Curse-Workers, in her Guest of Honor speech at Sirens and, as well as being utterly hilarious, her speech definitely made me glad that I had this book waiting for me at home in my room. (Yeah, you don't even want to know how many books I have here in my room.) And it's good. 

In brief, a certain segment of the population is born with the ability to work curses on others via their hands--but each worker can only work one type of curse, and each curse creates blowback directly in the worker, so that death-workers, for example, are always liable to lose fingers. To make things even more complicated, Prohibition outlawed curse-working in the States, and of course, to deal with that, workers have formed organized crime families.

( When a white cat crosses your path... )

I am not really a very good American, if we define a good American as someone who spends all her income on consumerist crap and wants a car and a house in the suburbs. I want less crap, out of the suburbs, and prefer to ride trains rather than drive a car, much though I like driving itself too much. The only attraction owning a house holds for me is that a house could probably fit all my books. Probably.

That said, the house I would buy for myself in a heartbeat if I could is for sale, and it could be mine for only $1.69 million.

This house is worth living in Haddonfield for, you guys. Here's the street view--it's hard to convey just how awesome the house is, the sweep of the hill up from the street; the listing photo is taken too close to really convey that.

*sigh*

THE THEOLOGIAN'S TALE: ELIZABETH

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I
"Ah, how short are the days! How soon the night overtakes us!

In the old country the twilight is longer; but here in the forest

Suddenly comes the dark, with hardly a pause in its coming,

Hardly a moment between the two lights, the day and the lamplight;

Yet how grand is the winter! How spotless the snow is, and perfect!"

---

( Of course I have an opinion )

Tonight I made soup, and washed the dishes, and picked up three books from the library. I feel like there's something I'm forgetting to talk about, but damned if I can remember what.

So instead let me just take the opportunity to say that Kamikaze Girls (the book) is AWESOME. I love Momoko so much, she is so great! Ichigo is great too, but Momoko is first in my heart because she is the narrator. I am totally going to try to find some of Novala's other books (in Japanese, for great kanji virtue) at Book-Off on Saturday. Also the book is hilarious, which is not something I can actually say all that often. Momoko, I ♥ you!

Oh yeah, I started reading a book called Pioneer Women of Historic Haddonfield last night, and I am amused that I can tell that 95% of the chapter on Elizabeth Haddon is lies, discriminately salted with facts and the odd detail that rings true. (Who would have thought the Haddonfield Historical Society would be a comparative paragon of truth and scholarship?) Also apparently Longfellow wrote a poem about Elizabeth Haddon? Yes I'm going to post that on here for NPM, and I'm not sorry, not at all. She was awesome too, though luckily for my purposes there's far too little in the historical record about her to write anything like a biography.

The Young Victoria. Dir. Jean-Marc Vallée, 2009.

I didn't really have expectations for this movie, but I knew I had to see it, and it turned out to be appropriate for Valentine's Day: Albert and Victoria's Epic Love Story.

The C19th and the Victorian Age have never really been my thing, but very recently I've become very interested in Victoria herself, since I am planning an alternate history in which she never existed. For all these reasons I found the politics surrounding Victoria's accession and early reign more interesting than Victoria and Albert themselves, though the movie made them seem fairly intelligent, and fairly realistic about the realities of royalty at the time, at least by the end, and I was quite interested in the portrayal of their uncle King Leopold of Belgium, since he was at one point in line to be Prince Consort of England. I was disappointed, though, that the politics dropped out of the movie's storyline as it progressed. Unsurprisingly, the movie takes a fairly benign view of monarchy as an institution, though it also provides an intriguing snapshot of that era when Parliament had wrested power firmly from the throne but the Lords still retained the premiership. The movie also doesn't focus much on Victoria and Albert's social policy views aside from vague talk about improving conditions for the poor, which is again unsurprising but also disappointing, due to everything I've heard about Albert's purported social conservativism and his influence thereby on the age's mores. But the costumes were pretty! (Thanks to damned_colonial I could tell that Albert liked linen shirts.) And the acting was good across the board--Paul Bettany rocks his mutton chops and his role as Lord Melbourne, and Emily Blunt was great as HM the Queen. About twenty minutes in I realized that Marc Strong, whom we just saw as Lord Blackwood in Sherlock Holmes, was playing Sir John Conroy, and it was like the world was reflecting my obsessions back at me. (No, really: I was writing more Holmes fanfic in my notebook until the lights went down.) Art and life, stay separate!

...They don't, though. Every time I ride the train to Philly, I pass the graveyard in which Walt Whitman is buried, and I am struck again by a recurring idea that I have: Walt Whitman rises from the dead and saves Camden! Obviously there are a lot of things wrong with this idea, starting with the obvious, but it will not go away. In my defense, "I dreamed I saw a city invincible" is an immortal (if bowdlerized) line, and it's graven on Camden's City Hall. Perhaps, someday...

I have written before about how much I'm looking forward to N.K. Jemisin's debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, yes? Yes! Well, Jemisin (nojojojo) is offering an autographed copy of THTK and a divine tuckerization in the third book of the trilogy at helptheproject, which is cool, yes? Yes!

Equally cool, Jemisin has also posted her awesome, awesome story "The Effluent Engine" on her website as part of A Story for Haiti. Do yourself a favor and go read it now. Seriously, it is awesome, and not just because it is lesbian steampunk; I truly think that this story is perhaps the example par excellence of both steampunk and alternate history done right. (For context, naraht has an interesting post about [alternate] history and oppression here.)

Speaking of steampunk, everyone knows about dmp and her DW, Beyond Victoriana, right? It is always fascinating, but in particular I want to read the early 20thC Chinese novel mentioned in the last post. Maybe when I grow up I can translate it.

---

I just spent an hour shoveling. I'm told it's the second-most snow ever in our neck of the woods, though I'm sure that here in Jersey we got more than the 28.5 inches recorded at the Philly international airport (or maybe it just feels that way. This snow is heavy). As compensation, the purple and pink sunset over the fields behind my house was lovely. I was planning to go to the Dinotopia Family Day and see James Gurney at the Delaware Art Museum tomorrow, but I cherish my doubts as to whether the plows will come through in time. We'll see.