Monday is the first day of the week

[lunabee34]

1.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a very slender novella, short story really, and far from what I have come to expect from Le Guin: not a bit of science fiction, set in the seventies in which it was written, high school protagonists, coming of age story. It has much in common with the S. E. Hinton That Was Then, This Is Now and also with The Graduate that I recently reread (however, unlike those it has a happy ending).

The story is told from the first person POV of the 17 year old male narrator. Really sharp insights into what it's like to be a smart teen who feels at odds with family and all the other kids around you and who finally finds a kindred spirit. Really nice commentary on the intersections of music and math, psychology and medicine, and other disciplines.

Highly recommended.



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Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I read this my first semester of grad school; I remember enjoying it and thinking it was funny, and I am giving past me the side eye.

Miss Lonelyhearts is just mean. The Day of the Locust is the better of the two, I think, but it's also meanspirited. Both of them feature way too much rumination on rape.

Honestly they read like the short stories written by that one guy in the workshop who thinks he's so edgy--all his stories are violent and all the women are whores and everyone is grotesque and speaks in non sequiturs and he thinks it's all very profound you see.

Bleck.



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2. I got a Barenaked Ladies CD from misbegotten! Now we have tunes for the trip to Emma's MRI today. This is the last stop on her magical mystery medical tour and then we get the results on Wednesday.

3. I was just remarking to kass that cartoons today are such a far cry from the cartoons I had to watch as a kid. I mean, I loved the Smurfs, but that show never gut punched me in the feels or dazzled me with its narrative construction, you know? LOL

Case in point: the Trollhunters franchise just came out with a movie set immediately following its latest series, and it is so damn good. I cried like five times, and then the ending! OMG, the ending! I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say that the end does one of my absolute favorite tropey things and does it super well. Also, there's canon mpreg. So hurray!

4. It's August. Boo. Back to school for Fi and work for me and off to Atlanta for Ems. Slow down, time. Just a little bit longer, please. :)

Comments

[chelseagirl]

With you on Nathanael West. It's been a longtime since I read Miss Lonelyhearts, long enough that I don't recall much about it, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth.

When does school start down there? We go back on September 1. It's usually the day after Labor Day, but that's so late this year. But I recall my cousins in Ohio always having to make family plans no later than mid-August because the kids went back. Of course, public schools were not air conditioned when I went there, so there were constraints!

[lunabee34]

Fiona starts this Friday, we start the 11th and Emma starts on the 23.

Yeah, West was not an enjoyable read. Having recently reread Nightwood and those books on Modernism, I can see that he is exploring the issues of the time in his writing but bleck. Also the rape. Nobody gets raped, but his male protagonists think about raping people a lot.

[chelseagirl]

Wow. And here I'm in a panic about school starting on September 1-- I will have to suck it up and remember how much worse it could be!

BTW, re. my cousins, I mean my cousins re. their children, so when all the parents were alive and we could do family gatherings. like 5 years ago? 7 years ago? Sadly, I mostly see them at funerals now. And on Facebook. Although once things are a bit more normal, dammit, I'm going to plan an annual visit to Ohio because they're my only close relatives besides 87-year-old mom. I'm still a bit cautious about travel that's not within my immediate region or to see mom, at the moment.

[lunabee34]

*nods nods*

I hope you get to see them all soon. *hugs*

I genuinely can't remember when school started when I was a kid. I think it started after Labor Day when I was little and then slowly crept back over the years into August.

There She Is, My Ideal!

[executrix]

When I was a kid, school ran until the end of June, July and August were vacation, and the Miss America pageant was the landmark signaling school was about to begin.

Re: There She Is, My Ideal!

[lunabee34]

I haven't thought about the Miss America pageant in years, but I adored watching it as a kid. It's all stupid now and not worth watching, but when I was a kid and they still actually showed pretty much the whole thing and all the talent portion, it was so much fun to watch. We always watched it as a family. Good times.

[kore]

I liked West when I was younger, but I fear he has been visited and drained dry by the Suck Vampire (close cousin to the Suck Fairy).

That's such a beautiful little book by Le Guin -- the kind of dreamy half-fantastic realism she might have written if those first novels and stories had been accepted. I don't think she wrote anything quite like it again (Orsinia and the fantastic realism in Buffalo Gals &c are different, to my mind) until Searoad.

[lunabee34]

Ha! It's always a hazard to revisit the things we once enjoyed.

It really is a beautiful book. And I love it even more because you think it's going to end badly; all the other books I've read in that vein do. They fuck it up and split up and can't be together. But the couple makes it! Hooray!

[spikedluv]

*magical mystery medical tour

That bit gave me a chuckle. *fingers crossed*

Man, I can't believe it's that time already! (As others were saying, up here it beginning of Sept for public school and end of August for college, which does match with Emma's time table.) I'm going to have to remember to slow down to the school speed limit again, lol!

[lunabee34]

This summer just flew by. Like really fast. I guess sitting around on the couch and drinking tea is the ticket to making time fly. LOL

Thanks for the crossed fingers. One more day to wait for at least some kind of verdict.

[amejisuto]

I hope Emma's MRI went well today! And she has good luck on Wednesday!

This Trollhunters thing sounds good! I was always into boy's cartoons, GI Joe and Transformers.

Good luck with the back-to-school stuff. I know you're going to miss Emma but you can Skype her and things like that. You've done a good job with her!

[lunabee34]

Thank you sweetie. I hope we get some good solid diagnostic info on Wed.

I am so glad for Skype type stuff. That is going to make all the difference, especially for poor Fiona. LOL

[amejisuto]

Good luck on Wednesday!

[lunabee34]

Thank you!

*crosses fingers*