#but jane lynch's narration gets up my nose

[cantsayidont]

April 28, 2008. Alison Bechdel attempts to explain herself, in the intro to THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR.

[wordofrecall]

character playlists: ori

so. let’s do this. my playlists are long and scattered, but they make me happy, so i might as well share them and the thoughts behind song choices. so. here’s some songs for runaway knights & wannabe witches, and what have you.

something holy - childhood & riches & wonders

pearl diver - mitski - oh hunter, if you didn’t want the beautiful so badly, perhaps you would’ve found it in your spirit singing softly - look. it's on the nose, considering that her title is "the pearl hunter," but also, like, that rules. this is a song for wren, i think; ori in the present reflecting on her mother and the similarities between them.

icicles - the scary jokes - i can only be forgiven if i’m giving myself up to you on a silver serving tray / must i bare myself to the stabbing of your knife & gnashing teeth while our lovely company appears so entertained? - aaand a song for childhood. 99% of ori's socialization came from her parents having important guests over, so. uh. yeah. show off your reclusive child prodigy like a pageant whenever you have the opportunity. she probably won't grow to loathe you.

life: the cruel interlude (on god) - kilo kish - why do i dare believe in me when i bleed? - questioning was. always a big thing for ori. i don't think she ever believed that the mirzha was god, and i known that she never truster her father's patron, but. in her studies, in her passions, there's always this tiny sense of desperation for something to have faith in something. not herself.

bluejays & cardinals - the mountain goats - the stars come out of hiding for you, & i would too - there is. a lot, in ori's relationship with her brother. she was the favorite child, yeah, the one destined for great things in spite of her... troubles. but he never had those troubles! she didn't, doesn't understand how he went through life so unafraid. there's envy there. i also think that the line i quoted is terribly true, like, canonically. because. she sure did do that stupid shit.

be calm - fun. - take it from me, i’ve been there a thousand times--you hate your pulse because it thinks you’re still alive! - sometimes you have intense social phobia. and that's okay!

country death song - violent femmes - kiss your mother goodnight & remember that God saves, kiss your mother goodnight & remember that God saves - i think andrei is a much less pitiable or even sympathetic man than the narrator of this song, but. like. it's a country song about a father killing his daughter while preaching godliness. i had to.

i’m all bloody inside - liam lynch - inside me, well, it’s dark & gross as hell, i’m not a pretty sight - the family business!

the hazards of love 3 (revenge!) - the decemberists - but father, don’t you fear, your children are all here - fantasies. part of the fantasy is imagining a world where she doesn't feel terrible about the thought.

shankill butchers - sarah jarosz - they used to be just like me & you, they used to be sweet little boys - "blood hunters are ghost stories." "and also, they're fucking terrible. violent, cruel, zealous. the worst."

sparrow - st. vincent - & no eyes are on the sparrow, eyes are on the sparrow, how could that be the case? the lark keeps whistling his number, silly little number, as if he isn't prey - pity for the boy. sort of retrospective, but it's a thought that's been there since she was a child.

something burning - rituals & fire & running

starchild - ghost quartet - but i will transcend & vomit this loser out of me; i will become the next big thing, i will light myself on fire - maybe she is some kind of angel? bursting with radiance and terrifying to look upon.

arsonist’s lullabye - hozier - don’t you ever tame your demons, always keep them on a leash / when i was sixteen, my senses fooled me - oooor maybe she is a sixteen year-old who is having a panic attack and setting everything in sight on fire by accident.

blood - my chemical romance - i’m the kind of human wreckage that you love! - so she's broken.

girl anachronism - the dresden dolls - it’s not the way i’m meant to be, it’s just the way the operation made me - so she's failed and she's broken and she's sick, and there's no time to fucking think.

when the chips are down - anais mitchell - cast your eyes to heaven, you’ll get a knife in the back. - so she does what her mother did before her, and she runs from that which she has always known.

body terror song - ajj - i’m so sorry that you have to have a body / one that will hurt you, & be the subject of so much of your fear - feelings on being built Wrong; feelings on your mind's undue control upon your body.

in corolla - the mountain goats - & no one was gonna come & get me, there wasn't anybody gonna know, even though i leave a trail of burnt things in my wake every single place i go - very good as an ori song in general but this is her justification to herself in the water. under the docks, she says this to herself.

the harrowed & the haunted - the decemberists - will i be so brave? - just to get that oceanic vibe up.

luna - the mountain goats - rise through the flames & end again in flames at last - an inexplicable feeling.

unwhere - reeder - a song for leaving what you've always known.

something lonely - years & woods & dreaming

runs in the family - amanda palmer - run from their pity, from responsibility, run from the country & run from the city, i can run from the law, i can run from myself, i can run for my life, i can run into debt, i can run from it all, i can run 'till I'm gone - she is broken and all she can think to do is get as far away as possible

panic attack - liza anne - i hate that i can be seen like this

black eyes - david wirsig - my hammering heart hears the voices of spirits that tempt us, the scorn that they’ve spoken

for the departed - shayfer james - they will bury me alive, but i’m not inclined to care; i am too far gone now

hurt - johnny cash - everyone i know goes away in the end; you can have it all, my empire of dirt

my body’s made of crushed little stars - mitski - i work better under a deadline! i work better under a deadline!

blood in the cut - k. flay - guess i’m contagious; it’d be safest if you ran--fuck, that’s what they all just end up doing in the end

little pistol - mother mother - i think i might be scared of the world & the way it makes you feel afraid & how it gets in the way

villains pt. 1 - emma blackery - built to create, designed to destroy

the beer - kimya dawson - & the christians gave me comic books as if i would be scared of burning in hell while i was already there [...] i tried to scream fuck you but blood was pouring out my mouth

something safe - family & finding it & fighting together

haunted house - sir babygirl - i’m running just to hide & i’m hiding just to breathe & around every corner is the same night on repeat

your heart is a muscle the size of your fist - ramshackle glory - i love you & you make me glad to be alive; i promise that i’m gonna pay you back / you always know how funny everything is, even when i’m so serious that it’s gonna be the death of me

medicines - the taxpayers - o, but our rotting corpses lying there soon began to leak & grow these lesions that all smelled just like a rose / & all the blood & guts inside us germinated into timeless pages stained with lines of lovely prose

autoclave - the mountain goats - i am this great unstable mass of blood & foam

alligator skin boots - mccafferty - i’m cool to the touch, leap to my death, i’ll die for you all, i’ll die for my friends, it goes like this

100 years - florence + the machine - lord, don’t let me break this, let me hold it lightly, give me arms to pray with instead of ones that hold too tightly

tomorrow will be kinder - the secret sisters - but i feel warmth on my skin, the stars have all aligned

armour - rae spoon - you know i placed was to build a life for you

amy aka spent gladiator 1 - the mountain goats - play with matches if you think you need to play with matches; seek out the hidden places where the fire burns hot & bright / find where the heat’s unbearable & stay there if you have to--don’t hurt anybody on your way up to the light, and stay alive

curses - the crane wives - won’t you stay with me, my darling, when my walls start burning down?

something daring - islands & visions & loss

jane’s dream - janelle monáe

beekeeper - keaton henson - hear me, o woman that has gone astray, gone astray

fire - kimya dawson - i’m reading books about how they’re corrupt [...] as long as i’m burning, i’ll keep on yearning to save the world, not sure how, but i’m learning

cosmic hero - car seat headrest - i love you, but i can’t stand the touch, & of course i’m alright with death

turn the lights off - tally hall - everbody likes to get taken for turns to see how bright the fire inside of us burns [...] should be stronger, books abandoned

eat you alive - the oh hellos - child, i’m afraid for your soul; these things that you’re after, they can’t be controlled

cry for judas - the mountain goats - hallucinate a shady grove where judas went to die

o death - monica martin - no wealth, no land, no silver, no gold, nothing satisfies me but your soul

blood of angels - brown bird - and i would wage my soul to bet that there ain’t no one throwing lightning anyhow

the universe is going to catch you - the antlers - the arms of the universe kept you from falling [...] those arms did not come back

a burning hill - mitski - i am the fire & i am the forest & i am the witness watching it / i stand in the valley watching it

something terrifying - conversations & selfhood & divination

the lamb - dessa - but blood is blood, & what’s done is done; blood is blood, & its burden is a beast

going invisible 2 - the mountain goats - i’m gonna burn it all down today & sweep all the ashes away

the lion’s roar - first aid kit - she plays a tune for those who wish to overlook the fact that they’ve been blindly deceived by those who preach & pray & teach, but she falls short & the night explodes in laughter

the villain i appear to be - connor spiotto - even if you can’t see the good inside me, i don’t have the time to tell you why i do the things that i do, just please hold on & soon you’ll seem

up the wolves - the mountain goats - there’s bound to be a ghost at the back of closet, no matter where you live; there’ll be a few things, maybe several things that you’re gonna find really difficult to forgive

thursday girl - mitski - glory, glory, glory to the night that shows me what i am

at the bottom of everything - bright eyes - we must take all of the medicines to expensive now to sel; set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell

everybody does - julien baker - i know i’m a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you’d never touched, but you’re gonna run when you find out who i am

tongues & teeth - the crane wives - i know that you mean so well, but i am not a vessel for your good intent 

a pearl - mitski - you’re growing tired of me and all the things i don’t talk about / sorry, i don’t want your touch--it’s not that i don’t want you

[ya-bookreview-blog]

Review: One Night (That Changes Everything) by Lauren Barnholdt

Book jacket blurb: Eliza is in a full-blown panic. Her notebook has been stolen--the one that lists everything she wants but is afraid to go after. And the absolute worst person in the world has it: her ex-boyfriend Cooper. Like it’s not bad enough that Cooper was lying to Eliza for their entire relationship--now he and his friends are blackmailing her. They’re giving her just one night to complete the most humiliating tasks on her list or they’ll post her secrets online--including the ones that aren’t just about her. Eliza’s sure of only one thing. She isn’t going down without a fight. Cooper may have what’s left of her dignity, but she’s not the only one with something to hide.

(Published by Simon Pulse, 2010)

Overall Rating:

Best line: “An asshole who sometimes pretends to be nice totally has the ability to suck you back in, making you think that you would give him another chance, or that maybe you had him all wrong.”

Worst line: “Marissa thinks Clarice is a little bit of an airhead and kind of a tease, and Clarice thinks Marissa is a little crazy and slightly slutty. They’re both kind of right.”

Recommended? No

What you should read instead: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty

Read on, but beware of spoilers!

First of all, the title is a misnomer. The events of the book do, in fact, take place over the course of one night. But they don’t really change anything at all.

Do any of you remember the movie Sleepover? (Most notable at the time for the sister from Spy Kids skateboarding in a sparkly red dress; in retrospect, most notable for Jane Lynch playing the mother). This book has essentially that same plotline, but I’d have to do a rewatch of the movie to decide which is cheesier.

I wanted to like this book. I bought it at a second-hand book store after reading the first few pages. It gt my hopes up because it seemed to touch on a couple of feminist issues (the main character’s older sister stars a website where only girls have admin power over the boys’ profiles, for example), but I was to be sadly disappointed.

1. How well did the book keep my interest and engagement all the way through?

I made my way through to the end, and it was a quick read. But by the time I was about halfway through, I didn’t really care that much about the ending. It was a nice distraction to read on the train, but I wasn’t totally enthralled by it.

2. Was it well-written?

I’ve certainly read books that are much more poorly written than this one. The prose was realistic, unexceptional, and fairly easy to follow, but there were a few things that threw me off:

A. It’s written in present tense. This actually kind of worked with the pacing of the story, and I stopped noticing it after a while. But A Great and Terrible Beauty will always be the standard that I hold present-tense YA novels to, and this one was nothing special.

B. The thing that really kind of irked me about the writing was how the author would say something in narration, then repeat it immediately after in dialogue. Example:

I skip a few songs on Pandora until a Mr. Lif song comes on. Hmm. This is actually kind of catchy. You know, if you like that kind of thing.

“This is kind of catchy,” Marissa says, “if you like that kind of thing.”

The first couple of times, it seemed kitschy, but I could let it slide. By the sixth or seventh time it was annoying and distracting.

3. Diversity?

The only character that’s explicitly not entirely white is Isabella--the potential rival of the main character--who is described as “very exotic-looking, with long, straight dark hair, perfect almond-shaped eyes, and dark skin.” This description contains the double sin of stereotyping non-white characters as “exotic,” and comparing their features to food items. I had hopes for the MC’s friend Clarice at first, whose main characteristics turned out to be that she’s from the South and flirts with a lot of guys but doesn’t sleep with them (more on that later). She wasn’t physically described until 20 pages in, when my hopes for a more diverse character were dashed by her “long blond hair, curled perfectly.”

In fact, very few of the characters are physically described in any detail whatsoever. I could have appreciated that if I’d thought the author were intentional about it, but if you’re going to describe your MC’s outfit at length you should also probably say something about her physical appearance.

The other thing is, these kids are all clearly rich as balls. They’re living in nice suburbs of Boston, driving red BMWs, they have hot tubs in their houses and swanky apartments of their own in the city... I was somehow finding it pretty hard to commiserate with their trials and tribulations.

4. Believable?

There are... probably people whose junior year in high school was like this. Maybe? I can’t say that I’ve ever known any though. At any rate, I find it pretty hard to believe that a girl who’s afraid of singing karaoke at a hipster coffee shop is totally chill with drinking underage on the reg. She also casually mentions that her best friend got a nose job, got a tattoo, and removed said tattoo, all by the ripe old age of 16. Not to mention the small bit where her other best friend gets arrested for drug possession (presumably the first time this has happened to her), gets bailed out of jail by her parents, and then manages to sneak out an hour later and hardly mentions it again.

Like I said, someone somewhere has probably had this experience of high school, but it didn’t seem very believable to me in context, and didn’t really fit with the MC’s self-professed frightened/shy personality. It felt more like the author’s memories of college were shoe-horned into a high school story.

5. What message does the novel send?

Positives (what the author, presumably, was going for):

You should be brave and face the things that scare you. You should be honest and tell the truth to your loved ones.

Negatives:

A. GAH. Ok. FIrst and foremost, the thing that really pissed me off: there are characters that mention feminism, and going to political rallies, and carbon footprints. So you’d think the author would have at least a passing grasp on progressive thinking. But there is SO MUCH internalized misogyny that never gets addressed. Biggest thing: IT’S NOT OK TO CALL YOUR FRIENDS A ‘TEASE’ IF THEY FLIRT WITH PEOPLE AND DON’T SLEEP WITH THEM! This happens consistently with one of the MC’s best friends, and is never resolved. This perpetuates the (very, very false) notion that flirting with people means you owe them something. The guys constantly get pissed off when the girls don’t want to have sex, and then the girls just say, “Oh, yes, typical guy. You probably shouldn’t have been such a tease, though, Clarice, it’s kind of your fault that he acted that way” (That is not an actual quote; that one, I’m paraphrasing).

AAAUUUUGGGGHHH. In case there is a question in any of your minds: there is no such thing as a tease. You can tease people as part of consensual sexytimes, but IT IS ALWAYS OK TO BACK OUT AND CHANGE YOUR MIND. IT IS ALWAYS OK NOT TO SLEEP WITH ANYONE, NO MATTER WHAT YOU’VE DONE LEADING UP TO THAT POINT. GAAAHH.

B. Apparently, it’s ok to date jealous, emotionally manipulative men who lie to you (LIFE SPOILER ALERT: That’s not healthy. Don’t do that). At no point in the book does Cooper, the ex-boyfriend love interest, actually show that he cares about Eliza in a non-possessive way. He ignores her requests for him to give her space. He’s an accomplice to his baby-frat-brothers’ humiliation and degradation of her, on the very dubious grounds of playing the double agent. The book should have taken its own advice: “An asshole who sometimes pretends to be nice totally has the ability to suck you back in, making you think that you would give him another chance, or that maybe you had him all wrong.” That is almost textbook definition of a certain kind of abuser/abusive relationship, people. If that sounds familiar, please, get help and get out of that situation.

C. Also apparently, ditching your friends in a city in the middle of the night to hang out with questionably-intentioned boys and/or stealing your friends’ cars counts as “being there” for you (ANOTHER LIFE SPOILER ALERT: No. Just, no). One of the last lines of the book is the MC reflecting:

“I think about how [my friends] stood by my side tonight, how they were there for me, how they stuck by me and helped me through what’s probably been the hardest night of my life.”

This is all manifestly untrue. Between the two of them, her besties managed to ditch Eliza at least seven times during the night. Hell, one of them merrily drove off in the getaway car (which wasn’t hers, btw) while the other two were breaking into a house. Not exactly what I’d call conscientious and supportive friends.

Conclusion

What was changed in this “one night that changes everything?” Well, nothing. Eliza’s still stuck in an unhealthy relationship cycle with an emotionally manipulative dude. Her sister still loves her, her reputation is more or less undamaged, she hasn’t lost any limbs. And her friend will probably get off of her drug possession charges because she’s presumably white and rich.