Are You My Mother?

#911
Title: Are You My Mother?
Author: Alison Bechdel
 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Year: 2012
289 pages

As Bechdel and her mother agree late in the text, this is a meta-book. Unlike Fun Home, there's a distance or caution about it, though Bechdel punctuates this with moments of great anguish. Some possible contributors to this distance:
--Bechdel's mother is still alive, so the negotiation about the book must include her, whereas in "the dad book," her father had died and her mother was an arbiter of his story.
--The story of Bechdel and her mother is still unfolding, rather than concluded and summed up.
--The revelatory content of the book is learning about what's missing in the relationship, whereas the discovery in Fun Home was of content-rich secrets.
--The book, as a self-conscious meta-book, distances the reader from the contents.
--The book is about processes more than about information.

Not that this distance is a bad thing (and it might make the telling more effective). However, one effect of this structural choice is that it's probably less appealing to memoir readers in general, though more appealing to analytic geeks such as myself.

I was completely absorbed by this memoir and very much enjoyed the overdetermination and synchronicity of meaning Bechdel creates, as in Fun Home, through her narrative, dreams, illustrations, and citations. The latter includes scaffolding by Winnicott with major appearances by Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and essays, Freud, Lacan, and others. (I should say as well that the ghost in the machine, the repressed content, is the chilren's book Are You My Mother?, from which the title presumably derives.)

All that plus a lot of analytic psychotherapy and it created some startling points of connection with my own life and processes. Much like Maso's The Art Lover, I frequently had the experience of reading about my twin separated at birth, and with her own experiences, but with a strange and brightly mirrored resonance with my own.

I also enjoyed reading this as a therapist. I frequently interrupted my partner (also a therapist) to point out frames that are so true to the therapeutic relationship that they made us laugh with recognition and admiration for Bechdel's observational skills.

I'm a great fan of Winnicott, too, so it was great fun to see him as a central meta-character in Bechdel's memoir. It's a fine use of introjection and a transitional object. He'd have liked that.

The Silver Scorpion

#910
Title: The Silver Scorpion
Authors: Ron Marz, Ian Edginton, Edison George
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Year: 2012
144 pages

Download provided by NetGalley. This book collects six episodes of the comic but does not conclude the story arc. The premise of a teen Syrian superhero who has lost his legs and uses a wheelchair comes out of a summit of US and Syrian youth with disabilities. The storyline stresses themes of cooperation and respect without seeming pedantic or losing its momentum. Of note is the importance of mutual effort to fight individual arrogance and temptation.

The panel flow is natural and quick, in part because the drawing is clean and directs the eye forward. Colors and inking are also good. I can't evaluate the print production of the hard copy. Available athttp://www.scribd.com/doc/54720383/Silver-Scorpion

Looking for Jake

#909
Title: Looking for Jake
Author: China Miéville
Publisher: Del Rey
Year: 2005
320 pages

A collection of short stories that benefit from being read together, in this order, as Miéville uses their relationship to mirror, distort, or amplify aspects of each other. While a couple of the stories founder, perhaps because they are not in Miéville's typical style, most hold up nicely. In his novels, we become familiar with the logic of each setting; here, because the stories are short, the reading experience often is of disorientation. Since most of his protagonists are similarly discombobulated, the existential confusion is heightened.

Buildings and streets play a surprisingly large and active role in many of these pieces, as does the sense that mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world--or, at least, that the world is fraying, and not only does that mean something, but the shape of the threads means something, too. In many cases, characters struggle mightily either to make sense of what they experience, or to push away their understanding.

Best gooey imagery: "The ball room" (a story of an IKEA gone crazy), "Familiar." Creepiest: "Foundation." Most poignant: "Looking for Jake," "Details," "The tain." Least effective: "'Tis the season," "On the way to the front." Most evocative of Poe: "Entry taken from a medical encyclopaedia."

<b>Table of contents</b>
Looking for Jake
Foundation
The ball room
Reports of certain events in London
Familiar
Entry taken from a medical encyclopaedia
Details
Go between    
Different skies
An end to hunger
'Tis the season
Jack    
On the way to the front
The tain

The End of the Affair

#908
Title: The End of the Affair
Author: Graham Greene
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1951
192 pages

 Although this dragged a little at times, it still showed Greene's fine understanding of psychology, particularly the psychology of jealousy.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

#907
Title: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
Author: John M. Barry
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004/2005
560 pages

Don't, as I did, make the mistake of reading this on a plane, or you, too, will have an influenza/Twelve Monkeys experience of others' ubiquitous pathogens.

Barry is repetitive at times. I didn't mind the long tangential segments that provided background for his flu-based sections. It felt grand and sweeping rather than disconnected. It probably helped that I read this as an audiobook, so it kept moving along. However, there was a lot of dramatic buildup for what felt like an anticlimactic conclusion.

Vagina: A New Biography

#906
Title: Vagina: A New Biography
Author: Naomi Wolf
Publisher: Ecco
Year: 2012
400 pages

One wonders what factors other than randomness lead to winning this book as a Goodreads giveaway. I look forward to carrying this around at work.

***
While reading: While some reviewers find this "dry," I'm not finding it dry enough, as in: Science. I'm in a chapter on neurotransmitters that contains much information that appears to be overgeneralized or just misunderstood. Wolf begins many sections with a piece of science, then rapidly draws overinclusive or anecdotal conclusions from it. It's both reductive and weirdly amorphous. Her central idea may be worth considering, but it's oversimplified and made mysterious by turns. Also, if she and the female lab tech feel sad for the rat that's getting an opioid inverse agonist, then this isn't a controlled experiment since they know which rat gets which injection. And might not Wolf and lab tech's moods affect the rats'? And might not some of the rats be not melancholic, but rather, happy to read for awhile, maybe take a bath, and go to sleep instead of mating? There is much anthropomorphism in the lab.

As a woman, I do not see my experiences mirrored here in any profound or affirming ways. As a feminist, I do not see my feminism here. Frankly, I have been around for a long time, including the much-maligned 1970's, and I have never heard a feminist disparage any kind of orgasm. I'm not saying that none have, but political rhetoric at a podium or in a text and what people actually believe and say to each other are different things. As one of my feminist theory professors once said, "Irigaray ('When Our Lips Speak Together') isn't saying that women literally have orgasms just by walking around. That would be stupid. She's making a symbolic point."

And I keep being astonished by Wolf's revelatory experiences. She really didn't know until she was older than 46 that all female mammals have a clitoris? Goodness. I'm so distracted by this sort of anecdote that I forget what she was discussing.

I'll keep reading, but at 70 pages in, this seems to be getting sloppier, not cleaner.

***
The middle sections are crisper, but they're not well-integrated. So far it reads like this:

1st hundred pages: I have a really cool idea! It's too cool for real methodical exploration! I'll keep saying it, and quote anecdotes from my gynecologist.

2nd hundred pages: This is where I write like you remember, and it's about vaginas in literature. Relational pornography is better than zipless fuck pornography, which relates to my cool idea. Plus, anecdotes from my gynecologist.

***
I skimmed the last third, starting when I encountered one too many repetitive statements. It worked on the assumption that what had been asserted in the first 2/3 was solidly supported, then continued on this shaky base. While I have no opinion about the veracity of her premise, I just can't see that she substantiated it.

A few notes:

Both masturbation and orgasm by clitoral stimulation here get, in some ways, the same bad rap they got from Victorian medical culture--they're inferior. It's probably just as well that Wolf stuck to heterosexual women, because I can't imagine how she'd account for lesbian sexuality. That happened to Freud, too.

"Cooter" and "poon" are not "funny little sibling [names]" that "young lexicographers" give their vaginas (p. 209). "Poon" is a shortened form of "poontang." Here's the first hit I got for "poontang etymology", from Online Etymological Dictionary: c.1910, probably via New Orleans Creole, from Fr. putain "prostitute," from O.Fr. pute "whore," probably from fem. of V.L. *puttus (cf. O.It. putta "girl"), from L. putus, with derogatory sense. But also possibly from O.Fr. put, from L. putidus "stinking" on notion of the "foulness" of harlotry, or for more literal reasons (among the 16c.-17c. slang terms for "whore" in English were polecat and fling-stink). Shortened form poon is recorded from 1969. From the same source, cooter is: name for some types of freshwater terrapin in southern U.S., 1835 ...from obsolete verb coot "to copulate" (1660s), of unknown origin. The turtle is said to copulate for two weeks at a stretch. I could go dig out the OED or keep searching to substantiate that this is the origin of "cooter" for vagina (I can trace it to the 1980's for this use), but I'm not going to. If this is the quality of Wolf's research on such easily discoverable information, I really worry about the rest of it.

"Specific scents have been found to boost vaginal blood engorgement: cucumbers and Good 'n Plenty candies both are at the top of the vaginal-engorgement-activating scents, according to one study (and both are phallic in shape)" (p. 284). Really? So is a turd, but I'll bet it's not at the top of the vaginal-engorgement-activating scent pyramid. I'll bet a silicone dildo isn't either, though it arguably has more in common with a phallus than does a Good 'n Plenty.

Finally, "[S]everal [women] reported that they believed, in retrospect, that this [swallowing semen] may have affected their mood to some extent--the sugar rush..." (p. 316). However, I will point out that "Each teaspoon of ejaculate has about 5 - 7 calories" (according to http://goaskalice.columbia.edu/nutrit...), and according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejaculation, "The ... amount of semen that will be ejected during an ejaculation will vary widely between men and may contain between 0.1 and 10 milliliters," or a maximum of two teaspoonfuls. That's a max of 14 calories. That's the amount of calories in 3.5 ounces of cucumber, or 4 Good 'n Plenty pieces (http://caloriecount.about.com/calorie...). That's really not the stuff of a sugar rush, especially since some of that's protein, not sugar. How much sugar, you ask? Fructose is the main sugar in semen, which is good news if you're watching your glycemic load ("load" is not a joke, nor is "dry," above). Bad news for the sugar rush, though. Wikipedia quotes WebMD as saying that in semen analysis, the normal level is "at least 3 mg/ml." In our theoretical two-teaspoon ejaculate above, that just isn't a lot.

If further scientific inquiry is required: Eliasson, R. (1965). Accurate determination of glucose in human semen. Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, 9, 325-330: "The mean concentration [of glucose] in semen samples] was 7.24 mg/100 ml" or an average of 0.724 mg in the maximum ejaculate above.

That's all. I wish this were a better book.

Blood of Montenegro

#905
Title: Blood of Montenegro
Author: Bajram Angelo Koljenovic & James Nathan Post
Publisher: Writers Club Press
Year: 2002
Country: Montenegro
413 pages

Koljenovic describes his family's and his own experiences, perhaps, as ethnic Muslims in Montenegro over the last century, interspersing the personal story with historical events, notably the rise of Tito.

I have relatives who worked in the region over several decades. One once told me, "The tradition of strong oral history there means that grievances and slights of hundreds of years ago are still felt to be immediate and fresh." That assessment is certainly supported here, where both long-ago massacres and current verbal offenses casting aspersions on one's mother are reasons to kill a man.

This book characterizes itself as "semi-autobiographical historical creative non-fiction, that is, work incorporating some historical facts and persons, and some of which are fictionalized." While I appreciate the disclaimer, this makes it difficult to know what I'm reading. If it's mostly fiction, then the long excursions into Montenegrin and Balkans history are, while interesting, lengthy and not sufficiently integrated with the personal story. This ambiguity of genre seems to have made it difficult for Koljenovic to focus his story, and its self-published nature doesn't help because no formal editor has shaped it.

If this is mostly non-fiction, then the personal sections increasingly read like James Frey, where the narrator frequently asserts how dangerous and successful he and his friends are. They may be, but it's hard to determine. If the balance is more toward fiction than memoir, it seems boastful rather than informative. Koljenovic insists on committing interpersonal violence in the name of his code of honor, but insists that his economic crimes against both persons and states don't make him less patriotic. Again, without knowing what's fiction and what's not, it's hard to respond to this.

The language is frequently stilted and dialogue overly formal and expository. Problems of tense, spelling, and missing words are consistent but not too frequent and don't detract overall. The omission of diacriticals makes it harder to pronounce names and places. Read this not for literary quality but because it provides a window on Montenegrin life and politics in the 20th century.