The House of Dias Drear by Virginia Hamilton

Source of book: Audiobook from the library, but I also own this.

 

One of the joys of parenthood is discovering kid books that you somehow missed as a kid. A quick look through the indexes of this blog will reveal that the kids and I discovered a lot of interesting books together over the years. 

 

Alas, with most of my kids adults these days, we don’t have nearly as many kid books on our audiobook list as we used to, and they mostly have their own lives. But it was a lot of fun while it lasted, and I at least have so many great memories. 

 

While in a lot of cases, the kids found the books before I did, there are a number that I found on my own, often through the lists of past Newbery Award winners. 

 

The discovery of Virginia Hamilton came when the Library of America released a hardback collection of her best-known books. We are now up to three of her books read (or listened to), and I really do have to say that it is a shame that I didn’t discover these books when I was young. The House of Dias Drear in particular is a great haunted house tale that I suspect I would have read multiple times as a young boy. 

 

One of the things I have enjoyed about modern children’s literature by black authors is the way that the stories don’t have to be about civil rights or racism, but are often just about ordinary life and people, with the realities of white supremacy in America more as a background than as the focus. Not that there is anything wrong with the other kind of book, which the kids and I have also read, but that there is a power in simply normalizing the everyday existence of children and families and communities that just happen to be black. 

 

But Virginia Hamilton was doing this back in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. 

The House of Dias Drear is actually the first book of hers I have read that has slavery as a key plot point. But the book is a lot more than that. It is a great ghost story. Well, a ghost story the same way that Scooby Doo is about ghosts. It is also about a family, about the experience of being a young boy who is caught between trying to be brave and grown up and independent and still being a kid at heart. 

 

The protagonist is Thomas Small, age 13, who experiences a huge life change. His family packs up from their home in North Carolina, and moves to Ohio. His father is a history professor who has just been offered a job at a local university, and also the chance to rent the historic mansion of Dias Drear, an abolitionist who used the place as a stop on the Underground Railroad. 

 

Mr. Small also is in possession of a great deal of information about the house and its history, and he suspects that somewhere there might be a collection of historical artifacts that will be of use to the historical society. 

 

Oh, and the house has a bit of a reputation for being haunted. And no one who has lived there has made it past a few months before leaving, telling strange tales about their experiences.

 

Thomas starts off unhappy about the move (particularly about leaving his grandmother behind - she refuses to move with the rest of the family). He is both fascinated by the existence of secret passageways and tunnels and scared of a potential haunting.

 

And then there is the caretaker, Mr. Pluto, so nicknamed because of his reputation as being (perhaps) the lord of the underworld. I mean, he’s a blacksmith and lives in a cave, so why not? He is getting old, however, and Mr. Small assures the family that he is a good man, if a bit gruff.

 

Sure enough, though, once the Smalls move in, strange things start happening.

 

Metal triangles (which we eventually learn are signs left to guide those fleeing slavery) appear stuck on door frames during the night. The neighboring family, the Darrows, seem hostile. The visit to church is strangely unfriendly. 

 

And Thomas has a series of encounters with Mr. Pluto, in which he sometimes seems like a crippled old man, and other times like a supernaturally strong and fast apparition. 

 

He also meets Mac Darrow, a kid his age, who seems more friendly than the other Darrows. And also Pesty, a young girl who has become Pluto’s protege, and who seems able to charm a horse like a professional rider. 

 

With rumors of a treasure, a lurid story of how Dias Drear was finally killed by enslaver thugs, and the story of an enslaved person who escaped the disaster, there are the makings of quite a thrilling story.

 

And did I mention secret passageways, and tunnels, and hiding places, all with historic connection to the Underground Railroad? 

 

Oh yes. 

 

I really enjoyed this book. It has the right combination of excitement, daring do, realistic characters, and a great look inside Thomas’ head as he tries to navigate change and fear and growing up. It’s a really excellent read. 

 

I can’t say any more without spoiling all the fun surprises in the book, though. 

 

I will add, however, that this is a great example of how Hamilton highlights different African American experiences in her book. Each of the three I have read have had different slices of life presented. The working class Appalachian rural culture, where Irish and black families live side by side. The farming families. And, in this book, the educated middle class. Hamilton seems intent on showing that there are many ways to be in the world, and that the stereotype of black poverty and all the racist assumptions that go with that, are myths. 

 

The Smalls are a family that any of us can identify with. The exhaustion of caring for twin toddlers. The stress of moving and finding community in a new place, where people have different ideas of what “friendliness” looks like. Parents who love their children yet have to find the balance between freedom and protection. They are good people, and they rise to the occasion in this book. 

 

I think that it is high time that Virginia Hamilton be recognized as one of the best writers of her era. Her books have aged quite well, and seem every bit as relevant today. 

 

***

 

The other Virginia Hamilton books:

 

Zeely

M. C. Higgins the Great

 

I also recommend checking out my list of black authors. There are so many amazing books, including some of the best fiction being written today. 

 

Twenty-five Years After 9/11, the Terrorists are Winning the Long Game

All of us of a certain age can remember where we were and what we were doing when the aircraft hit the buildings. I was at home getting ready for work along with my wife who was getting ready to go to her nursing school classes. 

 

I was twenty-five years old, newly married, and far too naive about a lot of things, as one often is at that age. This was compounded by my being homeschooled and raised in an ultra-conservative religious fundamentalist bubble, although I was already starting to shift in my views, embarrassing Rush Limbaugh era notwithstanding.

 

So, 9/11 happened a half a lifetime ago for me. Literally half of my life has now been defined by those events and the aftermath. 

 

It is impossible to look back now without noticing that the terrorists are winning the long game.

As I said, I was naive, and failed to understand what the terrorists understood: a majority of white Americans - especially the religious ones - would gladly commit national suicide given a provocation. 

 

I will get into exactly how this is happening later in the post, but I want first to look at the internal dynamics that the terrorists understood, but many of us well-meaning Americans didn’t at the time.

 

A significant portion of white Americans were simmering in their rage, and just waiting for an excuse to act.

 

This rage was longstanding, and had been carefully stoked for decades by politicians like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Buchanan, to name just a few. It was further stoked by media figures like Rush Limbaugh. And, let us not forget, by religious charlatans, especially James Dobson. 

 

Many white Americans, particularly Evangelicals, were still furious about the end of Jim Crow. They were furious about the immigration of the last 100 years because it was mostly darker-skinned people. They were furious that women had gained rights in society and in the family. They were furious that gay and transgender people had the gall to exist publicly. 

 

Twenty-five years ago, I was a white Evangelical, and I didn’t see this truth. Some of it was that it is hard to notice the air you breathe. But also, for social respectability, the truth was hidden behind dog whistles and euphemisms. 

 

9/11 changed a lot of that. You could see the break in a pair of country music songs - I wrote about that a few years ago. 

 

Now, with the rise of Trump as the embodiment of this racist and misogynist fury, it has become all too clear that it was there all along. 

 

What the terrorists understood was that America would devour itself, with white conservatives turning on their neighbors in hate and rage. 

 

All it took was a flesh wound, and they would go ape-shit on the rest of us. 

 

Sure, it started with hate against Muslims and Middle-easterners. But within a decade - if that - it also became rage against all immigrants with brown skin: Latinx immigrants, Haitian immigrants, Asian immigrants - anyone who wasn’t white. 

 

I can sum it up in the moral disintegration of my own father, who went from praising immigrants and refugees as hard-working people seeking a better life, to calling for mass deportations (aka ethnic cleansing) and a complete shutdown of the refugee program. 

 

It started as “Islam is an evil religion, and we shouldn’t let Muslims in.” Never mind that there are three million Muslims in the US, that they commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born white people, are more educated than native-born white people, and that they are an important part of our communities. 

 

It then progressed to “The problem with our country are these refugees. We should shut that whole thing down.” Never mind that refugees are literally the least likely group to commit crimes, or that they have filled crucial jobs and brought new life to fading small towns.

 

And then, by 2018, “I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem.” And also complaints that there is nowhere left in America where you can get away from minorities. Yeesh. 

 

So yes, the terrorists were playing the long game and they are winning.

 

Let’s look at the ways. 

 

Our country is more divided than we have been not only in my lifetime, but in any time since the Civil War was fought over the right of white people to enslave black people.

 

We invaded two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which was actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Rather, the terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, who we depend on for enough oil to deter us from attacking them. And Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, something which we apparently knew. But better to just go after unconnected countries we didn’t like, right?

 

A quarter century later, it is pretty obvious that we didn’t solve anything. Iraq gave rise to a new terrorist group, ISIS, as the result of the civil war we triggered. It was at least a decade and a half before Iraq returned to at least some level of stasis. 

 

The cost in lives for that war is staggering. The US sacrificed more than 4000 of its soldiers, with many times that wounded. But that is dwarfed by the over one million Iraqi civilian deaths. Is it any wonder that we aren’t particularly beloved in the Middle East?

 

And then there is Afghanistan, which we spent two decades fighting, with the result that the Taliban, which is a terrible group in pretty much every way, even more entrenched.

 

It shouldn’t surprise us that this happened, of course. Going in and blowing up a country doesn’t endear you to its citizens. 

 

In fact, the truth of the matter is that the United States has done more to create radical Islamic groups than anyone. From our CIA coup that ended democracy in Iran and our support of the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, to our current endless wars in the region, we have managed to legitimize religious fanatics as the best counterweight to American imperialism. 

 

Fast forward to Trump’s illegal and profoundly stupid war against Iran. Which he is losing badly. Iran’s regime is more entrenched than before we attacked. Iran has realized that it can in fact control the Strait of Hormuz, and there is no way to put that genie back in the lamp. Our military bases in the Middle East look vulnerable, so much so that we were literally unable to re-provision an aircraft carrier. 

 

No matter what we do from here, it is likely that Iran becomes the major power in the region, we lose access to our bases, and our influence becomes fairly irrelevant.

 

We have elected - TWICE! - a grossly incompetent wannabe dictator, whose only appeal is to the worst of human nature: racism, misogyny, bullying, transphobia, xenophobia. And that is why he won. (See my father above…)

 

Not only has this divided our country, but it has greatly reduced our world influence and power. Because we have turned on our allies, including freaking Canada, of all things, we are no longer seen as reliable. 

 

Rather, the world knows that enough of us are profoundly stupid and filled with hate and rage, that any election can put another Trump in power, and we are back to the toddler tantrums. 

 

China looks like the most obvious winner here in the long term. 

 

Twenty-five years later, and there is no doubt that America no longer is the dominant superpower. And that we are crumbling, eaten from within. 

 

Other suicidal stuff? We are defunding the infrastructure that made our country great. From science to healthcare to vaccines to public transit, we have chosen instead to devote our government to ethnic cleansing and mass wealth transfers to the billionaire-predator class. 

 

Honestly, it is hard to think of any enemy the US has had that has been this effective in destroying us. (Although major assist to Russia and Vladimir Putin here as well.) 

 

In my view, this happened because the terrorists understood the nature of religious extremism better than we did.

 

We should have listened to Salman Rushdie, who grasped this fundamental truth:

 

“Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It is about power.”

 

All those white Evangelicals (and a disturbing percentage of white Catholics, Mormons, and Mainliners as well) may not have thought of themselves as extremists, but they had the necessary ingredients. 

 

And that most important of that was fear, hate, and rage against outsiders. Here in the US, where white supremacy is our national sin, and has been since the beginning, the ugly root is and always has been a burning fury against black people. Like any wildfire, this rage never stops with one group, but expands until anyone different at all - including those of the other political party - are consumed in the “we will not allow people different from us to exist.” 

 

The terrorists understood this, and knew that white religious people in the US would be all too easy to radicalize. 

 

Because the root of religious fanaticism isn’t about religion at all. It is about hatred of “the other.”

 

And here we are. 

 

Where one political party has turned full fascist. 

 

Where there are open calls - from the White House! - to deport one-third of Americans. The non-white ones.

 

Where there are mainstream movements to end voting rights for women. 

 

Ultimately, it turned out that the greatest threat to America was religious religious fanaticism. 

 

But it wasn’t Islam. It was white “Christianity.” 

 

And that is how the terrorists are winning the long game. 

 

***

 Crucial to understanding the long history of American interference and exploitation of the Middle East:

 

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny 

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer 

 

***

Also beneficial is Rebecca Solnit's excellent book, A Paradise Built in Hell. She recently re-issued a revised version of the chapter on 9/11 online, which you can read here.  

 

Replaceable You by Mary Roach

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

Note: Once again I have been forced to remove references to male genitals from this post, because it got flagged for a warning. The same is not true for female genitals, for reasons I do not understand.

 

There are very few authors for whom I have read everything they have written. I’m not sure how many they are - I guess I would have to go back and find all the ones who wrote one book and nothing else. Harper Lee ruined my streak posthumously - I haven’t read her new one, and it isn’t high on my list.

 

I am sure, however, that I have again read everything by Mary Roach. This is my third time. She keeps writing new ones, which is good, of course. There is always a sad feeling when I get to the end of her latest and know I have to wait for the next. 

 

I have reviewed nearly all of her books, the only exception being Bonk, which was the first one I read. I actually was blogging back then, but I still cared too much about what Evangelical friends and family would think if I wrote about a book with sex stuff in it. Suffice it to say that those days are long gone. I haven’t been a church member for nearly a decade, am estranged from my parents, and most of the people whose opinions I once cared about have outed themselves as racist, misogynistic, and homo- and trans-phobic. So, my remaining fucks will be reserved for better things. 

Replaceable You is a return to Roach’s fascination with human bodies. And, as she always does, she finds a way to participate in the things she writes about. 

 

The book is about the things one can replace on humans. Or that we are working to figure out how to replace. She starts with some pretty mild stuff, like Tycho Brahe’s nose, and skin grafts for burn victims. Not that this isn’t fascinating, but you might need a strong stomach for the chapters on tissue donation and organ transplants. 

 

Roach, of course, cannot be actually grossed out, as far as I can tell. She is game for just about anything that is merely unpleasant (as opposed to actually harmful or dangerous) or nausea-inducing. Watching the bones be removed from a corpse? Of course! Getting a hair transplant to her leg? Why not. Donating hair follicles for research? She’s a public citizen! And yes, of course there is plenty of talk about genitals. Because Mary Roach. 

 

I’m not going to go through all the topics, but I do want to share some great quotes and quips. And footnotes, where she buries some of the snarkiest stuff. In case you wondered, yes she makes fun of the Elongated Muskmelon - I’ll highlight those. 

 

Anyway, I’ll start with a bit of the introduction, “First Thoughts,” and a bit that triggered my memory. About dentures. 

 

Roach cites a 2015 survey by Poligrip, and highlights a few fascinating statistics. Some are just sad, like the fact that a quarter of those with dentures were afraid to kiss someone. 

 

But the one that stood out to me is that more than half of the respondents got their dentures when they were younger than age 45. 

 

Yeah, that’s surprising. But I also recall that when I was a young kid, my mom’s parents both had full dentures. They couldn’t have been older than early 50s. Which, well, I recently hit that half century mark myself, and I can’t imagine having all replacement teeth. But it used to be more common. Even people like my grandparents, who lived long lives, ended up with bad teeth early. 

 

These days, implants are far more common, thankfully. 

 

Skin transplants make for an interesting topic. I actually knew a lot about this from reading a book about Dave Dave, a burn survivor whose case at the time was considered unsurvivable. Technology developed at that time has made for huge improvements in burn care since. 

 

In both books, the various steps of skin transplantation are discussed, from the use of cadaver skin for protection during healing, to the thin shaving and growth of skin cells from the burned person to eventually re-cover the body. 

 

Leave it to Roach, of course, to note that one part of the procedure reminded her of a shawarma shop. 

 

And also to observe that the frozen grafts have stickers reminding staff “DO NOT MICROWAVE” for thawing them. 

 

The chapter on hearts and blood was fun for a variety of reasons. I donate blood, so I appreciate the advances that have been made in anti-coagulation technology. On that topic, there is a footnote where Roach describes early blood donation (which is depicted in Dracula, by the way), which had to be direct from donor to donee. 

 

Roach, naturally, describes the attempts at privacy as being “Blood bank glory holes.” 

 

I also liked that chapter on genital replacements. She talked a bit about this in Grunt, because war has a tendency to blow soldiers’ d!cks off. This book looks more at the creation of vaginas, which typically is done for transgender and intersex women, but cancer patients have also benefited. 

 

But it isn’t just vaginas. A lot of the use of intestinal tissue has expanded into other areas, because our guts are apparently very flexible and take well to repurposing. 

 

The best quip comes regarding the case of the cancer patient from over a century ago, who insisted on a replacement vagina, despite the significant risks in that era, because she was sure her husband would leave her if she didn’t. The physicians - all men of course - agreed with her on that. 

 

Roach’s response:

 

“And here we see how the anus can be used as a substitute for the male brain.” 

 

Roach, no surprise, is a feminist who is affirming of sexual and gender minorities, and has no end of snark for sexist males. At the opening of a passage on the phallocentric approach to pen!s construction or reconstruction, she has this observation.

 

When cisgender male surgeons let their sexual worldview dictate their practice, it’s not only women who endure the consequences. Garcia has had at least four trans men who came to his clinic for a pen!s reduction because the excessive girth of their new phallus made it impossible to penetrate their partner. 

 

She also notes a journal paper that explored the myth that nose size correlates to pen!s length. It doesn’t. “Big nose, big hose” is just a myth. 

 

I’ll also note here my wife’s experience as a nurse. She has, naturally, seen and catheterized a great many pen!ses. She reports that when the female nurses get a guy with a huge one, the reaction isn’t positive. Usually, the comment is “ouch.” It’s not the size of the tool, it’s the skill of the one who wields it. 

 

The chapter on joint replacement even ended up containing some great stuff about sex. The discussion starts with an article by Dr. Ban Saw, orthopedic surgeon. (Actually, his name was San Baw, but the letters were inadvertently switched in publication and wasn’t caught for years.

 

To head off speculation that Roach chooses her sources because of the names, she notes that the first choice for her interview was a person who, after the first contact, turned out to be the person Roach lost her virginity to. 

 

She then, in a footnote, talks about it without revealing the name. This stuff is comedic gold:

 

A friend from high school and I, townies both of us, had gone to a frat party with the aim of choosing someone cute and “getting it out of the way.” Boom, done. The man spends more time inside the hips of a typical arthroplasty patient than he did in mine. 

 

If you want to take a guess, she notes he is an orthopedist with the Mayo Clinic. She is 67, so he would have been presumably of similar age or slightly older. I’m heterosexual, so perhaps I am biased, but Roach is way hotter than any of the old guys in this list. (Hey, I have celebrity crushes too…)

 

The chapter about amputations was more interesting than I expected. There is the question of whether it is better to have a “natural” but strongly dysfunctional limb, or to cut it off and get a good prosthesis. In the case of feet and pain, the answer is often the latter. 

 

Roach observes that most of us either have or will have a prosthesis at some point. 

 

We all will, should we live long enough, be disabled.

 

This is a truth that I wish right wingers could understand. There is no point in looking down on the ill, the disabled, the unhealthy, and assuming they are at fault for their suffering. All of us will, unless we die young and suddenly, end up disabled. And sick. That is the progression of life and death. Better that we care for each other with love, and receive that care in our turn. 

 

Roach also initially claims that she doesn’t have a prothesis, but then realizes that she does. (And so do I, by the way.)

 

Oh wait, I do. Without my artificial lenses, I’m legally blind. Ezra puts on a leg in the morning. I put on contacts.

 

I made it to age 45 with my natural eyes. But they have gone downhill pretty fast after that age. Without my glasses - and I have two different pairs, one for reading, and one for music and computer work - I couldn’t read, write, or make music. With them, I can read a Mary Roach book and write about it. And then go out and play a symphony. 

 

There is a whole chapter on ostomies, which is quite interesting. As part of my professional practice, I have had clients with long-term ostomies due to a variety of conditions. One of my most stupid stories is about a client who applied for Medicaid due to disability, and the examining physician for Social Security entirely failed to note the presence of the ostomy. That’s malpractice level incompetence, likely driven by the pressure on SS doctors to deny benefits - the United States has as one of its personality traits a deep hatred toward the poor and disabled that leads to treating them with suspicion when they need help. Sorry, I could write a whole post about that. 

 

Needless to say, we appealed the denial, had a hearing in front of the administrative law judge, who was appalled at the doctor, and granted coverage. I am proud of that case. 

 

Anyway, Roach decided to attend the fundraising run for Ostomy Awareness Day. 

 

“The Giant Inflatable Colon will be on-site,” he added. If you know me, you know that that is, for better or for stupid, the sort of thing that tips the balance. I booked a flight.

 

And now we come to hair transplants. Roach asked that some follicles of her head hair be transplanted to her leg. Just because. Unfortunately, it wasn’t successful. And worse, her donated follicles weren’t all that great at growth. Oh well. Her hair is still good where it grows, though.

 

This is the first of the appearances of the Elongated Muskmelon. The discussion is about the work to figure out how to use stem cells to create hair follicles. Although they in theory could make other things. Like sperm and egg cells. 

 

Human “in vitro gametogenesis," should it make its way into practice, presents intriguing scenarios. The ability to generate eggs or sperm from, say, one’s blood cells, would present novel solutions for infertility. It would mean that gay and lesbian couples could produce offspring with genetic material from both parents. Also, in theory, a person so inclined - Elon Musk comes to mind - could use iPS cell technology to generate his own eggs, fertilize them in vitro with his sperm, and produce offspring with no genetic input from anyone else.

 

And yes, the Muskmelon is the first person who comes to mind in that scenario. I would myself very much prefer that this technology benefit gay and lesbian couples, rather than narcissistic sociopathic billionaires, but maybe that’s just me. 

 

Oh wait, there is another Elon Musk bit. When transplanting hair, the best practice is to not make lines too even and straight. 

 

“It’s a zone of transition. It can’t be too straight or too abrupt. You want some irregularity.” This is achieved by implanting follicles in a slightly meandering manner, a technique called “snail-trailing.” “And you don’t want to give a fifty-year-old the hairline of a twenty-year-old,” Chaffoo says. The name Elon Musk comes up. 

 

I didn’t win the genetic lottery in a lot of ways. I’m okay with being short, but the allergies and the tendency toward illness are not fun. But I did get good hair. Which is ironic, because if I were to go bald, I think I would just shave it. It’s no big deal. 

 

Speaking of stem cells, I love that Roach calls out the marketing industry for some serious bullshit. 

 

Not long ago, walking through Target with his wife D’Amour stopped to examine a jar of moisturizer. It was on sale, but that wasn’t what caught his eye. It was the words WITH STEM CELLS. And there they were in the ingredient list: “apple stem cells.” D’Amour points out that the plant stem cells are found in the shoots and roots, not the fruit of the plant. While it’s possible to culture them in a lab, that’s unlikely to be the case in a cheap Target product. His guess is that the company just added some cells from apple stems. 

 

This being Mary Roach, it is no surprise that butt enhancement makes an appearance in the book. And plenty of snark about male surgeons. After all, there is this whole paper about “what makes buttocks beautiful” - and the “scientific” method used to determine this apparently was a panel of plastic surgeons who “pointed out which buttocks they considered attractive and harmonious, and features on which this attractiveness depended.” As Roach says, “Oho!”

 

She then discusses the Golden Ratio, and talks about a website called “Math Is Fun,” which she says convinces no one. Oh well, I kind of like math. In moderation. 

 

I want to end with a downer, unfortunately. The epilogue was written after Trump’s second election, and the DOGE cuts. Several of the programs she discusses in the book no longer exist, thanks to the cuts. This is unfortunately something that we are going to see increasingly as the Big Billionaire Bill’s delayed cuts kick in next year. 

 

Already, my home county has lost its Alzheimer’s Disease Association and its associated adult day care that served so many of my clients - due to the cuts. I am thoroughly frustrated that local media dropped the ball on this when the bill was enacted, and still refuses to call out our local congressmen - David Valadeo and Vince Fong - who voted for it. And of course, Trump and his ghouls and goons. 

 

People are going to suffer, and the US is going to continue to lose its scientific and medical infrastructure as the result. 

 

And yes, I am so fucking furious at the people who voted for him. Even though, in the case of ADAKC, I suspect that a LOT of people who voted for Trump are now suffering after they essentially killed their own program. It’s beyond stupid, but here we are. 

 

Things could have been so much better. And perhaps in another generation we can repair the damage so my children can have a decent life. 

 

I’ll just end by pointing out that this all is a blazing example of how racism makes you stupid. And link to Jonathan Metzl’s excellent book, Dying of Whiteness - which is the perfect term for what we are experiencing. 

 

***

 

 The Mary Roach list:

 

Fuzz

Grunt

Gulp

Packing for Mars

Spook

Stiff

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book was our selection for this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. It was on my list already - my wife and I sit down once a year over craft cocktails and discuss the NPR book list and make notes about the ones we are interested in. My wife nominated this book for our club, and it was a vote winner. 

 

I actually listened to this book several weeks ago - we did it on our annual trip to the Utah Shakespeare Festival - but between waiting for our club discussion and the fact that I am still buried in books I finished but haven’t yet written about, I am just now getting around to it. 

 

Before I get into the book itself, I do want to note that one of our members was teasing me that I am the reason that we have now read two books with violin playing as a key element of the plot. This is false. In both cases, my wife is the one who nominated them, not me. (If you wondered, the other book was The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb, and I definitely recommend it.)

 

While the books are very different in genre and style, the one thing they have in common is that, with the exception of a plot-related requirement of suspension of disbelief, they both get the violin stuff right. 

 

In Slocumb’s case, he is a professional violinist and teacher, so he writes from experience. 

 

For Aoki, she took violin lessons for several years as an adult, and enjoyed it. Her writing shows knowledge of the mundane, everyday stuff of the aspiring player rather than the upper-level competition that Slocumb writes about. In both cases, as a semi-professional violinist myself, I greatly appreciate the loving attention to detail in the books. 

 

So what is this book about? Well, it is about a violin teacher who sold her soul to the devil, then weaseled out of the contract by promising to deliver seven souls to hell - those of her students. 

 

But it is also about intergalactic refugees, fleeing a plague and a war. And donuts. And food, so much food. And the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles. 

 

The central story, however, is about a young transgender woman, Katrina, who flees her abusive family to find a life for herself. She happens to be a self-taught violinist who loves music but hates competition. 

 

A chance meeting in a park between Katrina and the legendary violin teacher, Shizuka Satomi, leads to Satomi deciding that Katrina will be her final student - and her final soul needed to free her own. 

 

This is a fun project, of course, because Katrina is so far from the usual prodigies she takes on - she is in many ways hopeless. Not just technically, but in temperament. Katrina wants to play video game music on YouTube, not cutthroat competitions. And she has a deeper flaw when it comes to her soul: she doesn’t want anything that one could exchange for it. She really just wants love, not fame or fortune. And worse, she doesn’t think her soul has value anyway - nobody else seems to think it valuable, after all. 

 

So for Katrina, just having someone who cares enough about her to teach her is reward enough. 

 

And then there are the new owners of the local family donut store. Lan is a starship captain who has left her home planet (and her jingoistic husband) with her crew - which is really just her family: three kids, an aunt, and a sentient computer intelligence named Shirley, who was created to replace the real Shirley, who was stillborn. 

 

When Shizuka comes into the store looking for a place to pee, she and Lan have a meet-cute, and start to fall in love. 

 

There are a lot of other things going on in this book. The female violin-maker descended (maybe?) from the Amati family, but who was denied the chance to carry on the family business because of her gender. The plague, which seems to consist of an existential crisis which causes sentient beings to resort to war for meaning. Several disappointed candidates to be Shizuka’s students. 

 

And, obviously, there is the blending of genres. What exactly IS this book? 

 

Well, the best way to approach it is to accept that it is more than a little silly. It is full of humor, zaniness, unexpected ideas, and an ending that works, but is also highly improbable. It is also at least borderline YA, with all of that genre’s tendency to be a little unsubtle. It is busy, there are loose ends that never are returned to, there are some characters that seem extraneous, and some episodes that are disconnected from the rest. It’s messy, and that is okay. 

 

Read it to enjoy it, and don’t go looking for complete consistency or a tight plot.

 

Hiding in all of this fun, though, is a more serious core. Katrina experiences far too much of what many transgender people experience and have experienced. The parental abuse. The resort to sex work to survive. The constant misgendering and ugly comments. The fear of violence, particularly when needing to use the restroom. Being treated as a threat. Never knowing if any encounter in daily life will be positive or negative. 

 

Palpable in the book is the eventual relief that Katrina feels when she finally realizes that Shizuka and her housekeeper just don’t care that Katrina is transgender. To them, it is just part of who she is and not a big deal at all. 

 

Because of who my kids are, I have been around a lot of transgender kids the last several years, and I can attest that this is something real. All of us want a place where we can be ourselves, without hiding, without judgment, without threat. This need is too often denied to transgender kids and to LGBTQ kids more broadly. This is a shame. 

 

Now, about the violin stuff. I mentioned that the book gets the details right. That goes for things from rosin to technique to, well, everything. Except the one implausible idea that anyone can go from untrained to competition level in a few years. While this one could be covered by the soul contract, the improvement takes place before the contract is presented. Just suspend disbelief here, of course. I was fine with this choice. 

 

There are some specifics in the book that I did want to mention. First, Katrina has a deep love for the book of etudes written by Henry Schradieck. When I first heard this, several thoughts came into my head. 

 

First, clearly the author had to be a violinist, because nobody outside of that subculture has heard of Schradieck. 

 

Second, SERIOUSLY???? Of all the etude books to pick, she likes that one? Honestly, Schradieck, whatever its value as a teaching tool, is about as boring and tedious as etudes get. Here, take a listen. 

 

Obviously, I had to do some research and figure out what was behind this choice. It turns out that the author adores the Schradieck exercises. Which just goes to prove that every possible flavor has someone who likes it. 

 

Unlike The Violin Conspiracy, which name-checks pretty much the entire canon of violin repertoire, Light From Uncommon Stars only mentions a few. Liebeslied by Fritz Kreisler is mentioned because it is apparently in an anime that I haven’t seen or heard of. But it is a lovely work that I enjoyed learning as a teen - and Anne Akiko Meyers plays it so beautifully. 

 

The other classical work that makes its way into the plot is the Bartok Violin Sonata. Which is another one that nobody outside of the classical music world is familiar with. It is wickedly difficult even by Bartok standards. While rewarding to listen to closely, it doesn’t immediately reveal its beauty to a casual listener. I like it, but your mileage may vary. 

 

Again, the only possible explanation for its use in the book is that the author must genuinely love it. I say this as well because in the scene where Katrina performs the work, the author discusses at length how she sees the piece as reflecting the experience of being transgender, from its microtones to its crooked and limping dance tunes. I wish I had a copy of the book handy, because I recall more things in that line that I can’t quite remember enough to write with confidence, but which struck me at the time as being some pretty darn good musical analysis for a science fiction book. 

 

I also definitely have to talk about a certain very minor character in the book. I can’t find his name and don’t remember it exactly, but it is the old male violinmaker with the initials of H.B.

 

Why do I remember the initials? Because they are the same as those of the person I am pretty sure the author based the character on. 

 

I have known Hans Benning since I was a kid. He and his wife Nancy and their kids went to the same church as my family for years. He also did a series of service trips to the Navajo Reservation - we distributed food, built churches, fixed stuff, and so on. These were good memories, and ended up very much influencing how I think about American history. (Yes, I got to talk with one of the last remaining Code Talkers, which was amazing.) 

 

Anyway, Nancy is a violinist as well, and we used to play duets, and in the church worship service - that’s how I got my start on improvisation. 

 

Hans is an old German from Bavaria. His village was bombed by the allies in World War Two - and one of his friends later in life flew one of the aircraft that did the bombing. Another thing that makes you look at American history a bit differently. 

 

Hans and Nancy met at violinmaking school in Germany, and later then ended up taking over the luthier business from Nancy’s father Paul Toenniges, who made basses. Hans and Nancy made many instruments together over the years - she is every bit as skilled as he is. Now, their son Eric is the main guy, and his instruments are played by professionals in the LA Phil and other orchestras. They are truly gorgeous works of art and craft. 

 

Hans officiated at our wedding a quarter century ago, by the way. He is definitely a unique character, crusty on the outside, but not a bad guy at all. 

 

I should tell one story here: way back in the day, I was a part of the Suzuki program in the San Fernando Valley. It was run by Idell Low, who was five feet tall and had a tongue and personality well known. (For those who care, her most famous student is Leila Josefowicz - she had already moved on to bigger stages when I was Low’s student so I don’t believe we ever met, but oh boy we all knew about her. I saw her play a couple of years ago, and she is amazing.) 

 

Anyway, Idell and Hans were kind of frenemies with a history when one day, she was looking at some student-level violin Hans had in stock, and complained that it was crap. Hans took a look at her, took the violin, and went back in the shop. He then loudly ran a piece of scrap wood through the band saw, and returned to a white-faced Low who was sure he had destroyed the instrument. He deadpanned “you told me it was worthless.”

 

She passed on a number of years ago, and I wonder if she ever knew he had punked her. 

 

I strongly doubt the author will ever read this post, but if she does, and if I guessed correctly about the “H. B.” connection, I want to assure her that Hans is actually a good guy, and, although I cannot imagine him reading this book, I expect he would find the caricature to be amusing. 

 

So that’s the violin stuff. A few other things I thought were interesting:

 

The idea that humans actually don’t like things to be identical copies. Particularly in the case of food. The donuts made by a replicator don’t sell as well. 

 

The question of how to find win-win solutions to problems, including those involving immortal souls. 

 

The way Shirley is used as an analogy for parental obligation to accept and love their children - and the way it is too easy to see children as instruments, not people. 

 

All the food, and the question of authenticity surrounding it. 

 

The issue of fame, and how it all too easily destroys a person. And how the more you crave it, the less satisfying it is.

 

The exploration of what makes a family - for LGBTQ people, as well as those of us with difficult birth families, the idea of “found family” is really central to our lives. 

 

There were, as I noted, some flaws. I should mention that there are no good male characters in this book. There are some genuinely evil ones, but the main problem is that they are stiff and one-dimensional. This is a shame, because the main female characters are all well written and nuanced. I feel bad complaining about this because female characters have been given short shrift for centuries. Oh well. 

 

Overall, though, I really enjoyed the book. It is fun, zany, more than a little weird, and nerdy as hell. Don’t expect literary fiction, and don’t expect normal SciFi. Just have some fun, eat some donuts, and go listen to some Bartok. 

Come From Away (Ovation Theater 2026)

This Broadway production just became available for small theaters, and one of our local ones was able to get the rights. You will probably see this performed all over, as typically happens when a new musical becomes available. 

 

Because ours was one of the first community theater productions, it actually got written up by Broadway World, which is pretty cool. 

 

My wife and I were eager to see this one, because it contained many of Bakersfield’s finest stage voices, and also because I know nearly everyone in the live band. And yes, live band included. 

 

Ovation Theater will be running this one more weekend, so you still have a chance to see it. 

Come From Away is based on real-life events. When the FAA shut down all airspace in the United States after 9/11, many aircraft had to land wherever they could. For many inbound to the US, this ended up being Gander, Newfoundland. 

 

Why there? Well, we aviation buffs remember before aircraft had the absurdly long ranges they do today. It used to be that flying from anywhere other than the east coast to Europe required a fueling stop. Gander happens to be fairly close to the Great Circle routes from much of the US to Europe, so it made sense as a stopover.

 

For a while, Gander was the largest airport in the world, with the infrastructure to handle even the largest aircraft. While longer-range aircraft like the 747 started to reduce the need for Gander in the late 1960s, it remained in common use into the 1990s. Even today, it is a key emergency diversion airport. 

 

On 9/11, Gander suddenly found itself with 38 airliners landing, and a total of nearly 7000 people needing shelter and food. This was a huge undertaking for a small town - anytime a population doubles literally overnight, resources are stretched thin. 

 

Gander and the surrounding towns found a way, and this musical is that story. My understanding is that the individual stories told are based on actual people, and taken from interviews. How much artistic license was taken isn’t clear, but it is understandable that there would be changes both for artistic purposes and to protect the identities of the non-famous people. 

 

Over the course of the play we see a lot of the good - people opening their hearts to strangers - but also the bad - islamophobia and racism. People are complicated, and few are pure good. That said, Gander was a great example of how, in a crisis, most people will come together for the common good. (I cannot recommend enough Rebecca Solnit’s excellent book, A Paradise Built in Hell, for more on this.) 

 

The set is sparse, but flexible. By my count, there were 16 chairs (one for each actor) and four tables. And that’s essentially it. These are rearranged to form everything from a cafe to a bus to an aircraft. It works, too - there is no doubt what is being portrayed at any given time.

 

The actors mostly cover multiple parts, a way to show the diversity of the travelers from around the world, and also the very Canadian residents of Gander. Because of this, there aren’t really lead parts in the usual sense. Everyone has to contribute, and there are only a handful of longer solos. It is all about the ensemble. 

 

Regular patrons of local Bakersfield theater will recognize most if not all of the names: Bob Anderson, Christian Bradford, Ken Burdick, Adam Cline, Terri Cline, Blake Green, Paige Green, Tevin Joslen, Caley Mayhall, Jennifer Prow, Shawn Rader, Jennifer Resolme, Jake Wattenbarger, Liz B. Williams, Tamara White, and Matt Thompson. 

 

The band also has a lot of the usual suspects: David Collins, Robby Martinez, Braxton Porter, Jay Andrade, Jeff Ardray, Ray Sadolsky, Becky Ingle, and Jeff Ingle. It’s a good group that sounded great. 

 

I really can’t think of anything negative to say about this production. The sound was beautifully balanced, the acting and singing excellent, and the ensemble tight. My wife and I had a great time seeing it. 

 

Green Frog by Gina Chung

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book is from my NPR recommendation list. I nominated it for our book club, but it didn’t win the vote, so I ended up reading it on my own.

 

As regular readers know, I love short stories, and try to have a collection on my nightstand most of the time. Being able to browse a bit at a time often fits the smaller time slots I have for reading. 

 

Green Frog is one of the more unusual collections, in that it contains multiple genres, from riffs on Korean folk tales, to science fiction, to fantasy, to realistic family dramas. It really is all over the place, which makes it a grab bag of fascinating treasures.

 

Chung is the child of Korean immigrants, devout Christians who, if the stories are any indication, didn’t really understand their free spirited and queer child. There is a lot of family trauma in the book, and parts feel autobiographical, with the tension between love and frustration with her mother. 

 

As someone who also grew up in a high-control family where religion was supremely important to identity, who has since deconstructed (although not as much as Chung), and for whom LGBTQ identities have lead to the breakdown of relationships, I found a lot in this book that felt familiar. 

 

Overall, the writing is really excellent, and the stories of all kinds will draw you in. 

 

As I often do with short stories, I will talk about them individually.

 

“How to Eat Your Own Heart”

 

The collection starts with a bank, a pseudo-recipe for cutting out and eating your own heart, and a description of how it grows back, but different. It is unlike anything else in the book, but it definitely grabs your attention in its short five pages.

 

“Green Frog”

 

Ah yes, the title story. This one features a Korean folk tale that Chung’s mother used to tell her, about a naughty green frog who always did the opposite of what her mother wanted, driving the mother to an early grave. The story itself is about a daughter who can never seem to do what her mother wishes, unlike the other daughter, the golden child. And yes, the narrator is a bit of a fuck-up, and the other daughter is a hard worker. But after the parents die, things take a bit of an ironic turn. This one very much felt like it had autobiographical elements.

 

“After the Party”

 

This story is about a Korean-American woman who has married a white college professor, and essentially given up her dreams to manage his life for him. It’s a bit of a bitter story, and I wonder if she knew someone like the protagonist. 

 

“Rabbit Heart”

 

A bittersweet account of a relationship between a little girl and her Korean grandmother and a magical summer spent in Seoul. It is heartwarming, but bittersweet because eventually age and death comes for us all. The level of detail in this story is what makes it great. Chung captures the sights, sounds, emotions, and personalities so well. 

 

“Presence”

 

One of the science fiction stories, this one really haunts me. The premise is that a company has come up with a way to erase “adverse life experiences” from memory. It starts off with good intentions: why not cure PTSD in veterans, or relieve the victims of child rape from their nightmares? 

 

But after the protagonist and her now ex-husband’s company soars to success, the side effects start pouring in. Erase the bad memories, and a lot goes with them. When a new, far cheaper version is developed, the protagonist rushes it into production, ignoring the troubling results.

 

Eventually, everything goes to hell. The protagonist is thrown under the bus and divorced by her husband, and finds herself haunted by an apparition. It is a powerful story that has some parallels to one of my favorite Charles Dickens books, The Haunted Man. This is also one of the longest stories in the book.

 

“Human Hearts”

 

Another story based on Korean legends. In this case, the Kumiho, shapeshifting fox-like creatures that eat human hearts. 

 

The narrator in this case is only half Kumiho, the product of her mother’s affair with a human. This story also returns to the idea of a favorite daughter, who the narrator can never hope to match. 

 

In this story, however, a lot of the drama revolves around the narrator’s simultaneous disgust with the violent life she is born to and her innate dislike of humans. The ending is deliciously ambiguous. 

 

“Mantis”

 

The author imagines the love life of a female preying mantis from her point of view. After all, mantids often, but not always, eat their mates after mating. Great line from a male on a date, “It’s too bad that all of this will end with you eating me.” It’s a short one, but with a definitely unexpected perspective. It also feels relevant to the dating scene we humans have created. 

 

“The Sound of Water”

 

A rare story from the male perspective. This is a realistic story, and one I thought was quite good. Justin reconnects with Ellie, who dated Justin’s older brother James. In the meantime, his father is dying, and he is faced with the question of what to do with the family store, which he has no interest in running. Not that it is even making money anymore. 

 

At its core, the story is about regret and time and the problem of balancing duty to family with one’s own dreams. I appreciate that it isn’t a story about romantic love, but about friendship and connection. 

 

“Attachment Processes”

 

More science fiction. It takes a bit to figure out at first, but a couple has just gotten their daughter back. Well, not exactly. The real daughter is dead, from an accident. 

 

But new technology can sort-of bring them back in the form of an android with a sort of artificial intelligence that supposedly can learn and eventually duplicate the deceased child. It cannot grow, however, so the replacement will be forever at the age you choose, up until age 16 or so. 

 

Which happens to be the age that the real Elly died. But instead, the parents get her back at age five.

 

As we come to understand, this was an unraveling relationship when death cut it short. The real Elly became more and more difficult as she got older, partying and skipping school. The mother (the narrator) is filled with the “what-ifs” and thus wanted to go back to before Elly became difficult. 

 

And now the replacement Elly will never grow beyond age five. 

 

I will admit this story affected me a bit. I have wondered myself if my parents wish they could have kept me at a younger age, before I got to be difficult, questioning things, insisting on doing things my own way, and generally resisting their attempts to create a clone of themselves. 

 

And on the other hand, if I could go back to age twelve, and somehow redirect my parents from getting involved with Bill Gothard, if I could have gotten my mom to get treatment for her mental illness, if I could have somehow managed to get them to embrace mainstream ideas of child development so they could have enjoyed my teen years, rather than freaking out that I was giving my soul to Satan when I did the normal teen things. 

 

What if?

 

There is a good line in this one, that seems appropriate to my situation as well:

 

There is no possibility of life continuing after death. But that didn’t mean the end of love, even if it was the kind of love that was easy. The kind of love that didn’t demand anything of me, or require me to change, to become better, or to dive into the dark waters of my own faults and weaknesses and emerge with treasure. Elly would always be small and sweet and easy to love, never asking anything of me that I couldn’t give.

 

Dang. 

 

“The Arrow”

 

Man, there are a lot of stories about parental expectations in this book. A woman finds herself pregnant after a brief encounter with a married co-worker. This leads to her considering how she always felt her parents had a path laid out for her - the arrow to follow, which she gets tattooed on her arm.

 

The pregnancy, strangely, seems to affect her mother in an unexpected way, and the two of them end up bonding as the result. The pregnancy ends in miscarriage, but somehow both mother and daughter end up seeing each other in new lights. 

 

“Names for Fireflies”

 

A very brief story, more like a vignette, about a brief friendship between tween girls. It is also more than that, as the narrator has a crush on her friend. It ends all too soon, as the other girl’s parents divorce and she moves away, but the narrator is left with the memories and the desire. There may also be a bit of autobiography here, including the author’s rejection of the kind of religion she was raised with. 

 

“Honey and Sun”

 

This one is a bit bizarre, with twin girls, dolls that are (maybe) sentient, an eccentric uncle who takes the girls in when their mother has a midlife crisis, and a giant butterfly collection. 

 

It’s definitely more toward the magical realism side of the spectrum, or perhaps even straight-up fantasy. 

 

“You’ll Never Know How Much I Loved You”

 

This is the longest story in the collection, and one that goes all over the place. It is a story of a woman from birth to middle age, from her dreams of being a singer to her discovery that her husband has another wife already. The ending is ambiguous as well. Will she stay or leave? 

 

It also has a grandmother, who in this case tells the narrator:

 

“Listen to me. In this life, you must be your own prize, and then no one can take that away from you.”

 

“The Fruits of Sin”

 

A short tale of a teenage pregnancy with more than a little resemblance to The Scarlet Letter. It also explores the way a conservative church congregation slowly changes from judgmentalism to acceptance. It also leans into magical realism territory. 

 

There are a couple of lines in this one that are worth quoting.

 

“Who might the father be?” the rest of us wondered, telegraphing our curiosity to one another with our carefully plucked eyebrows. We were none of us young anymore, and our eyesight was going, but very little escaped the attention of our eyebrows, which quirked upward at the first sign of gossip, like antennae.

 

And this one, as part of a passage on how so many of the children of the church had disappointed. 

 

Other than Mrs. Park’s Philip, most of our children were unremarkable in the ways they disappointed us. 

 

Ah yes, the children who disappoint - it is such a theme in the book. 

 

“The Love Song of the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat”

 

This is about a daughter who is left to take care of the final arrangements for her father, from whom she has been estranged for years. Her mother moved back to Seoul, and her sister is extremely pregnant and can’t travel. 

 

The story is told in a kind of irritating present tense second person way, with the protagonist addressed as “you.” This isn’t my favorite style of writing, and I think it really only works well in things like Neil Gaiman’s poem, “Instructions.” 

 

Aside from the style, though, it is a good story. The protagonist’s memories of her father are tied up with his fruit bat research, and she has a lot of good memories. But alongside that are memories of his violence and anger. And a particular memory where her father abandoned her sister on the side of the road after an argument. 

 

For so many of us, our childhood memories are complicated this way. There were plenty of good times. But also some real trauma that our parents don’t want to talk about. 

 

Again I wonder how much if any of this story has its basis in the author’s life. 

 

Overall, this is a good collection, and worth checking out. Apparently Chung wrote a novel before this book, and it will be interesting to see if she publishes any additional books in the future.