Professional Idiot. A Memoir by Steve "Steve-O" Glover

http://www.spl.org

Over the years, lots of people have said that my grammar and spelling are too good for it to actually be me writing the words I post. The fact is that I grew up attending super top-notch schools (I was the son of a corporate executive, who wasn't initially thrilled about my career path). My dad also gave me two choices the summer I turned 16: get a summer job, or go to secretary school to learn how to type. I skated to secretary school so fuckin fast it was incredible. In short, it's me, it's always me-- I think anybody who ever authorizes another person to communicate as them is a fucking moron. Love, Steve-O
From Steve-O's Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

Just a couple of entries ago I said I don't read biographies. Well, here's my second one in a short while!

If you are unfamiliar with Steve-O, please don't Google Image his name because... yeah, just don't. He is one of the guys in the hit MTV series Jackass, where guys kicked each other in the nuts, rode trikes off skating ramps, and made each other puke on camera. 

The reason why I even clicked on Steve-O's AMA was because of my guilty pleasure: I love watching Jackass, or even better, Wildboyz.

Wildboyz was a ridiculous show where Steve-O and Chris Pontius traveled the world in pseudo-David Attenborough nature documentary settings, only to get their rightful comeuppance from wild animals. So when I saw Steve-O's words above in the AMA--you know, the guy's who walks on stilts and gets coconut crabs to nip at his butt cheeks--I had to read this memoir that was mentioned in the AMA thread.

It is so good.

Now, you might expect it to be a high-fiving tale of becoming famous for doing stupid crap on TV while possibly high on a variety of drugs. Well, it is very much that, but it displays a level of humility I was not expecting at all. It's as if Steve-O sat in front of his computer to type up this memoir as an exercise in paying his dues to people he screwed over in the past because he was so selfish and out of control. It takes a lot to admit that you have behaved poorly, instead of blaming the behavior on anyone or anything else around you.

I guess that's what I found refreshing in this memoir. It's well written, extremely entertaining and funny, but it's also self-deprecating and honest. You can tell it's his story in his own words, expletives included when they are needed--once you get over him having a tone of voice that is not just raspy laughter. The man lived many of his formative years in London, so you even get a bit of British dry humor in the mix. Just as you think his attempts at being famous can't get any more absurd, there's a chapter titled OK, Who Wants to Hear Me Rap?

Although I had some good laughs, the bits toward the end are pretty rough to read: Steve-O has to largely quote other people, including his dad and sister, as he has barely any recollection of the time himself: he was constantly high on a cocktail of drugs, paranoid about voices and raving about other dimensions. Classic Philip K. Dick stuff. His former cast members had to arrange a fairly aggressive intervention and have him committed, which no doubt saved his life.

Professional Idiot is probably not the first book people would think of buying as a Christmas, birthday or Valentine's gift to anyone (the photos in it... sheesh!), but it's a great reflection on the desire to be the center of attention. In its core, it's about a kid who convinced himself early on he would just disappoint others around him with his actions, so why not go all the way and be the craziest person anyone could ever meet if that granted attention.

By the way, Steve-O is still goofing around and doing crazy stunts, so don't think that he regrets everything.

If you need a gateway to reading Steve-O, here is short HuffPo post about writing the memoir.

Also, a library plug: if you have an eReader and you do not venture to the library that often, check to see if your library has made eBook borrowing available. The paper copy of this memoir had multiple holds on it, so I downloaded it straight to my Kindle from the Seattle Public Library as an eBook loan. Perfect!

My Sister, My Love. The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike by Joyce Carol Oates

* The canny reader will note that there must be a reason for highlighting this eccentric individual who appears fleetingly in this chapter as both "kindly" and somewhat sinister. Keep the rubbery-lipped young man in mind! (If I were a literary writer, I could assume that readers were primed to read my prose with, well--reverence, and care. But I am not, and so I can't. But note that nothing in this document is extraneous.)

For those readers--potentially, millions!--with an avid interest in American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been waiting. 

Oates is mean.

This story pinches and needles the reader constantly by making very explicit jabs at people being obsessed with celebrities and gruesome high-profile crimes, or at snooty readers who would not give a book in this genre--essentially, true crime--typically the time of day.

The latter is the best kind of mean. Because the book is written from the view point of a heavily medicated older brother of a 6-year-old figure skater prodigy who was found murdered in their home, the supposed author Skyler Rampike fills the story with footnotes, notes to the editor, and sarcastic apologies if he is not writing the story of a murdered girl in as gripping a way as the audience might want or, alternatively, not as stereotypically as people obsessed with reading trashy true crime stories would like.

Many times Skyler stops his recounting of the story to say, ah-hah, you thought I would use cheap suspense here, didn't you? Well no fear, the person I'm talking about is just X, so you don't have to feel suspense anymore.

It's a frigging Brechtian opera, this story. Many times, Skyler throws in sarcastic cliffhangers insinuating that he will reveal the true nature of the murder in the next chapter, with a cliched "Read on, dear reader" at the end of it. You kind of feel bad about being a shitty person; interested in social porn, you know?

On the surface, this novel is a meandering memoir of a brother who has been silently accused in the media of murdering her own sister but in his medicated haze he is quite unable to write in a linear fashion about his experiences and the dreams and memories that are brought about by sudden triggers. He may write down something shocking and on the next page plead the reader to forget about it, because he is not sure where the heck that memory came from and whether it was even true. 

The same images are repeated over and over again: the description of footage from his sister's, Bliss Rampike's, skating competitions that similarly were repeated over and over again in news, talk shows and gossip shows after her death; the description of the final family portrait that the family took, which also was reprinted in tabloids multiple times and which Skyler cannot escape even ten years after the murder took place.

If you are wondering why this all sounds really familiar, it's because this all kind of happened in real life, which makes this book even... meaner? I just started looking into this old case, and my goodness: everything down to the ransom note and suspicions are echoed in this fictitious story. 

Oates is able to make the metafiction work, while still writing a pretty damned good thriller. There are a few genuinely chilling moments, where suddenly you remember a single word from a few chapters ago that now has become a clue to who the real murderer was. 

It's one of those stories where any reader can make it their own: you can read it as a narrative about obsessing over celebrities and trashy gossip without caring how someone's life can be ruined over it. It can also be read as criticism to medicating our youth instead of letting them feel real feelings: Skyler was medicated for a variety of issues even before his sister was murdered, whereas basically he was just angry about his parents' behavior and absence in his life. It definitely addresses parents who vigorously live through their children without listening to their actual needs. It can also be read just as a creepy whodunnit.

The previous Oates I read was very different: although it sort of concentrated on a crime and a family living through the crime as well, the mood was much more dreamlike and just sad. This one is raw, angry and, like I said, mean. It's a bully of a book. If Oates can adopt such different voices and styles this easily, I can't wait to read more from her, no matter how upsetting the stories are.

The Pact. A Love Story by Jodi Picoult

fictiondb.com

James stared into [his patient's] dilated, distorted eye. He nodded, suddenly drained of all his earlier enthusiasm. [...] The panel at the New England Journal of Medicine would rescind the award when they learned about his suicidal son, on trial for murder. Surely you did not pay homage to a vision specialist who had not seen this coming.

Romeo and Juliet is often referred to as a tale of undying, forever love. The Pact is a story about realistic love and what happens when teenagers are mesmerized by the romantic notion of undying love.

Don't let that cheesy cover fool you. Jodi Picoult is excellent at writing about terrible things happening to good people, who then have to make tough choices. Her stories do not have a finger-wagging morality about them but instead, they are introspective: she plants thoughts that hopefully will make us readers understand why someone would make a completely opposite choice from ours, even if we do not agree at all with that choice. The stories teach empathy.

The Pact begins with a death and one botched-up death: one of the teenagers in this young lovers' suicide pact actually survives to the relief and subsequent horror of the four parents, who had lived as neighbors and watched their kids grow together and eventually fall in love.

Saying that this is a modern day Romeo and Juliet would be too cliched, but I can't help it! This time, though, readers are left to deal with the aftermath of such a suicide pact when people frantically look for anyone to blame. Surely the blame lies in the finger that pulled the trigger? Friends? Society? The parents who had been oblivious to any problems their kids may have?

The story begins on the evening of the death, and moves forward in real time in chapters titled "Now" to look into the parents' survival strategies and the lies they tell themselves, and to whether this was not a suicide but a cold-blooded murder. "Now" is intermingled with chapters titled "Then," which begin from the day the teenagers' parents became neighbors. The stories move forward until the final day in court in present time, where the last "Then" chapter takes the place of the accused's turn at the witness stand, recounting the day of the death.

It was fascinating to read about how these characters broke down and what lengths they went to in order to either protect a mythology about their family or to attempt to live a normal life again. Some of it is absolutely horrific, and I wound up hating some of the characters for being so unreasonable and calculatingly evil. But I also understood why they ended up that way.

The ending is quite genius in its unsettling nature. I actually was surprised at how I did not foresee the ending (and I'm not referring to the decision at the trial--anyone has a 50/50 chance of guessing it right). The final pages felt like cruelty coming from the hands of the author who so lovingly wrote about the protagonists, but it made so much sense and I would not have wanted any other ending. Dangit, Picoult was able to make me empathize even with her decision to write the story the way she did! See how good she is?

The Art of Drew Struzan by Drew Struzan and David J. Schow

Before reading this highly personal art book I saw the documentary Drew: The Man Behind the Poster (available on Netflix). Although I was familiar with almost all of his movie-related work, I did not know who he was until then. For reference, he made these: original Star Wars. Back to the Future. Blade Runner. Harry Potter.

I went to the library to pick up his book to stare at details in his art up close, now that the documentary had educated me on what all was involved in producing the images. I did not expect the book to be more than a coffee table book on art, so it shocked me with its honesty and, quite frankly, justified bitterness.

See, Struzan was pretty much screwed over by a business partner for almost a decade. You'll learn about this in the documentary. In addition, although directors were flocking to him, begging him to paint a poster for their upcoming movies because they knew he's the only one who would get it right, the studio execs would usually say sorry, but we went with another poster instead because Struzan's work was "too artistic." Instead, you get quickly made movie posters that just show the main characters standing or sitting in line, probably against a white background. Or just closeups of the main actors' faces.

To give a specific example, Pan's Labyrinth was one that received the "too artistic" criticism: the art was requested by the director, Guillermo del Toro, and Struzan painted an image based on del Toro's sketch. Del Toro loved it; the studio decided to use this instead. It's not bad either, but it just has a different feel to it.

As Struzan describes his posters he delves into the background politics of each. It is quite upsetting to read about a man who is absolutely amazing at what he does, highly revered for his skills by others and even his subjects, but then swept aside for the purpose of dumbing down the content for the mass audiences--which the audience did not ask for.

The more I thought about his work the clearer it became why he was so sought after: his posters embody the feel of the movie you are going to watch, not just a Photoshopped head of the main character to tell you that yup, that guy's going to be in it. If I recall right, this also becomes evident in the documentary in the way people speak about his work. 

It is great to have an artist in the popular culture scene whose skills go way beyond just technique. Then again, it is unfortunate that he has been pushed aside to retirement, where he now focuses on creating other art on his spare time. Art is divided enough into popular and high art, as if those two should never mix--let there be Struzan, who bridges the gap. 

Orchid Fever. A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy by Eric Hansen

There is something distinctive about the sight and sound of a human body falling from the rain forest canopy.

This is the first sentence in this quite funny and intriguing book about people who are orchid freaks, and the book just gets better from the first sentence onward.

Hansen follows orchid lovers around the world wide-eyed in a cloud of disbelief at what he is witnessing: he goes on clandestine orchid finding trips and interprets to the locals in the rain forest that yes, these silly men with their collapsible toilets and power bars have paid thousands of dollars just to take a picture of a flower instead of using it, say, for medicine. He also describes the erotic nature of orchid lovers' conventions, where he is surrounded in the darkness by silent fidgeting, heavy breathing and occasional gasping when new orchid hybrids are introduced to appreciative murmur. Although Hansen finds his subjects and obsession over a flower hilarious he slowly realizes that he has become obsessed himself: in hunting down all of the interesting characters who occupy the hall of fame in the world of orchid lovers.

Hansen not only makes gentle fun of his subjects when it is appropriate--when the levels of absurdity are just too high not to--but he also appreciates the passion with which these orchid lovers lead their lives. The book is less of a history of orchid lunacy and more of a picture of human obsession and where it can lead people, from punching a security official in the kisser at the airport and getting detained to finding out that people who make laws about importing and preserving orchids seem to have ulterior motives that serve only themselves (quelle surprise!).

Hansen's carefully placed dry humor is guffaw-inducing, yet I did not emerge from reading this as if orchid collectors and growers were a butt of a joke. On the contrary: while orchid obsession, as any obsession, can get quite ludicrous, under Hansen's guidance it all also makes sense.

I highly recommend Orchid Fever for anyone who is looking for an entertaining read about the absurdity of humans, even if you couldn't care less about flowers.

The Whistleblower by Kathryn Bolkovac with Cari Lynn

Jim [...] tromped straight to the beer, then splashed his way into the pool, all the while telling us that he had already been on one peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and had liked it so much he was signing on for another. Then, in the same sentence in which he described how scenic Bosnia was, he said, "And I know where you can get really nice twelve- to fifteen-year-olds."

This is what Kathryn Bolkovac heard before the police-force-for-hire group from the US had even left for a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, and it would only get worse once she landed and was made the head of trafficking investigation: she found that while UN and its contracted police force from the United States was supposed to help democratize Bosnia and keep its citizens safe, it was also actively protecting those contractors who just happened to be abusing a broken country by taking part in buying trafficked women and keeping them in their bedrooms, or denying that trafficking was happening at all.

Although she does win in court at the end for having been discharged from service for whistleblowing, it is extremely depressing to see the same people who were destroying or falsifying evidence or even engaging in these illegal activities being returned to their old posts, but in another country. The corrupt people from Bosnia were later sent to Afghanistan. Great.

The horrifying topic aside, it's a great nonfiction book that has an urgency about it. Bolkovac wrote it together with an author, which was a good call: I have read historical nonfiction by people involved in the events they write about, but if they are not writers themselves their message will fall to deaf ears due to terrible or boring writing. One book I read should have been absolutely fascinating, but the author kept on repeating the same phrases and jokes he apparently found hilarious and no editor had told him to cut them out, and he also meandered into details that weren't really relevant, making the whole book a weird mixture of random anecdotes with no head or tail. It became a jibber-jabber of a senile mind, to be frank. (I am not going to tell you which book this was).

Not so with this one: there is a good structure to this book, which begins with Bolkovac fearing for her life and being hidden by her colleagues as they have heard death threats being flown around in the office. It reads like a mystery thriller with the exception that it's all real. I'm sure Bolkovac had numerous anecdotes she could have added to illustrate her plight and the whole appalling situation, but instead of oversaturation she (or the author who helped her, Lynn) decided to focus on effectiveness of the message.

I read this 229 pager in 24 hours and it was hard to put down. Of course the topic itself is captivating: how can this be happening? But the writing definitely played a part, and I'm glad that Bolkovac's story got an appropriate outcome.

You can find out more about here on her website: http://www.bolkovac.com/

Kerjäläinen ja jänis by Tuomas Kyrö

Arto Paasilinna is possibly the best known Finnish author out there: his 1975 novel The Year of the Hare has been translated into 18 languages and I have met multiple French people who have praised him to me (one had come to Finland to take Finnish lessons just because he was madly in love with Paasilinna's novels). For a meek Finn, that equals great success. I read quite a lot of Paasilinna in my teens, but The Year of the Hare is the only one I have reread since.

Kerjäläinen ja jänis is not written by him, but before saying anything about the novel Paasilinna needs to be brought in, because this modern retelling/spoof of the classic novel gets meta like no other.

The Year of the Hare begins when a reporter called Vatanen runs over a hare on his way to an assignment, gets out of the car and then something snaps: the meaninglessness of his reporting job juxtaposed with the hurt animal who just lives in the moment inspires Vatanen to grab the hare and disappear into the forest right there and then. Introspective and humorous adventures ensue, when the reporter and the hare hide from Vatanen's past and future as best they can. Here is a link to the New York Times' review from 2002 about the novel and Paasilinna in general.

That was 1975. Here is Tuomas Kyrö in 2011 with his "The Beggar and the Hare." The title made me snort as I immediately knew what the contents would be about, and I giggled even more when I read the protagonist's name, Vatanescu. Kyrö is not even trying to be subtle.

Vatanescu is a Romanian man brought to Finland by a human trafficker to beg for money on the streets of Helsinki. He speaks a bit of English, has no ID and his only desire is to make enough money to go back home and buy his son soccer shoes. He is a complete outsider because he can barely communicate with others, least with Finns don't understand begging on the street, finding it revolting.[1]

One day Vatanescu escapes and saves an injured rabbit from the hands of ruffians who were trying to capture this menace to wildlife and sell it to the zoo for tiger fodder.[2] Unlike in Paasilinna's story where the hare shows Vatanen in its mute ways what life could really be like once you get off the rat race, Vatanescu sees himself in the rabbit: an unwanted outsider in Finnish society who has nowhere to go.

He begins to meander from place to place aimlessly with the rabbit in his pocket. He has no idea that he is slowly becoming a celebrity when cell phone snapshots of him and the rabbit begin to surface in social media and go viral.

While Paasilinna's Vatanen was fighting against society's pressures on the modern human, Vatanescu expects nothing and is trying to be nobody. He has no grand plan, no philosophical revelations. He has no say in it when Finns put him on a pedestal and make a mythical creature out of him, the cardboard stand-in for Finnishness that may not really exist. They want him to be the Vatanen Finns could never be.

I began reading Kerjäläinen ja jänis thinking that it is a modern retelling, written tongue in cheek. The further I got, the more the novel became a satire of Finns and our pining for mythical symbols to stand for ourselves when real life gets too real. All cultures have their mythologies that are retold to boost a national image that may or may not be true. Vatanescu is ironically what Finns want to be seen as, without actually being anything like him. He even becomes a pawn for populist politicians to appeal to voters.

Stylistically, Kyrö has Paasilinna's tropes down: the ridiculous names, laconic everyday philosophers, almost magical encounters when people connect with each other. I was first annoyed by some of the portrayals of foreigners in Kerjäläinen (I mean, "Ming Po" is supposedly a Vietnamese name? Come on...), but now I'm thinking that perhaps this was intentional, satirizing how Finns see foreigners in Finland.

I can imagine people having a knee-jerk reaction to this novel, thinking that The Year of the Hare is too sacred to be used as a framework for making gentle fun of modern Finns. I have enjoyed The Year of the Hare for its themes and its black humor--plus, it's a really tiny novel and a quick read (I should probably read it again). It's not the novel's fault that it has become larger than life for Finns. Kyrö does not make fun of the novel--he satirizes Finns who are in love with The Year of the Hare.

Reading Kyrö's version was a bit tough with its kill your darlings approach to the original, but at the same time I think it's a healthy approach culturally. There is nothing wrong with Finns making fun of themselves as a whole for a change, instead of poking fun at subcultures and foreigners while letting the reader identify with the protagonist; letting the reader remain safely in the in-group.


[1] In the mid-2000s, Romanians began to appear on the streets of Helsinki, begging for money. The only unwanted attention on the streets up until then were drunk Finns who might curse at you or people trying to enlist you to give money for some noble cause. That kind of begging was slightly tolerated, but when the Romanians came... who are these foreigners?

[2] A genuine problem in Helsinki: the hares are OK, but selfish people began to let pet rabbits loose in the parks because they got tired of petting them. They obviously bred like rabbits and became such a nuisance to the park and its flora that the rabbits had to be gotten rid of. A good real-life illustration of how Finns want to still be regarded as the great lovers of nature, but actually do silly things like these: letting pet rabbits wreak havoc in nature (while probably also making fun of any environmentalists for wanting to preserve natural landscape--those damned tree huggers!)

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Below is nothing but spoilers, because the reasons I found this story both infuriatingly annoying and genius cannot really be talked about without giving the story away. If you want to be surprised by this novel and plan on reading it, come back once you are done with it. I knew nothing about Atonement before I started reading it besides that it was highly acclaimed and it was made into a movie. Now I wonder how on Earth they made it into a movie...? Anyway!

***spoiler galore begins here****

I almost did not finish this novel, because stylistically it was annoying as hell with its prose that was so close to purple that I was wondering whether I'd been given the wrong book to read and not the praised Atonement. I understand taking liberties with punctuation for artistic reasons, but having multiple pages of text be paragraphs upon paragraphs of seemingly just one sentence, comma-spliced to hell was just a headache to read.

The twist at the end, however, is that that's how it was meant to be! Once I read the very last pages it dawned on me: it was crappy on purpose! So genius! But unfortunately, it's like making misogynist jokes ironically--you're still making misogynist jokes. Or growing a mustache ironically: you're still... You know what I mean.

The story of Atonement takes place in 1935 and focuses on a thirteen-year-old girl, who loves putting up plays and lives in a sort of a fantasy land of her own. She sees her sister have an encounter with a man they all grew up with; a servant's boy. The man gives this little kid a note to give her sister, but realizes that he had given her the one that was extremely inappropriate, written in crazed passion. Of course the little brat reads the note and begins to fantasize that this man they once knew is an animal who should be arrested for being too dangerous around women.

When some other kids disappear during a dinner party and another girl is raped, the brat claims to have seen the young man do it. The raped girl claims she saw nothing. The police come and take the young man away, professing his love to the brat's older sister.

Then, cue war time. Now, I admit: this is where I almost stopped reading the story, because it went from purple prose to the most boring thing I have ever read. I started looking for sentences that would have some substance in them, but everything was just blahdeblah. I felt like McEwan was just going through the motions and putting something on paper. And the cockney accents on paper, my god...

We follow the young man who has been imprisoned and now is part of the war effort, and we follow the brat who is now eighteen and a nurse, feeling a bit guilty about what she did.

Toward the end, the brat decides to contact her sister and tell her of an elaborate scheme to reveal who the real rapist was and clear the young man's name. Too bad this is years later and the whole family has been torn apart. The sister throws the brat out who swears that everything will be OK once she confesses.

Then, the story ends there with the brat's initials and the year 1997.

The next page is from her diary, or a letter--I can't remember--where as an old woman she reminisces about her childhood. She says that since the awful events of that day she has been writing and writing this story to get it published, to get the real culprit imprisoned and to be atoned (geddit???) for her sins. Unfortunately, her publishers have always turned her down, saying that she cannot use real names, or she cannot make the ending this or that because of libel, but finally now, as an 80-year-old, she has finished the version she wants to publish. The real rapist is still out there, an old man, but our former brat is dedicated to publishing her story once he dies. She also tells us that the real story was much sadder than her newest version, where the young lovers live happily ever after.

We also see letters from her publisher commenting on her writing style and her plot points.

So, you see? The novel begins the way the 13-year-old girl, full of fantastical thoughts, would have written a book: pompous style, pseudo-poetry with comma overload and imagery. The older and more ashamed of her actions she gets and the worse the real life events become, the more stilted is her writing, which eventually crescendos into an adult's fantasy of having everything be all right, and her getting absolution from her sister whom she has alienated and wronged with her stupidity as a kid.

And hey. The brat ended up being an unreliable narrator--my weakest of weak spots in literature. How could I not like it?

I thought that was genius, and I would now read it again seeing that it was all wonderfully on purpose. I almost started reading it again right away after finishing!

However... Is it enough that five pages at the very end reveal why the rest of it was annoyingly written? After all, what I still ended up doing was slog through prose that made me want to throw the book away in disgust.

Yes. It is the best worst book I have read in a while.

EDIT:

Oh my pete.

What if...

What if the last few pages were an atonement for the rest of the novel?

If that would be the case, this novel would be even more amazing!

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Image: Google books

Two confessions off the bat: I rarely read autobiographies and I have not watched a single full episode of 30 Rock. I have nothing against biographies and although I like Tina Fey, I tried once watching 30 Rock, didn't find that particular episode funny, and then I just didn't try watching it again. Now, after reading Bossypants, I know that was the pilot which Fey herself finds embarrassingly bad, so... Maybe I'll give it another go?

Bossypants is my light holiday reading: I picked it up because I figured it's in large-ish font with wide margins and thus perfect snack reading in between more serious books (which I probably will never finish and write about here). And I could use something silly to read.

Not only was the book all that, it was surprisingly clever. I only say "surprisingly" because I had assumed that Bossypants would be a John Barry-like book of slightly chuckle-worthy, brainless anecdotes. Shame on me. In addition to Fey's funny anecdotes on growing up and getting into the entertainment business, she does get serious between the lines--while still keeping the tone punchy and hilarious.

Here's an example from her discussion about women in the business:

I've known older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they're all "crazy." 
I have a suspicion--and hear me out, 'cause this is a rough one--I have a suspicion that the definition of "crazy" in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. 
The only person I can think of that has escaped the "crazy" moniker is Betty White, which, obviously is because people still want to have sex with her.
...
Network executives really do say things like "I don't know. I don't want to fuck anybody on this show." They really do say that stuff. That's not just lactation-stopping dialogue on Entourage.

Her tone is honest, unapologetic but also undramatic: as in the case of sexism, she does not complain about it but instead, illustrates hilariously what the situations have been like and then how to overcome those obstacles. And if you can't overcome the situation and you can't overlook it either, she has tips for that as well.

The clever thing about this book is all the advice that she hands out without pointing fingers or claiming that the advice will work for everyone. Such as her list of how to become a good improviser in comedy, Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat. It includes awesome advice such as the following, which could be found in any self-help book worth its salt:

MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying "Don't ask questions all the time." If we're in a scene and I say, "Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What's in that box?" I'm putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers. In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don't just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. 

Come to think of it, I would buy a self-help book written by Fey.

This tiny book covers entertainment business, motherhood, mentally wrassling with Lorne Michaels and the SNL cast, trying to keep a show afloat and feed families while posing for a magazine cover knowing that the final picture will be (thankfully) Photoshopped* to hell.


(*Protip from Fey: apparently feminist magazines are the best at Photoshopping, as they know what to leave in and still make the image flattering.)

Knitting books--the Craft of Instructions

I'm 90% a self-learned knitter: having been forced to knit a hideously deformed mitten in second grade by a teacher who apparently had no idea of choosing appropriate crafts for various motor skill stages, I didn't feel any urge to knit ever again until I was in my mid-20s. Now that there was nobody telling me what to knit and how to knit, I just started picking up books.

I have read, used, and perused many a knitting book in order to not just learn how to knit, but to find patterns that don't scream awkward family photo ops during Christmas and uncomfortable sweatiness. The best place to do this are libraries and the craft sections, because the evolution of knitting books is readily available there.

In the past 30 years, knitting books have definitely shifted from practical no-nonsense to practical cuteness. The "You want to knit a useful thingy for your family, little lady? Here we go!" straight-forwardness has slowly morphed  into spinning a yarn (ouch! I had to) about the author's background, how she was inspired by landscapes, flora, her grandmother... and then each pattern will have a paragraph or two describing how the author came to create this sassy peace of clothing of most likely locally dyed alpaca yarn. It actually makes knitting books fun to read: not only do the authors need to know how to write instructions; they have to know how to write compelling stories.

Modern knitting books are filled with dreamy imagery and photos of women having coffee at a farmhouse in Scotland, wearing way too large rubber boots and sweaters and being twee. The other alternative is to begin sentences with "Not your grandmother's [hat/mittens/jacket/potholder]" displayed next to a punk girl sticking her tongue out and wielding knitting needles while wearing a knit skull-patterned bikini. And although this market is still very much dominated by women, there are knitting books either aimed at manly knits or written by men for men, such as the awesomely titled Knitting with Balls (link is safe for work, trust me). It is all about selling an aesthetic: although I will be wearing these socks in rainy Seattle, isn't a part of me buying the idea that these socks bring me closer to chopping wood with Tori Amos in windy Cornwall, surrounded by wild sheep and rock fencing?

Reading through these books has made me appreciate anyone who executes not just crafted story telling but technical writing well. I've purchased books based solely on the pictures of the end results, only to find that the instructions themselves are confusing. The annoying part is that you won't really know how good the instructions are until you work on the projects.

And this is the part where I exclusively rant about the do nots in these books. If you are a new knitter, you can skip ahead to my book recommendation.

Consistency
Knitting is not that hard: once you learn a method, you notice that it is repeated over and over again in a variety of ways. That is why it is so disappointing when instructions recycle terminology: in one pattern X means X, but then in the next pattern X means Y! I've been happily knitting half a sock only to realize, that it's all wrong because I was using the terminology from the previous pattern. You have to unlearn what you just learned. Silly.

Related to that: it's OK to use jargon! 
The beauty in reading technical writing--whether it is knitting instructions or a guide on how to install a new ink cartridge to your printer--is that the vocabulary is consistent and precise. Specific jargon is used not to alienate people, but to make sure that everything has a name and its place in the instructions. Something you can trust.
Usually this is not a problem: many knitting books make sure to include a glossary for terms that may be unfamiliar to new knitters. Once you learn that a tricky 3-stage maneuver has a specific name, you will never need to look at the glossary again. Luckily, I have ran into only one knitting book where the author had for some bizarre reason decided to use vocabulary invented by herself. I'm sure it seemed like a cute idea at the time, but individualism would be best expressed in the end product and the surrounding stories, not in the vocabulary used if the aim is to get other people to knit your products and not just show off.

If a knitting book has actual illustrations and glossaries for techniques = great! 
The best knitting books use as little words as possible in the actual instructions and link to a glossary for unfamiliar terms. This way, you only need to have one page open to follow your work, instead of leafing back and forth. If something is too complicated to describe in words, the glossary will then show an illustration, because it's sometimes impossible to describe a way to wrap a yarn around two needles in words.

My cautionary tale of the opposite comes from an author, who had decided to explain everything in words: no images in sight (well, save for a total of two images in the back: how to cast on in two different ways), and the words she used were extremely vague. I even ended up unraveling and knitting the difficult bits by interpreting the instructions as their exact opposite to see, if that would resolve the issue and my possible misunderstandings. Nope. My product still looked nothing like in the final pictures, and I could not figure out what I was doing wrong. I have a basic understanding of how to make, say, a sock, so I just substituted a pattern from my head for the bits I didn't understand, and made it up as I went along. Felt a bit like a waste of money, really.

Check how the book makes sure you can actually fit into your creation
Again, a tale of Warn: I was following a sock pattern that simply said, "Knit using this pattern for 15 inches, and then begin the heel." Had I realized in the store that all lengths were in set inches, I probably wouldn't have bought the book. I mean, this makes no sense: it will produce the same length of a sock for every knitter, regardless of how long your legs are! So a short person will knit herself a thigh-high sock with these instructions, but can't wear it because the pattern does not take into account that the sock should be a bit wider at the top if it starts at thigh-high.

How do good books do this? "Knit until you are an inch away from your heel" or "Repeat until the sock covers your small toe" (for starting the decrease rounds at the end). Or even better, they provide ways to customize sizes by measuring if you are planning surprise socks for someone else.

Finally: are the books willing to concede that you don't have the money to buy yarn made out of rabbit fur?
I usually end up substituting all the yarn suggested in the patterns, either because I want to use something from my ever-growing stash instead of getting a new skein, I don't like the color options or--to be honest--I don't think I should pay a hundred bucks for materials for a shawl. Some books obviously have tie-ins with yarn makers, which is fine, but I get annoyed when the instructions do not mention the weight (=the thickness) of the yarn used, making it hard to replicate the pattern with other materials. These books will also have a handy list at the end showing where you can order these specific yarns.

There are books that do mention the weight of the yarn, and I take an immediate liking to them. It's like saying, "Hey, this is the yarn we prefer to use, but if you can't budget it--go for these alternatives." I have even seen books that say that explicitly.

The only exception I have made is a book specifically written for using Noro yarn. Noro is an expensive-ish Japanese yarn, and what makes it special is that all of the skeins are hand-dyed: none of them are exactly the same and the colors are ridiculously vivid. I bought the book to not only make the most of Noro's uniqueness but also to use the patterns for cheaper, variegated yarns that American companies are now making after they've realized how sought-after (but pricey!) Noro is among knitters.

wikipedia.com

A great example of good starter books: The Stitch 'n Bitch series
If you are looking into starting knitting, or to expand on your basic knitting skills, I highly recommend the Stitch 'n Bitch series. I learned crocheting from their Happy Hooker book and just recently got The Handbook for Knitters. Created by Debbie Stoller, these books are half technique, half patterns and they work as a great reference tool even after you have knitted everything in it.

The technique parts have very clear, visual illustrations. They have never made me scratch my head. All the vocabulary used in the book is covered in the glossary. Further, all of the books in the series have basic garments from socks and hats to shawls to practice on and then a couple more fanciful things thrown in (such as a little coat for a dachshund!). They are actually useful and look good, with very little knitting effort. What is more encouraging for a beginner than that!

Although I have been knitting for quite a while now, I hadn't found a simple hat pattern that I liked until I read this book--now I have my go-to, easily memorized pattern for whipping up a quick hat that also looks great and can be easily customized with cat ears and pom-poms if I feel like it.

The tone in the books is, despite the name, very friendly. Throughout the book there is this invisible friendly hand over your shoulder, telling you that it's OK if you screw up. We all do at some point! Here's how you can fix it. Have a glass of wine, relax--you got this.

Now I'm off to knit a Seahawks-themed hat with the basic hat pattern from that book. It will be ready for game day!

(P.S. Here is my post from 2011 if anyone wants to read a more detailed account of one book failing to help me get better at knitting)

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

"It's the way families are, sometimes. A thing goes wrong and one knows how to fix it and years pass and--no one knows how to fix it." - Judd Mulvaney

I had bought this book years ago as an attempt to educate myself on Joyce Carol Oates. It sat untouched in my bookcase until recently, when I read an article in the New Yorker about something quite horrific that referenced this novel as a great fictional parallel. No better nudge to read the book finally than this!

And ugh. It is very good, but in the same way as the movies Dancer in the Dark and Lilya 4-Ever are very good. I don't think I can read it again, because it is very heartbreaking and unfair. Hmm. Maybe that is one reason for not having been enthusiastic about this book until now, because the jacket described it as "heartbreaking," which just makes me think of some silly over-the-top romantic sob story. But now I can't find a better word for it.

Trying not to spoil too much, here is the gist of the story in one paragraph: the Mulvaneys live in a small town on a farm, and are an epitome of a wonderful family--the parents banter with each other, everyone has cutesy nicknames, there are pets under foot wherever you turn, and all the four kids are strikingly different individuals. Everyone is so cute and gutsy! Then, a tragedy hits the family. And suddenly you are reading about good people who make really crappy choices for who knows what reasons, because certainly you cannot see the logic in their actions although on some level you have sympathy for them. And this goes on for decades. It's... heartbreaking.

Even in the end, where the story wraps up in a sort of a happy resolution, it is all tainted with the knowledge that these people wasted so many years being angry at each other, and it's time that can never be brought back. What's worse, it seems as if everyone can breathe freely only after one toxic force is removed from their lives--and he is not even the real bad guy in the story! (Or is he? I suppose he does become one.)

It's a tough read, for sure, but it has so much to offer beyond just the main story. In the beginning, Oates goes into ridiculous, almost boring lengths in describing the details of how each character looks and what their possessions look like (the pages of describing antiques that the mother collects, geez...) as if those were the only things that the characters and the author had actual control over. As the years progress, the details disappear not only from the style of storytelling, but from the lives of these people. Once the tragedy hits the family, all this materialism that they believe makes them who they are is stripped away, and all they have left is their actions that now define them more than their reputations based on school or work performance.

I think I need another Oates to read. Based on this, I'm not going to find a happy-go-lucky story in her repertoire to cleanse my palate with, am I?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

"The weak are meat the strong do eat." - Henry Goose in "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing"

I watched the movie first, and to me it was nonsensical--not the least because of Tom Hanks's character's incomprehensible pidgin English. I wasn't sure, what the story tried to tell me: the same actors played different characters throughout different events in history (it seemed), and the main point appeared to be that every generation has a hero, who acts as a catalyst to save oppressed people. It seemed pretty heavy-handed, especially with some of the white actors doing a total yellow face act in a futuristic Korea. Brrrr!

I'm glad I read the book.

I'll do my best not to spoil any details. After I have written and published this, I might finally go and read what other people have thought of the novel--the novel unravels in weird ways, so I did not want my experience to be ruined by other interpretations. So I will definitely not be offended if you stop reading right here and go pick up the book yourself.

If you are unfamiliar with Cloud Atlas, it is laid out in multiple, abruptly ending stories spanning from the late 1800s onward until the heart of the story is reached in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Once the heart story is over, the book begins to go back through the previous stories, each continuing from where they were abruptly ended before.

Whereas the movie seemed to be partly a white guilt fantasy, the book offered two strong themes: tropes in fiction and the power of knowledge. Cloud Atlas is a prime example of metafiction: the movie concentrates heavily on reincarnations of individual characters and their more visible actions, but the book refers to characters reading, editing, or doubting what they read as real, because the story seems either too fantastical or too formulaic to believe. Only I, the reader, am real, as I am reading another person's adventures, whose adventures are read by another person, whose adventures are viewed on video by another person, and so on. The feeling is akin to reading The Neverending Story as a kid: who will read my story?

In various parts of the individual stories, the characters slyly imply that you are not reading anything more than calculated fiction. This is most evident in "Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", when a minor character, out of nowhere, scribbles exposition rules in fiction into his notebook--and then "Half Lives" follows the rules. This definitely made me want to revisit Joseph Campbell's stuff on hero myths to see, how well all these seemingly completely different characters did fulfill human storytelling tropes. This is why I didn't get the feeling of reincarnation as strongly from the novel as from the movie, although many of the characters share a similar birth mark. After all, the majority of them are fictional characters in the Cloud Atlas universe, some even more explicitly than others: one character, an editor, even ends up copyediting a manuscript he has become obsessed about--and that manuscript is the story we had just read before his!

I'm also a sucker for smart-assery in writing. A minor character refers to the structure of the entire novel within the story he appears in while writing down notes:

"One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now" likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future." - Alberto Grimaldi's notebook in "Half lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery"

The second big theme seemed to be power of knowledge: not only were these characters intrigued, even obsessed by what someone else in a previous generation had produced--whether fictional work, letters, music, videos--they often were the ones with secrets or skills that would help exposing a larger truth of the world they were living in and in some cases, even save lives.

At least three of the stories have characters explicitly discuss the power that knowledge can have in both societal success and its downfall. In some cases, the premonitions from one story are echoed in the reality of another, as seemingly unavoidable truths about human greed for power and the desire to subjugate others. Quite depressing, actually!

As a linguistic bonus, the evolution of English language and the final pidgin product in a world where written word is all but gone did not only make sense in an evolutionary sense, but was also easier to understand than when it was barked by Tom Hanks.

I am now ready to watch the movie again to see, what I missed the first time around. Also, I did hear that Cloud Atlas makes numerous references to characters and stories in Mitchell's other novels--guess I know what I'll be putting on hold at the library next.

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

www.karenjoyfowler.com

"Each of us has a private Austen."

My reading patterns are so predictable: once I read a novel I truly enjoy, I have to hunt down everything from the same author. I usually end up reading them in succession, too, although I try not to. If I read everything in one sitting, and they are all extremely good stories, what will I read after the next book that might turn out to be crappy? I should always have a novel waiting to restore my faith in good writing.

So, here we are. My second full-length Karen Joy Fowler.

The story seems simple because on the surface it is quick to read: five women and one man sit down to talk about Jane Austen's novels. Each chapter is a separate occasion, labeled by who is hosting and which novel is read.

Whereas I will give some time to revisit We Are All... to be able to experience at least some of the shock its twists and turns provided, Jane Austen I can see getting better and more complex with each rereading: the way Jane Austen Book Club is crafted is not simple at all. Each character is an Austen character, without heavy finger pointing or blatant copying of actions and quotables to give even the thickest reader a nudge. Their escapades, flashbacks, and interactions are clever references to Austen, while the story is completely enjoyable even if the reader has never read or heard of Jane Austen.

Adding to that, the story takes on the reflective nature of reading: we have six individuals discussing the same novels, but finding lovable traits in characters others think are appalling, or defending questionable actions their favorite characters commit. These discussions are intermingled with flashbacks to the the book club host's past, providing a framework for adulthood morals and ideas.

During this first read, I don't think I got it all: I'm not familiar with all of Austen's work (as much as I am a fan of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, I have never actually read it!) and now I feel like I should read them all just to be even better prepared for my second reading of this book. I'm sure I missed a lot of references.

As to my personal Austen favorite: Northanger Abbey.

It's a mockery of people who follow trends (Gothic literature in this case) and how obsessed impressionable young minds can get with reading fiction. Further, it is a cautionary tale for anyone thinking that a real jerk of a person will eventually turn out to be a lovable, misunderstood hero, just because that's what our tropes tell us to believe in fiction. Had this novel been written slightly later, it would have been about the dangers of believing that real life should play out like romantic comedies or Disney films.

This was the first book Austen wrote, but the last to get published--posthumously. I can just imagine her peddling this novel that criticizes fiction, and then going, Aw what the hell and writing Pride and Prejudice--where a real jerk of a person will eventually turn out to be a lovable, misunderstood hero.