#this is inspired by a review i saw about a book treating its male characters as just support and background to its female characters

[rxttenfish]

“oh i hate purple prose” “oh i hate it when a story stops just for worldbuilding” “oh i hate egregious gore” “oh i hate blocks of information all at once” “oh i hate blocks of text and lots of words to say one thing” ITS NOT FOR YOU, THEY WROTE THIS SHIT FOR ME

[ddp456]

My retirement

Hey, all.

Boy, um, I’m sure that title is kind of a shocker, so I’ll do my best to explain myself.  And stop me if you’ve heard this story before (or should I say, these stories before).

I created a surplus of materials and examples to go by when making a Gravity Falls/Wendy and Dipper story in the same fashion that I do.  But in my heart of hearts, I can tell you all that the souls of these stories, the thing that everyone seems to tell me makes them so real, are based upon three real people.

I grew up a lot like Dipper did.  I was a smart kid, but not that smart.  I was the one everyone pointed at as a freak.  The weirdo of the class.  The smelly kid.  I had friends; not a lot of them, but in most cases, time and distance separated us, or I drove them away of my own accord.  I won’t excuse it by saying I was different; a lot of my pain I caused myself.  I would be lying if I said I had proper guidance as well.  I couldn’t tell you how many regrets I have.

But as I got older, I met someone special; someone different.  They didn’t treat me the same as everyone else.  I couldn’t tell you if it was out of pity, or perhaps, they were able to see something that other people couldn’t.  And I appreciated it.  To be honest, I loved them for that.

“Love,” I know, is a really strong word.  It’s probably the most overused and misused word presented by most of civilization, and the majority of mass media.  To me, love means to cherish, to want to protect, to wish no harm upon, and if possible, take the blunt of any blow wishing to do so.

I like a lot of people.  I love a whole lot less, if that makes sense.

Even as I write this, I do not claim for this to be the correct way of looking at things; I can only tell you the way I saw things at the time.

Such is why I chose to hide my true feelings for the longest time.  For all of the healing and solace this person gave to me, the very last thing I wanted for them was to be the monster’s mate.  Unfortunately, my private life wasn’t too much better.  It was like there was no safe haven I could provide.

Above all things, I didn’t want them to hate me for that.

Then, as always, fate played its hand.  The good spark in my life was whisked away and I was forced to deal the rest of the world.  But after the lot of a new series of battles and worries, something amazing happened.  That little spark was reintroduced into my life.

But I was still afraid; afraid of the new monsters that would use this person to try to hurt me; afraid of a home life that wouldn’t accept them with open arms.  I wanted to get closer so very much, but kept them at a safe distance.

That is, until fate struck again.

Pinned up against the wall, at the very last moment I’d believed I’d have with said person, I confessed everything.

Kinda makes you think of a certain two dorks locked in an underground bunker, doesn’t it?

They say with age, comes wisdom, and upon looking back, I understand my youthful folly.  I shouldn’t have lied everything at their feet and expect a positive response.  They were shocked by my admission, as they had their own feelings and hopes and dreams and heart’s desires.

I believed, because of my fear, I was too late.  If I were honest from the beginning, maybe, it might have made a difference.

Despite of the distance and my own hardships, I tried my best to stay in touch with my friend.  A lot of times, it was for the better.  And a ton of times, it made things a jillion times worse.  And I’ll admit; it was my fault.  I let my own loneliness get the best of me.  The very last thing I ever wanted to do was to creep someone out.  Maybe that’s why it bugs me so much when someone jokingly says that about poor Dipper.

In the future, I would apologize for reaching out, only to have a welcome hand on my shoulder in return.  “I’m really glad you did.”

As time passed, we did grow closer; not always in the ways I hoped, but I’d be fibbing if I said I didn’t enjoy it.  We were constant valentines.  They were my first real date; my first real kiss. I’d have calls waiting for me instead of me doing the chasing.  For the first time in a very long time, I thought things were getting better.

But once again, fate would have its way...

Even after all these years, I question: how is it that upon telling a loved one that you must part ways (again), they become so upset that they strike you and demand why things are the way they are, if they do not care?

(For the record, kids.  You should NEVER let a S.O. hit you no matter what.  After all, don’t want to leave a bad example on the way out)

Part of me will always wonder if this is what made things sour between us; that eventually, I became another person that would always let them down, regardless if it were my fault or not.

Little did I know that behind their mild exterior, lived a wild heart that craved adventure and excitement.  A group of rowdy and unpredictable friends were more than eager to help scratch that itch.  I would be told incredible tales of mischief and wonder and mayhem.  And if I were honest, I would say part of me was jealous.  I wished it was just us having the adventures. I wish we could have spend the day together at an arcade.  Or a carnival.

I’ll say something else I never admitted before.  This person has told me countless times in our lives that I was their hero.  The truth is that there were several times in my life were I considered them my hero.  They were brave and independent and smart-on-their-feet and pretty much everything I wasn’t but wanted to be.

And beneath all that, there was a person who was embarrassed to be sensitive and “weak” and wanted to cry.  At that time, I cherished that person more than anything in this world.

Then, I heard about the other stories: the “close-calls.”  And that led me to believe that there would come a time where my loved one would go off on one of these wild adventures and never come back.

I wasn’t too far off.  I’ll spare you all the rest of the details.

As I said earlier, I like a lot of people, but I love even fewer.  So, it was a really long time before I could feel the same way about someone as I did before.  In the middle of all of this, I accidentally stumbled upon a show on cable called Gravity Falls, and found a kindred spirit with the male lead, Dipper Pines.

Even more so, I saw parallel lines between my personal plight and that involving Dipper and his crush, Wendy.  And while Wendy shares the same adventurous appetite as my loved one, that’s pretty much where their similarities end.

And poor Dipper, man.  Oh, the internet was just brutal to that kid.  “Robbie is the victim?”  Get outta here with that garbage.  It was the same crap I’ve heard half my life.

As I explored the GF fandom, I noticed a lot of the best Wendy/Dipper works came from fanfiction. (Thanks google!)  And I found my inspiration for stories of my own.  I was able to relate my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my doubts; bits and pieces of my real life, even if they are grossly exaggerated.  (so, no fighting ghosts, haunted mansions, or cursed arcades for me, I’m afraid)

To my surprise, the first batch of stories received a ton of feedback.  Lots of people cheered my interpretation of Wendy and Dipper, and what I hoped they’d evolve into.  (I’d give myself a 70% on that estimate)

Did all of these viewers, reviewers, and rebloggers share the same view of the world; about love as I did?

About two years in, little did I know I would get another surprise.  I would get a Dipper of my very own.

I wasn’t looking for love. Honest.  But upon new experiences and meeting new people, I discovered someone - a special speck of wonder - that became enamored with me.  I didn’t notice it at first.  I still find it odd that someone can look or think of me in such a way.

But I remember what happened the last time I hesitated.  I always said that in the slim chance I would ever get a second chance, I wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice.

I kept my word and enjoyed the best years of my life.

I made up a lot of lost time with an adorable hipster with a similar spirit to Wendy.  An old soul, they loved retro culture as a whole: the movies, the music, even the video games.  Their literary tastes were also very similar to mine.  I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a conversation with someone about books outside of a school setting.

But at the same time, you could see Dipper’s innocence there as well.  A tough attitude hid a fragile heart. A hidden brilliance was often overshadowed by a lack of courage and self-esteem.

It was around this time that I noticed new comments on my latest stories.  People were saying that I was (inadvertently) writing a stronger and more detailed Wendy.  At first, I didn’t understand what they meant.  Then, after thinking about it, I finally got what others were noticing.

My Wendy had changed because I had changed.  Somehow, I gained a deeper insight on her character and the way she would view certain aspects of her life, I was now a Wendy myself, with a little Dipper that thought the world of me, and for this, I tried my best to make sure they would never feel the growing pains that Dipper (or a younger me, for that matter) would usually face alone.  I was their cheering section, their coach, their backup, and I encorporated all of these things into our favorite redhead.

I found it funny that the show would (periodically) use that same angle.  I only wish they would have done it as much as I did.

But as with all great things in my life, I royally screwed everything up.  And during a time of distress and turmoil, my little Dipper found something better and hitched their wagon elsewhere.

So, by now, you have to be asking, “Why are you telling us bits and pieces of your life?”  I do this because I want people to understand why I can’t do this anymore.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love writing the stories.  I also love the fact that there’s so many people that look forward to each tale, as if it was made by the real Gravity Falls team.  To me, that’s a great honor that very little can ever replace.

But at the same time, the series (and especially Wendy and Dipper) is so close to my heart, and in some cases, so indistinguishable from certain aspects of my personal life that it actually hurts.  For the record, I haven’t sat down and watched an episode of Gravity Falls since the Blu Ray box set came out, in which I listened to the commentary for a project for Wendip-Week.

Maybe it’s because I know what happens to Dipper and Wendy at the end of the series.  Maybe it’s because their fate reminds me so much of my own.  It’s a “Chicken or the Egg” question for sure.

This is why DBR3 and Serendipity took so long to finish.  At times, I had to force myself on the computer to write 1,000 words at a time.  It takes me months to do what I used to do in mere days or at most, a week.  I don’t have the strength or the enthusiasm to do it at the same pace.  And you all deserve better than that.

I need a break, guys and gals.  I need to clear my mind and find out what’s going on inside here.  For the first time in years, I have accomplished all of my Gravity Falls related goals.  Just to go down the line:

-Published a new chapter every weekday for a month straight in honor of the GF Season 2 Premiere.

-Created a few GF stories based in the first-person perspective.  One of them is one of my most popular stories.

-Delivered a DBR2 and DBR3 due to high demand.

-Shaped a two-part Wendy/Dipper story based in the same nature and context of the classic graphic novel, Scott Pilgrim.

-Wrote several extensions to Gravity Falls episodes that I had uneasy feelings about.

-Helped a fellow Tumblr user create a Wendy/Dipper themed full sized Christmas poem in less than 24 hours.

-Tried my hand at a Wendy and Mabel story just to try something different and to see if I could do it.

-Wrote and outlined a 50-page Gravity Falls comic after 3+ years of trying to get it off the ground.

That’s not really a bad resume, not counting all the contributor’s work I’ve done for other Wendip artists/writers or the essays, guides, and projects I helped Wendip-Week design.  Even if I still had the energy to keep going, what unexplored territory is there for me to explore?

So what does this mean?

Well, that’s up to you lot, isn’t it?

I would love it if the same fans that enjoyed my stories took up the reigns and show us in the Wendip/GF communities what they could do.  Lead the way with new Wendy and Dipper tales!  Make it about the past, present, or future!  Give us a new way to look at them, or present them in an undiscovered light.

And it doesn’t have to be writing, either.  Make a comic.  Draw a picture.  Heck, do a radio broadcast for all I care.  Express your minds, hearts, and soul and create with them just as I have.

(and as a side note; I hope my Deviantart friends take this to heart.  The last time I was on the site, the cute/adorable pic/X-rated pic ratio was greatly, greatly one-sided in a bad way)

A lot of people might be asking, “Well, you’re calling it quits. Why shouldn’t we?” 

Because if you believe in the messages I put into the stories or the effort we put into Wendip-Week, then aren’t those messages worth spreading?  Just because my personal life went to crap in a handbasket, it doesn’t mean the same would happen to anyone else.

A harsh lesson I learned with age is that you can do everything perfectly, or to the best of your abilities, and still fail.  The Gravity Falls team loved to instill this over Dipper time and time again.

I want to believe in something better.  Don’t you?

And who says I’m gone for good?  Maybe I’ll find a new form of inspiration and come up with an unique idea that I just can’t keep to myself,  Perhaps Gravity Falls will come back in some form and ignite enough of a fire in me to pull a comeback.

But, until then, I plan on taking a long, well-deserved break.  After all, I have a ton of missed Wendip Week submissions to catch up on.  I promised myself I wouldn’t check them out until my final story is completed.  It looks like that day is finally here.

However, it is the holiday season, and for this, I wish to leave you all with three different sources of inspiration.  Maybe it’ll help; maybe it won’t.

1.  An inspirational letter from none other than my namesake.

2.  A key word of advice from one of the only series that could stand up to Gravity Falls’ legacy.  It is a message I wish I could have learned sooner.

3.  And simply because we NEED more sources of strong females (and something I wish I would have found in time for the Spider-Man essay), here is a tumblr blog dedicated to my favorite Marvel female, who IMHO is as close to an adult Wendy as we’ll get,

I wish you all a happy holiday, and hope that my announcement hasn’t dashed your holiday spirit.  I am forever honored by all those I have worked with and by those who took my nonsensical musings and elevated them to something more.

As one of my favorite bands like to close their shows with:

“It's never goodbye, It's just 'till next time."

-ddp456

[glenngaylord]

OUTFEST 2020 FILM REVIEWS:  The Rest Of The Fest

As the curtain closes on another Outfest, this one presented under extremely unusual circumstances, I sit in awe of the filmmakers and of the staff who put together not only a great group of films, but managed to creatively bring them to its audience online and at drive-in screenings.  Typically, you find yourself having to choose one film over several others, but with this new format, you have a great chance of seeing everything you want.  In past years, I found myself lucky if I saw 15 films.  This year I saw 23 features and 4 shorts programs out of the 160 on the schedule.  

As it’s impossible to get full reviews submitted for everything while the festival is still chugging along, I wanted to write capsules of the remaining films not covered at TheQueerReview.com .  Please visit the website for all the other reviews I wrote as well as those by my colleagues.

THE OBITUARY OF TUNDE JOHNSON ★★★★★

Melding a Groundhog Day-style concept with police violence against black people, this stunning film could not be more prescient and emotionally overpowering.  A black gay teenager relives his moment of murder over and over again, with slight shifts in the narrative taking us to someplace unexpected and earned.  Director Ali LeRoi directs his first feature as if he’s been doing it all of his life and has interpreted Stanley Kalu’s ingenious script with a great cinematic approach.  Gorgeously framed, beautifully acted, written, and directed, this is one of the most powerful films of 2020.

TWO EYES ★★★★★

I can’t form sentences here so I’m gonna vomit out words:  Instant classic. Glorious. Set over three centuries seamlessly melding a triptych of stories about gender identity.  I’m a blubbering mess.  Fantastic and very funny last line.  Travis Fine is a very gifted filmmaker who screams love child of Terrence Malick and Kelly Reichardt.  Heartbreaking. Inspiring. Unforgettable.  Montana is so beautiful.  Barstow is not.  A perfect film for anyone who wants to find their place in the world. I wouldn’t complain if TUNDE and TWO EYES both received Best Picture Oscar nominations.  

DRAMARAMA  ★★★★

Theater nerds rule in this incredibly endearing, early 90s set film about a group of high schoolers discovering themselves in one night at a ridiculous Murder Mystery-themed party.  Hilarious script, vivid and wonderful performances, and the opposite of a “Coming Out” movie in the best possible way.  Jonathan Wysocki has given us The Breakfast Club for air-kissing, mid-Atlantic accented freaks and geeks. 

CICADA ★★★★

What happens when a traumatized, bisexual man who has more sex partners than any standard montage can contain slows things down to concentrate on one kind but also traumatized young man?  This elliptically told film has a fun, flirty side but carries its heaviness with great ease.  A terrific feature debut for director/writer/editor/lead actor Matthew Fifer. 

THE STRONG ONES (LOS FUERTES) ★★★★

From Chile comes this sexy, moving story of two men at cross purposes who form a beautiful bond.  Set against some stunning scenery and mining the chemistry between its two leads for everything it has, I am half-jokingly calling it Brokeback Andes.  It’s so much more than that trite, hackneyed comparison.  

MONSOON ★★★1/2

Director Hong Khaou’s followup to Lilting sets its sights on modern day Vietnam as Henry Golding’s character visits to find a suitable place to distribute his mother’s ashes.  It’s a terrific mediation on a gay man finding a sense of belonging in a place he’s never been and Golding proves himself to be a subtle, compelling actor.  Perhaps a little too quiet and reflective, the film makes up for what it lacks in narrative drive with its awe-inspiring cinematography and immersive qualities.  

P.S. BURN THIS LETTER PLEASE ★★★★1/2

What an unexpected surprise.  Michael Seligman and Jennifer  Tiexiera’s documentary about a treasure trove of letters dating back to the 1950s brings us into the world of drag queens from almost 70 years ago.  With many of its subjects not only alive but in fine form telling their stories and the dishiest voiceover readings ever to grace a film, I was not only thoroughly entertained, but I didn’t expect to weep like Laura Dern at the end.  Oh, this is so so so so good. 

MINYAN ★★★★

Eric Steel’s feature debut has its own unique tone and a star making performance by Samuel H. Levine, a spitting image of a young Al Pacino/Sylvester Stallone hybrid.  With its 1980s Jewish Brighton Beach backdrop, this powerful yet subtle film about a young man coming to terms with his sexuality as well as his place within his religion, it’s a stunning debut.  Ron Rifkin is stellar as Levine’s charming grandfather and Alex Hurt (William Hurt’s son) has his father’s intensity.  Fantastic, lived-in production design which feels like its decade without resorting to the usual candy colored tropes and a evocative score makes this a memorable experience.  Reminiscent at times of On The Waterfront, this film puts a fresh new spin on a coming of age tale and finds so many moving moments from first sex to an elderly gay couple hiding in plain sight.  A must-see. 

SHIVA BABY ★★★★

Writer/Director Emma Seligman must have studied Rosemary’s Baby quite a bit with this angsty story set mostly at a memorial service.  Rachel Sennott is fantastic as a young lesbian who moves from one cringe-worthy moment to the next in an attempt to avoid as much conflict as possible.  The great supporting cast includes Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron, Molly Gordon, and Jackie Hoffman, all note perfect.  Less a comedy and more of an emotional horror story, Seligman knows how to make the best of a cramped space and throw up an endless variety of obstacles.  You just want Sennott’s Danielle to get her goddamned bagel with lox and cream cheese, but the fates have something else, something better, in store. 

COWBOYS ★★★★

Steve Zahn gives a career best performance in this moving story of a father with mental health issues and his trans son escaping into the Montana wilderness.  Sasha Knight makes an impressive debut as Zahn’s son and Jillian Bell expertly walks that fine line between villain and empathetic character.  Its comparisons to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid are not coincidental.  Not perfect by any stretch, it may feel fairly conventional, but it’s tackling a vibrant subject matter.  Extra points for giving Ann Dowd a role where we don’t hiss at her. 

BREAKING FAST ★★★

Solid romcom with a Muslim backdrop, this very tight, deceptively simple script provides just the right amount of sparks between its charming leads, Haaz Sleiman and Michael Cassidy.  While structurally not breaking new ground, the entry point into a world we don’t see enough of on screen coupled with food porn for days makes this a fun, funny, goes down easy delight.

ASK ANY BUDDY ★★★1/2

Q: Daddy!  Daddy!  What were the 70s like down at the Piers in NYC?   A: Oh shut up and watch this movie.  

An experimental collage of vintage gay porn and archival footage from the disco, pre-AIDS heyday gives this film a mesmerizing, museum installation quality.  While technically without a story, you feel like you’ve gone on a journey nonetheless.  Would pair well with William Friedkin’s Cruising. 

DRY WIND ★★★1/2

Slow cinema meets voyeuristic gay porn in this one of a kind Brazilian exploration an arid small town, a workers’ union crisis, and a man obsessed with the Tom Of Finland drawing come to life who motors into his life.  Overlong and a little too obtuse as it goes along, it’s worth watching this Alice In Wonderland takes a quaalude, gets a very hairy back, and has a lot of sex in the dirt. 

NO HARD FEELINGS ★★★★

This year’s Teddy Award Winner at the Berlin Film Festival, Faraz Shariat’s film uses its backdrop of a refugee camp in Germany to tell the story of Iranians and Irani-Germans searching for a better life.  Its three leads bring a spark and youthful energy to a story with devastating undercurrents.  A wrenching glimpse into the emotional effects an oppressive culture has on its people, yet told with a driving pulse. 

LILY TOMLIN: THE FILM BEHIND THE SHOW ★★★

A look behind the scenes as Lily Tomlin and wife Jane Wagner workshop their legendary 1980s Broadway show, The Search For Signs Of Intelligent Life In The Universe.  It’s great to see these two at the top of their game and get a glimpse of their creative process, but this documentary is almost devoid of incident and feels more like a sweet gift to the fans than a fully realized film. 

SHORTS: WHAT A BOY NEEDS ★★★1/2

A mixed bag here of people searching for excitement, I found a couple of gems here nonetheless.  Not to take away from the shorts I don’t mention, I want to single out two exceptional films. Ruben Navarro’s Of Hearts And Castles looks great, has a beautiful vibe, and shows us a lovely connection forming right before our eyes.  Kiko’s Saints proves highly original as we follow a female Japanese artist on assignment in France become obsessed with a gay couple who have a lot of sex on the beach.  Combining animation with fairly explicit sex, I loved seeing the male gaze from a female perspective. 

THE CAPOTE TAPES ★★1/2

I love Truman Capote. I grew up at a time when smart authors found themselves on talk shows and were treated like superstars.  I’ve read his books and always have been in awe of his ability to be himself.  Featuring never-before-heard tapes of Capote’s friends being interviewed by George Plimpton, unfortunately, I don’t think this repetitive documentary gave me anything all that new.  It’s still touching at times and for the uninitiated, this is a great overview of his life, but I was watching the clock. 

OUT LOUD ★★★1/2

A moving look at the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles as they prepare for their first public performance.  With its ticking clock storyline, director Gail Willumsen expertly interweaves storylines of its founder and members.  As such, you really learn what’s a stake and what it means to them.  I was lucky enough to see the chorus perform David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust a few years ago and basked in the power of its mere existence…and was also ridiculously entertained. 

TWILIGHT’S KISS (SUK SUK)  ★★★1/2

This quiet charmer form Hong Kong shows us something we almost never get to see on film - two elderly gay men meeting and falling in love.  The fact that both have been married to women doesn’t stop them from exploring their feelings.  A little to gentle by half, I still was in awe of this rarity.

[liskantope]

Some brief (and sometimes not-so-brief) reactions to major Disney films 1937-1967

Around a month ago I made a temporary switch from Netflix to Disney+ with the goal of watching all major Disney movies in order, roughly paced so that one year of Disney film-making equals one day of real life. I should clarify here that by “major Disney movies” I mean mostly just all the animated ones plus a few hybrid live-action/animated ones, and a few of the most popular live-action ones (at least the ones I remember having a song considered good enough to feature on one of the Disney Sing-Along videos, a staple of my video-watching as a kid growing up in the 90′s). I would have been interested to see Song of the South, which I’ve never seen in its entirety, but it’s not included on Disney+ for fairly obvious reasons. As I get further into modern Disney, I’ll probably skip over most of the sequels and other features I strongly expect not to like (with the exception of Belle’s Magical World, which is said to be so legendarily bad that I just have to see what the fuss is about).

This time range of three decades happens to include more or less exactly those Disney productions that Walt Disney himself took a major role in (he died shortly before the final version of Jungle Book was finished). I’d like to do this again in another month, when I will have gotten up through the late 90′s, but honestly this post wound up way longer than I was imagining and took several more hours than I expected (or could really afford), so I’m not promising myself or anyone else that.

Looking at Wikipedia’s list of Disney productions, I’m a little taken aback at what a low percentage of these are animated features, which to me form the backbone of that company’s legacy; visually scanning the list makes the line of animated films look shorter than I had always imagined, but really what this is showing is that Disney produced far more live-action movies than I ever knew about, including (and perhaps especially!) in its early days. Right now I’m continuing on through the 70′s films, but this set of mini-reviews represents the first month of watching and three decades of Disney magic.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937

This is the full-length feature that began them all and which had the burden of defying contemporary skepticism that a full-length animated feature could be taken seriously at all. We are already far beyond the earliest days of animation and have progressed lightyears beyond the quality of “Steamboat Willie”; throughout the film I marveled at the sophistication of the animation with a newfound appreciation of how groundbreaking a lot of the sequences must have been.

I know I watched this at least a couple of times in childhood and I think once when I was a bit older, but even that was long ago.

Snow White is based on one of the simpler classic fairy tales, and the writers had to come up with ways to flesh out this very short story enough to occupy well over an hour. This was done not by exploring the character of Snow White or the Queen or even filling in extra plot details (the fate of the hunter is never addressed) but by spending a lot of time on the dwarfs. The detail spent on individuating them took a lot of work from the animators, but I think their efforts paid off. I can’t say the same about the attention paid to Snow White or the Queen (pretty much the only remaining characters). Snow White has an almost entirely flat personality, with no sense of curiosity or concern whatsoever about the Queen’s designs to have her killed, just having literally only one goal in mind: to marry this Prince who she’d only seen for about two minutes and run away from out of shyness. (This is of course a trend we’ll see with Disney princesses for a long time.) The Queen similarly only has the goal of being “the fairest in the land”. Something about the particular harshness of her voice strikes me as The Quintessential 1930′s Female Villain Voice (“I’ll crush their bones!”), whatever that means -- maybe I got my idea of what this should be from the movie Snow White in the first place.

I still think “Heigh Ho” (which I’ve known well since early childhood) is an excellent song in its utter simplicity, especially when complimented with the “Dig Dig Dig” song (which I did not remember at all until a few years ago when a Tumblr mutual posted the excerpt containing it!). I’m not enormously fond of “One Day My Prince Will Come”, although I did enjoy playing it on the violin at a couple of gigs with one of my musician friends back during grad school -- I was convinced then, and up until watching Snow White just now, that it belonged to Cinderella.

Pinocchio, 1940

This was a favorite movie of mine in earlier childhood; we owned the VHS and I watched it a lot. As a child, I had no sense of one Disney movie coming from a much earlier time than another one; it was only much more recently in life that I understood that Pinocchio really comes from all the way back eight decades ago. Pinocchio taught me the meaning of “conscience” (both in the dictionary sense and in a deeper sense), and it shaped my notion of what fairies may look like -- for instance, my mental picture of the Tooth Fairy, back when I believed in her, was inspired by the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.

It’s amazing just how much the quality of Disney animated features improved from the first one to this one, the second. It helps that both the story and the characters are far more complex than those of Snow White. The plot from the original book (which I’ve read in Italian and English) was more complex still, of course. There is one gaping hole where it’s never explained how Gepetto somehow found himself in the belly of a whale (I don’t remember whether or how this is explained in the book), but I’ll forgive that.

It’s interesting to see the 1940′s caricature of “bad (early teenage?) boy” shown in the animation and voice of Lampwick. Phantom Strider talks about the turning-into-donkeys scene as a notoriously dark scene for adults who didn’t find it as terrifying when they were children -- count me in as one of those adults! It’s especially terrifying to see the whole mass of boys-turned-donkeys being treated as slaves in the hellhole known as Pleasure Island and realizing that this is never going to be resolved in the movie -- it’s rather unusual in Disney stories for some great evil to be left unresolved with no recompense even for the chief villain. In fact, Pinocchio is pretty much the only Disney story I can think of where the worst villain doesn’t meet some kind of dire fate. Really, the range of Pinocchio’s view is much narrower: it’s just the coming-of-age story of one puppet in his quest for Real Boyhood. (And yes, I still giggle at how intricutely Jordan Peterson analyzes particular scenes from the movie to support his beliefs about neo-Marxism or whatever.)

Disney+ heads many of the descriptions of the older movies with “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” I’m a little surprised they don’t do this with Pinocchio, given what appears to me a rather derogatory depiction of Gypsies.

“When You Wish Upon a Star” has become a timeless hit, for good reason. And I still find “Hi Diddle Dee Dee” extremely catchy.

Fantasia, 1940

I saw this one multiple times growing up (for earlier viewings, I was not allowed to see the final number “Night on Bald Mountain”). My mom, for her part, saw this in theaters at the age of around 4 (even though it originally came out long before she was born) and thought for years afterwards that there was no such film in real life and her memory of seeing it had been just a pleasant dream.

I have nothing much more to say about this one except that, representing a very different approach from most animated films, Disney or otherwise, 1940′s or otherwise, it succeeded exquisitely. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” number was particularly perfection; it was as though the composer originally had every motion of the story in mind when writing the music. At the same time, having the main character appear in the form of Mickey Mouse in some way seems to cheapen the effect.

The Reluctant Dragon, 1941

I watched this for the first time, not having known it existed. There isn’t really much to say. All that stuck in my mind was one of the shorts, “Baby Weem” (amusing in a disturbing way), and the longer segment which gives the movie its title (also amusing, in a different kind of disturbing way). It was especially interesting to see a 1940′s cartoon portrayal of a very effeminate man, or should I say, male dragon.

Dumbo, 1941

I saw this maybe two or three times growing up, and not in very early childhood. It was never one of my favorites. Later on, I learned that it was done very low-budget to make up for major financial losses in the Disney franchise. This definitely shows in the animation. However, if there’s one thing I can say in praise of Dumbo, it’s that it’s incredibly daring in its simplicity, not only to have such elegantly simple animation but in having a mute title character (instead the main “talker” in the film is the title character’s best friend, who had much more of a New York accent than I’d remembered).

In some ways I find this film incredibly cold and dark by Disney standards, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, and I remember feeling this way even on earlier watchings when I was much younger. The stark cruelty of the humans running the circus, as well as the elephants other than Dumbo and his mother, just really gets to me. (I vividly mis-remembered one of the lines I found most memorable in childhood as “From now on, Dumbo is no longer one of us.” The actual line is, “From now on, [Dumbo] is no longer an elephant”, which in a way, is even more chilling.) In this regard, there was no need to make a modern, woker remake of Dumbo containing an explicit anti-animal-exploitation message -- the 1941 version conveys this message loud and clear. Now that I’m writing this, I suppose it could be argued that this is another instance of what I described under “Pinocchio” of leaving a major evil unresolved in a Disney film. And apart from that, while the ending for Dumbo is meant to be a very happy one, as an adult I find it incredibly naive: Dumbo is now super internationally famous for his extraordinary gift and is entering the life of a child celebrity, and it’s just going to be smooth sailing from now on? I hate to say it, Dumbo, but your troubles are only just beginning. (I was glad to see Dumbo reunited with his mother in the last scene, however, which I hadn’t remembered happening at all.)

“Look Out For Mr. Stork” is a skillfully-written song I’d completely forgotten about for two decades or so but remember knowing well when I was young. I still think “When I See an Elephant Fly” is a fantastic song, especially with all its reprises at the end -- I’d had some bits of it confused in my memory but had kept the main chorus with me over all the years. Now it’s widely decried as racist, or at least the characters who sing it are decried as racist caricatures. For whatever my opinion is worth, I’m inclined to disagree with this, in particular on the grounds that the crows seem to be the most intelligent, witty, and self-possessed characters in the movie. I’m also pretty sure I heard critical things about it over the years which are false. For one thing, not all of the crows are played by white actors -- only the lead crow is, while the rest of the voices are members of a black musical group called the Hall Johnson Choir. Also, I’m not clear that the lead crow was actually named Jim Crow by the time the movie came out (no name is given in the movie itself). Now an earlier, much more forgettable song featuring black men singing about how they like to work all day and they throw their pay away... yeah that seems awfully racist.

Bambi, 1942

I have surprisingly little to say about this one -- it’s just very distinct from other Disney films of the time, in its story’s lack of magical elements, its characters all being animals and animated in to realistically model animals’ movements, its lack of musical numbers, and its plot reaching the same level of simplicity as that of Snow White. Not to mention actually having a benevolent character die, which I don’t think had been done up to that point. I remember watching this a couple of times as a kid; I was never terribly eager to watch it again and I feel the same way now, despite having majestic beauty that I can really appreciate.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949

This is the first of Disney’s animated features that I never had seen before. What a strange movie, or should I say, two smaller, unrelated movies rolled into one. I liked Mr. Toad’s half better than Ichabod’s half, or at least I found it more entertaining. I was brought up with the book The Wind in the Willows and recall seeing a non-Disney animated rendition of it (which was better and somewhat more thorough than this half-movie-length rendition). I was kind of excited when the “The Merrily Song” started because it unlocked a song from my early-childhood memory that I’d forgotten about for more than twenty years but knew from one of the Disney Sing-Along videos. I still think it’s a not half bad song, especially with the harmony.

The Ichabod story was not at all what I expected, not being familiar with the original book version (I had always assumed that Ichabod must be the name of a villain). I found it completely boring until the final horror sequence. As a child I would have found the courtship part even more boring (at least now I can muse on how man-woman courtship dynamics were shown in the late 40′s), and I would have found the horror part at the end very scary (in fact, maybe this is the reason my parents never showed the movie to me). It is a little shocking in being the only Disney story I’ve seen so far with a decidedly unhappy ending.

Cinderella, 1950

This one I only ever saw once or twice as a child. This is not counting a very vivid memory I have from around age 6 or 7 when I was watching a part of it over at another family’s house and their child, who was almost my age and nonverbal autistic, rewound and repeated the same 2-minute sequence involving the mice for probably about an hour (I was impressed because I at the time didn’t know how to work the controls of a video player).

I suppose this could be considered the second in the main trifecta of the most conservative fairy tale princess stories that Disney did in the earlier part of its history. I think one can argue that Cinderella has the strongest and most fleshed-out character out of those three princesses. I like the spirited internal strength she reveals in her very first scene. That said, like the other earlier princesses, she seems to have one singular goal in life, and that is to find her true love, not, say, to escape her abusive stepmother and stepsisters.

My reaction to this movie is overall positive. The mice were fun (I also like how their voices seemed a lot more like how mice “should” talk than in most other Disney cartoons); the dynamic between Cinderella and her evil relatives, and the dynamic between the stepmother and stepsisters themselves, was shown in a rounded way; and the fairy godmother is a great character despite having only one scene. The character of the king is pretty odd (very selfish yet his main dream is of getting to play with his future grandchildren) while not especially memorable or well fleshed out. There are certainly some great classic songs in this one -- not the most stellar that Disney has ever produced, but solid.

Alice in Wonderland, 1951

I was curious about what I would think of this one, since we owned the video of this at my home growing up and I watched it many times during childhood but as I got older I fell in love with the original Lewis Carroll books which, together, I often consider my favorite work of written fiction ever. I had not seen the Disney film Alice in Wonderland for around two decades, although I made the mistake of catching parts of more modern, live-action adaptations of the story more recently. I wondered what I would make of the old animated Disney adaptation after getting to know the books so well.

There is simply no way that any movie can recreate the true flavor of the books, but Disney’s Alice in Wonderland does a fine job of creating the general nonsensical, sometimes bewildering dream atmosphere, and, perhaps more importantly, capturing the essence of Alice’s personality. I give a lot of credit to Katherine Beaumont for this -- she has the major girl’s role in the next movie on this list as well, but she especially shines as Alice. Two other very distinctive voices, Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter and Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, also add a lot to the cast of characters.

While mixing around some of the scenes of the original book Alice in Wonderland, with some scenes of Alice Through the Looking Glass inserted, the progression of the plot is a long, dreamlike sequence of strange situations with only a few common threads, true to the original first book (Looking Glass had a little, but only a little, more structure). In the movie, everything breaks down at the end with many of the previous scenes and characters swirling together and Alice frantically trying to wake herself up. One could object that this is not how the dream ends in the book Alice in Wonderland, but there is a similar sort of breakdown at the end of the dream in Looking Glass and it feels very real somehow, as in my experience this is sometimes how vivid dreams disintegrate.

Oh, and did you know that Alice in Wonderland has a greater number of songs in it than any other Disney film? There are nearly 25 that made it into the film, even if lasting just for seconds, with a around 10 more written for the film that didn’t make it.

So, does the Disney film do a good job of conveying one of my favorite books of all time, within the confines of being a children’s animated film? I would say yes. For reasons I described above, and from the fact that it manages to avoid working in a moral lesson for Alice, or depicting Alice as a young adult, or manufacturing an affair between Alice and the Hatter (ugh), like some film adaptations, I would say that this classic Disney version is the best Alice in Wonderland adaptation that I know of.

Peter Pan, 1953

Although I never knew this one super well, this movie has a special place in my heart from the way the flying sequence enchanted me in early childhood. I have to differ with the YouTuber Phantom Strider when he dismisses the 40′s/50′s-style song “You Can Fly” as just not doing it for him, because that song along with the animation of the characters’ journey to Neverland had a major hand in shaping my early-childhood sense of magic and wonder and yearning. I distinctly remembering a time, around age 6, when I just didn’t see much point in watching other Disney movies, or movies at all, which didn’t have flying in them, because what could possibly top the sheer joy and freedom of feeling able to swim through the air? I’ve had hardly any exposure to Superman, and so the kind of bodily flight I imagined in fantasy or performed in dreams was almost entirely shaped by Peter Pan. (At the same time, the crocodile in Peter Pan influenced my nightmares at the same age.)

I only ever saw this one a few times, but I distinctly remember the most recent of them being when I was a teenager, perhaps even an older teenager, and I remember thinking at the time that it was a pretty darn solid Disney movie. I still think the same now, while granting that some aspects of the movie seem a little antiquated and certain sequences with the Native Americans are quite cringe-worthy from the point of view of modern sensibilities. Only a couple years ago, when visiting my parents’ house, I finally took down the book Peter Pan from the shelf and decided to give it a read and found it a beautiful although slightly strange and offbeat story. In particular, I was shocked at how nasty and vengeful Tinker Bell was (particularly in trying to get Wendy killed), when I had remembered her as sweet and naive in the movie. It turns out I was wrong about the movie -- Tinker Bell tries to get Wendy killed there also! -- but somehow the tone is moderated well enough that in this version I never really feel horrified at her behavior, nor do I feel disturbed at the situation of the Lost Boys in the way the book made me view them. The song of the lone pirate who sings about how a pirate’s life is short, right before Captain Hook fires his gun and we hear a dropping sound followed by a splash, is one of the more masterful executions of dark humor that I’ve seen in Disney animation for children.

While most of the songs in Peter Pan, considered as songs on their own, are pretty good, I think the best one is the one whose lyrics didn’t make it into the film: “Never Smile at a Crocodile”.

Lady and the Tramp, 1955

Despite being more obscure than most of the old Disney animated classics, I used to know this one quite well since we had it in our home. I’ve always considered The Great Mouse Detective as the most underrated Disney film of all time, but I think it has serious competition here. Lady and the Tramp is an absolute gem. While not quite as Disney-fantasy-ish with its lack of magic and other fairy tale elements, in my opinion Lady and the Tramp is, in most ways, superior to everything else on this list save Mary Poppins. Beautiful animation which shows Lady and most of the other animals moving realistically in a way we haven’t seen since Bambi*. Everything visually and conceptually framed from the dogs’ points of view. Great voice acting. Consistently solid dialog without a single line too much or missing. A story evoking the dynamic between humans and pets, class inequality, and deep questions about the place of each of us in society and choices between a stable existence among loved ones and striking out to seize life by the horns. Our first female lead who stands on her own two four feet and whose sole goal isn’t to get kissed by her true love (one could argue that Alice was the earlier exception, but she is a little girl whereas Lady is actually a romantic female lead). When Lady is approached by her two best (male) friends in a very awkward (perhaps especially from a modern sensibility) but sweet scene where they offer to be her partner, Lady makes it clear that she doesn’t want or need a husband just for the sake of having a husband to make babies with -- her standing up for her own wants in this way doesn’t in the least turn into a Moral Stand that dominates the movie. Excellent music all the way through.

Oh, and this movie was my very first introduction, in early childhood, to the Italian language (”Bella Notte”), which some 25 years later sort became my second language of sorts.

Criticisms? Well, the baby was animated rather stiffly and unnaturally, but that was like half a minute of the movie at most. And there’s the whole segment with the Siamese cats, which produced a great song purely music-wise (fun fact: Peggy Lee provided the voices of the cats) but nowadays comes across as rather racist. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, but I will say that I’m sure in the minds of the creators this was no different than having animals of all other nationalities (Scottish, Russian, Mexican) appearing in the film with voices reflecting the respective accents.

*There may be a few exceptions, like Peggy, who seems to be modeled after the musician Peggy Lee and moves like a sexy human woman. The way that human sex appeal is conveyed through the animals’ movements in this movie is quite impressive: my mom confesses to having somewhat of a crush on Tramp growing up and not quite understanding how that could be possible when, well, he’s a dog.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954, and Old Yeller, 1957

I don’t want to say about these movies, as they don’t really fall under the category of animated classics. I just want to say that, while I saw each of them once growing up, on seeing them again I recognize each as a great movie in its own adult point of view way that is not necessarily very Disney-ish.

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

I think this was the movie I was watching at the time I decided it would be fun to write a bunch of mini-reviews for Tumblr, as my reactions were changing a lot as I was watching. I went into the movie very curious, because while I only remembered enough of the fairy tale story to know that it was another of the very simple ones, and I remembered the one song as a waltz by Tchaikovsky, and I knew I had seen the movie once (and probably only once) as a kid, I couldn’t remember anywhere near enough to possibly fill a full movie time. What was actually going to happen in this hour-and-a-quarter long film?

I wasn’t watching long before I came up with the description “spectacularly forgettable”, in part to justify why I’d managed to forget practically all of my one previous viewing. The story doesn’t have much substance and feels sillier than even the other fairy tale Disney plots, like even minor twinges of critical thought, even granting the magical rules of the universe, are liable to make the plot topple. There is some filler to flesh out the movie, but (unlike with Snow White’s dwarfs) none of it is as amusing as the creators seemed to think it was. The only characters with actual personality are rather boring -- the capers between the members of royalty and the jester are a bit on the annoying side in my opinion. Maleficent seems to have no motive whatsoever. She actually calls herself something like “the mistress of evil” later in the movie. This is pretty black-and-white even by Disney standards, where the bad guys usually at least want to think that they’re on the right side of things or justified in their aggressive behavior. Aurora (the title character) has the least personality of all the Disney princesses. Literally all I can say to describe her is that she has the Disney Princess Trifecta of characteristics: she has a good singing voice; she is friends with all the “nice” animals; and her only goal in life is to be reunited with her True Love who she met once for all of a few minutes. The reason why I couldn’t remember any songs other than the Tchaikovsky one is that there aren’t any.

The one thing I consciously really enjoyed while watching was the fact that the score throughout was Tchaikovsky; the idea of having one work of classical music as the entire score seems like a bold one for a Disney film. As I was digesting the movie afterwards (and watching the short documentaries supplied on Disney+ helped here!), I came to realize that this classical music backdrop was complimented in quite an interesting way by a fairly unique animation style. I had been disappointed by the animation early in my watching, disliking how a lot of the figures in the beginning castle scene (for instance, various people’s faces), looked very “flat” somehow. But I’ve come to see this as part of a style where everything looks almost like a series of cut-outs superimposed on each other, to incredibly beautiful effect in a lot of the outdoor scenes.

My conclusion? If you watch this the same way you watch most Disney animated movies -- focusing on plot, characterization, action, and meaning of the main story -- it will just be kind of forgettable at best. But if you watch it as more of a purely visual and musical piece of art without trying to make much “sense” out of it (so, more like I would watch a ballet), you may find it uniquely beautiful among Disney classics.

One Hundred and One Dalmations, 1961

Whew -- what a complete and utter contrast from its predecessor! I can hardly imagine a film that’s still distinctively Disney while being more different from Sleeping Beauty in every aspect.

I remember seeing One Hundred and One Dalmatians a handful of times in childhood (when I was around 5 and it had just come out on home video, my mom almost bought it for me but decided to go with Beauty and the Beast instead explaining that it had better music -- I grew up knowing the preview for Dalmatians that showed at the beginning of our Beauty and the Beast VHS than the dalmatians film itself). I remembered a number of scenes very distinctly, including a lot of the Horace and Jasper bickering and Cruella smashing one of their bottles of beer into the fire and knew Lucky’s line after getting stuck behind in the snow almost word for word, while I had entirely forgotten all of the country/farm characters and entire sequences involving them. I had forgotten, but soon remembered, the television scenes including the Kanine Krunchies jingle. (Some years later, I think as an older teenager, I read the original book with some interest.)

Although I wasn’t around in 1961, everything about this movie’s style strikes me as very contemporary -- the animation in particular seems like the current style for 60′s cartoons. Something about the dialog and humor feels that way as well, as though it closely represents a sort of 60′s young-people-in-London culture that I’ve never seen myself (I was struck for instance by Cruella being asked how she’s doing and cheerfully answering, “Miserable dahling as usual, perfectly wretched!”). It was a little strange and offputting to see television so prominently featured in Disney animation from so long ago, and to see such a decrepit bachelor pad (with the accompanying lifestyle and attitudes) as Horace and Jasper’s in a children’s movie. The crazy driving in snow at the end startled my adult sensibilities (as I now have some memorable experiences driving in snow) in a way that didn’t affect me as a child -- scenes like that just didn’t feel like Disney after having just watched all the previous films. All in all, these novel features made the whole movie a wild ride.

I’m bemused by the fact that, despite taking place in London (which I hadn’t remembered -- I thought it took place in America), the only accents which are fully British are those of the villains Cruella de Vil, Horace, and Jasper.

Main criticisms: I found all the stuff with Rolly being characterized by his body shape and only ever thinking about food to be in poor taste (although not surprising for the times). And while “Cruella de Vil” is a great jazz number, the movie has no other music to speak of -- my mom was quite right to choose Beauty and the Beast over it.

(I realized when finishing this review that this is the only one of all the movies in the list that I’d actually enjoy seeing again sometime soon. Not sure what to make of that. Something about it is more interesting than most of the others? Especially the human-centric parts?)

The Sword in the Stone, 1963

I never saw this movie until later childhood or maybe even early teenagerhood, when I quite liked it. On watching it again, I was overall pretty disappointed. This movie has some decent songs and some fun aspects to the story, but a lot of it is kind of weak and forgettable and it’s all just sloppily done.

The story has a clear moral message which is generally pro-education and about reaching one’s full potential, but in my eyes it comes out kind of muddled because the story shows Wart ending up as a legendary king only out of the arbitrary happenstance that that happens to be his divine destiny. Merlin’s motives seem kind of inconsistent as well, with him sometimes seeming to support Wart in his desire to become a squire, then flying off in a rage when Wart chooses squirehood over fulfilling a “greater” destiny, then joyfully returning after Wart pulls the sword from the stone and is now set on the fixed path to being king, even though this involved exactly zero change of attitude on Wart’s part. The message that actually comes across looks more like, “We have to just follow whatever fate has in store for us” than “We must strive to be the best we can be”. And, it arguably even comes across as subtly disrespectful to more mundane lifestyles and career paths.

The animation is not great by the high standard of full-length Disney features (I noted how I especially disliked how tears were shown). Wart’s voice seems to change a lot, sometimes broken and sometimes not yet broken. I found out after watching that this is because the character was played by three different actors, sometimes with more than one of those actors in the same scene! This was purportedly because the voice of the first actor cast for the role started to change, but then why does Wart sometimes sound like his voice has already changed anyway? Sloppiness all around.

Still, some parts of The Sword in the Stone are fun even if none of it is stellar, and it entertained me more when I was younger, so worth watching once, especially if you’re a kid, I guess?

Mary Poppins, 1964

I came into this one far more familiar with it than with most of the other Disney movies, including the ones I watched many times when I was young, so it feels a little strange to try to summarize a similar-length review of it. Mary Poppins is in my book without a doubt one of the top three Disney movies of all time, in some respects the very best, and certainly the masterpiece of Walt Disney himself, the culmination of literally decades of determination on his part to turn Pamela Travers’ children’s works into a movie. (I would feel sorrier for Travers about how strongly Disney twisted her arm to turn her books into a movie whose style was entirely antithetical to hers, if it weren’t for the fact that the Disney version of the story is just way better than her rather weak set of stories. I give Travers ample credit for having created an amazing character in the person of Mary Poppins, but for coming up with good stories, not so much.)

I didn’t see the full movie Mary Poppins until later childhood (although I knew many of the songs) and it quickly became a favorite of mine. I went a gap of a number of years without seeing it before I copied the soundtrack from someone when I was in college, which spurred me to go out and rent it (back when Blockbuster was a thing) and so I managed to reconnect with it at the age of 20. More recently I’ve become somewhat of a Mary Poppins enthusiast -- feeling pretty alone among my generation in this regard, with the possible exception of the theater subculture -- having seen probably most or all of the documentaries there are on its production and learned a ridiculous amount of trivia about it, not to mention knowing the whole soundtrack pretty much in my head.

Mary Poppins seems to be Disney’s longest children’s classic, at 2 hours and 19 minutes. All it lacks, really, is an animal-themed or classic fairy tale atmosphere and a proper villain. But what can you get out this movie? Stellar child acting (especially for that period) and excellent performances all around, apart from some awkward but endearing aspects of Dick Van Dyke’s acting (while his singing and physicality is superb). A complex and multi-layered story combining magic, comedy and a little tragedy, appreciable in equal measure from a child’s level and from an adult’s level. Revolutionary special effects which include the first extended hybrid live-action and animation sequence. Timeless words and phrases which have permanently entered the lexicon. One of my favorite extended musical sequence of all time in any movie (”Step In Time” takes up 8 minutes and change, and I’m glad they didn’t go with the “common sense” measure of cutting this “unnecessarily long” number). The Sherman brothers at their very best, in a musical soundtrack that easily scores in my top two out of all Disney movies (the other one being The Lion King). A beautiful message (among several big messages) about the little things being important (or at least, that’s a very crude summary), exquisitely encapsulated in the most beautiful song of the movie, “Feed the Birds” (this apparently became Walt Disney’s favorite song ever, and I’m pretty close to feeling the same way -- I’m determined that one day when I finally have a piano I’m going to learn to sing it along with the piano). I could go on and on here.

If I try really hard I can come up with the sole nitpick of feeling that maybe the parrot head on the umbrella’s handle shouldn’t only reveal itself as a talking parrot head in only one scene right at the very end -- this should have been shown at least once earlier. Even granting that, this film is still practically perfect in every way.

The Jungle Book, 1967

(Let’s get the Colonel Hath in the room out of the way first: “The Jungle Book” is a terrible title for a movie. You know, when you base a movie on a book you don’t have to give it the same title as the book...)

I saw The Jungle Book several times as a kid and, despite not considering it nearly as good as Mary Poppins, similarly reconnected with it in adulthood (particularly the soundtrack). Only several years ago I found myself thinking of getting hold of a double album of classic Disney songs that I thought I’d heard about but couldn’t seem to find online. It soon occurred to me that mostly what I really wanted was some of the songs of The Jungle Book, so I got that movie’s soundtrack instead. I soon learned for the first time that The Jungle Book’s songs were written by the Sherman Brothers*, precipitating an “Ah, that explains why I remember them as so good!” moment. (“I Wanna Be Like You” seems like the clear winner among the songs.) Of course hearing the soundtrack made me curious about the movie, which I did eventually get hold of several years ago; thus I had seen this film exactly once already since childhood.

It says a lot about the music and the overall technique behind this film that I still look back on it as one of the great classics, considering how weak the story is. In particular, I consider a story arc to be pretty flawed when characters that seem significant and/or memorable come in without really living up to their expected big role: the wolves who raised Mowgli play a crucial role in the beginning before more or less disappearing (and it doesn’t entirely make sense to me why Bagheera, rather than they, is guiding him to the man village), and King Louie (who is a well-formed character that I particularly enjoy watching) really ought to come back into the story later somehow (an alternate, and much more complex, ending had him make a reappearance). The villain Shere Khan is not especially well developed in terms of his character and motives, but I do enjoy his menacingly bass voice. Still, the voice acting, the action, the animation, and the overall setting are all very solid here.

I’ll end with some random observations about the song “That’s What Friends Are For”. I think the likeness of the vultures to the Beatles was mostly lost on me as a kid (along with the recognition that this movie came out in the Beatles’ heyday). More interestingly, even when I was old enough to understand how vultures eat, the fact that every single line of the song is a clever macabre double-entendre went completely over my head. I do think it was a very obvious mistake, by the Obvious Standards of Cinematography, to give Shere Khan the last line of the song and begin that line with the “camera” on him, rather than have his voice come in “off-camera” and Mowgli and the vultures looking thunderstruck before panning to him, but maybe I shouldn’t be pushing for overdone techniques here.

* An exception is “Bare Necessities”, which was written by Terry Gilkyson, the original songwriter Disney received submissions from, who wrote two hauntingly beautiful other numbers which were deemed not Disney-ish enough to be put in the film.

Some general stray observations:

These older Disney films love gags involving alcoholism and drunkenness, a bit of a questionable emphasis given that the audience is children. This trend continues into the 80′s at least, but I don’t think one sees it much in modern Disney movies.

Watching these animated films I often find myself flinching as characters’ heads smash into things or gigantic objects smash over their heads, feeling almost surprised when they come out of it pretty much fine. I guess this a staple element of cartoon action throughout the decades, but I can’t recall a more recent Disney animated film where we see this (guess I’ll soon find out!)

There is a certain style of vocal music, with unified rhythm and lyrics but complex harmony and a capella, which seems to have been immensely popular in the 40′s and 50′s and distinctively appears in practically every single one of the 40′s and 50′s films above (“You Can Fly” is a typical example). I recognize it also from some non-Disney-related old records my parents have that were passed down to them. I’m curious about whether this style has a name.

For years I thought the Sherman Brothers did only the soundtrack for Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, only discovering they did The Jungle Book songs rather recently as I explained above. It turns out they were involved in most of the major Disney films around that period, including The Sword in the Stone and The Aristocats (although not its best-known number “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat”).

There is a particularly sad instrumental passage, played by the string section starting with a minor-key violin melody going downward and joined by lower string instruments, which I knew well from my Jungle Book soundtrack (partway through “Poor Bear”) but was surprised to hear in desperately sad moments of several of the other movies around that time (including One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Robin Hood, or at least a close variant of this passage with slightly different endings). I have no idea who wrote this or how it came to be reused so many times.

I knew the name Bruce Reitherman as the voice of Mowgli in The Jungle Book, but in watching all of these other features back to back I’ve noticed that there are some other Reithermans in the front credits of quite a few of them.

[violet-bookmark]

Lady knight, by L-J Baker

After Shadow of the knife I still was in the mood for literature inspired by ye olde medieval times, but for some reason Rangers at Roadsend was not doing it for me. I am not a quitter and I will definitely review that book soon (at least before the end of this year) but this time I needed something more chivalric and gritty, but with a happy ending to not end up dead inside like with SOTK.

Enter Lady Knight. This is a story about a female knight who is struggling to make a living and is forced to hire her sword to dishonourable lords who are complete assholes, since no reputable order would take her because she is female. She is very cool, gender non conforming and amazing, and not gonna lie, she had my heart from the first page (Riannon marry me pls). She is also ailed by a mysterious poison/supernatural power that seeped into her body via some wounds she took from a magical sword in a past war in Vahl, which almost kill her at times, until her cousin Aveline, naer of a religious order, entrusts her with a magical sword of her own who seals the demonic power inside her and prevents it from killing her as long as she keeps the sword close.

Aveline was interesting, but a complete asshole at the begging. I liked the scenes where she was talking with the goddess, since they were very mythical and immersive, but she treated the women she slept with like dirt. There was a moment in which she just had sex with a priestess and she thought something like "this woman's ambitions will probably never go further than an orgasm", which speaks for itself about what kind of person she is. She was also quite fond of crusading against infidels, which was historically accurate, but I still hated it. I liked how she cared for Riannon in her own way, how ambitious she was and how she knew what she had to do to obtain what she wanted.

Before diving into the character of Eleanor, Riannon's love interest, I want to adress something that bothers me immensely about how some people interpret her. A long time ago, before I even had this book, I read some reviews about it in which she was described as "straight" and talked about as if she was an insipid character. Not the case. She is obviously bisexual: she expresses past interest in men, but she is also the one to show interest in Riannon and to pursue her, and there are so many times in which she talks about her newfound attraction to women in a relatable way for same-sex attracted women. She also wants to reciprocate during the sex scenes and talks about how much she wants to see Riannon's breasts, to touch her vulva and to perform oral sex on her, which does not sound straight in the slightest. How can anybody read these scenes and think "oh yeah, this character is straight"? Every time I was reading one of their scenes together, I kept thinking about how damn obvious it was that she was not. She is bisexual! She is also very interesting, compassionate and smart; a social butterfly who is well aware of the limitations that society imposes on women, but who also knows that in order to gain freedom she needs to follow the rules to a certain extent (and to keep paying a hefty price of coin to the queen for her right to remain a widow, instead of being sold in marriage as a prize to one of the queen's male vassals). She was also quick to emphatize with other women and to try to make things better for them in unpleasant situations (there is a scene in which her teenage niece is getting married to a much older man, and she comforts her to the best of her ability before the wedding night, remembering when she was younger and in the same situation as her) and she was just a lovely person all around. She was my favorite character along with Riannon, and I shipped them so much. I joked before about marrying Riannon, but if I could choose I would probably want to BE like Riannon and marry Eleanor, she is that great.

The romance was very well done, very romantic in a medieval-esque way, very sweet and very healthy, something that I was grateful for after the sucker punch that was SOTK in that regard. Both lovers treated each other as equals and accepted each other despite their differences; at first I half expected Eleanor to be horrified by Riannon's masculine appearance, but she was not. Unlike the 99% of the characters (the 1% being Aveline), who treat Riannon like dirt for being gender non comforming, she was curious and accepted her and never thought she was weird or bad, or that she had to change. Riannon also saw more to Eleanor than other people did; the majority of men and women only saw her as a rich, beautiful widow good either to bed or to use as a pawn for their plans, while Riannon treated her as a person with interests, personality, wants and desires.

The author had obviously done her research about social strata, languages and traditions, something that I appreciated a lot and made the world building feel very cohesive and realistic, and a lot more medieval than in SOTK. By the way the characters talk and think you can just feel they are from another time, used to another kind of life and bound to different moral codes. I loved that. Only thing I would complain about (which is a BIG pet peeve of mine) is how what I assume to be the equivalent of Ireland in the story was named Iruland. I have done some research and from what I can tell that was never the name of Ireland, not even during any medieval period, so why? I know the author probably wanted us to be able to identify it as the equivalent of Ireland, but just changing a letter of the name to do that is lazy writing in my opinion. She could have done that in other ways, like showing cultural and historical similarities to Ireland or just saying "Ireland" and calling it a day if she did not want to go through the effort of expanding on world building. It was like when, in The Golden compass, the equivalent of the romani people in that world were called "giptians" (in my country's original language it was worse, they did the same as this book and only added a damn letter to "gypsies"). Why would you do that? It was especially jarring in TGC, since there were already another ton of cultural cues pointing to the "giptians" being a (lazily done) equivalent of the romani people, why didn't Phillip Pullman give them another name? To this day this question haunts me, and I resent this book for reminding me of it.

I liked this book's approach to magic. I liked how it felt mystic yet very medieval-like, not flashy, notorious and easy to control like in other types of fantasy, and in some scenes you did even wonder if it was magic at all what was happening. This is my favorite type of magic in fantasy, I am not keen on the type that is flashy and easy to master, like in Harry Potter (I can like a saga despite of that, but still), so I loved that. It felt very much like "invisible forces that humans can never control completely despite their well-organized rituals, and work in mysterious but undeniable ways", which is my favorite type ever of how to depict magic.

I enjoyed the plot and the political maneuverings a lot and wish we actually got to see more of that, it actually had a lot of potential and could have spanned for several books. More boring YA books have made it to a trilogy with less plot. A lot of interesting stuff was going on but the romance took precedence, and a lot of elements that could have been more explored got swept under the rug. I get it; it is a romance book and a lesbian one to boot, so it is "niche", but a second book would have been great to resolve some elements that were left open in the first book. The ending is hopeful and kind of open, but it was not the type of book in which an open ending makes sense. I might be biased here, but I would have liked a closed ending, since so much was left in the air: did Aveline succeed in her plans? What happened with Cicely? And the baby? Will the magic sword always have its power? Aveline saw a vision at the begining of the book, but will it happen at the end of the war? There is too much left untold. More than anything, I also wanted to see Riannon and Eleanor living together happily until they reached old age. I get the author was trying to send the message that homosexual love always faces hardships in an intolerant society and that there is always hope, but I wanted to see more of the two women being happy, especially since the chapter before the ending was so heartwrenching. I won't spoil anything but a character is raped, the rapist is killed in the next chapter in a very befitting way, but still. The aftermath was very hard to read.

I recommend this book if you like political intrigue and gritty storylines similar to Game of Thrones, but not that sadistic and with more focus on female characters and more female empowerment. In fact, if I had to describe this book with a single phrase it would probably be "the lesbian game of thrones, minus the dragons and more realistic all around". However, if you are not in the mood for holy wars, violence, magic swords and ye olde medieval misogyny, give it a hard pass.

[speckeh]

My 2019 Garbage Book Dump

It’s 2019! I’m tired, I’m hella gay, and I’m still reading books as much as I can with my busy life! Enjoy this book list with reviews! 

1. Thunderball: 5/5 stars. Mormon jokes. Making fun of dietary changes? A young Italian woman (girl) who controls the island with her beauty. It becomes a mission against nuclear threats against the Europe and the US? Not exactly the MOST thrilling James Bond book, but I had a lot of fun reading it. I’m glad this was my first read of the year!

2. The Lydia Steptoe Stories - Faber Stories: 4/5 stars. I found these short, tiny books in a local bookstore. There were 6 of them on the table and I bought three. Sometimes I wish I bought all of them, but not all of them spoke to me. The Lydia collection was interesting as it held three stories with: a young man being “seduced” by his aunt, a young girl wanting to be a dominatrix, and a woman who wishes she could be youthful again. While I didn’t find the stories awe-inspiring, I did find them extremely entertaining and nice to think about.

3. Emma Cozy Classics: 5/5 stars. I have the pride and prejudice one. While it might not be as fabulous as a full book, but the pain-staking skill of felt art is entirely impressive. It went on my Jane Austen book shelf.

4. Come Rain or Shine - Faber Stories: 3/5 stars. What would you do if your friends thought you were absolutely insane and their lives are falling apart worse than yours? What would you do if your friend asks you to play absolutely stupid to his wife to make him look better and for her to realize her life isn’t so bad that she got lucky enough to not marry you? I for one, would drop these fucking friends and never look back. The story was a fucking train wreck and absolutely insane to the point where it wasn’t even humorous to me. Several authors state it’s Ishiguro’s step into comical writing and I wish he wouldn’t.

5. Passionate Minds - Women Rewriting the World: 1/5 stars. I found this book at my Uni’s free bookshelf. I was super excited to read this book but it’s one of the dullest and full of biases book I’ve had the displeasure of picking up. I got to read about my girl Gertrude Stein but I was expecting more female writers, not actors who the writer obvious gets off on. There’s nothing wrong with that, and this book has rave reviews, I just couldn’t stand the writing style and obvious fawning she had (and not in the academic/historically reserved way authors should be).

6. Wandering Island Vol. 2: 4/5 stars. It’s been two years since the first volume came out. I found myself reading it in record time which has me both disappointed and a bit confused (not because I read it fast, but because of the strange editorial ending). The art is impeccable with a few questionable “obviously a man drew this” moment, the story has kind of been a bit muddled up and didn’t necessarily go anywhere this volume. It felt more of a build up for Volume 3 which I don’t know when will be released. The editor wrote this strange 6 page essay that started off they were going to postpone Wandering Island 3, then went on a long rant about how the manga editing world has changed with ^-^ faces all throughout, only to then write fan theories of where they think the story is going to finish with: “We’ll translate the pages as soon as they come out! ^-^” what the fuck?? Haha

7. Fun Home - A Family Tragicomic. 5/5 stars. I bought this book today and I finished it this evening. I’m still processing everything that happened but one thing I know for sure is that I found one of my top 5 books of 2019 as well as a new favorite already. Alison approaches a hard topic of coming out, learning about her father’s secret life of being bisexual, and coming to terms with the strange person with anger issues that was her father. While my father wasn’t gay, there were several elements of her father I saw in my own. The volatile anger, learning more about his life after his death, hearing shattering truths from your mom, the regret of not having conversations sooner and him not seeing who you truly are before their passing. It struck a chord with me and I’m going to be thinking about this comic book I feel like for two months.

8. The Real McCoy: 4/5 stars. This is like a small wikipedia pamphlet book about the famous names, phrases, or lyrics you might know. I wasn’t necessarily impressed with the booklet, but I found some of it entertaining. I gave it a high rating because it served its purpose but I’m totally gifting it to a friend who loves random facts.

9. The Heart Affirming: 5/5 Stars. Epic poems about the Greek Gods, the universal feeling of appreciating nature, the wondering of the cruelty of humanity. This is a rare find of a poetry book not popular and one I found at my local library book sale that was signed by the author. If you have the pleasure to pick up this 1939 poetry book, please do! It’s a treat from the past that shows we still yearn for the same poetic romanticism we did then to now.

10. Bloom: 4.5/5 stars. I’ve realized I’m going to graduate college in the fall and this weird depression hit where I realized my life is really finally going to change forever. So I’m having a mixture of senioritis where I don’t want to do any work when I’m done with school by Wednesday, and I’m having a mid-century life crisis where I don’t know what to do with my life (I mean I do, but it’s terrifying). So I went on a LGTBQ+ splurge on amazon, something i haven’t done in awhile, Bloom was one of those books. Bloom is a fast paced comic about a high school graduate who wants to move out and move on, but his friends are dicks and his parents want him to stay. Welcome the new hot boy whose grandma just died and conveniently loves to bake. Ari wants to leave the bakery and this new hot guy is just his ticket to leave, or is it? I really liked this comic for the art and the story line was refreshing. But there were several instances where the book moves really quickly and the development was… meh. HeartStopper has great, slow pacing that lets you feel like the characters and story moves in a believable way. Bloom is rushed in some parts, but still.. So cute.

11. Spinning: 5/5 Stars. 2/4 of the LGTBQ+ books I ordered have been read! I read this book the day before valentine’s day and I’ve already been in a weird mode/crisis of being a university senior. I, loved this book for all the reasons why people gave it 3 stars. Everyone stated the story didn’t wrap up, that i jumped, that it felt fragments, but if you read the very end the author state not all books should make sense or follow a timeline or be accurate and these followed her own recollection without revisiting anything. I really appreciated and I loved the style. It’s a heavy book with sexual assault, manipulation, child abuse, and a very unhappy protagonist who isn’t likeable. But at the same time, finishing this book I just felt such grief that I didn’t pursue an art career. That I didn’t just join an art program or give my art career a chance. I think when I’m in the end of my career, retirement, I may go to art school again or maybe I’ll splurge money on lessons or maybe I’ll just accept my art as is. Either way, this book made me fiercely jealous of a 21 year old. It reminded me of a famous story of my dad reading a book about astronauts and crying in the bath because he should have been an astronaut, and how this book made me want to cry because in some form I should have been an artist. But like my dad, we’ve both chased careers that really inspired and gave us amazing opportunities. But I think it’s natural to miss over those childhood passions you didn’t follow through with because you felt like you weren’t enough.

12. My Solo Exchange Diary Vol 2. 2.5/5 stars. I read the first volume last year due to prompting from one of my precious friends (Ramona). My loneliness with Lesbianism was AMAZING. I bought it. My Solo Exchange Diary felt like the author was rambling in circles, completely mentally unwell, and had no ideas of how to properly take care of herself. In Volume 2 she was able to search for some help and she was able to deal with some introspective thoughts about how her viewpoint might have been wrong and how she was toxic to herself and her family. Volume 2 still left a taste in my mouth that felt… weird? She’s moving in the right directions but I think she’s desperately trying to follow the hype of her lesbian hit manga and she’s failing due to her wants to surpass herself. I laughed and felt bad as she mentioned how people slammed her for Volume 1, so it felt very meta to read how she reacted because my comment was also criticizing her: read here. But if you’re reading it in a bookstore or a library, do it. It’s nice to see how she’s slowly making progress with herself.  

13. Sputnik Sweetheart. 1/5 stars. I picked this up in Brussels in the select few english section because the cover was intriguing and the back cover claimed it was a lesbian story. I was so excited, and imagine my absolutely hatred when I realized a straight cisgender man had written a “lesbian” story through the eyes of a straight male who is lusting after his lesbian best friend. He proclaims he gets boners at looking at her breasts and how her eccentric style only makes her that more beautiful just to him. I hate everything about this book. I wish straight cisgendered men would leave lesbian narrative stories alone unless you’re going to write them right. Get the fuck out of my books.

14. Fortunate Beasts: Letters to Lucardo Vol 2: 5/5 stars. The long waited and anticipated sequel to Letters to Lucardo!!! It’s been two years since I read the first volume, supported it on kickstarters, and I’m going to keep funding each release until the quadiology is complete! This had a lot less background building, exciting sex scenes, but you now understand the two lovers and get to see them develop their budding relationship. While it wasn’t as smut riddled as I expected, I was very happy with the continuation!

15. The little Lame Prince: 2/5 stars. DNF. Did not finish in case for those who don’t know/can’t remember (I hardly remember what DNF stands for myself). I’m torn as I want to eventually finish this book but I’m just not in the mood for it. It’s a sweet story but is very slow and from what I can tell, repeats itself a lot. It’s a old book from the early 1800s which explains the somewhat hard language and problematic moments, but it’s still charming. I’ll debate when I’ll try this again. For now, it’s returning to my shelves with a bookmark in the pages.

16. Shounen Houkokusho. 5/5 stars. A shounen-ai soft, wholesome gay family about a little boy standing up for his dad’s long time partner and asking them to get married. Very sweet. So precious. I love.

17. Same Difference and Other Stories: 4/5 stars. This was a reread from my friend Mark who gifted this to me back in december of 2014. It’s been 5 years since I picked up this book and I decided to see how its changed. As an adult, this comic speaks to me a lot louder than it did nearly half a decade ago. Struggling to find your way through life, seeing all your high school “friends” getting married, having jobs, meanwhile you’re just.. Here. Definitely a story I needed to revisit again in the future and also I still appreciate Mark’s notes he left in here for me!

18. Amazing Women: 101 Lives to Inspire you: 4/5 stars. This was my gift after finally being cut loose from the cancer clinic. I never had to go back there again and so I decided to pick up a momento. This was the book I chose that they offered. I really appreciate how they cover diverse women from all over the world rather than American-centric. They don’t go further than 1826, keping mostly within 200 years which is a bit of a bummer. There were also some choices I felt were questionable, like Zoe Sugg (who had her book ghost written and scams her viewers) and that they didn’t have Alison Bechendel was a huge disappointment. But this book is opinionated as they did have to narrow it down to 101 women, so I’m never going to be happy unless I pick my own. I also appreciated that if a diplomat was assassinated they mentioned it in the book.

19. The Epic of Gilgamesh: 5/5 stars. I learned about the Epic of Gilgamesh back when I was a itty-bitty sophomore in high school. I remember being so intrigued and would draw my gay ass characters as the Harlot and Endurk. I think I still have the drawings somewhere and they’re cringey. I bought the book and it’s been sitting on my shelf for YEARS. I did a deep clean of my bookshelves last night from 11:30 pm - 4:30 am, and this morning I just wanted to read since I haven’t been able to for months. I loved it! I love creation myths, old myths from “lost” cultures, plus the language was hella gay in this story. It’s a short 61 pages, so if you have like an hour or two and are in the mood for some myths baby, pick it up!

20. The Making of Pride and Prejudice: 4/5 stars. This book is chalked full of interviews from staff, actors, photos of the sets, and a bit too long section on the director and writers moaning about a script. I loved the photos of the behind the scenes and reading Colin Firth’s reluctancy to take, arguably, his most iconic role because he didn’t care for classical movies. Thought they were boring. Really a cool book to have if you’re a big Pride and Prejudice 1995 fan.

21. Greek Myths: 2/5 stars. I love the artwork in this book, but the author shows a lack of research when he writes the Roman names for the greek gods. I’m all fine with showing a Roman cultural story, but if you’re writing a Greek Myths story, BITCH use the Greek names!!! If it wasn’t for the artwork, this book would be traaash.

22. Wicked: 5/5 stars. I’ve been in a reading rut for almost a month where I’ve felt unmotivated to do anything. Since going back to brief counseling and getting my head on straight again, I’ve felt the motivation to read. I’m also doing the 2019 OWLS for a Wandmaker and this was one of my assignments. I absolutely loved Wicked. The musical came in last month and it reinvigorated my love for the show. I’ve been wanting to read the book, it’s been haunting me for awhile and I found a back of the Wicked series for 5 dollars at my library sale. Snatched that bitch up. I read this 408 pages in two weeks, probably would have in a week but school. God, I related so much to Elphaba. Not so much the whole, feeling like she has no soul, but taking school seriously and not making friends, coming from a religious family and rebelling, feeling like she’s responsible for her whole family, (not feeling like she’s attractive) and seeing her growth and becoming more comfortable with herself really made me feel better about myself? It’s a super dark book, but it’s great. It’s really great.

23. A Children’s Guide to the Night Sky: 4/5 stars. This was essentially the condensed and easier version of my Stars and Cosmology course I took two years ago!! I sped read this and some of the greek myths they described were dumb down/removed the queerness of it. Which is why I took off a whole star.

24. The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up: 5/5 stars. Hello Marie Kondo. Everyone is on a cleaning kick/obsessed with Marie Kondo. I liked this comic because it was short and also made her book in a bite size, story drive style. I liked its simplistic form!

25. Julian is a Mermaid: 5/5 stars. I’ve had my eye on this book for a year, ever since it was announced in Goodreads’ monthly list. I found the last copy and snatched it up. I like the muted colors, the art style, the different bodies, and letting little boys know it’s ok to dress up as mermaids or anything feminized. A great message!!!

26. Kiss Number 8: 5/5 stars. This is one of those random comics I saw in the new releases and the cover caught my eye. I read the first few pages and decided to buy it. I loved it as it’s a coming out story but the main story isn’t revolved around coming out. It’s about the complicated nature of family, coming out through the years, and trans themes. I know some people say this book and the characters are transphobic due to misgendering and dead names used, but the main character is catholic. Her family are mega catholic. She’s going to a catholic school. Of course there’s going to be misgendering and dead names used! It’s how people naturally react to news. If you’re super sensitive, I wouldn’t read this book, but I loved it to bits. I held it to my chest like I do rarely with those books that give you the warm feels.

27. Elephi - The Cat with the High IQ: 5/5 stars. This was a book I grabbed at a close down sale. It’s about Elephi who sees a small fiat car abandoned in the snow outside and decides to use his brains to get the car inside the fifth story apartment. The author really knows how cats act and I felt like all the mannerisms were perfect for a year old cat(kitten). Really a cute book that I read in 40 minutes??

28. One Happy Tiger: 4/5 stars. A book about a tiger counting friends. Cute. It’s a children’s book. Not too substantial in anything.

29. The Language of Thorns: 5/5 stars. Ok WOW. I bought this about a year ago during B&N’s signed deals where they just had a ton of books signed by the authors. I’ve seen this book floating around on BookTube for awhile and I decided to check it out at the bookstore. The illustrations sold me and I bought it. Imagine the already dark Grimm’s fairy tales, but darker. More context for the characters: Ursula, the Nutcracker, Hansel and Gretel but if Gretel was the only one at home. Really amazing stories and if you’re interested in dark, pretty illustrations that change with each page, pick it up!

30. Satoko and Nada vol 1: 5/5 stars. Ramona and I went to B&N yesterday, just sitting around like two useless gays reading a bunch of manga. This is one she picked out and told me to read it. You know me, as a white academic I am constantly on the lookout for narratives that aren’t white and can educate me. This was one of them! Satoko is from Japan while Nada is from Saudi Arabia, both are exchange students in the US. Their friendship, learning about each other’s cultures is so fucking cute. ;0;

31: I Hear the Sunspot vol 1: 4/5 stars. I docked this down from a 5 star rating because it just jumps into a established plot. I had no idea if this was a continuation from another series or if the author purposefully just threw us in the mix of an established gay relationship but they’re not really (they are but they’re confused) with some flashbacks that looks like it came from another volume? But despite those factors, the art is gorgeous. The characters are well developed and have complex background and stories to tell (one of the main characters has a degenerative hearing issue and will eventually become deaf).

32. Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter: 4/5 stars. This was a required text I had for a independent study I was a part of where I created a assessment of the climate of where I worked. This is a great resource in learning how to build assessments from scratch, and if you’ve never conducted one. I found the information they gave was limited to assessment of students who use the a writing center, while my assessment was more focused on how safe, valued, and heard those who currently work in the space feel. A great way to step into assessments!

33. Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom: 4/5 stars. This was the first fictionalized piece of Slyvia Plath I’ve read. I can understand why it wasn’t published at first. There’s a lot of loose ends. Why was Mary going to the Ninth Kingdom? Why is everyone so placant in going to a “hell” type place? Also what the hell was the ending and her running away? This story left a lot to be answered, but I also love that about this short story.

34. Momo to Manji Vol 2: 5/5 stars. Volume two of one of my favorite historical yaoi mangas. It’s still hasn’t been fully translated just yet but I love it all the same!! So many complex characters, relationships!

35. Sweet Blue Flowers Vol 1. 5/5 stars. The first edition of a 5 volume series. Ramona told me to read this and I devoured the first book! Wholesome young girls falling in love with each other! Boyish girls who are heartthrobs! Unrequited love galore! Definitely going to check out the rest of the volumes!

36. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me: 5/5 stars. Man. This comic took me through a roller coaster of feelings. First it kind of made me miss the constant interactions I had with people in junior high and high school. It also reminded me heavily of my first gf and I wondered if she and her friends viewed me as Laura Dean (in terms of being too cool. I never cheated lmao. And always just out of reach). It made me melancholy for a younger me who was also hopeless in love with their best friend. It was a wild ride, but one I recommend wholeheartedly!

37. Lovable Lyle: 5/5 stars. I’ve been looking at this little crocodile for awhile and I’ve come to the conclusion he is me. This book was silly but heartwarming as Lyle is beloved but suddenly receives letters from his sworn enemy. They try to ignore it, but they are persistent until they catch the culprit. Fucking ridiculous story but I loved every second.

38. The Great American Pin-Up: 5/5 stars. It was really cool how they sectioned off each famous artist of pin-ups. Some of them were tasteful nudes, semi-nudes, or lingerie teasing moments. As someone who is both gay and used to draw pin-up girls, this is a great reference!!!!

39. Drawing the R.A.F.: 5/5 stars. This book is one of those rarer finds. A british artist was commissioned to draw the officers of the R.A.F. in the middle of World War II. Some portraits are far better than others, but the worser ones are attached with amazing stories. Such as a 6”6’ pilot having to be physically shoved in a spitfire. These are fantastic and the art work is really beautiful.

40. Where’s Will? 4/5 stars. Where’s Will is a William Shakespeare version of Where’s Waldo. The art is beautiful and the hidden characters are extremely clever. However, I remember so often spending hours upon hours trying to find Waldo and the extreme satisfaction of finally finding him. Where’s Will I could find him within 5 minutes. It never went long enough to the point I feel worn and frustrated and finding several more interesting characters. He stood out more than he should and I flew through this book that Waldo would find insulting! But the illustrations are beautiful!

41. Carr’s Pocket Books - Florence Nightingale: 4/5 stars. This mini collection of Nightingale’s journals throughout her life is really interesting. As a woman who revolutionized what it meant to be a nurse and nurse practices, it was nice to see her own words from age 9 to 90. She was an elegant little girl with her writing and she showed wisdom beyond her years. Did I learn anything substantial about her work? No. But I did come to know her on a far more personal level that I appreciate.

42. Carr’s Pocket Books - How Horatius Kept the Bridge: 5/5 stars. Another one of these small pocket sized books I bought in Oundle, England. I don’t know why, but I’ve just been desperate to go through my books and get rid of any and all that don’t speak to me anymore. I also just want to read, a lot. This was part of my kick this week, trying to get through as many as possible. This poem story is about Roman soldier Horatius and how he single handedly took the Bridge against the Greeks. It’s a military triumphant, silly, and mystical, but I really enjoyed the structure of it. It was short and sweet.

43. Echoland: 3.5/5 stars. Echoland follows Arvid, a 12 year old Norwegian boy who visits his grandparents in Denmark for the summer. However, he’s growing up and he’s realizing that his parents are strained for some reason, his sister is too grown for him, and his grandparents are getting older. This book was confusing. It was short, quick, and I think younger children would enjoy this book more than me. It deals with more adult themes but through the eyes of a 12 year old. However, I found a lot of the storyline to be confusing: Why does Arvid not want to be touched? Why are his parents fighting?? Why does he hate all the men in his family? Why is he pushing everyone away? Why are his parents putting up with his attitude? There are a LOT of questions I have and there’s no real answer to be found. Maybe it’s the author’s style, but I found the story to be not as believable, but still enjoyable.

44. Mathilda. 2.5/5 stars. Mathilda was an audiobook I listened to as I suddenly got a migraine at around 6 pm and it didn’t let up until around midnight. The last three hours I’ve been listening to it. I thought this was Matilda from Roald Dahl but was instead by Mary Shelley herself. This was a very bizarre story. I really enjoyed the first half of the story which is about Mathilda writing a final letter to her best friend upon her deathbed. She’s retelling him her tragic story and how the death of her father was her fault. Her childhood was very bleak, touch starved as her mother died and her father abandoned her to his half sister. Her half sister wasn’t warm to her and saw her as a pest, which had Mathilda growing up til she was 16 without a father. Suddenly her father decided to return and within 2 months of his return her aunt dies, and now she’s in his custody. At first everything is fine, until her father starts to lash out at her and is very distant. He at first wants Mathilda to replace her mother and then rejects the idea. They go for a walk and Mathilda presses her father to tell her his deep secret and why he hates her all of a sudden. He refuses until she presses on and then he tells her that he lusts for her. She freaks out, he almost dies in the woods from shame, and then he leaves the next morning. Mathilda is then angry because SHE wanted to leave her father, but because he’s abandoning her again she chases after him. She finds him dead in a hotel room and then Mathilda begins to resent life and living. The story was great up until she decides to chase her father after he leaves her. It became a jumbled mess and Mathilda herself says her mind is a little mad with her decisions. The story started off as an intrigue with beauty descriptions, intense, and then just went bat shit crazy. The story ended on beautiful reflections on nature and how death is not beautiful for those living, but it really lost me. The last hour was a drag. I would definitely suggest listening to it if you have a migraine!

45. Megume to Tsugumi: 5/5 stars. Gay comic, lmao.

46. Golden Sparkle: 5/5 stars. I don’t remember the plot but it was cute.

47. Maltese Falcon: 2/5 stars. I was forced to read this for a film and literature class. Everyone was ranting and raving how the main character should be a male role model but that’s extremely stupid. Look, I love bad male representation (looking at you James Bond), but he was just trash. I get this is a famous crime novel, but GOD. It’s bad.

48. Maiden & Princess: 5/5 stars. This was about a maiden going to a ball who everyone thought she would marry the Prince. Except she and the Prince are best friends and she really fell in love with his sister. We love pride month books!

49. Prince & Knight: 5/5 stars. A gender-swap of Maiden & Princess except this was a Prince who goes off to slay a dragon to save his kingdom only to fall in love with a knight and marry him. SO GOOD.

50. Komi Can’t Communicate, Vol. 1: 4/5 stars. My friend Ramona told me to read this volume since she read it and loved it. While I loved the art and Komi, the story line was just a tad flat for me. It’s a really fun series if you like high school semi-romance but mostly heavy on friendship~!

51. What was Stonewall? 3/5 stars. This was one of those children informative books where they retell a piece of history. I thought this was great for children who know nothing about Stonewall but are hearing it from Drag Queens or in June for Pride History Month. I thought the information about Stonewall was short and concise and also good for children, however the book did verge off point and talk about other points of history as well as random actors who are gay. This is good, but it isn’t Stone wall, you know?

52. Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag: 4/5 stars. I watched Milk and I cried at the end. I’ve been wanting to know more about how Milk created our Pride Flag and this was another one of those books where it’s curated for children. So I appreciate the run down version it gives us, but they had to “modify” what the stripes mean, such as purple being Sexuality. Let kids hear the unfiltered truth!

53. TBH #1: TBH, This Is So Awkward: 4/5 stars. This was in the teen new released section and it’s a book of text messages. I hated this book, but also was way too invested in it when I was reading it out loud to my date. It’s just a bunch of middle school people sending love notes, getting the Valentine’s Day dance cancelled because they won’t stop using their phone and their principal said “Social Decency.” And then it ended by one of the girls bringing the valentine’s day dance back by creating a Task Force to enforce no texting during school. It was fucking wild and I loved every page I flipped through and wrote in.

54. Adaptations from Short Story to Big Screen: 4/5 stars. I liked it well enough, it was a textbook so I didn’t really read the stories in-depth. However, there are two stories I absolutely love which are Field of Dreams and Smoke Signals.

55. Our Father Who Art in a Tree: 5/5. I loved this book. It’s very true to the experience of what it’s like to be depressed and the first few months of deep grief. While I didn’t lose my parent until my teenage years and my brothers were older, but the strained relationships grief causes is so fucking poignant.

56. Little Miss P: 5/5 stars. I know it’s strange, because it’s a man writing a book about periods, but this was an excellent book. It really showcased the love-hate relationship women have with their periods and also sometimes accurate representations of what it feels like.

57. Ginza Neon Paradise: 4/5 stars. I don’t remember reading this manga! (I’m updating my book list after some months)

58. Na Leo I Ka Makani/Voices on the Wind: 5/5 stars. A book of history and photos of native Hawaiians, royals, and other cultural aspects important to the island. Some really cool photos.

59. Satoko & Nada vol. 2: 5/5 stars. Satoko and Nada are back again, continuing on with their studies and friendship. This book still continues to teach westerners some cool Eastern values while the main characters are learning about each other as well. I think the 3rd volume will come out soonish and that might be the end!!! I love this little series!

60. Annie on My Mind: 5/5 stars. One of the first lesbian novels to show a happy ending with the characters. It’s very much a high school love story and first real love. There were some parts of the story that were absolutely aggravating, painfully embarrassing, but also really heart warming. It’s a queer foundational book in literature, and if you’re interested in the history of queer literature, this should be on your list.

61. Killing Stalking: 5/5 stars. The comic finally ended. I started reading it in 2016 and finished in 2019. God was it a ride. It was full of conflicting feelings, creepiness, and an ending that leaves the reader confused, fulfilled, and also not fulfilled at the same time. I wouldn’t suggest reading it for those who are squeamish with gore, violence, and dark sexual themes, but it’s a fantastic read into what it’s like to experience stockholm syndrome and intense violent trauma.

62. Go for it, Nakamura!: 5/5 stars. A high school student falls in love with his popular classmate, but his classmate doesn’t know he exists! A cute gay book about falling in love, making friends, and pushing yourself to achieve your goals!

63. The Great Gatsby: 4/5 stars. The next two books are books I listened to while deep cleaning my room. It took me two days to fully clean my room, and this was also a challenge for my N.E.W.T.S 2019. I remember reading this book in high school and liking, and I think I lent out my copy and never saw it again. I bought it recently and decided to give it a re-read/listen. I think reading the book would have made it more engaging to me, but I found the themes to not be as impressive as an adult. Maybe it’s because I can’t relate to the characters or their choices are so dumb that I just can’t believe it anymore, but it was still entertaining to listen to. The narrator was great!

64. Emma (Narrated by Emma Thompson): 5/5 stars. This feels a bit like cheating because this rendition was not only abridged, but also had live actors. I’m very familiar with Emma, and Emma Thompson as the narrator was a genius move. However, do I feel like I read/listened to Emma? Not really.

65. Fresh Romance, Vol. 1: 4/5 stars. Half of the stories were very confusing and not very good. However, I really loved two stories about a Regency marriage and a spin off of Beauty and the Beast. I would read this volume just for those additions.

66. Pilu of the Woods: 5/5 stars. A cute story about emotions, friendship, and the woods. It even has a recipe on the back I want to read it!! The colors and characters are adorable. The storyline might not be as solid, but it’s a great read!

67. Ou-same to Puppy Love: 5/5 stars. A foreign prince falls in love with a neat-freak government official. Queue stupid boys in love!

68. Sugar Days: 5/5 stars. Childhood best friends, one small and manly, one tall and feminine, both love each other without having the courage to tell the other!!!! Very cute!!!!!

69. The Tea Dragon Society: 5/5 stars. I remember seeing this book a year ago and how everyone was ranting and raving about it. However, I never bought it or saw it. My best friend brought it over the other day for me to read and I could finally see what the fuss was about. QUEER CHARACTERS, LITTLE DRAGONS WITH TEA LEAVES GROWING OFF OF THEM, MULTIPLE REPRESENTATION!!!! IT’S SO GOOOOOD!

70. Luminous Animal: 5/5 stars. A jazz poetry book. It’s interesting how Tony Moffeit can write the same theme over and over, with the same lines but in different poems with different perspectives. It was really cool!

71. Still Mostly True: 5/5 stars. A weird poetry book that has philosophy and deep meaning poems with also weird ass drawings. However, my poetry book had inscriptions from someone else to their friend. The inscriptions were sometimes very annoying, but also kind of heartwarming how this friend made sure her friend knew she was thinking of her and loving her.

72. Sky, Wind, and Stars. 5/5 stars. A poetry book that was a Korean activist who was murdered by the Japanese through medical experiments for his radical poetry. We watched the movie in my Korean History through film class, and I loved it to bits I wanted to read his poetry. The movie downplayed just how radical his poetry was. Even as a English speaker, I can clearly see the activism, Korean pride that was written during the Japanese occupation. It was a wonderful poetry book, and an important one to Koreans at that. If you have the chance to read it, please do.

73. Memoirs of a Geisha: 5/5 stars. Haley (one of my bffs) recommended me this book like 3 years ago. It’s her favorite and I kept saying I would read it. August was the N.E.W.T.S. challenge and this fit the category of “audiobook” as I listened to a fan read audio of it and then had to read the last 7 chapters. I completely see where my friend finds inspiration in her writing from this book! I really loved the sad story, the harsh reality of Japan, even if this book was more on the idealized version of WWII in Japan and how Geishas were. Some of the thinking of Chiyo I feel could be chalked up to white men ideal sexualization, but overall I really enjoyed this book! Plus the fan who read it was really into her characters and she made the experience really fun.

74. Be Prepared: 5/5 stars. When you’re poor, Russian, and have the All-American-Girls as your best friends, life is extremely hard. No one likes your Russian food, the smallness of your home, and listening to a language not their own. VERA NEEDS SOME FUCKING NEW FRIENDS. As someone whose best friend is Russian, has a sister-in-law who is Russian, and a nephew learning to speak Russian, some people are really insensitive and it drives me nuts. I know a lot of people are upset with this book because it’s not a “full memoir” and yet is described as a memoir. I’ll just pose the question, can you remember 1 month straight at 10 years old, from people to dialogue? No? Yeah, cut the book some slack. This has great representation in terms of Russian culture and learning through it from little Russian eyes.

75. Kiraide Isasete: 5/5 stars. It’s another gay manga.

76. I married my best friend to shut up my parents: 4/5 stars. While I appreciate this story is light-hearted, it seems a bit far fetched for my taste. Also the main character doesn’t believe she’s gay, so I find it hard that a) she would actually get married and b) would just readily fall in love with her friend when she’s literally had no sexual desire for anyone. But other than that, it’s a ridiculous love story and it’s to the point!

78. Heartstopper V.2: 5/5 stars. I already read this awhile ago but I finally got my copy! So I’m just putting it in my list!

79. Raven: 5/5 stars. Raven is the first installment of the origins of the Teen Titans characters. I really loved this novel since Raven has always been a dark character in the original show. This book explores her experience with death, coming to terms with her birth origins, and New Orleans with ancient magic. A great start to a series I’m looking forward to reading the rest of!

80. Heartless. 4/5 stars. A child is taken care of by a succubus (male) after a religious cult burns down a hospital to get rid of the succubus. This story is intense in the gore and horror, but pretty light in plot. There’s no real driving force behind the characters and what they do, no explanation, it’s all just there for the reader to assume it just happened. But the characters were dynamic and interesting with superhuman powers and abilities.

81. The Adventure Zone Vol. 2: 5/5 stars. Every time I see Madame Director I sigh in relief because she exactly looks how I envisioned her while listening to the podcast many years ago. The story line is short, I feel like some of the build up jokes are lost or the frustration Griffin has with his brothers and dad that make the podcast so hilarious are missing, but it’s a really beautiful comic and also a great way for people to start listening to TAZ and MBMBAM

82: The Wind in the Willow: 4/5 stars. An audiobook I listened to. I had the paperback but it was too much reading for my mind for a classic children book. When I found the option on Libby, I listened to it as I started my preparations for the start of my final semester as an undergraduate! It went by fast, the actors were in their characters and there were some songs performed. I really enjoyed it, even if Mr. Toad is ANNOYING AS FUCK. Would recommend for those wanting to kill 2 hours of their time.

83. Classmates: 5/5 stars. High school sweethearts? Can’t express their feelings well? Uh, sign me the FUCK uP.

84-108. W Juliet: 5/5 stars. I haven’t read W Juliet since I was in 7th grade. I remember that I loved it so much that when I was in high school I began collecting the volumes and proudly put it on my shelf. I used to have two bookshelves worth of manga, and when I grew older I sold them but only kept two series: Marmalade Boy and W Juliet (I’m gonna read Marmalade Boy next). I’ve been wanting to reread W Juliet recent and revisit Mako and Ito’s silliness, and with the long weekend I did. I was not prepared for the analysis it would give me to my own life. Like, holy shit. This manga series was so important in developing me who I was as a kid, (some of them very mild kinks that my rp friends are subjected to), the loss Ito has and her issues with gender and like 100000% me and how I don’t like masculine guys at all with their toxicity (hello Mako, you summer child boy). I honestly want to do a fucking research paper on this series with an analysis of myself because of how much I love this series and how I connect to it. You can bet your ass this manga is coming with me for the rest of my life.

109-117. Marmalade Boy: 3/5 stars. Marmalade Boy was the manga that started it all. I remember being 8, having found the manga section with my best friend, and we decided to share reading Marmalade Boy. I was so captivated by the story that I made her wait in the car at her house, refusing to let her have the book until I finished it. It was the final of the volume, and it wouldn’t be another 3 years until I read the series OUT OF ORDER. I kept rereading this series, picking it up, I remember it felt like watching a movie. As an adult? God this series is really awful. The characters are very annoying, the teacher is very creepy, the plot moves WAY too quickly, and no one knows what consent is. It’s fucking insane. 1-7 volume is trash, but the 8th volume really put to life in the characters. For one, they’re older, it's been a few years, and they can step back from the crazy lives of high school. If it wasn’t for the sheer nostalgia, I would be giving these books away. But you gotta pay respect to those books that introduced you to life changing moments.

118. Ouji to Kotori. 4/5 stars. An art student, a prince who buys him, trying to escape, foreign lands, a story that has a “romantic” but is open ended. I liked the flow of the story, the art, and the characters were actually believable.

119. Mean Girls Club. 3.5/5 stars. Mean Girls Club is a 1950s tale of girls rising against the patriarchy through sex, survivor, drugs, and murder. The art style is amazing. But the story line is flat and feels rushed. Not a favorite, but still pretty enjoyable.

120. Grumpy Monkey. 5/5 stars. Grumpy Monkey is the story of a monkey who wakes up grumpy. Despite everyone not believing he can be so grumpy on a beautiful day, him denying that he’s grumpy, and getting angry at people telling him HE’S grumpy, is such a goddamn mood. Nothing pisses me off more than people telling me my mood. You don’t know me. Fuck off. Anyways, this also felt like a mental health book for kids, letting them know it's ok to NOT feel ok. As long as someone is willing to listen and not wanting to fix your grumpiness.

121. Dia de los Muertos. 4/5 stars. A children’s informational book about the Day of the Dead. Short, simple, great education.

123. Wild Cherry. 4/5 stars. Wild Cherry is a poetry book I’ve been totting around for 2 months but have had no energy to pick it up. I’ve been very depressed that I haven’t had time to read, and despite me falling asleep right now, I forced myself to read it. It felt very repetitive after a while with her constant calling back to long lost love, death, and April, but I appreciated the 1923 themes that were NO doubt soo popular.

124. Through the Woods: 5/5 stars. A horror comic book that reminds me a lot of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” I lent it to my co-worker since he loves these types of stories!

125. Dancing with Mr. Darcy: 1/5 stars. I read the first story which was Jane Austen crossing the River Styx and facing her judgement and then I tried to read the rest and it was all so fucking boring??? I put the book down and will not be continuing.

126. The Night Diary: 5/5 stars. So this was an audiobook I listened to during the week I had awful vertigo. I couldn’t go to work or university and I laid on the couch, glasses off, just listening to this story. If it hadn’t been read to me, I don’t think I would have loved it as much. It follows Nisha who is forced to leave after WWII when India is split into New India and Pakistan. All muslims are allowed to stay, but all Hindus must leave for New India because of territorial wars. It follows the dreadful path during the desert, the violence they faced, and the child’s innocence slowly being robbed from her. It’s all told through Nisha’s diary who pens it to her mother. The voice actor did a wonderful job.

127. We Contain Multitudes: 5/5 stars. Tiny twink nerd falls in love with Giant Jock football star. And then he falls in love with the nerd and they’re hormonal and coming out and angst with love. I understand why people are upset with the novel: the plot twist seems like a total cop out that the author placed and a 15 year old dating a 18 year old can get borderline statutoary rape. However, I absolutely loved this book. It was refreshing to have a “coming out” narrative that wasn’t focused on coming out, but rather these two boys falling in love through letters, reading the cringe of HS romances, and desperately following these boys through it all. It’s definitely a favorite I read this year!

128. Lovely War: 4/5 stars. This is the third book I read while going through vertigo, and my second audiobook. It’s set during WWI, following two love narratives but told through the perspectives of the Greek God. It was really refreshing, the voice acting was excellent, and I really enjoyed listening while dizzy constantly. I would have given in a 5 star rating, but near the end, Hazel’s pixie-manic girl stereotype was getting out of hand and her hypocrisy was really fucking annoying. However, up until that point, I really enjoyed it and recommended it to several friends!

129. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge: 4.5/5 stars. I really struggled not giving this book five stars, but I thought some of the narration and story-telling could have done a tiny bit better. This was a great audiobook to listen to while I packed and finished projects before my plane ride to my first ever work conference. I was bummed out that I couldn’t listen to this audiobook on the plane because Libby requires wifi, but I really enjoyed the fantasy comedy of this book (even though fantasy tends to be a topic I don’t dare approach because it just through you into a world with no explanation). 10/10 would recommend to strangers on the street.

130. Aaron and Ahmed: 4/5 stars. I read this books during my great “aaaAH I’M GRADUATING TIME IS UNREAL” So these will be short. A story about after 9/11 and the brutality American soldiers went to gain answers, even if there were none.

131. The Tea Dragon Festival: 5/5 stars. Dragons? Tea? LGTB+? Who could ask for more??

132. Roadqueen: Eternal Roadtrip to Love: 5/5 stars. Lesbians calling out how trashy other lesbians treat girls who generally like them. “Fuck Boy” was used a lot and I loved this.

133. Skull-face Bookseller vol. 1: 5/5 stars. A skeleton tries to sell manga and explores the crazy customers who come in, the social mistakes foreigners make with Japanese booksellers, and Honda-san doing her best to survive in her job.

134-136. Beastars Vol 1-3: 5/5 stars. I saw a bit of the anime and realized there was a manga. I bought the two volumes I could and then the third one from amazon. I really enjoyed this series and look forward to reading it more!

137. I hear the Sunspot Vol 2: 5/5 stars. It’s nice to see the couple going on, even if its GUT-WRENCHING and stupid how they refuse to communicate!!!!! But it hits hard topics of the community for the hard of hearing and functioning in a world where signing is considered not important enough to teach.

138. Pink: 5/5 stars. A sex worker who spends all her money feeding her alligator and the trouble she gets into. Weird art style and at first I opened this book and didn’t buy it. 3 months later, decided to buy it and I adored it.

139: Restless: 4/5 stars. I don’t remember much about it, but I think it was cute. Maybe boyfriends find each other again?

140. How can one sell the air?: 5/5 stars. I’ve had this “calling” to start really reading native american stories and heritage. This is a controversial book with Suquamish people as they either see their leader finally giving up or instilling courage to stay firm even as the world does their best to destroy them. I really enjoyed reading his speech.

141. Skull-face Bookseller Vol. 2: 5/5 stars. Honda-san comes back again with her friends and exploring working in the shop with more crazy customers but also with her new found fame being a manga artist.

142. Gold Rush Women: 4/5 stars. A lot of white women with these narratives, which was disappointing since most of the Gold Rush Women were indegenious or came from other areas of the world rather than just Europe or East America. Wish there were more stories on the black, mexican, indegineous, or chinese women who were forced into slavery or abused or helped create the west.

143. No one is too small to make a difference: 5/5 stars. Greta Thornberg amazes me. Here we have a 15 year old with aspergers who is doing her best to inspire scientists, politicians, and anyone in the world to take charge of our climate change issues. It also amazes me how many people are threatened by a 15 year old and she’s forced to repeat herself in her speeches because people refuse to listen to what she has to say. She’s amazing.

144. Ookami he no Yomeiri: 3.5/5 stars A bunny and a wolf get married. What more can I say?

145. Monody: 3/5 stars: Monody is a strange poetry book. The lyrical writing leaves lacking in terms of uniqueness and deep thought, but aesthetically it is beautiful. Blue font paired with geographical maps of Reno, Nevada, the poetry book comes off more of an art piece.

146. Usagi no Mori: 3/5 stars. Uhmmm. Don’t remember…

[oc-tipstricksandreviews]

Can you review my OC? Thank you.

Original. It follows a group of agents in Skotos, a village mostly populated with people who have been wronged by humanity. (It has become a haven for those types of people after people discovering it by pure luck + technology).  One day, while Skotos agents were doing their thing (school and house visits, assemblies, online posting, whipping out bells and shouting, etc) and trying (keyword: trying) to educate people about the horrible things they were doing and why they should stop it, they discovered this organization about the Angels. (They were trying to convince everyone to stop what they were doing, but most of them refused to listen and called the agents names. One of the agents found out that the treatment was because of an organization called the Angels through questioning various of the villagers. The Angels apparently originated from the internet and formed an organization about their beliefs over time). The Angels were trying to promote humanity’s sick things by saying that the victims deserved to be mistreated and even insisted that not only that humanity should not show pity for the victims, but they should also even treat the victims more harshly. To counter this, the head elder of Skotos formed a team of Skotos agents to shut down the Angels (AKA kill all of them since none of them could listen to reason and almost everyone had been brainwashed by their propaganda), but the Angels wiped them out. This continued down the line, through generation and generation and the story takes place where “Squad I” is sent out to hopefully stop the Angels. My OC is in Squad I.

Aarav Kumar

Name: Cassius Kumar

Inspiration: Gaius Cassius Longinus, Judas Iscariot, Satan, Adolf Hitler, and Kamui Gakupo.

Age: 22

Birthplace: A village named Angeli. Angeli’s Latin for Angel, which ties into the expectations it has for its citizens. If they sin, said villager must repent. If they do not repent, they get moved to the horse stables and/or banished to die a slow and painful death. Meanwhile, if their family sticks with them, they are executed. The system is pretty twisted but it’s an exaggerated version of the high expectations people have for each other and the consequences that said people face when expectations aren’t met (not to mention the number of violence humans exercise on a daily basis).

Sexuality: Asexual Demiromantic

Crush: N/A

Looks: He has light brown skin, sable hair, and sapphire-blue eyes. He has some acne on his forehead, though some of it is hidden by his bangs. He also has wrinkles on his forehead and his hands. He is 5'11 and weighs 120 lbs (he’s supposed to be underweight). He wears a long-sleeved black shirt with black pants and black leather shoes. His cloak can somewhat be compared to that of a nun’s dress, except that it is halfway cut open in the front, and he, of course, doesn’t wear a veil. (He’s a priest of a made-up religion).

Abilities/Powers: Every human (in this world) has two special abilities (no one in this world has been born with more or less abilities, although there is a drug that can permanently take away your abilities). One of them (the first of which is the same for everyone) is awakened at birth, and the other is awakened (or rather, it just appears when said person turns 21) when they turn 21 (in this case, Cassius has “awakened” the two of them). The 1st power is the ability to hear any language and have it translated into your own when it reaches your ears. This excludes phrases that are meant to be said in the original language, names, and curse words (the last reason is to provide plucky comic relief). The first ability also rewinds the grammatical structure of a sentence that someone says to fit your language, as well as mess with your eyesight so words written in a different language will appear as if they were written in your language. The second power that Cassius possesses of is kind of strange: He reads a passage from the Babonian Scriptures (the Babonian Scriptures are still a work in process for Babo. Right now, there are 1,000 pages, 700 which are filled with him punishing random people) and whoever his gaze is fixated upon will have what he describes happen to him/her (for this to work, the Babonian scriptures must be whole- same book cover, same pages, same text. If a requirement is not met, then it does not work). However, even if this power seems overpowered, it does have its drawbacks: If he messes up on a word, his power won’t work (the thing he’s trying to do to his enemies will instead happen to him); If he can’t speak, his power won’t work; and his power can’t reach those close to him (he knows because he tried to kill a rabbit, but it got away since it always stayed within the 20 feet blind-spot that his power has) because Babo wanted Cassius to develop fighting strategies and to not rely on his power too much (he gave Cassius a blindspot). The quote he reads also is limited to that of the Babonian Scriptures, and it won’t work without his eyes.

Strengths: He is intelligent, calm and wary of others and is a careful judge of character. He (most of the time) knows what people to trust and what people to avoid. He also communicates with people with apparent “ease,” though he is terrified of humans on the inside. However, sometimes this shows through his constant habit of not meeting the eyes of someone he talks with. Another strength of his is that he’s (usually) very determined and hardworking when it comes to achieving something that he wants.

Weaknesses: He is a dirty coward, and would gladly throw you under the bus if it meant saving himself even if you saved his life 2 seconds before. He is also not very physically fit, so it is easy to crush him and outrank him in terms of physical strength, as well as going crazy (an exaggeration) when he’s not in control of the situation presented to him.

Family: Prisha Kumar (mother, alive) and Indranil Kumar (father, alive). They both love him but they cannot communicate because if they communicated with a sinner, they would be executed. Prisha loved Cassius, but her way of showing love was letting him figure out things for himself and spanking him when he got a problem wrong. In his childhood, Cassius saw her as a dictator; however, when he matured, he began to love her when he saw the long-term lasting effects that her discipline had had on him. (There’s tricky wording with the two “had"s right next to each other but I couldn’t find a substitute, partly because English isn’t my first language so my vocabulary needs expanding). When she noticed his lack of emotions (due to his shrunken amygdala, he experiences social emotions [shame, guilt, embarrassment, etc] on a much smaller scale), she shouted for joy knowing that she wouldn’t have to deal with a lot of crying when he entered his teenage years. When she found out that he had gotten raped, she grew infuriated but told Cassius to suck it up (after comforting him for about an hour) since she knew he would be seen as a sinner by the community. Indranil was a strict man, though he was a bit more lenient and caring than Prisha. He took the main part in raising Cassius, teaching him about the world and the behavior that he should act in. He also believed that the conclusion to major problems could not end without bloodshed and taught Cassius to defend himself. Indranil was always the parent to go to whenever Cassius was confused with something or needed an emotional bolster. That being said, though, Indranil still punished Cassius. When Cassius was little, he would take a ruler and smack the back of his legs with it. As he matured, Indranil changed tactic and made Cassius sit on a durian shell for a set period of time, with the time differentiating with the weight of the "crime” committed and Cassius’s age. Cassius fondly looked upon his father, though the times when his father was upset were the worst for him, as he hated the punishments his father would dole out. When Indranil found out that Cassius had little social emotions, he celebrated with Prisha and cried tears of joy. When he found out that Cassius had been raped, he did everything he could to distract Cassius from that incident for a few weeks.

Friends: He has two friends. One is a male witch whose name is Przemysl Slusarski and the other’s a Muslim named Ahang Arjani. He respects Ahang, and they both like to learn more about the other’s religion, create theories about life with each other, talk about their pasts, and brainstorm theories about which areas humanity could improve on. His relationship with Przemysl is filled with lots of bickering and Cassius smacking the other male for being an idiot (he’s the only one who could get under Cassius’s skin), but they are friends nevertheless.

Drive: He wants to kill Julius Green (his rapist) and educate humanity on their mistakes and why they should fix them.

Likes: Horror books, Books with deep meaning, Books in which humanity is wiped out, writing and reading in his “ego journal” (it’s a journal in which he writes his faults in to lower his ego. Unfortunately, it’s a double-edged sword as his self-esteem is not very high because of this) daily, playing chess, thinking about the happy times he spent with his loved ones, thinking about the happy times he’ll spend with them if they’re reunited, thinking about all the ways he can kill his rapist, and reassuring himself that he’ll be out of the treacherous world he lives in once he kills his rapist. He also has chocolate cravings (though he never indulges in them), which can show you his opinions about that particular food. Other additions to his likes are silence, knowledge, and inner peace along with sleep. Dislikes: Noise, deprivation of sleep, bumbling idiots who are good for nothing, overly happy people, intelligent people who he can’t manipulate, Angeli, the Angels, his rapist, and the world he lives in.

Personality: He is very shrewd and calm (most of the time), and oftentimes thinks before he acts/speaks. Because of his past, he enjoys manipulating the situation since it makes him feel like he’s in control. Due to his shrunken amygdala, he doesn’t show much emotion (hence social emotions that include but are not limited to guilt, shame, embarrassment are not present). He also has enormous amount of cowardice and the low self-esteem he has.  However, although he enjoys using the situation to his advantage even if it costs a few lives in the process, please note that he does not take pleasure in anyone’s death (except his rapist). After all, major problems can’t be solved without bloodshed. He also likes to complain about what’s wrong about the world and himself, which was something he picked up after he was banished from Angeli. He doesn’t think it’ll do anything- he just does it to lower his ego. That’s only his exterior though- on the inside, he’s actually a very confused person who is drenched in sorrow every day and whose only driving point is the murder of his rapist. (At the beginning, he plans to suicide after he kills his rapist because he’s tired of the world he lives in and he wants to be reunited with his loved ones if possible).

Health: For his mental health, he is a bit suicidal since he is tired of the world he lives in and only lives for the demise of his rapist. He plans on suiciding after he kills his rapist. (No one except Ahang knows about his intentions since he isn’t open about it. Ahang opposes his thoughts and constantly throughout the book tries to convince him to do otherwise, but she understands where he’s coming from and why he feels that way). For physical health, he is a bit underweight due to starving himself after he arrived at a village called Skotos - if his rapist ever caught him again, he wanted to be unrecognizable, hence him growing out his hair, starving himself, and tanning to such an extreme extent that his health is in danger because of it. (He was originally very muscular so losing weight was the only option he could do to change his body shape). It was very difficult for him to lose weight since neglecting his bodily needs meant that an aching pain was in his stomach. His body eventually adjusted to the lack of food, but it took a long time and he still needs to eat. He did not train during the time, an after he fled Angeli he immediately decided that he wanted to do it. He did have some thoughts about why he had to change and not Julius, but he then realized that Julius would (probably) never change.

Fears: Genophobia- it reminds him of the time he was raped and it only “activates” when he’s in a sexual position/setting. Homophobia (the fear + aversion)- his rapist was homosexual so whenever he meets other homosexuals, he grows a bit wary and like his other phobia, it only “activates” when he’s around homosexuals. When people are discussing about them, he slowly walks out of the room or tries to ignore what they are saying by plugging his ears with ear plugs for as long as they talk about them.

Anthropophobia- this was from his past and the pasts of the people of Skotos, too. Ever since he heard such gruesome pasts, he had been growing afraid of people. This does not apply to villagers in Skotos or his loved ones, but outsiders tend to make him nervous. He only experiences it when he comes in contact with outsiders. Apeirophobia- Since humans in this world, if not killed or infected with disease have the potential to live forever, this phobia is actually valid. This again ties into his anthropophobia- he fears that if he can’t kill himself, no one kills him, and he doesn’t catch a disease, he’ll end up living forever and meet another homosexual rapist that’s interested in him. It affects him on a daily basis. Dementophobia- He’s afraid that if he ends up going insane, he’ll lose all sense and morale and he’ll start to act like the monsters he condemns. Never seeing his loved ones after death (I don’t think there’s a name for this fear)- he’s afraid that when he suicides, he’ll end up going separate places than his loved ones and he’ll never be able to speak to them. It affects him on a daily basis. (The Babonian Scriptures don’t say anything about suicide, but he’s afraid that if he or his loved ones lived lives that were very different, they will not end up in the same place. Said places are: Hell [for those who have lived lives filled with cruelty], Asylum [this is a place where souls who have lived neither explicitly good or bad lives go] and Heaven [self-explanatory at this point …] ).

Hobbies: Reading, writing, gathering information, and planning for his cause. Those aren’t really hobbies but they’re little things that he enjoys doing so …

Weapons: A kitchen knife he bought at the grocery store. Don’t ask.

Backstory: When he was 18, he was a senior at Angeli Academy (which was the main school for the city he and his family resided in, Angeli) and met someone named Julius Green, who he quickly became friends with thanks to Julius’ bubbly personality. Over the months, though, he noticed that Julius seemed obsessive over something, and it turns out that something was him. When Julius confessed to him, he declined politely, and they continued their friendship. Julius would sometimes get a little too touchy with Cassius, but he didn’t mind- after all, they were great friends. However, even though he was hiding it, Julius’s infatuation with Cassius never did go away, and when it resurfaced it was worse than ever after Cassius started a very deep relationship with a person named Junia. As soon as they made it official, it seemed like Cassius forgot all of Julius, only hanging out with her. They did almost everything they could together, and the times that Julius could squeeze in a chat with Cassius were filled with him talking about how great Junia was. Junia practically became his world. Junia helped him with everything, expanded his confidence, and made Cassius a better person overall in addition to giving Cassius little “donations” to help his struggling family. Julius, becoming jealous, started getting all the information he could on Cassius, grilling him on everything, and even stalking him secretly. He also snuck sneak-kisses when Cassius was asleep, putting his hands in places where they were not supposed to be as well as hoarding Cassius’s “junk” and making them his prized possessions. He confessed to him again but was declined, this time with Cassius telling him to “get help and make a life for yourself.” After Cassius said that statement and fled, he felt a sudden burst of guilt, but he didn’t turn back. (That incident later led to Julius pushing Junia off of the roof of a building. He did it in a way that was so discreet that no one could find out the person who did it. It didn’t matter if they found out that he was Junia’s murderer, anyway- he was the son of the mayor of Angeli, which meant that he was protected at all costs. When Cassius heard the news, he was mortified and cried all week. He didn’t come to Junia’s funeral- he didn’t get the invitation). A week later, Julius and Cassius were assigned to work on a group project together, along with some other students. The very next day, Julius came over to Cassius’s house to work on the project, and 2 hours were made up of them researching and planning what the poster would look like. As Julius was about to leave, Cassius joked and said to Julius, “Now, don’t obsess over me too much now. You need a life, and you need to get one quickly.” Julius was infuriated by Cassius’s comment and tried to fend off his emotions, but they got the better of him, thus driving him to sexually assault Cassius. When the process was finished, a naked Cassius was left on the floor, bruises all over his body and half of his hair lying on the floor, mentally scarred. For three weeks he remained silent, wanting to hide his past, but on one day of the third week, he snapped when he saw Julius being praised for his “purity and kindness.” Anguished, he cried out the events of what he called “the Incident” but he was greeted with the unkind responses of “you’re just jealous,” “f*ck off, you dirty homophobe” and ���same-sex rape obviously isn’t real, stupid.” The villagers then proceeded to shun him because of his “lies” and no one would even acknowledge his existence, only communicating to him through their torturous and hate-filled letters (his family was separated from him, as per community law, and he was moved to reside in the horse stables). Those letters consisted of reasons why same-sex wasn’t real and called him out on the “lies” he had told. Every single letter sent a knife through his heart. One day, as he was walking in the streets, unnoticed, he saw Julius wandering around, lost in his dreams. At that point, Cassius could no longer contain his anger and slapped Julius, scraping his overgrown nails at his face and drawing blood. The council decided to kick him out of the village to die on his own. A few days after he was kicked out of Angeli, a ghostly figure who would come to be known as Jibaeja Babo (yes, that’s his name- the “babo” part would be there for the laughs) and asked him to become his “Jesus.” (What he wanted was a person to spread the Babonian religion [not to be confused with the Babylonians] and set an example for other future Babonians). It wasn’t that Cassius was special or anything- Jibaeja Babo was just looking for some vengeful souls and he happened to appear in front of Cassius. He promised Cassius food, shelter, and most important of all, vengeance … but only if Cassius became the religious leader of the Babonians. Cassius obviously agreed. After months of training (which basically was teaching Cassius about the ceremonies he had to do, familiarizing himself with the church, and answering questions about what the Babonian religion was about [ten answers wrong meant a bucket of boiling oil as punishment]), Cassius was given the title of High Priest by Jibaeja Babo was set out to teach people about the Babonian religion. (The Babonian religion basically focuses on how people are creatures of the light, which corrupts people into the horrifying beings that they are. The only way to cure themselves would be to accept the darkness within themselves and realize the wrongs of what they did, along with retaliating and punishing other wrongdoers who refused to turn. Of course, the leader of those retaliators would be Jibaeja Babo).

I don’t see anything wrong with your oc, the weight does seem super malnourished though. I understand you were going for that, though the lowest (that would basically be skin and bones) would have to be around 135, not much lower that that though.

Very interesting character and concept though!

[corellianangel]

Fan Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story

May contain minor/some spoilers after the cut.

I suspect that Solo: A Star Wars Story might be a bit like its title character. A bit rough at the start, maybe shady, pretty good-looking, and definitely out to get your money. But, as it goes on, it becomes more and more apparent how good and truly nostalgic and lovable it is.

This is a film that “nobody wanted.” Which means...what? I wanted it. When I saw Star Wars ANH, I wanted to know all about that cool Solo guy. And finally, 41 years later, I got my wish. And yeah… I’m mostly happy. After Last Jedi, I was pretty much done with the franchise, so it’s not like I went in with high hopes.

Solo is a relatively low stakes reprieve from the “we must save the world/galaxy/universe” all-or-nothing epic trope that has plagued us for the last few years. This is an adventure, a coming of age, and a western heist. Stakes are high, but only for the characters you are relating with onscreen, making it a curious addition to this year’s blockbusters.

Make no mistake; This is a love-letter to original trilogy Star Wars fans. It’s Han Solo in an Indiana Jones style adventure ( and what could be more fun than that).

4 out of 5 stars.

The first minute of Solo is exactly how a movie about the titular character should begin. But then it immediately lags, then even more so under ill-paced exposition. As soon Han goes solo though, it gains momentum. Then a short few minutes later as Woody Harrelson appears, things get rolling outright.

Alden Ehrenreich takes a bit of time to slide into Han’s scuffed boots, both onscreen and in our fan hearts. But when he does, it works wonderfully. He’s not the sexy gruff cynic Harrison Ford portrayed. No, he’s a “Kid,” who's got dreams. He’s a romantic. He’s wide-eyed, immature, and even petulant at times. But like Harrison’s portrayal, he’s arrogant, talented, goofy, jealous, easily embarrassed and will gladly spin a terrible lie. And oh yes… he can turn it on. Not at first, no… that’s really awkward ( more on that with Emilia). He’s not Harrison Ford by a long shot, but when given the chance later in the film, he makes a scene his own, and it’s HOT.

Unfortunately though, Alden is easily five inches shorter than 6’ 1” Harrison. And it’s glaringly obvious (especially to me, as I am quite a tall person). Sadly, Alden’s 1” platform 2”+ heel boots can only add so much. Otherwise, I’m satisfied with his portrayal. Alden’s a great actor, he had huge boots to fill, and I think he’s really been treated unfairly by the fans. Give the kid a chance, he might win you over.

Donald Glover IS Lando Calrissian though.  He’s sexy, sauve and even a bit silly ( in all the right ways… make no mistake).  I daresay Mr.Glover has taken Billy Dee William’s place in my heart as the epitome of Lando. Whether he’s coming on to Han, or Qi’ra or some unspecified alien species, he’s a pansexual on the level of Oberyn Martell from Game of Thrones. An arrogant playboy badass, who loves all the finest things. He is willing to enjoy everything life has to offer, and why not? It’s hard not to love him as a result. Lando movie, anyone?

Tobias Beckett is everything Han wants to be. Beckett is also in love with fellow crook Val, and his attachment to her is cemented firmly in a couple of scenes, which unlike the Han/Qi’ra scenes–have great chemistry. And Woody Harrelson’s portrayal of yet another grizzled mentor is stunning. I found him much more appealing than Harrelson’s equivalent character from Hunger Games. Though the mantel is starting to wear. Don’t get me wrong. I adore Woody Harrelson. His being in this film gave me a reason to think I might just like it. I’m just not sure I want to see him as yet another badass mentor after this.

When Thandie Newton appeared in Beloved back in 1998, I was an instant fan. I’d seen her before in a few other flicks, but she blew that one out of the water as the title character. Since then she had worked steadily in a number of critically acclaimed roles. I was absolutely thrilled to see her in this as Val. And utterly heartbroken that she was totally underused. When Val is onscreen, she overshadows everyone else, even Beckett. It’s a shame we don’t see more of her than we do. Boo!

Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra…Hmm.  She’s cute, charming, and tries her hand at swordplay here. But honestly, the Queen of Dragons is a poor fit. The original casting call was for anything other than yet another white brunette. And with amazing ladies like Tessa Thompson in the running, why oh why did we end up with Emilia? If not racism (God, I hope not); Ang’s answer: Think $$$, from Game of Thrones fans in theatre seats. I can think of no other reason. Her chemistry with Alden is tepid at best ( and any of that comes much, much later). I feel bad for Emilia here. I think she was miscast, and that tarnish will always stay with the fans. ( P.s. : the three adult heterosexual males I watched the movie with, were over-the-moon smitten with her. To each his own. I guess…)

On to the non-humans...

Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca is physically brilliant. He’s stolen my heart as Chewie from the lovely Peter Mayhew (sorry Pete) over the last three movies. But honestly, we discover nothing new about Chewbacca in this. Zero. It’s rather unfortunate. I wish I could say more. But we learn more about Chewie in episode three than this. A missed opportunity. Sorry Chewie. For some reason Disney put your character in the doghouse here.

L3-37 is another definite weak spot in Solo. We have a snarky female droid (yay!) as a droid-rights advocate (cool!).  But it’s so completely overwrought. Only Lando’s constant eye rolls save this character from being as ridiculous as Jar Jar Binks. Which is another shame, because I felt she fills in the current canon equivalent of Lando’s copilot droid Vuffi Raa, from the EU/Legends novels from waaay back in the 1980’s, (interestingly they are both pilots, are both self-aware droids and have vaguely parallel fates) Some editing issues arise as far as L3′s character is concerned too. She’ll be leaning, casually watching,  while droids are being slaughtered in front of her, but only interferes with other robots later in the same scene? Why?? Were the first dead droids not good enough for her to save? It’s inconsistent, poor editing; and that really hurts the character. Sorry Phoebe Waller-Bridge, you did great job with what you had. I’m not sure that the script/editing was as good as you deserved.

The spaceship the Millennium Falcon is 100% a full character in this too. Without giving too much away, she represents her pilots as they sit at the helm. She’s treated with more respect - reverence even -  in this, than any other film. And I can say this is her movie as much as it is Han’s. Millennium Falcon fans, you are in for a treat!

And the bad guys...or one guy anyways....

Paul Bettany is chilling and utterly convincing as the gangster Dryden Vos. He also has much better chemistry with Qi’ra than Han.  I’m fairly certain this is mainly due to Paul’s astonishing acting ability.  He first came to my attention as the title character in the darkly funny UK crime film Gangster No.1. I was floored by him then and he’s still blowing me away, even as the rather challenging character Vision in the MCU. Bettany does not disappoint in Solo either. He took over this role with zero preparation, with the weight of replacing another respected actor at the last minute in an extremely troubled production. And the optics of having a white European actor taking over from an African-american are...ermm...not the best. He pulls it off, though. But I can’t help but wonder what Michael K Williams would have brought to the role. Vos is a soulless psychopath under Bettany, not unlike his character in Gangster No.1.  Would Williams have brought the tragic–almost romantic deep spirit and inner strength he brought to his gangster Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire to Vos instead? It’s rather sad we will never know.

I don’t think I can say much else about the other antagonist(s) without spoiling a bunch. But let’s just say...wow! Well done! Surprises and fan service all around!

There is something missing here too. We never see Han as an imperial pilot. Nor the promised Shakespeare-inspired comedic comic book characters that Ron Howard teased last fall.  These gems may be reserved for DVD releases, but I feel Han’s missing academy stint is definitely a gap in this story. And the movie lacks because of it.

Importantly, I do recommend seeing this in IMAX 2D as it is a very dark and muted film.

The usual amazing, special effects, costumes and sets we’ve come to expect from the Star Wars film franchise are all present here.  The styling is different from the previous films, as it takes place about halfway between Episode Three and Rogue One.  It’s neat to see the evolution of the Empire’s gear. 

And the easter eggs are everywhere; prequels, Rebels, Clone Wars, Star Tours ( the Disney Park ride), the comic books from the 1970′s and 80′s, the EU/Legends Han Solo novels by Brian Daley, the Lando Calrissian novels from the same era are especially referenced numerous times. Even the Indiana Jones franchise gets a significantly placed nod.

To say the least, the fan-service is strong with this one.

But not the Force. Not at all. None of that simple tricks and nonsense here at all.

Because I’m a pretty hard-core fan, I pre-bought two showings on initial release. The first time I saw Solo, I was unsure if I actually liked it, but it seemed to be a decent film.  The second viewing ( the same night) was an absolute joy. Times three and four were with different groups of adults, and they all had a blast. Five was with a group of 13 year old girls, and they all enjoyed it too.

So let’s call my rating of Solo then, 4 out of 5 stars. 

Honestly I don’t get the backlash against it.  Don’t take your Last Jedi hate out on this. It’s a fun ride with decent jokes and no space-boob-milk monsters—honest!

And if you think Solo offers nothing different, new, or imaginative. You are 99% correct...Remember, we got that full package of “different and innovative” in Last Jedi. If that’s your schtick, watch that one instead then.

Oh, and one more thing- that 1%?... two words:

Shower scene.

[starwarsnonsense]

Colin Trevorrow's Women Problem

At the moment of writing, my ask box is full of messages about The Book of Henry, the newly released film from Colin Trevorrow, who is both writing and directing Episode IX. This is because BOH is, to put it mildly, getting terrible reviews. These reviews don’t just say the film is bad. They say the film is a disaster on the scale of The Room (no, not the one with Brie Larson) and Birdemic.

Perhaps more worrying, though, is the suggestion that BOH is terrible at characterising its female characters, who apparently include an infantile mother whose every move is dictated by her 11-year-old son’s instructions, an alcoholic waitress who kisses a young boy on the lips, and a schoolgirl who exists to be sexually abused and subsequently rescued thanks to a boy’s genius. This is, understandably, a cause of concern given that Trevorrow will soon be the arbiter of Rey’s fate - the same man responsible for The Book of Henry will soon be responsible for giving the heroine of the Star Wars sequel trilogy her voice.

The issues with BOH seem to go beyond an insidious edge of sexism - reviews point out wild tonal jumps and ludicrously misjudged directorial choices. While it might be tempting to place most of the blame for the characterisation on the scriptwriter, Trevorrow’s handling of the material only seems to have magnified its faults and heightened the bizarre tonal inconsistency. This points towards the responsibility for BOH’s failure lying largely with Trevorrow. Any assignment of blame aside, Trevorrow has treated BOH as a passion project, having been working on getting it made for around 10 years - for some mystifying reason, he found what appears to be objectively bad material an enticing directorial prospect. At best, this seems to indicate poor judgement - at worst, it indicates troubling detachment from the qualities of sound and emotionally resonant cinema.

I haven’t seen BOH for myself. If you want to read reviews from people who have seen it, check out the notices on the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page (the score currently stands at 25%). Because I haven’t seen BOH for myself I am not in a position to truly judge it, so I intend to move on. Instead, I will briefly discuss the other Trevorrow projects I have seen and my feelings on them.

The first Trevorrow film I saw was Jurassic World. I thought it was fine - it was bland and by the numbers, a pillar of corporate cinema, but mostly inoffensive to me. I only became conscious of its more insidious aspects when I started reading think-pieces on the portrayal of its female characters and the attitudes demonstrated towards them. Bryce Dallas-Howard’s character is uptight and shrill, a career woman whose ‘arc’ sees her humbled and restored to her proper maternal role (of caring for her nephews) and the status of assigned love interest to the hunky hero. Poor Katie McGrath suffers an even more ignominious fate - we see her screaming body being mauled by an assortment of dinosaurs more than we see her developed as a character. Trevorrow gave a spectacularly ill-conceived explanation of the thinking behind McGrath’s character’s death to Empire magazine:

But we definitely struggled over how much to allow her to earn her death, and ultimately it wasn't because she was British, it was because she was a bridezilla. She has one line about the bachelor party: 'Oh, all his friends are animals.' In the end, the earned death in these movies has become a bit standard and another thing I wanted to subvert. 'How can we surprise people? Let's have someone die who just doesn't deserve to die at all.

It’s almost like he catches up with himself here, giving the true reason for her punishment (how dare a woman be invested in her wedding! Brutal torture incoming!) before correcting himself by saying she didn’t deserve to die. The clumsiness of the back-track would be almost amusing if it weren’t for the insidiousness of the initial remark.

Much more recently, I watched Safety Not Guaranteed. I mentioned this on the podcast, and if I’m being entirely honest the film has soured for me since then. While I can’t really pinpoint outright sexism in SNG (though there is a definite aspect of Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the lead character, whose ultimate purpose seems to be getting a socially awkward loner out of a funk), I can highlight the remarkably bland and uninspired direction. While I appreciate that Safety Not Guaranteed was low budget and the first feature Trevorrow had ever made, I still find it remarkable that it demonstrates almost no creative flair or visual imagination yet still became his calling card in Hollywood. Safety Not Guaranteed was apparently the film that impressed Kathleen Kennedy enough to get Trevorrow on board for Episode IX, but she clearly saw something in it that I did not.

Just yesterday, I watched something from Trevorrow that wasn’t just bad. It was actually repulsive. This film is Trevorrow’s first short film, called Home Base:

This ‘film’ (I use the term in the loosest sense of the word) is, apparently, a comedy. The premise of this ‘film’ is that a man who is dumped by his girlfriend for another man decides to take his revenge on her by ‘fucking her mom’. This man is never questioned or treated as the appalling misogynist he so clearly is, instead being presented as something of a cheeky chappie whose ‘triumph’ at the end of the film (yes, he does it! He fucks her mom! What a hero!) we should applaud while hooting with laughter and slapping our knees. The awful capstone on all of this is an awful correctional speech that the man delivers to his sobbing ex:

I don’t think you’re shallow. I think you’ve got something wrong. You were just emotionally completely disconnected. I mean that whole orgasm thing, I mean it’s not my fault if you can’t come. I’ve tried everything, you’ve done everything. You’re just emotionally frigid, you’re physically frigid. I leave the light on in a room and you freak out, you’re not paying the electricity bill. It’s my apartment. And how you feel about kids. It’s weird.

There we have it - the writer and director of this is also the writer and director of Episode IX. Joy of joys.

And any allegations of sexism aside, just look at that thing. I was amazed by the length of the credits, by the fact that something that looks so shoddy and cheap could even have an ‘Assistant Producer’. It looks like it was shot by a lone agent on a camcorder over a single weekend. This is not the kind of short film that should portend great things. In any just world, this kind of audiovisual abomination should signal an abrupt end to a career in Hollywood.

The fact that Trevorrow has found such extraordinary success despite his track record, with much of his success apparently resting on his personal connections and his ability to charm prominent figures such as Brad Bird and Steven Spielberg, is a troubling indictment of the system that saw Patty Jenkins denied the opportunity to make her second feature for over 15 years. While Oscar-winning female directors struggle to be taken seriously and given opportunities, directors like Trevorrow - who demonstrate little artistic sensibility and only have extremely limited filmmaking experience - are put at the helm of major franchise films. For a highly eloquent explanation of this phenomenon, I strongly recommend checking out Kayleigh Donaldson’s piece on Pajiba. 

I do not have a personal grudge against Trevorrow. In every interview I have seen with him, he has seemed charming, eloquent and enthusiastic. He is clearly passionate about Star Wars and intensely aware of the scrutiny he and his film are under. But at the same time I am troubled by the persistent misogyny and lack of creative flair that have been evident in his work from the beginning of his career. Star Wars films are basically modern myths, totems of Western culture that people look to as a source of inspiration and hope. In particular, this new trilogy is the story of a young woman coming into her power as a hero and grappling with her destiny. It’s a story that should be handled by a filmmaker who has demonstrated an interest in characterising women as something more than props for men’s stories. And I have strong doubts that Trevorrow is up to this task.

I am not saying that Rey shouldn’t have relationships with male characters - Wonder Woman is an excellent demonstration of how a woman’s story can involve a strong central relationship with a man without that bond being shown to diminish her - but I am saying that that shouldn’t become the sum of her story. Nothing would break my heart more than seeing Rey become sidelined in her own film, or reduced to a prop for another character’s journey.

I have loved what I’ve seen from Disney-owned Star Wars so far, and I don’t believe that Kathleen Kennedy will allow Trevorrow to use Episode IX to peddle the retrograde misogyny so clearly on display in Home Base. But I do think it reflects badly on her that Trevorrow was appointed the director of Episode IX in the first place, when there are clearly so many superior directors out there - women and men - who have shown far greater creative flair and competence. I think there will inevitably be a fallout from BOH - most likely after the inevitably dismal box office results emerge - and while I expect it’s too late in the process for Trevorrow to be removed from the project entirely, I fully expect him to receive considerable oversight and have his work scrutinised to ensure that the capstone to this new Star Wars trilogy doesn’t do irreparable damage to the franchise.

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... F is For Family (S02E03) The Liars Club Airdate: May 30, 2017 @fisforfamily Ratings: @netflix Original Privatized Ratings Score: 8.75/10 **********SPOILERS BELOW********* One thing I've never been accused of is being un-empathetic, at least not since a bit after high school anyway... It is quite possible I may have had some sort of horrible God complex like most did in their early stages of adulthood. I often question why I treated people certain ways or did things that I did. Not knowing any better really isn't a good answer. Sure, empathy is a trait you hone and grow into as you age and experience life's many different heartaches, but its also true that it does come naturally, eventually anyway. Sometimes there's just something inside you that literally allows you to cosmically switch shoes with someone in a blink of an eye... At times I can be so sensitive to other people's energy that I adopt their general mood or disposition. I know I'm not the only one, but I think there's a select few of us that had a very distinct opportunity to experience as much as humanly possible and it shapes the way we see the world. As a young, developing adult, I wanted to be as street smart as I was book smart. For me, you couldn't just have one without the other or else you opened yourself up for great windows of ignorance. I purposefully put myself in awkward and dangerous positions. Sometimes I'd even travel great distances with nothing but a few hundred bucks in my pocket and an eagerness to connect with others in any way possible, hoping it would somehow shape my maturity, worldliness, and understanding. I'd end up homeless, reveling in it, attempting to draw as much as possible from the experience instead of focusing on removing myself from a bad situation. Homelessness wasn't the only thing... I had to see, feel, and try everything I could, because for me, perspective was everything... And even as a wiser adult (with still so much to learn), it still is. There was a large stint in my life where I was unemployed like Frank (Bill Burr). I allowed my core values and self-importance to destroy good things happening in my life. I always tell people this who are thinking of quitting their job on a whim or reacting off of strong emotion, or even those needing a dose of reality in confirmation form. When you have a job, everyone wants you. It's easy to find work when it's not a necessity, but when you find yourself in a position, like Frank where you're forced to take what you can get, suddenly nobody is in a giving mood. It's one of life's dirty little tricks, and if you don't believe me... Try it out. No, no, please don't, seriously. I wouldn't wish what Frank is going through on my worst enemy. I've been there and it doesn't feel good. Frank has been blacklisted by his boss throughout most airlines as an undesirable, no matter how qualified for the position he may be. Sure, there is pride involved. I saw a commenter call it 'toxic masculinity'. I understand the concept of 'toxic masculinity' and the harmful psychological effects it has on men and women within society. Even though this particular string of events happen p in the 70's, a better, more accurate example of 'toxic masculinity' would be the misogyny that Sue (Laura Dern) is dealing with in her stifling, unhealthy office space... Not Frank's unwillingness to break down and accept a handout from the government, or filter through jobs that he deems compromising or humiliating to his experience and very specific set of skills. I don't think there's anything 'toxic' about the drive to provide for your family... Or the desire Frank has to actually do what he's trained to do, what he's good at, and what he can potentially make the most money doing. If anything this is human in nature, not exclusive to the ideals of masculinity. When we talk about ego, there's definitely a split on how both genders handle things... Why each gender may protect certain aspects, attack issues in a particular manner or prioritize ideals more than they do others; but ultimately as human beings, at the end of the day, we all want to count. We all want to do our part in protecting and providing for the ones we love. Even in the 70's, where male ignorance and patriarchal control reigned supreme, as continuously displayed in Sue's ongoing story arc... i.e. 'I'd like to put some mustard on her sandwich', Sue is now head of her household and must assume the role of lead 'bread winner' and only working spouse. She wrestles with earning the respect of a group of men who rule over her company like a bunch of primitive primates and a woman who gives into the ideas of that sexually charged, insult driven, 'toxic masculinity' to maintain her position by acting like 'one of the boys'). Ultimately, they don't even deserve Sue's respect. We are seeing Sue, as a character, show signs of defying what a woman's role is in the 1970's. Honestly, this is one of the most endearing spots of S2 so far, Sue's drive is inspiring... Even though she's constantly pulled down and made to feel less than human, she wades through a cesspool of humiliation and depression because her family is counting on her. Sue pushes on because she must. She knows she has no choice, but this isn't about that... This is about maintaining her family, and clearly Sue is not afraid to step up to the plate, though it does take a lot out of her emotionally and physically as well. She looks to Frank to do the same, and as hard as everyone wants to be on Frank, I have to put my hand out here. I find it hard to believe that this many people have never found themselves in a situation even remotely similar to Frank's. His embarrassing breakdown during Maureen's (Debi Derryberry) 'Honeybee Troupe' meeting was comical and a great way to tackle these sensitive subjects with a cheeky wink and irreverent humor... But don't let that waggish satire cloud that sense of relatability and empathy with Frank. The follow-up scene that contrasts that similar humorous moment with an embarrassing private period of candid vulnerability where Kevin (Justin Long) catches his father sobbing and verbally exclaiming that he 'fucked up' as he breaks down on the living room floor had me torn. This is almost like an instance of 'talking to god', where you're completely letting your weaknesses and insecurities boil over to where you're simultaneously falling apart and attempting to find a way to cathartically push on... And then boom... One of the people that you go out of your way to always make sure they see you in a position of control sees you completely helpless. Frank springs into action and attempts to show Kevin he's still a man who can solve problems by attempting to create a space for Kevin to have private moments for himself, freedom to grow without being cramped by his younger brother, Bill (Haley Reinhardt), his constant hovering and a instinctive drive that is very similar to that of Sue's that annoys Kevin's apathetic teenage sensibilities. Kevin is gracious towards his father at first, but he hears Frank lie to his mother... And that doesn't exactly sit well with Kevin, especially since it was Kevin who was outed for skipping school and Frank then used his authority to keep his own lie going about keeping with his assumed responsibilities at the Unemployment Office. Any headway Frank made with his eldest son was destroyed in that moment. Kevin remains silent and allows the moment to remain uncontested, but the damage has been done. Obviously animated series rarely inspire this sort of impassioned article from me. 'F is For Family' is an extremely special and 'one-of-a-kind' show that really takes all my favorite elements of any type or genre of series and turns up the existential volume to full blast. Michael Price and Bill Burr have literally created my dream series in animated form. With each episode, I become more and more appreciative of what this show is at it's core. When people put their heart & soul, their blood, swear & tears into their work, it shows. People see that, they react to it, even if they don't completely understand it's value right away. I continue to take my time w/'F is For Family'. Netflix has already renewed the series for S3, there's no longer a need to rush through the episodes, and to be honest... Rushing through a show this earnest and intricately nuance is only doing it a disservice. Netflix may have reinvented the way we watch television, allowing for binge sessions, and all-night marathons... But 'F is For Family' provides us an exceptional antidote for that new style of consuming entertainment, calling for the series to be sipped like a fine wine, even promoting repeat viewings of episodes so that the series can truly be honored for everything that it is. Great job guys, I can't praise this one enough.

[eugenefischer]

The Joker and John Wick

Todd Phillips’ move The Joker isn’t out yet, but critics have seen it. While many have given it glowing reviews, others have said that it glorifies real-world patterns of violent behavior. Plot synopses have led some to worry the film might normalize the beliefs of the incel community, which has produced several murderers already.

Todd Phillips responded to that criticism in an interview, saying,

The movie still takes place in a fictional world. It can have real-world implications, opinions, but it’s a fictional character in a fictional world that’s been around for 80 years. The one that bugs me more is the toxic white male thing when you go, “Oh, I just saw John Wick 3.” He’s a white male who kills 300 people and everybody’s laughing and hooting and hollering. Why does this movie get held to different standards? It honestly doesn’t make sense to me.

This comment has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter.

I’ve seen some people argue that it’s a faulty comparison because John Wick’s victims provoked him to kill them, by attacking him and killing his dog. Others are saying that Phillips has a good point, and those critical of violence in media shouldn’t get to pick and choose which violence they abjure.

The people who say it’s a bad comparison are correct, but not for the reasons given.

It’s not a bad comparison because of who gets killed, or the motives of the main character. It’s a bad comparison because the movies operate in two different rhetorical modes. Or, to put it another way, because not all fictional worlds are the same.

The John Wick series are solidly action fantasy movies. The copious violence is choreographed and balletic; combination fist/gun/knife/car/axe fights that would be impossible in reality. The main character belongs to an international secret society of genteel super-assassins, with its own baroque customs, currency, and global infrastructure. This is a fictional world that is blatantly unreal. No one worries about John Wick inspiring copycat crimes because it would be literally impossible. Behaving as John Wick does requires living in a world that doesn’t exist.

The Joker, from its marketing and reviews, appears to be working in the rhetorical mode of psychological realism. This is the same mode as a great deal of mainstream literature—fiction which concerns invented but believable people, doing things that didn’t happen but believably could have. Phillips admits this in another interview, saying, “I literally described to Joaquin at one point in those three months as like, ‘Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film.'” So while the world of The Joker is, as he says, fictional, this depiction of it is striving to be realistic. That’s why people are criticizing it in a way they don’t criticize John Wick.

John Wick 3 valorizes a kind of violence that doesn’t (and can’t) actually happen. The Joker, according to some critics, valorizes a kind of violence that does. Those critics may turn out to be wrong, but they aren’t hypocrites for treating the two movies differently.

[via WordPress https://www.eugenefischer.com/2019/09/26/the-joker-and-john-wick/ ]

[mrmichaelchadler]

Her Own Story: A Nora Ephron Appreciation

This review was originally published on March 28, 2016 and is being republished for Women Writers Week.

Nora Ephron has been portrayed on screen by Diane Keaton, Sandra Dee, Meryl Streep, and Streep’s daughter, Grace Gummer. And that’s just the characters based on her life; her wit and insight are reflected in dozens of other characters she created as well.  

Nora’s writer mother Phoebe taught her that “everything is copy.” Even as she was dying, she ordered Nora to take notes. All four Ephron daughters became writers, but Nora, named for the door-slamming heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, most of all mined her own life and those around her for material. She is best remembered as the writer and/or director of four of the most successful romantic comedies of all time: “When Harry Met Sally...” (1989), “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), and “Julie and Julia" (2009). The glossy charm of those films, and, let’s face it, their marginalization as “chick flicks,” makes it easy to overlook just how smart they are. For decades, no other romantic comedies have come close in quality or influence, despite the best efforts of various adorkable Jessicas and Jennifers confronting cutely contrived misunderstandings with Judy Greer as the quirky best friend. 

Nora was the oldest daughter of screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (their story is told in Henry’s memoir, We Thought We Could Do Anything). They were New York City playwrights lured west to adapt established works like “Carousel” and “Daddy Long Legs” for Hollywood. Their four daughters grew up in Beverly Hills while the Ephrons worked on films like “Desk Set,” starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” with Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe and “Captain Newman, M.D.,” with Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis. Phoebe wrote to Nora at camp describing the scene outside her office on the studio lot: a special effects crew creating the parting of the Red Sea for “The Ten Commandments,” using blue Jell-O. 

The Ephrons often entertained their friends, mostly other New York writers, and Nora grew up listening to complicated, challenging, witty—sometimes relentlessly witty—people. She remembered Dorothy Parker playing word games at her parents’ parties.  Nora dreamed of being the Parker-esque queen of a new Algonquin Roundtable: “The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit.”

The Ephrons did not hesitate to use each other's lives as material. Even Nora’s son, Jacob Bernstein, produced a superb documentary about his mother, which is of course titled "Everything is Copy." It tells the story of Nora’s sister Delia putting her head through the bannister rails in their house, so that the fire department had to come and get her out. The Ephrons made that into an incident in a James Stewart film they wrote called “The Jackpot.” “My parents just took it and recycled it, just like that,” Nora says in the film. Later, Nora’s letters home from college inspired her parents to write a successful play called “Take Her, She’s Mine,” which became a movie starring Sandra Dee as a free-spirited (for 1963) daughter and James Stewart as the lawyer father who tries to keep her out of trouble.

Phoebe and Henry were not the kind of parents who came to their children’s school events or comforted them reassuringly. Phoebe would respond to her daughters’ stories of heartbreak or disappointment by telling them it was all material for them to write about. She had a biting humor, sometimes at her daughters’ expense. But the Ephrons taught their daughters how to tell stories, especially their own stories. 

After college, Nora went to New York to work as a “mail girl” for Time magazine. News magazines of that era did not allow women to write bylined articles; the most they could expect was to be researchers for the male journalists. The fictionalized but fact-based Amazon series “Good Girls Revolt” depicts the experiences of the women who fought this system, and it includes a character named Nora Ephron, played by Grace Gummer. 

Nora was in the right time and place when two great upheavals came together in the 1970’s: the feminist movement and the arrival of “new journalism”—vital, opinionated, very personal writing that powered popular and influential magazines like Clay Felker’s New York Magazine. This was the perfect place for her distinctive, confiding voice. Her essays were deceptively self-deprecatory—her first collection was called Wallflower at the Orgy and one of her best-known pieces describes her insecurity about having small breasts. But Nora’s columns, especially the series about women collected in Crazy Salad and the series about media in Scribble Scribble, are fierce, confident, devastating takedowns of those she found pretentious, hypocritical, or smug, including her former boss at the New York Post and the President’s daughter, whom she described as “a chocolate-covered spider.”  

By 1976, Nora had already divorced the first of her three writer husbands and it was around this time she fell in love with another media superstar, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. In “Everything is Copy,” he described the night they met: “We had this amazing conversation.” They got married and she moved to Washington.  

When she was pregnant with their second child, she discovered he was unfaithful. She packed up and moved back to New York. As director Mike Nichols says in “Everything is Copy,” she cried for six months before taking her mother’s advice and writing a thinly disguised novel about it, the scathingly funny Heartburn. “In writing it funny, she won,” says Nichols, who then directed the 1986 movie version, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Streep called the book Nora’s “central act of resilience.”  

“She wrote herself out of trouble,” says her agent, Bryan Lourd. That was economic trouble as well as heartache. Although she had never intended to become a screenwriter like her parents, she found that it provided more flexibility for a single mother than being a journalist. So she adapted Heartburn for the screen and co-wrote 1983's “Silkwood,” also starring Streep as the Kerr-McGee employee turned activist.

Those who dismiss Nora’s work as lightweight because it is often light-hearted overlook its singularly radical and unapologetically female point of view. The moment in "Everything is Copy" that best illuminates her significance as a filmmaker is when Streep recalls Nichols asking Nora to provide more perspective on the husband’s point of view. But Streep understood that “this is about the person who got hit by the bus. It’s not about the bus.” Nora was saying that we have already seen a lot of movies from the perspective of the man; this one is the woman’s story. Indeed, it is the ability to control the point of view that was most important to Nora as a writer and director. In the novel version of Heartburn, she anticipated and answered questions about why she would tell the world something so personal and humiliating.

Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Nora loved the control of being a director and paid attention to the smallest of details.  For “Sleepless in Seattle,” she had a door flown across country so that the characters who had not yet met would be literally opening the same door, sending the audience a subliminal signal about their rightness for each other. She said that directing a movie meant that all day people asked her to decide things—she found it very satisfying to give them answers.

"Everything is Copy" shows a Newsday headline for a story about Nora: “She tells the world things that maybe she shouldn’t, but aren’t you glad she did?” Nora was her own best copy, and it is a treat to see topics and opinions from her personal essays show up in her films. In "When Harry Met Sally...," Sally’s “high maintenance” style of ordering in a restaurant is based on Nora, and the sexual fantasy she confides to Harry as they walk through Central Park in autumn is one Nora discussed for its possible anti-feminist implications in Crazy Salad. In “Sleepless in Seattle,” Nora pays loving tribute to a movie she saw with her mother, “An Affair to Remember.” (After they saw the movie, Phoebe introduced Nora to its star, Cary Grant.) In “Julie and Julia,” the loving, devoted relationship between Julia Child and her husband Paul is based in part on Nora’s very happy third marriage.

One of Nora’s most underrated films is perhaps her most personal, 1992's “This Is My Life,” based on the book by Meg Wolitzer, with Julie Kavner as a single mother trying to make it as a stand-up comic. Lena Dunham told the New Yorker that this film, Nora's directorial debut, made her want to be a filmmaker.  

On each viewing, a new joke or angle revealed itself to me and its world became richer. I loved Samantha Mathis’ surly teen, Gaby Hoffmann’s quippy innocent, and especially Julie Kavner’s Dot, their single mother, a standup comedian hellbent on self-actualizing despite, or maybe because of, these daughters. But what I really loved was the person orchestrating the whole thing. The costumes, perfectly low-rent polka-dotted blazers and grungy winter hats. The music, a mixture of vaudevillian bounce and Carly Simon’s voice that somehow made the city seem more real than if car horns scored the film. The camerawork, a single gliding shot that followed each family member into her bedroom as she settled into a new apartment in a less than desirable Manhattan neighborhood. I loved whoever was making these actresses comfortable enough to express the minutiae of being a human woman onscreen.

At first, the conflict in the story comes from the character’s struggles to support her children. But then, as she becomes successful, the conflicts are central to Nora both as Phoebe’s daughter and as her sons’ mother: How can a mother pursue her passion and talent, knowing she may neglect the needs of her children? And should her children’s confidences and problems be copy for her stand-up routine?  

In one scene, Kavner’s character Dottie talks to her agent:

Dottie Ingels: I spend 16 years doing nothing but thinking about them and now I spend three months thinking about myself and I feel like I’ve murdered them. Arnold Moss: You had to travel. It’s part of your work. Kids are happy when their mother’s happy. Dottie Ingels: No they’re not. Everyone says that, but it’s not true. Kids are happy if you’re there. You give kids a choice: your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they choose suicide in the next room. Believe me.

2000's “Hanging Up” is based on Delia Ephron’s 1995 book about her father’s death. Delia and Nora wrote the script, and Delia speaks frankly in "Everything is Copy" about the arguments they had while they were working together. The movie is a mess, of more interest for what it reveals about Ephron family dynamics than for its quality. The character based on Nora is played by Diane Keaton, who also directed. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote: “It is so blond and brittle, so pumped up with cheerful chatter and quality time, so relentless in the way it wants to be bright about sisterhood and death, that you want to stick a star on its forehead and send it home with a fever.” Tellingly, the Keaton/Nora character in the film is accused by her sister of appropriating her emotions for public display.  

My favorite “everything is copy” example in Nora’s films is from her most overlooked movie, the very charming and funny “My Blue Heaven" (1990). It stars Steve Martin as a former mobster in the witness protection program and Rick Moranis as the FBI agent assigned to take care of him as he prepares to testify against the head of the crime syndicate. The single mom prosecutor played by Joan Cusack reflects some of Nora’s experiences. But it isn’t the Ephrons who are copy here. By this time, Nora was very happily married to her third husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi, whose book about former mobster Henry Hill was the basis for the brilliant Martin Scorsese crime drama “Goodfellas.” Clearly, as her husband was writing about Hill, Nora was thinking that putting a goodfella into witness protection could be a funny story.  

Nora’s sons are now writers, too, both reporters, telling other people’s stories. But in writing about her death for the New York Times and telling Nora’s story in “Everything is Copy,” Jacob Bernstein tells his own as well. We see him talking to his father about the divorce and the many-year fight that followed, which included a negotiation for joint custody in exchange for allowing Nora to make the movie “Heartburn.” The agreement filed with the court even included a clause ensuring that Bernstein would be portrayed as a good father in the film, so the film did not just reflect her life; it was shaped by it. In "Everything is Copy," as Jacob mulls his grandmother’s famous phrase, and the private illness of his usually open-book mother, another generation of family writers expresses how their personal experiences can be illuminating for us, too. 

from All Content https://ift.tt/2tM9i8f

[hangingsunshine]

Islam dan wanita: memilih untuk jilbab dan paradoks.

NEAR THE VERY heart of a question Americans have been asking themselves since September 11, 2001--"Why do they hate ush"--lies the question of how different societies treat their women. Americans by now seem bored and faintly embarrassed when feminist stories make the headlines. Who wants to hear about chauvinism at a stodgy American golf course when most of the meaningful barriers to female achievement in the United States have already been scaledh Yet as routine as the self-assertion of women is here, in other parts of the world it may be the most contentious issue of all. In Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries--where adherents of extreme variants of Islam try to intimidate peaceful Muslim majorities--antipathy toward the West revolves around sex and gender every bit as much as it revolves around "globalization" or the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or infidel soldiers quartered on sacred lands. The dogma purveyed by the Taliban of Afghanistan, Jemaa Islamiya in Southeast Asia, and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, among others, would encourage polygamy; lower the age of marriage for girls (the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 made girls legally marriageable beginning at age nine); require women to cover themselves in public; deny women marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights equal to those of men; punish females accused of adultery or prostitution with death by stoning; and, most fundamentally, unite church and state (a theocracy being the Islamists' preferred way to impose the aforementioned rules on a society). We must understand radical Islamism if we are ever to counter its malign force. By the term radical Islamism I mean the varieties of political Islam that take their inspiration from the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, from Sunni Wahhabism emanating from Saudi Arabia, or from the Shiite theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All three are radical because they define Islam in opposition to all that is non-Islamic. In other words, these violent strains share in being reactionary. And one of the things about our way of life against which they have reacted most strongly, going back to at least the 1920s, is feminism. This article will examine the radical Islamist reaction to feminism, along with other related matters: the participation of women themselves in radical Islamist thought and political acts; how attempts by governments to secularize their populations actually fed Islamism in the universities; the "Islamic revival" in Egypt; the less than healthy view of sex evinced by Islamists; the treatment of women in Afghanistan and American feminists' role in bringing that treatment to light; and, finally, an emerging "Islamic feminism" (as opposed to Islamist feminism) that I believe deserves support and encouragement. Coeducation and its discontents MEDIA COMMENTATORS have explained to Americans over and over again since the attacks on New York and Washington what scholars have been documenting for decades: Radical Islamism is steeped in resentment. Iranian writer Daryush Shayegan tells us the Islamists' "consciousness is wounded" by Western achievements. They use religion as a political weapon, he says, and their program is twofold: to wound the West in return while at the same time coercing mainstream Muslims into practicing a strange, stripped down version of Islam that will bring back the glorious age of the Prophet Muhammad. Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle East historians, places this resentment in the widest possible context: Islam's fortunes and misfortunes since its advent in the seventh century. Its unimpeded rise, from the time of the victorious and prosperous Prophet Muhammad, lasted a thousand years. The defeat of the Ottoman Turks outside of Vienna in 1683 began a decline that has been just as steady, lasting to our own day. Lewis contrasts this up-down trajectory with the early struggles and checkered history of the Jews and Christians. How galling for Muslim radicals, he says, that the once persecuted Jews and Christians have come to define the world we live in. And, he adds, where Judeo-Christian and Muslim societies contrast most notably is on the woman question. Herein lies the West's greatest vulnerability, or so the adherents of political Islam--the Islamists--believe. In a recent interview, Lewis noted that, unlike Christianity in all its forms, Islam and most of the rest of the world allow and practice polygamy and concubinage. Western visitors to Muslim lands have talk[ed] with horror of the subordination and ill-treatment of Muslim women (and, I might add, with ill-concealed envy of what they imagine to be the privileges of Muslim men). Muslim visitors to the Christian world are shocked and horrified by the loose and promiscuous ways of the West and also the absurd deference, as they see it, given to Western women. (1) One such visitor, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, a founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, spent time in the United States from 1948 to 1950. He observed with disgust that, in the very churches of the Christians, there were dances at which the sexes mingled and touched. Such a sight convinced Qutb that Christianity had lost its way, leaving a society and a way of life that were debauched and ready to be defeated. The Islamist project to attack the West and "purify" the faith began to take root in Egypt in the 1920s. In 1924, a reformist government opened a modern university that permitted women to attend. At the same time Egypt's first feminist, Huda Shaarawi, set aside her veil in public, and photos of her uncovered face made the front pages of Egyptian newspapers. It was also when Sayyid Qutb and others were establishing the first Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. But Islamism didn't come to full fruition until the 1970s, starting to win large numbers of adherents at the precise moment that feminism was at the height of its political power in America and Europe and gaining a foothold in the urban centers of the less developed countries. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi draws the connection very directly in Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Indiana University Press, revised edition 1987). Mernissi's book, first published in 1975, addresses the vast changes in Muslim societies as the European powers were relinquishing their colonies. Not only were rural populations migrating to the cities, but the universities in those cities--for centuries the exclusive preserve of local male aristocracies--were being democratized. Those whom Mernissi calls "traditionally marginalized and deprived male rural migrants" were for the first time permitted to seek higher education in Rabat, Lahore, Beirut, Amman, and other centers. So, too, were women. The introduction of ideas of liberty and equality into these societies had effects that were complicated and in many cases subtle. Clearly discernible to Mernissi, however, was an antagonism that arose between nonveiling college women and the males who arrived in the universities along with them. The male parvenus, in the millions, glommed onto violently anti-Western strains of Islam out of a sense of pique. "What dismays the fundamentalists," Mernissi writes, "is that the era of [postcolonial] independence did not create an all-male new class. Women are taking part in the public feast." Newly urbanized and newly educated young men singled out modern women with diplomas and careers as the worst traitors to Islam. These zealots saw offenses against "real" Islam everywhere, but the uncovered women in their own midst were the ultimate heretics. That generation now constitutes the senior echelon of radical clerics issuing interpretations of Islamic law, or sharia, and the top level of terror networks such as al Qaeda and Jemaa Islamiya. Yet the rigidly puritanical and misogynistic character of Islamism has not kept it from attracting female followers. In an interview for Vogue magazine last year, a Saudi extremist in London told journalist Deborah Scroggins that he and his cohorts "have turned the strict sex segregation that keeps even many wealthy, educated Saudi women confined to the home, and the traditions that prevent outsiders from so much as asking their names, into political assets." He said women give his jihad organization money and serve on the review board of its publications. These nonworking women, he added, have a lot of time to devote to the cause, so they make good administrators of the group's websites. In January of 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the recently assassinated head of Hamas, called jihad "an obligation of all Muslims, men and women," and women suicide bombers have been obliging, in Chechnya and elsewhere. In April 2003, a woman who had lived in Boston for several years was detained in her native Pakistan after the FBI put out a global alert saying she may have ties to al Qaeda. It was not in a theocracy like Saudi Arabia, however, that the "feminist wing" of Islamism first developed. It arose in places where government was secular--Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran under the shah--and secularism was imposed on the French model, which is to say, harshly. Their admiration of the French Revolution led these governments to attempt a wholesale removal of faith from the public realm. To stand up against authoritarian secularism, then, many younger women, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, and particularly in the universities, turned to religion. Especially after the 1979 revolution in Iran succeeded and Islamism gained even greater force, campus activists railed against secular political establishments for slavishly imitating Western ways. The most militant act of rebellion for urban, educated women became wearing the traditional Muslim head coverings banned by their governments. In her portrait of Turkish women, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Nilufer Gole notes that "as Islam politicized itself, it moved women toward the political scene; and the black veil, the symbol of the return to premodern Islamic traditions, acted as an expression of the active participation of women in political demonstrations." Ineffectual attempts by the governments in Ankara and Cairo to stop the rebirth of the veil among their educated elites only fed this protest sentiment. The rising Islamist movements, writes Gole, called for the female to return to her "traditional settings and positions. On the other hand, they replace the traditional portrait of a Muslim woman with ... that of an active, demanding, and, even, militant Muslim woman who is no longer confined to her home." Indeed, Turkey's prohibition against the wearing of headscarves in public offices and universities has been enforced sporadically since the early 1980s, with a tightening of enforcement after 1997 when the secularist army ousted from office the country's first Islamist prime minister. The Egyptian government tried in the mid-1990s to ban the veil, though the matter got tied up in the courts and came to no definitive resolution. And so the irony reappears: Widening access to education strengthened the hand of fundamentalist Islam. A modern university woman asserting her "seclusion rights" is a woman forswearing her rights in the eyes of non-Muslims and of many Muslims as well. Women intellectuals of middle age today, exiled from various Muslim lands, look back nostalgically to a time before Islamism was widespread. Two decades or more ago, in Kabul, Teheran, or Baghdad, they could dress as they pleased and move about as they pleased. These are by and large secularist women whose adoption of Western notions of individual freedom puts them at odds with the "feminist" wing within Islamism. The Islamists' often severe, scarf-plus-robe covering contrasts with the use, especially among older women and women in rural areas, of headscarves that leave the neck and some of the hair uncovered, or the discarding of the veil altogether. Gole's interviews with Islamist women at Turkish universities record their preference for almost total coverage of the body and their disdain for the less strict reading of the Koran and the more modern dress habits of older Muslim women, whether traditionally Muslim or secular. The older women "do not practice true veiling because they are ignorant about Islam," said one of Gole's interviewees. It is a matter of dispute, however, whether the Koran demands that Muslim women cover themselves. One frequently encounters a textual interpretation that is liberal: Modesty is required of Muslims of both sexes, and Koranic references to veiling apply (or, applied) literally only to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad. Islamists, on the other hand, and some non-Islamist traditional Muslims as well, argue that the female obligation to cover is clear in the text. We will not settle that question here; the point is that Islamists have taken the practice and elevated it, as Gole says, to be "the symbol of Islamization," the visible assertion of their fundamentalism. The new Humbert Humberts ISLAMISM HAS, according to its practitioners and some of its academic and journalistic promoters, yielded a feminism that is far superior to ours, because Western licentiousness has been removed. "My niqab [body covering] is my freedom, because it lets me choose who does and who doesn't see me," a daughter of Cairo's political elite told the London Guardian's Geneive Abdo. A former fashion model interviewed by Abdo added: "When I put on the veil, I put on my brain as well." Abdo, researching her pre-September 11 book, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000), donned long garments to penetrate the sexually segregated salons of Cairo's high society. Her subjects had gone against their secularist, cosmopolitan upbringing to embrace the teachings of Egyptian clerics such as Sheikh Omar Abd al-Kafi, who preached Muslim distrust of Christians and endorsed the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against the life of Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. Newly pious Egyptian men and women "spread their own, unorthodox brand of Islam to friends and followers within their elevated social circles," Abdo writes. The Mubarak government's crackdowns on al-Kafi and other Islamist Pied Pipers of the Egyptian leisure class merely enhanced their mystique. Abdo's labeling Islamism an "unorthodox brand" of Islam is telling. The main purpose of her book was to show English-speaking readers a benign or mainstream Islamism that was supplanting the murderous rage of Osama bin Laden (a Saudi of Yemeni extraction), Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), and their like. This was wishful thinking, no doubt born of a belief that non- and anti-Western customs and ideas automatically deserve respect, and supported by the fact that they were catching on like wildfire among influential Egyptians at the time. In fairness, one cannot fault her too much for underestimating the relative strength of the terrorists. That she did not foretell September 11 makes her a lot like the rest of us. Then, too, Abdo's glowing depiction of "the Islamic revival" among Egypt's intelligentsia dimmed considerably when she confronted certain aspects of it, such as clitoridectomy (which, she asserted, apparently on the authority of the Egyptian government, is performed on 97 percent of Egyptian girls). Abdo tried in vain to dissuade one of her Egyptian acquaintances from having his six-year-old daughter undergo the operation. The secularist government banned clitoridectomy in Egypt in 1997, but, as with veiling, the ban is rarely heeded. Clitoridectomy has no precedent in the Koran, Abdo pointed out; it is a pre-Islamic African practice. The objections she raised with an Islamist leader, Sheik Mohammad al-Berri, prompted this explanation: A woman can be aroused at any moment. Even if a woman is riding in a car, if she hits a few bumps, she can become sexually aroused. Once this happens, a man loses control. So you see, this practice certainly is not meant to punish women. But it is necessary. Islamist regulation of women's morality--which is seen as the key to regulating male morality--apparently makes considerable use of the imagination. In fact one senses beneath their primness an unhealthy obsession with sex. This is nowhere more evident than in accounts of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Azar Nafisi, a U.S. literary scholar born and raised in Iran, taught comparative literature at universities there during and after the overthrow of the shah. Her autobiograhical Reading Lolita in Teheran (Random House, 2003) describes an Islamist regime that "went so far as to outlaw certain gestures and expressions of emotion, including love" and that levied upon women who did not totally cover their heads, hair, and bodies monetary fines, up to 76 lashes, and jail terms. While love was being ejected from the public sphere (as were other emotions--it was verboten to grieve publicly for relatives killed by Saddam Hussein's bombs in the Iran-Iraq war, for example), in private things were, by government fiat, supposed to get considerably steamier: The mullahs brought back a practice long banned in the Muslim world, "temporary marriage" (concubinage), so that Iranian men "could have four official wives and as many temporary wives as they wished." It was the habit of the bachelor leaders of the Muslim Students' Association on campus to declare that their only beloved was God. The rules imposed on women to aid male chastity could never be strict enough: Nafisi recounts that one of these young men got a female student expelled from the university "because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him." Equally telling in this regard was the professor who became agitated when one of his students chose to write on the novel Lolita. The professor's reaction was not disapproval of a Western novel about pedophilia--his sympathy was entirely with the pedophile. Indeed, if he sympathized more with Humbert Humbert than even Vladimir Nabokov meant readers to do, this was because he "had a thing about young girls spoiling the lives of intellectual men," writes Nafisi. Notwithstanding the professor's censure of "Nabokov's flighty young vixen," when he sought a new wife he insisted she be no older than 23. He found one at least 20 years his junior (and, as Nafisi points out, a child bride exactly Lolita Haze's age would have been acceptable under the regime's revision of marriage law). When the mullahs suddenly revived concubinage in Iran, Wahhabi religious authorities in Saudi Arabia raised objections, saying that it contravened the Koran. But in general, Saudi fundamentalists, no less than Iranian, put the 1950s hall monitors in the shade when it comes to being moralists with sex on the brain. According to Soraya Altorki, a sociologist who has studied women, marriage, and the family in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, the Arabic word fitnah denotes the disorderly behavior of men who have been sexually tempted by women; the word also means "femme fatale, a woman who can drive men to distraction and destruction." This linguistic conflation of cause and effect is one more reason to conclude that Islamism does not remove licentiousness from society but simply wraps it in layers of misogyny. What is peculiar about radical Islamist women--who, perhaps understandably, dislike being leered at or accosted by disorderly men--is their prescription for coping with the problem. Rather than expecting men to exert control over themselves, or asking mothers, as moral guardians, to take charge of their sons early fahruni on and raise them to respect women, they speak of this as if it lies exclusively with the female. Nilufer Gole quotes a passage from a 1987 article in Mektup magazine that spells it out: We can never go into the streets with our house dresses; if we do so, we will expose ourselves to lustful gazes and will become a source of disorder for the Muslim community.... To increase our attraction to our husbands inside the house and to decrease it outside are our fundamental principles. That is to say, we will be appealing in the house and repulsive outside. Of course, what numbers of educated and professional Muslim women chose to do became compulsory for every girl and woman in Afghanistan. One wonders how soi-disant "repulsive" Islamist women think it worked out when female "repulsiveness" was adopted as the law of the land. Before the Islamist takeover in the 1980s, Afghanistan had been working in fits and starts to join the modern world. Over the years its monarchic governments had been rather progressive, including on the treatment of women. Between 1996 and 2001, under Taliban rule (as the world is now well aware), women and girls were not allowed to get medical treatment if there was no female doctor available to administer it; nor could they be educated, hold jobs, walk about unaccompanied by male relatives, or (a late ruling) enter public parks. Here was a subjugation so total that Iranians could adduce it to argue that their Islamic Republic wasn't all that bad for women. As one female government functionary told Azar Nafisi before Nafisi's 1997 exile from Iran: "These [Iranian] young girls are a little spoiled--they expect too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens." Afghan women and their allies IN THE 1990s, after human rights monitors publicized the Serbs' mass rapes of Bosnian women in the Balkans, the international community began to view the treatment of women as a prominent aspect of war and conflict. It became less difficult than it otherwise might have been for human rights groups and feminist groups to draw the world's attention to the cruelty of the Taliban. The plight of Afghan women spurred American feminists--specifically, those from the "equal rights" branch of feminism that we associate with the National Organization for Women or Eleanor Smeal's Feminist Majority--to do good deeds. Feminist Majority led the way, beginning in 1997, in condemning "gender apartheid" in the largely overlooked country of Afghanistan. Equality Now, an international research unit based in New York, also documented the Taliban's practices many years before the United States took action against the regime. Lobbying by American feminists reportedly helped stop the Clinton administration from formally recognizing the Taliban government, which was, at least for a time, attracting positive attention from a U.S. administration keen to foster an Afghan pipeline deal proposed by the oil company Unocal. Some Afghan activists say, on the other hand, that the Americans did not have much of a feel for local conditions or culture. These activists did not consider it helpful, for example, when Feminist Majority sponsored a back-to-school program exclusively for Afghan girls. Afghan girls have suffered terribly, but assisting Afghan boys--who will otherwise be sent to radical Islamist madrassas to become the next generation of terrorists--is also a necessity. Ignoring the boys and men of a deeply patriarchal society does not make sense, Fahima Vorgetts of the Women for Afghan Women's Advisory Committee told me, "because the brothers and the fathers and the husbands, they are the ones who control the families. They are the ones that, if you alienate them, you won't have any success in bringing women to the table." The reflexive hostility to religion exhibited by the "equal rights" feminists also rubs some of their non-American colleagues the wrong way. Riffat Hassan, a Pakistan-born Muslim feminist theologian writing in the collection Women for Afghan Women (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002) edited by Sunita Mehta, said the support of the U.S. women's movement is laudable but it "must be given without the expectation or the demand that Afghan women will follow a donor-driven agenda ... rooted in aversion to Islam and Afghan culture." Afghans and Afghan Americans trying to help rebuild the war-torn country often speak of U.S. feminists with a mixture of awe for their grassroots political skills, gratitude for what they have done for Afghanistan, and unwillingness to adopt their quirks. The Afghans, like people all around the world, embrace the American polity's appeal to inherent rights but resist defining those rights precisely the way Eleanor Smeal or Betty Friedan would. Another essayist in Women for Afghan Women, Zohra Yusuf Daoud, the first (and last) woman to hold the title of Miss Afghanistan, wrote: "Some aspects associated with Western feminism, such as bra-burning, revealing clothing, and sexual promiscuity are not appropriate at this stage for Afghan feminists, if they ever will be." A spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a dissident group that has been active against every Afghan government going back to 1977 when the country was a Soviet satellite, told me that RAWA considers the Americans too wrapped up in issues like abortion and women's salaries compared to men's. She called these "luxury items" for women struggling for the right to move about freely, to educate and support themselves, and to have political representation. Most Americans, if they are older than 35, think of bra-burning as the political symbol of a bygone era; if they are younger, it's a safe bet they have never heard of it. It is important to realize nonetheless that this is the image of us that lives on around the world. To a degree perhaps surprising to us, 1970s feminism's shock to traditional societies--which Fatima Mernissi had singled out as key to Islamism's rise--reverberates today. It isn't only jihadists and Islamists who are capable of comparing the mores of their societies to our liberal and feminist-influenced mores and declining to hold theirs inferior. Many women's advocates in the Muslim world take veiling--politically exploited though it is by their enemies, the radical Islamists--in stride and believe that we should, too. Leila Ahmed, the Egyptian feminist scholar, has noted with chagrin that Westerners who don't know much about Islam seem obsessed by the veiling issue. RAWA, whose members have risked their lives to protest the Taliban's physically beating any Afghan woman seen in public without the all-enveloping burqa, takes no official position on that garment, saying every woman ought to be allowed to decide for herself whether to wear it. As Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist and lawyer, told the Irish Times (December 13, 1997): "When my husband can marry three other women, when my husband can take my children, when my husband can kill me, I have more important problems. When I find a solution for these problems, then I will worry about hijab [veiling]." According to many politically active Afghan women, their fundamental rights have not been vindicated despite the dislodging of the Taliban from power. They have a point. The anarchy and insecurity of postwar Afghanistan, particularly outside of Kabul, have made many women keep wearing the burqa to protect themselves. While millions of Afghan girls are now able to go to school, millions more remain confined to their homes because they fear retribution by Taliban or al Qaeda remnants or intimidation by the regional mujahideen, the heavily armed, religiously conservative warlords of the Northern Alliance that helped the U.S.-led coalition topple the Taliban. Several girls' schools in the provinces have been shelled or set afire. Islamist elements within President Hamid Karzai's postwar government have put in place (or in some cases continued) legal restrictions on travel by women and on the education of married women. The U.S. military announced in late 2003 that it was beefing up its security presence in southern Afghanistan, a tacit acknowledgement of the coalition's postwar failure to secure the country and the Bush administration's policy drift on Afghanistan. Female delegates to Afghanistan's postwar constitutional convention (at least those quoted in the press) have sharply criticized their fellow delegates and the final draft of the constitution, which was announced on the last day of 2003. The women numbered 100 or so of 502 delegates. A young, outspoken delegate named Malalai Joya, in a widely reported exchange that nearly got her expelled, rose to condemn the presence and the influence of several delegates, Northern Alliance warlords with blood on their hands and retrograde views of women. She and other members of an emerging female leadership in the country say they resent the compromises President Karzai made with the warlords to produce the final draft. It is true that the constitution (judging from the unofficial English translation that has been made public) declares "the sacred religion of Islam" as the state religion and invokes that phrase constantly. However, the degree to which the document affirms the substance of Islamic law is not clear. It promises a government "based on people's will and democracy" and one that "ensur[es] fundamental rights and freedoms" of "every citizen of Afghanistan." The latter phrase got amended, no doubt in response to the outcry of the women, to read, "every citizen of Afghanistan, woman and man." Two of its articles grant women a quota of political representation in the upper and lower houses of the legislature. (The constitutional scholar Noah Feldman has made the point that the 16.5 percent of the upper house slated to be female tops the 14-member female contingent in today's United States Senate.) Another article requires the promotion of education for women and calls for illiteracy to be eliminated. Whether the pluralistic and democratic aspects of the constitution are honored may depend on the makeup of the new Afghan supreme court vested with the authority to interpret it, as Feldman has noted. The process (the loya jirga) from which the document issued was messy; enforcing it will be no less difficult, particularly in a country struggling to emerge from decades of war, chaos, and tyranny. The achievement of formally bringing women back into politics for the first time in a generation should not be minimized, however. If women successfully go to the polls--and I venture to say any interpretation of the new constitution would support their exercise of their suffrage--sharia and related social regulations unfavorable to women are not likely to fare well in the long run. There is reason to believe the majority of women in Afghanistan--and in Iraq, where an interim constitution has been devised for the postwar transition--will, if they are able to vote, choose candidates and policies promising to modernize the country in ways that improve their position in society. As Fahima Vorgetts of the women's advisory committee, who returns periodically to her native Afghanistan, recently told me: "This war changed a lot of women. People are talking about politics now." Women in rural and highly traditionalist areas of the country have told her, "We may be blind, but I don't want my daughter to be blind. Meaning, I don't have an education but I want my daughter to have an education. That tells me a lot, for [women] to push for a better life." Defenders of tolerance and monogamy A SOBERING REMINDER, however, that elections don't automatically strengthen liberal democracy can be found in the recent history of Iran. Iranian women were granted the right to vote by the shah in 1963. They have been voting ever since, but the mullahs who took power in 1979 are still in power, doing their best to rein in an ever more rebellious populace. Sitting over the country's political institutions is a theocratic judicial panel that stifles the reforms and the reform candidates approved by the Iranian electorate. (Because a too-powerful judiciary in Afghanistan poses just such a danger to that country's fledgling democracy, President Karzai and the United States government pushed for a strong executive in the Afghan constitution.) When the revolution was gathering steam, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in an eclectic and pragmatic move--and recall that the entire movement was eclectic, a coalition of Shiites and Marxists out to rid Iran of imperialism, capitalism, monarchy, and the decadent influence of the "Great Satan"--exhorted women to go out in the streets and demonstrate against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. After Pahlavi was forced into exile, the Islamic Republic repealed important laws that protected women's rights. Yet it also expected women (properly veiled, of course) to help the revolution advance and prosper by entering higher education and the work force. Hence the birth of what Azar Nafisi called "the myth of Islamic feminism.... It enabled the rulers to have their cake and eat it too; they could claim to be progressive and Islamic" at one and the same time, even as they indulged in the inveterate Islamist habit of denouncing Nafisi and other "modern women as Westernized, decadent and disloyal. They needed us modern men and women to show them the way, but they also had to keep us in our place." That female reformers are bursting out of their allotted place in Iran became obvious to the world when Shirin Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. The human rights activist and lawyer believes regime change can come to her country through constitutional processes. She told the Weekly Standard (November 3, 2003): "The situation in Iran is different from Iraq and Afghanistan. There were no mechanisms for internal change in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iran, there are." Ebadi said traditional Shiism--unlike the Islamist variant of Shiism that is wielded as a political weapon by the Teheran government--countenances enough of a separation of religion and state to enable people of different faiths to form a polity together. It is not surprising that the Bush administration's search for Muslim allies in the wake of September 11 has concentrated heavily on Shia believers like Ebadi. (Shiism is branded as heretical by the Wahhabis, the Islamist Sunnis of Saudi Arabia.) Perhaps the two most important matters about which Americans and Shirin Ebadi agree are her championing of religious tolerance and her disapproval of polygamy. She is not alone in holding these particular views, leading one to suspect that Islamic feminism may not be as mythical as Azar Nafisi said. These views are, it seems to me, the markers of an Islamic feminism that the United States should wholeheartedly support as a direct challenge to the "feminist" wing of Islamism. Women authors and political activists of many Muslim and Western nations hold that, while the Koran permits polygamy, it seeks to limit a practice that was widespread at the time of its promulgation in the seventh century. The relevant verse, they point out, is both conditional and stated in the negative: If a man fears he cannot support more than one wife, he should have only one. Nevertheless, there are Muslim men who defend polygamy--strictly speaking, the term is polygyny since the verse refers to men taking multiple wives, not vice versa--as religiously compulsory and a way to fulfill their sexual desires without resorting to adultery. The clash of interests that polygyny touches off has long been evident. The feminist pioneer Huda Shaarawi recounts in her memoirs that, as a 12-year-old bride in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, she was told by her mother shop that her family tried in vain to get the groom (her cousin, with a wife and children all older than Shaarawi) to agree in the marriage contract to give up sexual relations with his first wife. (2) Today one hears of advocacy on behalf of first wives to enhance their legal power to obtain a divorce should they oppose a husband's intention to marry again. Women or their families have, from either vantage point, tried to enforce monogamy. In Iran, a husband's multiple marriage option is sometimes brandished as a threat--a way to assert power over one's wife, according to women interviewed in Haleh Esfandiari's book Reconstructed Lives (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). There are reports out of Indonesia that, to evade the Indonesian law allowing polygyny only with a first wife's consent, some men take another wife and keep it a secret from their first wife and children. Polygyny was hemmed about with legal restrictions during the dictator Suharto's 32 years of secular rule. In the time since he was forced to step down in 1998, public disapproval of polygyny has eroded and the practice has flourished in Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim population. It flourishes also in Malaysia, where current law demands that a husband prove that starting and providing for a new family won't lower the standard of living of the wife and children he already has. Powerful Malaysian clerics are challenging these restrictions. When a regional mufti nullified the requirement of wifely consent, a Malaysian women's group, Sisters in Islam, responded with a controversial public information campaign called "Monogamy Is My Choice." Its aims are strengthening wives' legal options and creation of a national marriage and divorce registry for Muslims so women can find out the status of their husbands or husbands-to-be. (The country's current database lists only the marriages and divorces of non-Muslims.) Polygyny has been banned in the Muslim world only by secularist Turkey and Tunisia. Sisters in Islam cannot afford to be perceived as seeking a ban, given the strong backlash against the group by Malaysia's religious establishment and growing Islamist movement. Sisters in Islam Executive Director Zainah Anwar insists that the goal is not a ban but simply allowing women to choose whether to participate in a polygynous marriage or not. (In comments to the New Straits Times [March 19, 2003], she made clear her belief that few women would choose it.) When Anwar spoke in Washington, D.C. on the status of women under sharia in May of 2003, in the midst of the antipolygyny campaign, her prepared remarks did not touch on polygyny at all. She walks a fine line in confronting the social and legal practices that set men above women in Malaysia. Her reform-from-within approach--she is a believing Sunni Muslim--is comparable to Ebadi's in Iran. Intrepid as lion tamers, these women have a prudence that tells them when and where to confront, when and where to desist. Their work does not receive any backing at all from certain feminists: namely, the multicultural and postmodern ones considered to be at the cutting edge of academic thought in the West. "Polygamy can be liberating and empowering," said one such cutting-edge feminist, Miriam Cooke, head of Middle East Women's Studies at Duke University. If we could just shed our Western predilection for monogamy, Cooke told Kay S. Hymowitz of City Journal (Winter 2003), "we might imagine polygamy working." She speculated to Hymowitz that some wives may be relieved not to have to service a husband so often, while other wives may use the opportunity to take on new sexual partners, too. When Cooke was asked how likely wives would be, in strict Muslim settings, to go on sexual adventures, her reply was the post-modern equivalent of a shrug: "I don't know. I'm interested in discourse." A male social anthropologist at the University of Oslo was described as positively "fundamentalist-friendly" by the literary critic Bruce Bawer, writing in Partisan Review (July 22, 2002): One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims [in Norway], explained the professor, was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Shirin Ebadi's and Zainah Anwar's efforts to defend women ground under the heel of sharia, Afghan women seeking to vote under a new constitution--none of these causes would make even the smallest amount of headway if such ostentatious relativism were the norm in the wider world beyond the elite campuses of the United States and Europe. At least the "equal rights" feminists are animated by a conviction that there are rights everyone shares; having taken leave of that conviction, the academic left is capable of excusing the worst cruelties of our time--as long as the perpetrators are members of "the Other." As Azar Nafisi has said: "In the strange world of Middle Eastern Studies, any attempt to condemn gender apartheid is branded an imposition of Western values." Feminism(s) and freedom HOW DO WESTERN women stack up against the above-outlined standard of Islamic feminism--a feminism that is respectful of religious faith, committed to pluralism, and protective of monogamyh The truth is that Western feminists and liberals of various stripes fall short in different ways and to different degrees. Two liberal journalists, Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Giuliana Chamedes, wrote an article entitled "Europe's New Crusade" in the American Prospect (August 26, 2002). While it dealt with the ill-treatment of Muslim immigrants in Europe in the wake of September 11, the piece was most notable for its critique of European multiculturalists, gays, and feminists for their unhelpful political stances. The authors rightly faulted the multiculturalists for being silent about the threat posed by Islamist sects in Europe that advocate violence. They were far unhappier, though, with the 1970s-vintage feminist Oriana Fallaci, and the late homosexual politician Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands for criticizing Islamic intolerance. After witnessing the Twin Towers' collapse, Fallaci wrote a broadside for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in which she heaped scorn on "the sons of Allah," and the daughters, too, for submitting to polygyny and wearing the veil. Fortuyn, before being assassinated by a left-wing extremist, was gaining a following among Dutch voters in 2002 with his insistence that Muslim immigrants assimilate or be kept out of the Netherlands. According to the authors, Fallaci's and Fortuyn's confrontational defense of Western freedoms was harmful--it would only incite the white, Christian, heterosexual majority in Europe to greater heights of prejudice toward Muslim immigrants. Polakow-Suransky and Chamedes clearly preferred that both the anti-religious bent of "equal rights" feminism and militant homosexuality's anger stay trained on the Christian majority as the real problem (it being the locus, in their view, of most Continental religious, ethnic, and sexual bigotry). Thus, despite their chastisement of the see-no-evil multiculturalists, their article's overriding message was to let Islamism largely off the hook in the name of political correctness. In making their plea for the continued alliance of feminists and gays with multiculturalists under the umbrella of a broad left coalition, they seem to have lost sight of what it is about the West that is most worth defending. Several American feminists have put forward a feminist reading of the Koran, which in itself seems a very healthy development. One of the more prominent efforts in this line is Qu'ran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1999) by Amina Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam. Inasmuch as it is a linguist's highly detailed study of the Arabic text of the Koran, I am not able to judge whether sound reasoning has been used to reach the conclusion that the words of the Prophet Muhammad offer justice to women as well as to men. Certainly Wadud is at one with the Islamic feminists I have been discussing in saying that domineering male interpreters of the text, not the text itself, are responsible for misogynistic practices under the aegis of Islam. Nor do readers of Wadud find a breezy multicultural endorsement of polygyny; she roundly condemns it. The trouble comes when she announces that two of the three "commentators whose exegetical works were consulted" for Qu'ran and Woman were Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abdul Ala Maulana Maudoodi, the two principal Sunni theoreticians of Islamism. The political project of Qutb--inciter of the destruction of infidels and the coercion of nonfundamentalist Muslims--was to cure the Muslim world of the "hideous schizophrenia" caused by separating church and state. Yet to hear Wadud tell it, Qutb, in his writings on the Koran, "discusses the shared benefits and responsibility between men and women in the Islamic social system of justice" and is generally something of a feminist. This is not easy to reconcile with his rabid reaction against the social mixing of the sexes, mentioned above. True, one could argue that Qutb stood for a sexual politics of "separate (very separate) but equal." But Wadud does not so argue. Neither Qutb nor Maudoodi (the foremost jihadi ideologue of the Indian subcontinent) is presented in political context. Filling in that context would have meant defending Qutb's and Maudoodi's fundamentalism or else trying to deny it. In any case, exercises in mainstreaming these ideologists of holy war do not serve the cause of women. The feminist reading of the Koran advanced by Asma Gull Hasan is not that of a scholar but that of a young American giving the illiberal elders in her family a hard time. Apparently building upon schoolwork she did at Wellesley College, Hasan put together American Muslims: The New Generation (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), a book combining the relativism of the multicultural feminists, the policy diktats of the "equal rights" feminists, and hefty doses of complaint about her fellow Americans' stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists. It is also, in some respects, a rather charming work. The cheeriness with which the author scolds her uncle for his "chauvinist beliefs," or the way she doesn't let up on her traditionalist grandfather until he admits that, on Judgment Day, men and women will stand equally before God, are pure American jeune fille. Hasan is a pro-assimilation American Muslim who appreciates the opportunities that the United States has afforded her family, originally from Pakistan. She criticizes her fellow Muslims who display anti-Semitism. Yet the relativism of her outlook--and it, too, is very American--makes a muddle of her thinking. Most disappointingly, the book treats terrorist acts such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center not as an evil to be stopped, but strictly as a painful public relations problem for "Muslims like me, who would never think of hijacking planes." American Muslims was written before September 11; a year after al Qaeda struck, a Hasan op-ed in the New York Times ("Learning a Lesson for Ramadan," November 6, 2002) might have shown an improved understanding. No such luck, though. The op-ed, concerning her newfound reluctance to practice her faith openly during Ramadan for fear of discrimination, amplified the most vapid and bellyaching aspects of the book. Airport security was now a nightmare for her. Giving to charity risked government scrutiny. There was no allusion whatsoever to the event that changed not only her life but the skyline of Manhattan: the attack the year before that killed over 3,000 people. Such stubbornness places Asma Gull Hasan, to this day, in the mushy middle on terrorism--not a good place to be. Betty Friedan published a memoir a few years ago in which she recounted hearing, at international women's conferences, about things that women in faraway countries had to contend with, such as clitoridectomy. Sounding like somebody from Peoria, Illinois--which she is--Friedan wrote in Life So Far (Diane Publishing, 2000): "I thought there were certain absolute things that under no culture would you respect. Would you respect slaveryh Certain things in women's lives have to be absolute and under no culture should you respect the mutilation of young girls." When a woman points a blameful finger--and that has been women's job since time immemorial--her words gain force insofar as they draw upon eternal verities. To be sure, in her newspaper cri de coeur (which she later expanded into a book), Oriana Fallaci went overboard in calling the veil "stupid" and belittling wives willing to participate in polygynous marriages. Likewise, the secularism of feminist thinkers like Friedan can be rigid in a way that recalls not American history, tradition, or constitutional principles, but the Jacobins' extirpation of faith from the public square. Yet for all that, American women would do well to negotiate the tensions now being felt between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East with a moral compass aligned more closely with Fallaci and Friedan than with the multiculturalist or the grievance specialist. September 11 has clarified matters for many. Left-liberal intellectuals are--or at least some of them are--groping their way toward a defense of the West that puts them alongside, if not fervently with, the Bush administration. This is happening even as conservatives make the case that the fight against terrorism is a fight against people who would mistreat women and stone homosexuals. The women writing in the American Prospect, Polakow-Suransky and Chamedes, registered the conservatives' arguments and were not amused. It bothered them when "male politicians ... suddenly began invoking women's emancipation" as if they cared about it. The warning they issued to feminists and homosexual activists was that "their causes have been effectively adopted and appropriated by those who have claimed the mantle of defending [European] tolerance in the face of intolerant Islam." It's a rather petty warning to issue. Why not let anyone who is willing--Westerners and those struggling in the Muslim world to emulate the pluralism and democracy we enjoy--converge on the need to bring about a decent life for women (and men), who deserve to have their fundamental rights respectedh This is, in fact, what the woman question brings out especially well: the rights of human beings that are manifest not in any penumbra of any constitution but in the full light of day. As one of the supporters of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a woman from Denmark, put it: "Once in a while you can have your doubts about whether you are a feminist or not. But you cannot, even for a second, doubt that you are an Afghan feminist." (1) Interview with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal (November/December 2002). (2) See the chapter devoted to Shaarawi in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana University Press, 1990). Lauren Weiner has written about women in politics, history, and

literature for publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Weekly Standard and the New Criterion.

[wakingwriter]

When and why did you begin writing?

I’ve always written, mainly articles, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I decided to write my first novel, The Artist’s Muse. I’ve always admired anyone who has finished a novel, as I have started and abandoned so many over the years and recognize the commitment it takes to see a novel through to completion. I always told myself that I would write a novel one day but the more I talked about it the less likely it seemed that I would ever do it. Life was good and very distracting. I went out a lot, my work as a teacher was fun.

Then it happened – the event that got me to put pen to paper where everything else had failed. I was attacked in the classroom by a violent male pupil who had issues with women in authority. After that, teaching wasn’t the same.

I turned to writing. I wrote compulsively, penning articles to motivate others, writing pieces on art, travel, food. I had a desire to give meaning to my world and writing was the most powerful way to do it.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

This is a tricky one as there’s something almost mysterious, possibly pretentious, to call oneself a ‘writer’ which belies the hard graft that goes into the writing itself. When I first started to write The Artist’s Muse I would meet up once a week with a friend who also wrote. Yet when other friends asked us what we were doing we would be evasive, self-conscious, wary of criticism and the odd raised eyebrow. It was only when I had finished the novel that I decided it was time for me to tell people about it. I considered myself a writer at that point. I had completed a work of fiction. I’d written 90,000 plus words. I’d researched the paintings I’d mentioned and the historical context, I’d edited and re-edited, removing unnecessary detail, delighting in the sounds of my sentences.  Though to call myself a writer, that took a little bit longer. It was only when articles and reviews presented me as ‘Kerry Postle, author of The Artist’s Muse‘ that it truly sank in. I had written a novel. I was ready to call myself a writer.

Why did you choose to write in your particular field or genre?

My first novel, The Artist’s Muse,  is historical/literary fiction. I’ve always loved art and art history. I’ve studied it, even taught it. I’m interested in gender politics too. And so, when I went to an Egon Schiele exhibition in Vienna back in 2015, my two loves came together. I knew what I had to write about.

I saw rooms full of paintings of the same model, the wonderful Wally Neuzil, but I could find out very little about her life. She was very evidently key to Schiele’s work, and yet, for such an important figure, she was unsettling absent. And to make matters worse, what little I did manage to dig up about her was presented from a very male perspective. I felt compelled to put this right and to tell her story from her point of view, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve given her a voice where she presents her life with and influence on Schiele through her eyes. In this way we can understand her actions. She challenges us to judge her if we dare as she is aware that she very often swims perilously close to the limits of acceptability. However, to see how society dismisses her, how it turns a blind eye to the exploitative way that she is treated by powerful men, the reader has no option but to condemn the hypocrisy of those who should know better.  The Artist’s Muse celebrates the glittering art of turn-of-the-century Vienna while never ignoring the decay and corruption at its core.

What made you decide to sit down and actually start writing this book?

What made me start writing was the need to celebrate Egon Schiele’s art but also to challenge the right of one person to use another as a possession. I was compelled to breathe life into the artist’s muse and show her to be the inspiration she really was. The work Schiele completed with Wally is his most original. He failed to reach the same artistic heights after he had abandoned her and so The Artist’s Muse is my acknowledgment of the contribution she made to his ‘oeuvre’  and recognition of the sacrifices she had to make. I had to write it.

Tell us more about your main character. What makes him or her unique?

Wally Neuzil is the main character in The Artist’s Muse. She is Schiele’s muse and her commitment to him enables him to achieve the greatness that he does. Her voice is refreshingly unique. We follow her thought processes and although she has few choices we see, as she shares with us what she thinks, that she knows right from wrong. Exploited, in an abusive relationship, we feel her pain and understand why she does what she does. She has a knowingness about her that recognizes the wrong in what she’s made to do, yet she does it anyway because she must. Her voice is distinct and clear and she often challenges the reader directly, asking if he or she would act any differently. Her aim is to make us think, feel uncomfortable about the blind eye we may sometimes turn to the unpalatable truth before us. Yet underpinning it all is the little voice of a young girl who only ever wanted to live a good and happy life, to love and be loved.

Who is your least favorite character and why?

My least favorite character, yet the one who was the most fun to write, is the repulsive Herr Altmann. He is the most repellent character in the novel. Like a slug, he oozes bodily fluids. I’d been looking at Ursula LeGuin’s book on writing called Steering the Craft where she urges you to have fun with your language and that is what I did when I had Wally go into Herr Altmann’s study. She delivers a drawing to him (it’s of her body) and as he unrolls it the sense of menace builds up. A powerful man who abuses his privileged position, I portray him as a vile and ultimately ridiculous fool.

If your book was made into a movie, who would you cast?

Egon Schiele is the enfant terrible of the art world – stylish, handsome, louche. A young David Tennant, therefore, would be perfect but as time waits for no man I’m going to have to give the role to a younger model. Possibly Eddie Redmayne. As for Wally, his red-haired model, I would go for Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones) or Kate Mara, while the cold Emilie Flöge would be best played by Tilda Swinton or Cate Blanchett. Then there’s Klimt – not too sure who I’d like to play him. Nick Frost? The Artist’s Muse would make a wonderful film!

What is your next project?

My next project is a novel set during the Spanish Civil War. It again looks at misogyny, this time when used as a weapon in war. The trigger for the action is a war crime perpetrated by Franco’s Nationalists in a finca near the village of Fuentes de Andalucia. The soldiers, tired after a grueling campaign, kidnap local women. They are forced to cook and dance for the soldiers. Then they are raped, murdered and thrown down a well. The soldiers return to the village, bloodied underwear trailing like flags from the tips of their rifles.

What role does research play in your writing?

Research is key. It helps add authenticity to your work. When researching The Artist’s Muse two texts became central to the novel. The first was Otto Weiniger’s Sex and Character published in 1903 which is a pseudo-scientific attempt at illustrating the differences between men and women. It’s a work of unparalleled misogyny, so full of odious opinions that I found it hard to choose just one quotation to sum it up. However, the one for which I’ve opted should give you a flavor: ‘Woman,’ Weininger writes, ‘is soulless and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will.’ The other text is by an Austrian feminist called Adelheid Popp. It’s called The Autobiography of a Working Woman and it shows the hardships poor working class women had to endure at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna. I used much of the detail presented in this book to fill in the gaps and add authenticity to Wally Neuzil’s early life.

How successful has your quest for reviews been so far?

I’ve got quite a few in the UK but have struggled to get many in the USA, which is a shame, as I believe the US readership would love my story. I haven’t tried very hard to get more but that’s because I don’t know how to. Part of me hopes that the book will speak for itself, but I realize that readers need to know about it before that can happen.

Who is your favorite fictional character and why?

This changes constantly and depends on which book I’ve read recently. At this point in time, my favorite is Tabitha in Francis Spufford’s On Golden Hill. She’s really very intriguing. Nasty? Quite possibly. Prickly? Of course. But there’s something quite desperate about her that makes my heartbreak. Her own worst enemy.

Who are the writers that have influenced your work?

I studied French literature from the 11th through early 20th century as an undergraduate and specialized in 17th-century French drama and Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu for my Masters. My studies have given me an appreciation of well-written literature irrespective of genre and context. However, when I’m writing I immerse myself in books that do well whatever it is I’m aiming to achieve at that time.  If pushed I would have to say that Proust is my turn-to author when I need general inspiration. He combines great insight with a sharp wit that spares no one, least of all himself – a valuable attribute in a writer. The writing of Richard Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish/ The Narrow Road to the Deep North) is also a favorite, but in truth, there are so many great books out there.

  How can you discover more about Kerry Postle?

Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Goodreads |  Amazon Author Page | Amazon UK | Amazon | Website

    Kerry Postle, author of The Artist's Muse @kerry_postle #historicalfiction When and why did you begin writing? I’ve always written, mainly articles, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I decided to write my first novel, The Artist’s Muse.

[booksareawayoflife]

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas

‘FEYRE WILL BRING VENGEANCE. She has left the Night Court – and her High Lord – and is playing a deadly game of deceit. In the Spring Court, Tamlin is making deals with the invading kin threatening to bring Prythian to its knees and Feyre is determined to uncover his plans. But to do so she must weave a web of lies, and one slip may spell doom not only for Feyre, but for her world as well. As mighty armies grapple for power, Feyre must decide who to trust amongst the dazzling and lethal High Lords – and hunt for allies in unexpected places. BUT WHILE WAR RAGES, IT IS HER HEART THAT WILL FACE THE GREATEST BATTLE.’

Book Review: *NO SPOILERS FOR THIS BIT* I struggled waiting to read this book. I had pre-ordered the paperback, and hardback, and was so tempted to buy the paperback in store, but I forced myself to wait a day, and get what I pre-ordered. This book only slightly disappointed me, but it was still a 10/10 or 5/5 read. I think you just have to bear in mind that ACOMAF is slower, and more character building, whereas this book is war. It’s going to be serious. ACOMAF is still my favourite book in the series, with ACOWAR being a close second, but others have liked it equally.

I am trying so hard not to spoil this book in this section. But it was a good read. I would recommend that you do not hold it to the standard of ACOMAF, simply to avoid disappointment. If you expect the worst, it can only get better. I will say that Feyre in the Spring Court is a lot of fun. You will probably end up jumping for joy in the games that she plays, because it is such a good part. And that that Feyre’s reunion with the Night Court is my favourite bit. I don’t consider those spoilers, because if you have read ACOMAF, you know this will probably happen.

*SPOILERS* This is where things get spoiler-y so don’t continue reading if you do not want to know.

I did think Feyre would spend a lot longer in the Spring Court. Like I was expecting Feyre to turn on Tamlin and Hybern, on the first battle. I don’t mind that things happened quicker than it did, because it did speed things along, but I suppose I was just expecting more scheming. One plot hole I noticed is, what happened to Alis? You know that she fled to the Summer Court after Feyre left the Spring Court, but then you do not find out if she lived the surprise attack on Hybern. I hope we do in later books, because I really liked her in ACOTAR and ACOMAF because of what she did for Feyre.

I did love Lucien in this book. He did redeem himself, but I was expecting him to redeem himself. I was annoyed when he basically got written out of the book about half way in, just to return at the end. I wanted him to become brothers with Cas and Az, I can only hope that ACOTAR Book Four, has a POV from one of the inner circle so we can see that. But I doubt it. The POV will be either Vassa, or something to do with the Autumn Court. Because a lot of those plot holes were left unfinished.

I do feel as if the ending was rushed. Simply because there was so many plot holes. You have no idea what happened with the Autumn Court. Plus Lucien and his heritage. Alis. Whether or not the Weaver and the Bone Carver are actually dead, seeing as they are the embodiment of death (I highly doubt their dead). Mor and Az not having that discussion that Mor is not interested. Whether the aspects of the Cauldron are still a part of Nesta and Elain. How relations with humans were. A lot of it was left open. So it could just be for the next book to answer, but I highly doubt we will get a lot of answers.

Talking about Mor and Az. I was really sad that this ship did not happen. I understand that Mor is Bi, and prefers females, and it is good for representation, but I shipped them so hard. I don’t have a problem with Mor and her sexual orientation. I just don’t know if I can forgive her for basically not telling Az, and having sex with other males just to remind him that she is not his. Az probably got that Mor isn’t his, but she didn’t need to be that brutal in the years that they know each other. It made me like Mor a lot less. With Az, I did feel like there was a lot of character development because he got closer to Feyre. I especially liked how he told the story of Nepelle, just to inspire her that in the most dire of situations, she will be able to do what is necessary.

I liked Cassian more in this book. I liked him a lot in ACOMAF, but I had more at stake with Cassian in this book. Because I liked him so much, I didn’t want him to die, and I was expecting him to from the start. I was glad that he survived. I didn’t like him and Nesta though. Because I don’t like Nesta. She is a bitch. I can understand that her being a bitch is just a mask, but she is like 99% of the time a bitch, and I can’t get over how she treated Feyre in ACOTAR and ACOMAF. But if Cassian is happy, then I’ll be happy…

Rhys and Feyre. I loved their bond talks, and their reunion. I hoped that Feyre would be pregnant in this book though. But sadly that did not happen. I don’t have much to say about their relationship other than I loved it. Words cannot do it justice.

I did like Amren more in this book. But I did feel as if Amren would not have stayed. If she did not know the Amren part of herself when she was in her true form, then I don’t think Amren would have stayed. Don’t get me wrong, I am really happy that she stayed, but I just question whether or not her loyalty to the Night Court, would have been enough. There is Varian, and I am happy that Amren is happy, but I do feel as if he was just flung at her. In ACOMAF Varian didn’t know if he liked her or was disgusted. I don’t think a few weeks of letters would have changed that. But I could be wrong. I also like her comedic relief sometimes, and her banter with the inner circle.

With Tamlin, I did have mixed feelings. I mean, he is a dick and we all know that. But Tamlin was the person that I kept on thinking about after I finished ACOWAR. I felt sad because I used to really like him in ACOTAR. The “Be happy” bit is what got to me. He is a dick, but I just felt so sad for him. But at the same time, I didn’t really like his redemption aspect in this book. It wasn’t a true redemption. I didn’t feel like he did because he saw the error of his ways, but more because he loved Feyre, and just didn’t want her to die.

I loved Feyre’s dad in the end. I was just sad that he did not play a bigger part in this trilogy. I am glad that Nesta and Elain were the ones that killed the King of Hybern, as he did deserve it. 1000x.

The Suriel was a dreamer, and we shall remember it. I got hit with the feels with it’s death. I cried when it died. It was such a good friend to Feyre. Feyre better build a monument to it, I swear.

I did think that the battles were nicely written. It wasn’t too in depth, but enough for you to understand that anyone could have died. And that the number of deaths were high. It was just weird that nobody actually died. I was waiting for someone in the inner circle to die, but no. I am glad nobody did die, don’t get me wrong. I was just expecting someone close to die.

10/10 or 5/5. Were you expecting anything less? I did love this book, but I did feel like there was more flaws, and plot holes than ACOMAF. I read it in less than 30 hours, because I did feel like I needed breaks for things to sink in and absorb what happened. I would recommend this series to anyone (that’s like older than 15), because I think everyone will find something to enjoy. I loved it, and I can’t wait for the next three books. I definitely love this series more than Throne of Glass.

Love Lou xx