Girls kick ass, literally and less so

[starlady]

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.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Pioneer Women of Historic Haddonfield makes me giggle. Also, please post the Longfellow poem; I love Longfellow!

[starlady]

I read it last night and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I think my image of Longfellow is entirely derived from "Hiawatha."

Yeah, seriously, this book, I can't even tell you. In the second paragraph of the Haddon chapter it skips back to the Saxon kingdoms and then directly back to the reign of James II by way of the Battle of Hastings to make the claim that her father had ancestors in said battle. To which I say: BS!

[seekingferret]

Longfellow is a lot more than just "Hiawatha" and "Paul Revere's Midnight Ride". And even "Hiawatha"... yes, it's appropriative and at times hokey, but it takes European verse structures and Iroquois hero tales and finds a middle ground that works as a hybrid and that's a pretty mind-bendingly cool thing in itself.

But the poem that made me a Longfellow fan is "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport", which I cherish as my favorite outsider's view on Jewish culture.

[starlady]

...Wow, so I guess Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket", which is one of my favorite poems and examinations of Quakerism from the outside, was a reply to Longfellow. Double points to Longfellow! (Though, he was totally wrong w/r/t Israel.)

And yes: he's good at what he does, it's not his fault that times have changed and left him mostly behind.

[inkstone]

I really, really love Momoko's voice in Kamikaze Girls. It's so charmingly snotty and self-absorbed.

[starlady]

I love her so much.

Also there's such fascinating things going on in the background vis-a-vis class and social status, it's amazing. "Rococo is anarchy", I ♥ you, Momoko.