Just When You Hit 40K…
So Weasel Boy (which is, I’ve not yet said, a category romance containing were-wolverines) hit 40K recently, and I’m thinking of how I’m going to wrap it up. I am struggling with the urge to go back and excise bits that might not be working quite right. I can pretty much tell it’s a timesuck work-avoidance mechanism. The book is resistant, like they always are (for me) in the middle. The only way through is just to put one’s head down and get the damn words out.
In other news, I know I promised two winners to the Night Shift ARC contest. There is a winner for the short fiction contest–it’s Carla Demich’s smoking-hot short about Danny and Doreen. Unfortunately, I have so many other entries to go through for the other part of the contest, and such a tough choice to make, that I’ve narrowed it down to three and have to have a blind taste-test by the Teen to help me out. I’ll post later today with the winner–and congrats, Carla! All the short-fic entries were great, but Carla’s really blew everything out of the water.
It’s a lovely gray rainy day here, and I’ve finished a couple of books. The first was Mao, The Unknown Story.
This is a biography of Mao, but not your usual “the man was a Red saint” bio. For one thing, the picture presented of Mao Tse-Tung is that of a smart, functioning sociopath whose quest for power sacrificed literally everyone in his way and a great deal of his fellow countrymen as well. I could have done with a little more analysis of how such a military noob got control of armies, but I am well aware that it would have made an already-long book into a doorstop.
Mao seems to have risen to the level of his monumental self-love, double-dealing, and thirst for power. I have little difficulty believing the man was, for lack of a better term, an asshat. I also have little difficulty believing the controversy over the somewhat un-academic nature of the book’s structure and sources. But truth (or so-called objectivity) isn’t solely found in academia, and when you’re dealing with a repressive regime that will still kill to keep its founding myths endorsed, of course you’re not going to name your sources so the bloody hatchet men can find them.
I would have like a bit more about how exactly Mao kept power in the Party, but I’m not familiar enough with the Communist apparatus exported in the 30s-50s or with Chinese social norms and strategies during that timeframe either to pick up on what the authors could have given me contextually about that issue. That area of study will have to wait until I finish with Charles II, the French Revolution, and Disaster Capitalism. (So much to find out about the world, so little time…)
Pretty much the only difference between Mao and Stalin is that no Kruschev has yet arisen who finds it expedient to lift the curtain on Mao’s transgressions against humanity. And Mao seems to have been slightly better than Stalin at using the resources of the state to starve and terrify the population–or maybe his statistical “pool” was bigger so he could kill more with the same strategies. It’s a toss-up.
In any case, the book was a good read and I was interested all the way through. Though it was seriously depressing, and it’s led me down many a mental primrose path contemplating the connection between the majority of people who thrive in politics and the psychological profile of the criminal sociopath.
The next book, kind of a palate-cleanser, was Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. True to form, Robbins has served up another looping foray into philosophy, thinly disguised as a novel. While the pedophilic subtheme was enough to squick me a little (Robbins is no Nabokov, but sometimes even Nabokov was no Nabokov, if you know what I mean) the book was still incredibly enjoyable, and I devoured it in two days when I should have been writing more and reading less. I particularly enjoy Robbins’s idea that a sense of humor (and a refusal to take oneself seriously) is a hallmark of evolutionary advancement, and any book that marries the idea of neutral angels, the CIA, the Third Prophecy of Fatima, and a South American witch doctor with a pyramid-shaped head is bound to be a good time. Especially in Robbins’s hands–he fiddles Dame Grammar like a man who loves Her, and gleefully violates story rules with a sort of puppylike abandon that’s hard to shake a disciplining finger at. Other readers might get exasperated with his run-ons and digressions, but I’m more forgiving of that sort of thing when the author has my attention and is performing interesting hat-tricks. Oddly enough, I cannot read Palahniuk (except Fight Club) but I really have a great time with Robbins, and their looping sentence structures really strike me as very similar. Go figure.
If my review of Fierce Invalids seems a little light on plot, that’s because trying to boil down the plot of a Tom Robbins book without trying to rewrite and explain the whole damn thing is useless. I’ll content myself with saying the book follows its hero, Switters, around through a series of events that are logical in their own way and yet extraordinarily fantastic (in all senses of the word).
The only problem I have with Robbins is that women are a mystery to him. But I think I’ve only read one or two male writers who can really write a female character, and it’s no shame to admit that a boy is mystified by the Female. (It is, after all, our prerogative to mystify.) Plenty of male writers end up using the female as an Other, a receptacle for all sorts of weird sexual dreams thinly covered with social commentary or philosophical hogwash, and completely overlook the fact that women have an interior life/exterior existence of their own, divorced from the male gaze. I suppose you can do that when your gender is considered normative and the other half of humanity’s considered the aberration on all sorts of levels, primal and otherwise.
Still, there’s a big difference between a male writer who genuinely likes women and is okay with being mystified (Robbins) and a male writer for whom women are a dangerous mystery that must be controlled or beaten down so the male psyche can survive (like, for example, Bukowski, especially in his more misogynistic moments). The quality of work may be superlative (I really enjoy reading both Robbins and Bukowski) but the differing treatment of female characters is sometimes enough to make a girl wish for some literary dynamite and a grammar bazooka, not just a room of one’s own.
Okay, I’m dragging Woolf into it, so it must be time for me to end the ramble. I’m kind of eyeing my TBR pile and wondering what to dive into next, and I pretty much have it narrowed down to the bio of Charles II OR another attempt at Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which both the Selkie and Make_Me say is superlative.
Choices, choices. In the meantime, it’s back to getting Weasel Boy in trouble. Wish me luck and lots of vampires, and I’ll be back later today with the other winner of a Night Shift ARC!
