Kylie's Book Log

There is an ad running across the top of my Gmail right now that says:

Are you Native American? - Find your Native American roots - Know % Native American in your DNA

...

I think a quote from The Office says it best here:

Michael: Why don't I kind of introduce myself, OK? I am Michael and I am part English, Irish, German and Scottish. Sort of a virtual United Nations. But what some of you might not know is that I am also part Native American Indian.
Oscar: What part Native American?
Michael: Two-fifteenths.
Oscar: Two-fifteenths -- that fraction doesn't make any sense.
Michael: Well, you know what, it's kind of hard for me to talk about it. The suffering.

What I want to know is how in the hell did I get targeted for that Gmail ad in the first place?

Ucccch.

Oh, rock on, Connecticut. Well done.

French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins Nobel Prize in Literature

...who?

Hey guys, first post! I work in a chain bookstore as a specialist, and I love it...Most of the time...I'm going to rant, bear with me now:

1.) No, I can't search for a book by COLOR of the cover. I wish I could. Apparently, it would be much easier for you.

2.) I am so sorry that our advertisements about discounts were misleading. Unfortunately, I am but a lowly bookseller...I'm pretty sure I didn't have those personally pulled out of my butt.

3.) Do not ask me how old I am. Yes, I look young...No, you don't have the right to see my drivers license.

4.) If you throw your money down on my counter instead of handing it to me, I reserve the right to NOT tell you "Have a nice day!" Asshat.

5.) We are a smallish size store. I am sorry we didn't carry that obscure 1985 copy of whatever that is no longer in production. I'm sorry it takes a little while to order it and get it in the store for YOU personally. I'll work on that.

6.) I don't know why your child's teacher chose that book. Yes, it is Michael Crichton. I'm sorry. Maybe you should call her about that.

7.) Do not yell at me if I don't have your child's reading list for school. It's a courtesy that I get most of them anyway.

My goodness, but this article bristling at America's (apparent) exclusion from the Nobel Prize for Literature is one of the zanier things I've read for awhile!

The premise of the article, which is actually interesting, was sparked by this quotation:

Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, made that clear this week when he told the Associated Press that American writers are simply not up to Nobel standards. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular," Engdahl decreed. "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

So I'd certainly think that that would be debatable. And the Slate article does debate it. The problem is that I can't quite see how much of anything they say makes any, uh, sense.

Here are some of the highlights:

• "America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become." They want us to secede from the Nobel Prize? Really? Will we have to fight a war? Is Slate going to go over to petitionsonline.com and craft a petition to try to get the American government to tell the Nobel committee we don't want no education Nobel Prizes? What?
  
• "Though, while Engdahl decries American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel's history, it was exactly its "backwardness" that the Nobel committee most valued in American literature... Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930, wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them." Oh, dude, I know you didn't just call John Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck "anti-intellectual". And who in the hell ever said that a novel that isn't "formally adventurous" (I'm guessing that this means breaking traditional boundaries in terms of form and style, although dude still needs to learn to make some sense) is automatically "backward" and, it is implied, cowardly? He just ripped on Buck, Steinbeck, and fucking Sinclair Lewis. This is his defense of U.S. lit?
  
• Oh, but bright side! "No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954." This is a stretch. Especially since if you caught me on an oppositional day I might quarrel with the award to Hemingway myself. I'd probably be wrong, but I'd have plenty of fodder for the argument nevertheless, I think.
  
• "But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure." ...WHAT
  
  NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT
  
  
• "To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe." We did what now? Is the worldwide profusion of McDonald's somehow supposed to affect our Nobel Prize in Lit standings? Because otherwise I'm not really all that clear on what he's talking about.
  
• "Even Austrians and Italians didn't think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes." Man, if I were Elfriede Jelinek or Dario Fo I'd be itching to bitch-slap this guy. As it is, I'm itching to bitch-slap this guy. I didn't know much about the Fo pick (when was that, anyway?), but of the circle of my friends who are into this kind of thing and who had read Jelinek, all of them thought she was a great pick. I've been meaning to read something by her forever because her books look fascinating. And this guy is going on about how everyone knows she didn't "deserve" her prize? Who is this douche?
  
• "But to prove the bad faith of Engdahl's recent criticisms of American literature, all you have to do is mention a single name: Philip Roth." Oh boy, here we go. I'll spare you all the guy's natterings about how Roth is super-super-cosmopolitan because he did interviews with lots of Europeans who won the Nobel themselves; clearly the roster of people he has interviewed should be the yardstick by which his Nobel potential should be measured. (Personally, I sort of think it more relevant that in writing about him I can't use the word "yardstick" without feeling extremely extremely dirty, although what relevance I think that should have, I can't really say.)
  
• "Unless and until Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes."
  
  OH
  
  I GET IT NOW
  
  YOU WANT PHILIP ROTH TO BE YOUR BOYFRIEND
  
  OKAY WELL I THINK JUST GOING RIGHT IN AND STICKING YOUR HEAD UP HIS ASS IS MOVING A LITTLE FAST, BUT I HOPE IT WORKS OUT FOR YOU
  
  YOU COULD MAYBE HAVE SKIPPED OVER THE PART WHERE YOU INSULT DORIS LESSING AND JOSE SARAMAGO, THOUGH, I DON'T REALLY KNOW THAT THAT WILL GET YOU ANY FARTHER WITH PHIL
  
  IT CERTAINLY AIN'T GETTING YOU FAR WITH ME
  
  BUT GOOD LUCK
  
  PLEASE SHUT UP NOW

Seriously, Slate. Why do you make no sense?

I love how Sarah Palin debates like an unprepared college English major taking an oral quiz. Whenever they ask her a question that has her stumped, she does a feint and a clumsy segue and then answers a different question that she's memorized a response to.

Also, "I'm not one to attribute every man activity of man to the changes in the climate." Oh, the lady's good for the lulz. Not good enough that I want to see hide or carefully-feathered hair of her one day after November 4. But for now, I'll take my fun where I can get it.

Anybody going to the ABA Winter Intstitute this year?

This is a post about Desperate Housewives. I am not LJ-cutting it because for the last ten minutes I have been listening to audio of a squawking quail -- no human voices, just the quail -- and wondering how to transcribe it. Therefore I am embittered and I want you all to suffer, too. Does it sound like I'm kidding about the squawking quail? I'm not kidding about the squawking quail. SQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEK SQAAAAAAAAAAAAAEK its in mi hed SQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEK o the birds is in mi hed

Right.

So I came across an issue of TV Guide today in which the cover story was about Desperate Housewives. To recap for those of you who don't open my Housewives cuts, it is a show and I like it but I spend a great deal of time ranting about the sexual chemistry between Marcia Cross, who plays Bree, and Dana Delany, who plays Katherine, and how it is evidence of the terrible terrible heteronormativity of network television that they have not started screwing long since. And this is the deal with Desperate Housewives.

At the end of last season Bree and Katherine had gotten as far as eye-fucking over Salade Nicoise and hollow-point wadcutter bullets, but they had remained textually straight, and that was stupid. But it's a new season, and here's what Marc Cherry has to say about Katherine's role in it:

"Katherine, who finds out she's going to be a grandma this season, is rattling around in her big old house and very lonely. 'She'll enter into a relationship with another resident on the lane -- one of our regulars -- and it'll cause a bit of a scandal,' Marc Cherry says. Adds Delany of the tryst: 'Some viewers will love it, others will be upset.'"

Note the carefully gender-neutral terms used to refer to her new paramour, and also the fact that this person is a "regular" and a resident of Wisteria Lane. Note also that Marc Cherry really, really likes to mess with his audience's head.

Poll #1271334
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which resident of Wisteria Lane is Katherine going to have a fling with?

How depressing am I going to find the percentages on that last option as compared to all the others?

What do I have to offer to redeem this poll for you?

LET HIM OR HER WHO HAS NEVER POSTED AN ENTRY ABOUT LOST OR SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES OR BATTLESTAR GALACTICA OR THE WIRE OR THE OFFICE OR ANY OTHER TV SHOW THAT IS LESS MOCKABLE THAN DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES BUT STILL INTRINSICALLY A TV SHOW CAST THE FIRST STONE

( righteous-ass feminist rage. Possibly triggering to survivors of sexual violence, or fans of Sandra Bernhard, whoever in the *hell* she is. )

Students Confess To Hanging Effigy of Obama from Tree

A George Fox University employee discovered the life-size cutout of the Democratic presidential candidate hanging from a campus tree last week with a fishing line around its neck. Posted on the cardboard effigy was a sign that read "Act Six Reject." Act Six is a program that promotes campus diversity and urban leadership.

I like it when people tell me that racism plays no part in this Presidential election, and that if blacks would just stop *looking* for racism, it would be laid to rest for good.

Q. What kind of fly trap is best?
A. The kind where you fill a hanging receptacle with a pheromone-mimicking chemical that smells like fly sex, and then when all the flies swarm it in hopes of gettin' some, they get stuck on a gluey substance lining the receptacle.

Q. Is that a joke?
A. No.

Marcia Cross + Tina Fey glasses = AMAZING.

This is a fun meme. More difficult than I thought it would be. If you have any of the books I list, let me know in the comments -- I'll be curious.

"List ten books you have which you think nobody else on your friends list might have."

1. Stop Kiss, by Diana Son -- which is a play with a really sweet take on discovering lesbian love for the first time. I found it on the street in a cardboard box full of books someone was throwing away, interestingly.

2. Junebug, by Maureen McCoy -- which looked really good at a glance, but then it bored me and I never finished it. I own it, though!

3. Selected Poems: Rogha Danta, by Nuala Ni Dhomnaill -- which I bought when I had a crush on an Irish girl who recommended it to me.

4. Fast Ride with the Top Down, by Harper Grey who is actually Carol Anshaw -- which is a story y'all have already heard.

5. Female Perversions by Albert Reissner -- which is hahahahahaha.

6. Stolen Years by Sara Zyskind, which is actually a really good Holocaust memoir that I got off the mass-market rack in a grocery store somewhere between here and Virginia when I was about ten and my family was doing a road-trip vacation. It's long out of print and I never saw it anywhere else, but I reread it a million times when I was a kid.

7. Erasure by Percival Everett -- which I got at some library sale and which is pretty interesting in its take on race and stereotype.

8. Alt Ed, by Catherine Atkins -- a Speak-imprint YA novel about a fat girl in group therapy that I can't reread for the next however long it takes me to finish the Beth book, for fear of homage-turned-accidential-plagiarism.

9. Midnight Hour Encores, by Bruce Brooks -- a book about a world-class teenage cellist that my cousin gave me when I was twelve or so.

10. Queendom Come, by Ellen Galford -- which is by one of my favorite historical-comical-lesbian-fiction authors, and which I found to be damn near impossible to get. The Dyke and the Dybbuk was better, anyway.

So those are the ten that I think are statistically likely to not be had by other people on my flist, but then I wanted to add three more to the list because they're books I loved as a kid and rediscovered to be just as wonderful as an adult, and I'm curious as to whether anyone else knows them:

11. Robyn's Book, by Robyn Miller -- which is a beautifully written memoir/series of personal essays by a girl with cystic fibrosis. She died at 21 years old, on August 7, 1985, just as the book was going to press. It's odd to me to think that the pages of the book are so full of life, although it's a story of the disease that was killing her -- and then to think that she died so soon after the book was finished. And that it all happened 23 years ago, longer than the 21 years that she lived. I don't know, it's a very poignant book.

12. Shadow Castle, by Cockrell -- which is a book so old that I can't actually tell you how old it is from the copy I have, because the front cover fell off and, I think, the title/publication page as well. The only last name listed on the spine is "Cockrell". The back cover says it's published by Scholastic Book Services, and that's all I know. It was among my absolute favorite fantasy books when I was a kid though.

13. Monster Hunters: Mystery of the Secret Marks, by Nancy Garden -- which, yes, is by the same Nancy Garden who wrote Annie on My Mind. And yes, this foray into YA supernatural-mystery territory is just delicious. The plot is wholly uninventive -- poltergeist at a girls' boarding school! one girl with a mysterious past! secret codes! shadowy figures! telekinesis! intrigue! lacrosse games! But the writing is toitally fun and engaging, and the encoded lesbian subtext is *awesome*. I ♥ this book, and as I write this, am actually shocked I never tried to get my hands on any of the other books in the series.

So, yeah. Lemme know if you have any of those. This was less a "ha ha I read obscurer books than you do!" and more "which of these books are likely to have the lowest readership?" Figuring that sort of thing out was my job once upon a time, and I still find it fascinating. So let me know if my guesses were correct.