Spotted at Target

At first, I had a hard time believing that this book existed. I cannot imagine anything more lazy (and shrewd, to be honest) than piggybacking your chick lit on the coattails of a popular television show, no matter how much or little your book pays homage to that show. I know this isn't precisely a new phenomenon, but it seems to be reaching new lows. I read The Jane Austen Bookclub, but didn't feel like it was as blatantly a co-opting of the works of Austen.

That said? Later today at Half Price Books, I saw a book where Mr. Darcy is a vampire...and one where Austen herself is a vampire. There's a whole sub-genre dedicated to inserting zombies in classic literature, or turning beloved literary or historical figures into vampire-hunters. Once was clever, but now it just reeks of commercialism and cynicism.

I know the generally accepted wisdom it that there is nothing new under the sun, but couldn't people try just a little bit harder to draft original content for the public's consumption? Are people's tastes really so narrow as this? That they cannot resist a book tie-in that isn't even really a tie-in?

And don't even get me started on this:  

This is the back of a "revision" of Pride and Prejudice that adds sex scenes to the original text. In terms of sheer commercialism and cynicism, I cannot imagine anything worse than this. But I am certain the bar is out there, just waiting to be lowered.

Keeping the Castle

Keeping the Castle by Patrice Kindl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Think of this book as Jane Austen-training wheels. It's similar, both thematically and storywise, with slightly less demanding language than the classics.

I heard about this on NPR, and their review captures it better than I ever could:

"Patrice Kindl ... has made her name writing for teens," Pearl says, "but this is the kind of book that has great crossover appeal to adults — especially adults who love Jane Austen. This is a young woman who is ... holding her family together. She has two stepsisters who are kind of wicked, her mother is pretty ineffectual, and they live in a very crumbling castle. ... And the next castle over, a new family comes to live there, and they have two non-married young men of just the right age. And, of course, one is dashing and funny and handsome, and the other is a little bit snarky and not someone you would want to be interested in....

"[Jane Austen] made it look so easy, and it's very hard to get that exact wryness and humor and these little tart observations that she makes in Pride and Prejudice. ... It isn't Jane Austen, but it's one of the closest things to Jane Austen that I've read."

I really, really enjoyed it: by the last fifty pages, I was very reluctant to put it down. I'm wavering between an four and a five for this. It skillfully combines little homages to lots of different books (Austen, I Capture the Castle) into one sweet confection of a story.

ETA: A friend asked me if I really thought that Austen's language is demanding, and so I should clarify that I think Austen is pretty accessible, as classics go, but Keeping the Castle is written in a much more modern vernacular, comparatively.

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DOMA and Prop 8 Repealed--Democrats Make Hay

I'm surprised at this point I haven't seen Hilary Clinton officiating a same-sex wedding in California today. Every plaintiff in these cases seems to have had an up-and-coming Democrat to perform their ceremony.

Politically moral or morally political?

I have a terrible habit: I am political on social media. Mostly Facebook, where I am likely to encounter folks with whom I went to high school. I grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, in an area with an unfortunate confluence of new money and small-minded Kansas semi-rural folks. When I was in high school, it was a moderate Republican area. In that way that Kansas politics have gotten more and more crazy over the last fifteen years or so, it's a hard line conservative area, now.

So I still have a few acquaintances from high school who are in the area, or in Kansas generally, whose politics have mirrored the shift that's taken place in the area.

When these two facts align just so, they can result in some unpleasant conversations.

Recently, after a long conversation about the FDA's reversal on Plan B, a man I knew in high school weighed in that the decision was to be mourned because it would lead to an increase in murder, an increase in fornication (yeah, he really talks like that: he's a minister in a fundamentalist sect) and would take children away from the moral guidance of their parents.  We talked a bit about some of the underlying false assumptions in some of the above--Plan B is not commonly regarded as inducing abortion--without much progress--and then he said something that I have had stuck in my craw ever since:

I hardly ever write about strictly political issues. that is not to say that i am without opinions, but they are not my prime concern. You assume politics because it is the forum is which your discern truth.

See what he did there? He's got God and religion, and that informs his politics. I've just got politics, like some kind of modern day Lucrezia Borgia, who is political...and amoral, because of the imperfect forum I use to 'discern truth.' He doesn't say it outright here, but he has implied before that my politics are at best "humanist" and at worst...utterly divorced from moral considerations. Nevermind how clearly untrue that is: I'm not HIS kind of religious (and very few people are!) but the assumption that I am therefore immoral/solely political makes me want to hand him a box of genital punches.

I guess I don't have a conclusion about why this bothered me so much, except that it's so emblematic of the cultural script that people of fundamentalist faith impose on people who are different from them. I encounter it so rarely, but this was really subtle, and it's left me cruising for a fight that probably isn't merited by how it was presented, and talking about it would require resurrected an old thread in an off-topic way.

That's why you all get the rant here, I guess.

What would you have said in my shoes?

Hrm.

If an anti-gay bigot spells it "biggot," is that telling? It just seems perilously close to another double-G word that's likely part of his vocabulary....

"American Savage" by Dan Savage

American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics by Dan Savage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Worth the read just for Bigot Christmas, though that's not the only good essay in this collection. Dan Savage is not without his flaws, but being boring certainly isn't one of them.


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 One of the most amazing things about Savage as a writer is that he can be as crude as can be in one essay, then leave you wondering where you left the damn tissues in the next one. Savage brought me to tears several times in the essay about his mother, and as a long-time reader of his column and podcast subscriber, I knew most of these stories already. The love and grief when he writes about her death are real, and I think it's unlikely that most people could keep a dry eye. I've read most of his books, and they are alternately inspiring, educational, filthy, and hilarious. Not bad at all, for your time.

Constant rebooting

I set up a new domain and imported my blog over here, doing just a little clean up to keep the new setup looking nice. I went ahead and linked this blog to Google+ with the notion that I would maintain a more active presence there, going forward. Facebook, it is wearying and a time suck like none other.

I could use a little more introspection, a lot more personal writing and goal reaching, and a lot less of Zuckerberg's infernal creation.

Lots more to come! I hope to see you around.