Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel Moniz

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Let me say at the outset that this collection of 11 short stories is both excellently written and also a bit rough in the subject matter of a few of the stories.

 

So, if you have issues with certain themes, you might either want to skip a story, or at least be forewarned. 

 

I also am going to, as I often do with short story collections, go through each in order. Thus, there will be spoilers. If you want to read the stories first, stop after the next few paragraphs and come back later.

 

The book is about relationships - family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances. It is also about traumatic incidents and how they unite or divide. It is about the less comfortable truths about interracial encounters, whether marriage and parenthood, or in less intimate settings. It is about the vulnerability humans have at transitional times: puberty, pregnancy, illness, marriage, death of a parent, abandonment. 

 

As I mentioned, the book is really well written, and emotionally compelling. The fact that I wanted to yell at various characters is an indication of how real they felt. So if you like good writing, good characters, and believable scenarios, you might like this book.

 

But be warned that some terrible things happen in this book too. 

 

Okay, if you don’t want spoilers, here is where you stop. 

 

***

 

“Milk Blood Heat”

 

The author starts right in with what I found to be the most traumatic story. Ava is a middle-class black girl, who is best friends with Kiera, a white girl. They go so far as to make a blood pact - cut their palms, let the blood make milk pink, then drink it. 

 

The two of them are a bit of trouble together, although probably not more than the average middle schooler dealing with puberty and all the really big feelings of the age. 

 

So much about this story is beautiful. But from the beginning there is the ominous fact that the two of them talk a lot about death and what it would feel like to die in various gruesome ways. 

 

It all goes to hell at a fancy birthday party for a mutual acquaintance, when the girls sneak off to the hotel roof to talk, and Kiera, on a whim, throws herself off it to her death. 

 

Yeah, that’s a rough story to start with. 

 

The thing is, I kind of understand Kiera all too much. To be clear, I am not suicidal, and I don’t tend that direction. (I used to joke as a kid that I was more homicidal than suicidal, but really I’m not violent by nature.) 

 

That said, there is a weird human psychological phenomenon where some of us feel a weird urge to jump from heights. It affects about one-third of people, most of which do not have suicidal ideations or other risk factors for suicide. Christopher Walken actually talked about his experience in one of his films where he felt this. 

 

More recently, and more seriously, a 14 year old boy walked off a cliff hiking down from Mt. Whitney last year. Fortunately, he appears to have recovered well, but scary as hell. (Lack of sleep may have been a factor, but probably also “the call of the void.”) 

 

I love to walk up mountains and love views, although cliffs are not really my vibe. In the course of my many hikes to tall places, like Half Dome, I have experienced this, and it is not fun. I don’t think I am a risk to do anything rash, but the fact that my psyche does this is one reason why I tend to stay well back from the edge. 

 

Anyway, I should mention that the ending of this story is pretty incredible. If you can handle the trauma, it is worth it.

 

“Feast”

 

This is the one where I really wanted to yell at the protagonist. Rayna is a black woman married to a white man, Heath. He has a six-year-old daughter from a prior. Rayna has just had a miscarriage, and is experiencing psychotic issues afterward. Thinks like seeing body parts from her lost baby everywhere. 

 

She needs help, but is masking her symptoms from her husband. Until her stepdaughter, trying to make her feel better, triggers something. 

 

Fortunately, in this story, only the pregnancy is lost. Nobody dies. But damn, poor kid is going to have some trauma. And the ending on this one is frustrating. One worries that later, Rayna is going to harm herself or someone else. I want to shake her and get her some therapy and medication. 

 

And really, if you are experiencing post-partum or post-miscarriage depression, please get help. 

 

“Tongues”

 

This one has some trigger for sexual assault, although it is a lot less traumatic than the first two stories. 

 

Zey is a 17 year old girl who is losing her faith. Largely because her pastor (who is creep-ass too) insists on the subordination of women. 

 

After her younger brother Duck gets bullied due to the rumor that she is “possessed,” she takes matters into her own hands, literally, in a seriously crazy incident that leaves the bully pretty shaken. And he deserves it. 

 

I certainly get the deconstruction stuff, and I have dealt with my own creep-ass pastors over the years. I have also seen how bullies operate. So I was mostly with Zey in this story. 

 

“The Loss of Heaven”

 

All of the stories are from the point of view of women other than this one and a really short one that has more of a group narrator. 

 

Fred is in his 50s and is facing the loss of his beloved wife Gloria, who has chosen not to undergo a second round of radiation and chemo after her cancer returns. 

 

This story is really perceptive, about the ways that many men struggle to process or discuss their feelings. The stoicism, the isolation, the projection of fear and grief onto more “manly” emotions like anger and arrogance. 

 

This is all complicated by Fred’s belief in traditional gender roles. He loses control and cannot deal with that loss well. 

 

Fred is a sympathetic if frustrating protagonist. I can see in him so many from my grandparents’ generation, my parents’ generation, and even my own. 

 

He is unable to truly feel the legitimate grief and his impending loss, and this means he cannot really share with his wife, or anyone else. 

 

The story is also about the loss that comes from putting freedom and wealth over relationships. In the end, those things are mostly meaningless when you lose the one you share your life with. 

 

“The Hearts of Our Enemies”

 

I think this one may be my favorite of the collection. The central relationship is between the mother, Frankie, and her teen daughter, Margot. 

 

Frankie has come close to having an affair with her daughter’s teacher, Mr. Klein. When she breaks it off and confesses, her husband leaves for a while. Her daughter pretty much disowns her, but, as we find out, not because of the affair per se. Rather, it is because her mother lacked the courage to actually have the affair. The sort of yes, sort of no, strikes her as cowardly. 

 

To make things crazier, Mr. Klein starts pursuing Margot - and Frankie finds the love note. 

 

Here too, there is a creative and interesting revenge scene. But it is the psychology of both Margot and Frankie that is the best part of the story. 

 

“Outside the Raft”

 

This is another story about failure to connect, failure to be honest with one’s self. In this one, young Shayla is close to her cousin, Tweet, who has a reputation as a troubled child, probably because her parents are in prison. 

 

Shayla overhears her mother saying that Tweet has “darkness” in her that she hopes doesn’t rub off on Shayla. Since Shayla knows that she has her own dark impulses, she fears that she will not be loved if she is herself.

 

A near drowning at the beach where Shayla panics and nearly kills Tweet in her attempt to get back to a raft confirms to Shayla that she is unworthy of love. There are a lot of “what if?”s in this one. 

 

“Snow”

 

Another interracial marriage story. Trinity is newly married to her husband Derrick. They are going through a rough patch, though, where the sexual connection is struggling and both are feeling that the problem is their fault. 

 

Most of the story takes place at the restaurant where Trinity is a waitress. She flirts with a co-worker, who clearly has a thing for her. 

 

Then she meets Snow, a Vietnamese-American woman, who is stunning and confident, and also a bit daft. They bond over the course of the evening, in part over how their darker bodies are fetishized by men, and which ends up involving both holy water and cocaine - it’s a weird story.  

 

In any event, Trinity has to decide whether to put in the work with her husband, or chase a new experience. 

 

“Necessary Bodies”

 

Hey, so many stories about women with ambivalence! Billie has found herself pregnant. Her partner is supportive, and she is on the fence as to whether to keep the pregnancy or terminate. 

 

In part, this is driven by her narcissistic mother, who is turning 50. She wants an elaborate party. She wants a grandchild. She wants to be the center of attention at all times. 

 

So Billie assumes that she herself will be an unfit mother. There is also the question of the effects a child will have on her life. Is she willing to put in the time to parent? 

 

Her younger sister Violet, who has that naivety and wisdom of the young, suggests Billie pretend that she wants the baby, and see how she feels. 

 

While the story isn’t entirely clear about what her decision is, Billie does come to understand her feelings a lot better. 

 

And Violet is completely correct: none of us are prepared for parenthood. Nobody ever has been. You figure it out as you go, more or less, sort of, and not all the way. Welcome to being human. 

 

“Thicker Than Water”

 

Another one with sexual assault warnings. 

 

Cecelia’s father has died, and his ashes need to be scattered across the country. She travels with her brother, Lucas, from whom he has been estranged since her father’s death, and Lucas’ white girlfriend, Shelby. 

 

As it becomes clear, there is a lot of backstory to this situation, none of which Shelby knows or understands. This is no shade on Shelby, who is actually a great character. She has the usual white girl blind spots at times, but she is good-hearted, and wins Cecelia over pretty well. 

 

But what do you do with a situation like this? Cecelia was sexually abused by her father, and Lucas never forgave him for it. Cecelia seems to have repressed most of the memories, but they come back. Shelby can’t know this, though, so I feel bad for her having to be in the middle of an emotional vomit. 

 

This story too has an ambiguous ending. Will Lucas and Cecelia reconcile? Will Cecelia retreat again into denial, or use her father’s death as a reason to process her own damage? 

 

One hopes so, because both siblings are decent people in a bad situation. And Cecelia and Shelby really should be friends. 

 

“Exotics”

 

This one is a very short vignette, a riff on the Explorers Club, a club that used to eat exotic - even endangered - animals. Neil Gaiman did his own version of this idea, with a very different direction.  

 

This version is from the collective point of view of the staff. And in this one, it is strongly implied that in the final dinner, the club members eat a human infant. 

 

So, trigger warning. It’s also really short. 

 

“An Almanac of Bones”

 

The final story is about a pre-teen girl, Sylvie, who likes to collect animal skulls and other bones. She lives with her grandmother, because her mother is a world traveler who can’t handle parenthood. 

 

Her grandmother is a real hippie sort, with “moon festivals” that often involve nudity and other more adult pursuits. 

 

When her mother shows up for one of these, Sylvie ends up discussing the issue of motherhood with her mother. It is an interesting and somewhat ambiguous conversation. Nothing is resolved, shall we say, but I think mother and daughter understand each other at least a little. 

 

I have a hard time identifying with the mother, because I have always been an involved parent, and can’t imagine just leaving a kid. But that is me, I guess - plenty of others do otherwise. 

 

Those are the stories. As I said, it’s a good book, well worth reading, but it does have some rough stuff in it, so be warned. 

 

The audiobook was narrated by Machelle Williams, who does a good job. No complaints. 

 

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (A Noise Within 2026)

Trivia question for today: What is the best-selling modern play? 

 

Well, if you go by printed copies rather than tickets, the answer is Death of a Salesman, believe it or not, with over 11 million copies sold. 

 

Oh, and the play won a Pulitzer too. 

 

My wife and I decided on short notice to grab tickets for the opening preview of this play at a smallish professional theater in Pasadena. We had never heard of A Noise Within before, but not only does it have a cool name (presumably drawn from one of Shakespeare’s common stage directions), it has a great setup that puts around 300ish people close to the action. 

 

Back when I was in high school, the local kids all read this play in 11th grade. I was homeschooled, and our curriculum mostly tried to pretend that the 20th Century didn’t happen, at least as far as literature was concerned. It was dismissed as “pessimistic” and “devoid of Christian values.” So I don’t even remember if we read a full play for American Literature or not. Perhaps not. 

I have spent some time reading modern plays, including American ones from what now appears to be a golden age of theater - Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller. 

 

Also, my wife and I have enjoyed live theater together since our first date so many years ago. 

 

The Death of a Salesman is, in my opinion, one of the best plays not only of its era, but of any era. It has held up remarkably well. Even if traveling salesmen are not as common as they were, everything else feels fresh and relevant. Substitute a modern occupation for the sales - maybe an Uber driver? - and it could happen today. 

 

Having only previously seen The Crucible, which is a pretty conventional linear narrative, I was surprised at the avant garde elements of this play. It must have seemed fairly daring in 1949. 

 

The story is told through flashbacks, dream sequences, and episodes that take place only in the protagonist’s head. It is easy enough to follow, and every line in the play is necessary and integral to the plot, so it isn’t exactly Godot or Six Characters in Search of an Author. But it does feel modern. 

 

At 77 years old, I figure it is pretty hard to spoil this play. The salesman, Willy Loman, dies at the end. That’s, um, literally in the title. But yes, spoilers ahead. 

 

Willy Loman is an old salesman, in the twilight of his career. Which has never been as successful as he claims or hoped. Rather, it has been a grind, with his family mostly scraping by in a dollar-store version of the American Dream. 

 

Recently, though, he has been under stress - his company terminated his salary and made him commission only, and he is struggling to make sales at his age. (Most of his contacts are dead or retired now.) 

 

Whether due to the stress, or other factors, he is showing significant signs of dementia. He loses track of blocks of time, has been in serious car accidents that he can’t understand how they happened. He talks to himself constantly, and seems to be confused about both the present and the past. 

 

Honestly, as an attorney who works in elder law, he could be any number of my clients or their parents over the years. 

 

He is stuck in his old stories, his old dreams, and most of all, his own misguided self-conception as a “popular” man. 

 

In reality, he is barely on speaking terms with his two sons, he has exactly one friend, and even that friendship is under strain due to his increasingly erratic behavior. He is one misstep away from being fired, and he isn’t making ends meet at all. 

 

We learn as the play unfolds about the generational dysfunction in the family. His father abandoned them to go seek his fortune in Alaska. Later, his older brother Ben also set out, ending up making a fortune in diamonds in Africa. Willy, not a risk taker and loyal to his job, misses a chance to join him. 

 

Denied the success he dreamed of, Willy lives vicariously through his older son, Biff, who is a star quarterback in high school.

 

But Biff flunks math and thus fails to graduate, losing his college scholarship, and finds himself drifting from low-wage job to low-wage job for the next decade and a half. 

 

Something happened after high school that seems to have killed his initiative - something we only find out near the end of the play. 

 

Younger brother Happ grows up invisible, a sidekick to his golden-child brother at most. Ironically, he grows up to be a corporate grinder like his father - more successful than Biff at least. But he also has become a player, having a series of women, none of them serious. Settling down isn’t for him, it appears. 

 

Willy does have a devoted wife, Linda, who has stood by him all his life, and by the end is the only thing keeping him functional. She is getting old and tired, though, and it is clear she is running out of options as his mental state deteriorates. 

 

I guess that is enough to give an idea about the play. There is conflict between Biff (who has returned for a visit) and Willy over Biff’s future. But also, Willy clearly feels guilt which he deals with in an unhealthy manner by projecting it onto Biff, claiming Biff blames him for everything. (Which is the opposite of what Biff is doing.) 

 

Things go from bad to worse, as things do in tragedies, until the final catastrophe. 

 

It is interesting to me that Arthur Miller claimed that the play wasn’t a classic tragedy. Because it really does fit the definition in spirit, if not in the letter.

 

Aristotle essentially set the template we use today to define “tragedy” in the surviving portion of Poetics, although he was describing more than prescribing. 

 

Miller’s play actually meets most of the requirements. The action takes place in a single day (although there are the flashbacks - kind of like the Chorus explaining the history in a Greek tragedy), it occurs essentially in the same place, and it has a single plotline. So, score one for the Three Unities. 

 

It has the essential character arc of a tragedy. A basically decent man has catastrophe come upon him due to a fatal flaw - the Tragic Flaw. In this case, one could describe the flaw as denialism - Willy’s inability to see himself as what he is and his insistence on living in denial and projection. 

 

There is a turning point - as we learn near the end, it is when Biff catches his father with another woman that Biff loses faith not only in his father, but in himself. 

 

The action is mostly driven by relentless fate, the fundamental unfairness of the universe that seems to have it in for the protagonist, no matter what he does.

 

Really, the only missing element of a classical tragedy is that Willy isn’t a “Great Man™” - the king or prince who is brought low. Instead, Willy is the kind of ordinary man that would typically populate a comedy, not a tragedy. 

 

In that sense, it is a tragedy for the American mythology, right? The celebration of the ordinary man, who not only gets his “rags to riches” narrative, but can experience the same tragedy in drama as the powerful. That’s actually a good thing, in my opinion, and part of a longer shift from the centering of the aristocracy to a focus on ordinary people that has been occurring for the last 250 or so years. 

 

It is interesting how Miller found his inspiration for the story. It was definitely grounded in his own family. He had an uncle who was a salesman, who eventually committed suicide. There was the weird competitiveness between Miller and his cousin, which became in the play the relationship of Biff (the cousin) and Bernard (Miller), the jock and the nerd, respectively. The plot may not precisely follow any family narrative, but Miller seems to have drawn much of the characterization from real life. This may be why the characters seem so believable. 

 

Willy Loman really is one of the most fascinating characters in literature. For a deeply flawed man, he is strikingly sympathetic. It is all too easy to imagine inhabiting his psyche. Just like it is all too easy to see family relationships that resemble the Loman family mess. This is a truly personal play, and thus very different from The Crucible with its political focus. 

 

That isn’t to say that politics don’t come into Death of a Salesman. After all, it is unregulated capitalism of the pre-Depression era that has led to the post-war corporatism that grinds Willy down. But all of this is just context for what is mostly a family and personal breakdown. 

 

My wife had an interesting observation that I decided to include here. 

 

Willy’s mental state and behavior at the end of his life very much resembles where we are with Trump right now. The dementia is manifesting in very similar ways. 

 

Now, to be clear, Willy Loman is not much like Trump. Loman is flawed, of course, but he is no sociopath or narcissist. He’s just a guy. Much like many other guys of his era and other eras, who lacked the ability to process his trauma or acknowledge his emotions. But he’s not a bad man. 

 

Trump, of course, is a narcissist and a sociopath, and a rich fuck with a shit-ton of power to harm people and destroy the world. He is one of the most evil men of my lifetime, a person not merely capable of doing evil himself, but of inspiring others to do evil as well. 

 

But there are a lot of similarities right now. 

 

Trump too is stuck in his imaginary past of being “popular” - he seems to think most people love him even as his ratings tank. He lashes out, seeing persecution everywhere, and blaming everyone else for the consequences of his own behavior. He seems to be unable to understand reality. He keeps telling the same old stories, full of delusions of grandeur but also repetitive and increasingly simplified. He forgets where he is, falls asleep, and cannot process new information.

 

It is dementia. And he has it bad. 

 

As I said, Trump isn’t Willy Loman. By any measure, the death of Loman is a true tragedy, as complicated and flawed as he is. The death of Trump will be a sigh of relief, as he will eventually be unable to perpetrate further evil in this world. Few care about the death of the Willy Lomans of the world - they are mourned by family, unknown by most others. Trump will have a huge queue to piss on his grave. Ding dong the witch is dead. 

 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the story is that Willy comes to see himself as worth more dead than alive. Even though his one remaining friend, Charley, pleads with him that nobody is worth anything dead, the problem is that Willy is somewhat right. Circumstances - the fates, the flawed systems of capitalism, his own stubbornness - make him worth more in economic terms if he is dead. And that is the tragedy not just for the Willy Lomans of the world, but for all of us as society. 

 

I’m sure there are things I wanted to say about this that I forgot to put in, but this should give an idea. It’s a great play that everyone should see. 

 

I should say a few things about the production itself, which was truly top-notch. These are professional actors, but without the huge budgets of the biggest shows. 

 

I loved the theater itself, in which even the cheap seats felt right up on the action. It felt almost as intimate as a theater one-tenth the size. 

 

The sets were fairly minimalist, with the furnishings becoming less and less as the play went on, a metaphor for the diminishment of Willy’s life, until there is essentially nothing left at the end, just the walls of the neighboring apartments closing in on him. 

 

I cannot say enough good about the acting. You expect this from professionals, of course, but this show was a clinic in inhabiting characters. 

 

In particular, Geoff Elliott as Willy was Willy. It was honestly difficult to feel he was performing the part rather than literally being Willy Loman. Apparently Elliott is one of the people running the theater, along with Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who directed this play. A man of many talents, it appears. It was a command performance, one of the finest I have seen on any stage. 

 

I’ll also mention Deborah Strang (Linda), Ian Littleworth (Happ), David Kepner (Biff), David Nevell (Uncle Ben), Bert Emmett (Charley) and Michael Uribes (Howard) as standouts in bringing characters to life. (And no shade on the others who filled out the cast in smaller roles.) 

 

Overall, it was just a brilliant production, and well worth the reasonable price for tickets. This is one of the advantages of living not too far from the Los Angeles area. If you are a local, I’d definitely consider seeing this. 

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie by Maya Angelou

Source of book: I own this

 

I would say that in pop culture, the American poet of the 1990s was Maya Angelou. She read a poem at Clinton’s first inauguration, her books were everywhere, and her face was on television as a pop icon. 

 

This contributed to her reputation as a “pop” poet rather than a serious one. Which, in my opinion, would be a mistake. Plenty of poets of the past were wildly popular, and also met high artistic and cultural standards. Which is why we still read them today. 

 

I also believe that we will be reading Maya Angelou in the future. 

 

As I noted in other posts that I feel in some ways, Angelou’s celebrity detracted from other worthy poets of her time, particularly other black women. This isn’t her fault, of course. Rather, it is an example of the phenomenon sharply satirized by R. F. Kuang: white-dominated publishing and culture tends to consider one person of color enough for diversity, and lets that one person monopolize budgets and publicity and attention. 

 

The cure for this isn’t to throw shade at people like Angelou, but to actively seek out and promote other authors whose works tend to be unjustly neglected. For other black authors, I recommend checking out my Black History Month list. 

 

I own her complete poetry, but hadn’t read that much systematically. I did feature her longer poem, published as a separate work, Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem in one of my Christmas poetry posts about a decade ago. 

 

I decided to start at the beginning and read her first collection. I suppose this could qualify both as a Black History Month and Women’s History Month selection as well. 

 

I haven’t read any of Angelou’s non-fiction yet, so I am not going to give a mini-biography here. I do hope to read her prose in the future.

 

This first collection, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, was published in 1971, a couple years after her autobiography. 

 

The poems in this collection range from modern to traditional, from really short to at least medium length, and cover topics from nature to politics. I selected my five favorites to feature in this post. 

 

I will start with a nature poem, because I have always loved that topic, and enjoy how each poet treats it. Nature is part of us, just as we are part of nature, and to sever ourselves from nature, as too many humans do, is to do a moral injury to our psyches, which also tends to result in harm to others and our ecosystem as well. 

 

Late October

 

Carefully

the leaves of autumn

sprinkle down the tinny

sound of little dyings

and skies sated 

of ruddy sunsets

of roseate dawns

roil ceaselessly in

cobweb greys and turn

to black 

for comfort.

 

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order simply

to begin

again.  

 

The end is also the beginning. Death leads to life. The cycle continues. And honestly, I love fall, almost as much as spring. 

 

This next one is such a gem, I get chills every time I re-read it. And when I read poetry, I read it out loud and multiple times, because the music is part of the beauty, and the secrets reveal themselves over time and repetition. 

 

Remembering

 

Soft grey ghosts crawl up my sleeve

to peer into my eyes

while I within deny their threats

and answer them with lies.

 

Mushlike memories perform

a ritual on my lips

I lie in stolid hopelessness

and they lay my soul in strips.

 

This poem is in a simple traditional form, but, like Emily Dickinson, Angelou turns simplicity into profundity. We all have memories like this, ones we tend to not want to remember, ones we cannot escape. Our souls feel these deeply enough that we tend to resort to denial and lies to counteract them. Healing requires acknowledging them and coming to peace in some way with our pasts. 

 

Here is another one I love. 

 

In A Time

 

In a time of secret wooing

Today prepares tomorrow’s ruin

Left knows not what right is doing

My heart is torn asunder.

 

In a time of furtive sighs

Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes

Half-truths told and entire lies

My conscience echoes thunder.

 

In a time when kingdoms come

Joy is brief as summer’s fun

Happiness its race has run

Then pain stalks in to plunder.

 

It’s a bitter little poem, but speaks truth, and finds emotional resonance. It may not be the entire truth, but it is a truth, held in tension with others. 

 

There are a lot of political poems in this collection. I picked this one to feature. 

 

To a Freedom Fighter

 

You drink a bitter draught.

I sip the tears your eyes fight to hold,

A cup of lees, of henbane steeped in chaff.

Your breast is hot,

Your anger black and cold,

Through evening’s rest, you dream,

I hear the moans, you die a thousands’ death.

When cane straps flog the body

dark and lean, you feel the blow,

I hear it in your breath. 

 

I particularly love the use of “thousands’” rather than “thousand.” The death isn’t a thousand singular deaths, but a single death died by thousands. The many sacrificed to white supremacy over the centuries. It’s a compelling word picture, and a great capture of the scope of the struggle. 

 

I’ll end with this one, which strikes a bit close to home. As a white “liberal,” I know I have my blind spots. This is a pretty pointed criticism. 

 

On Working White Liberals

 

I don’t ask the Foreign Legion

Or anyone to win my freedom

Or to fight my battle better than I can.

 

Though there’s one thing that I cry for

I believe enough to die for

That is every man’s responsibility to man.

 

I’m afraid they’ll have to prove first

That they’ll watch the Black man move first

Then follow him with faith to kingdom come.

This rocky road is not paid for us,

So I’ll believe in Liberals’ aid for us

When I see a white man load a Black man’s gun. 

 

*liberal. I find myself unexpectedly being considered a liberal these days, despite being conservative by temperament, simply because I strive for basic human decency. Apparently, seeking racial equality makes one a “liberal.” Indeed, it appears these days that believing that we all have responsibility to other humans is a “liberal” thing, and that the right wing believes empathy is a sin, rather than literally the foundation of Christ-following. What times we live in. 

 

And yes, Angelou is right. We white liberals need to follow, rather than insist on leading. And we need to arm our black brothers and sisters (whether literally or figuratively) by providing them with the resources to fight for their freedom. 

 

I am looking forward to reading more of Angelou’s poems, and encourage everyone to do so. 

 

Space Oddity by Catherynne Valente

Source of book: I own this

 

Space Oddity is the sequel to Space Opera, which our book club read and discussed during the pandemic. The first book grew out of the author’s live-tweeting of the Eurovision contest. A fan told her she should write a science fiction story about Eurovision. So she did. 

 

The original book imagined a galactic version of a song contest, but with far higher stakes. Not only would resources and money flow in the direction of the winner, but if a new species was discovered, they had to prove their sentience by participating in the contest. If they came in last, well, tough luck. They would be annihilated and allowed to re-evolve and hope for better results next time. 

 

If the species at least came in something other than last, then they were added to the galactic group of sentient civilizations and allowed to live. 

 

So, in that first book, the has-been glitterpunk rocker Decibel Jones (formerly Danesh Jalo) is drafted to represent Earth. 

 

The problems are many, from the fact that one-third of his band (The Absolute Zeros) is dead in a tragic accident, and the band hasn’t actually played anything in many years, to the fact that Earth kind of lacks the knowledge and resources to compete in this sort of glam competition. 

 

At this point, if you haven’t read the first book, I recommend you do so before continuing this post. In order for the second book to make sense, you have to know how the prior book ended. 

 

I also have to recommend reading all five books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. There are far too many sly references to those books if you know where to look. 

 

So anyway, having prevented the destruction of humanity, the Absolute Zeros now have to do the obligatory - and tedious - galactic tour: playing concerts, giving master classes, signing albums, pressing the flesh. You know the drill.

 

Somehow, though, Oort St. Ultraviolet manages to beg off, although he does reappear later in the book in an interesting role. 

 

That means the tour is left to Decibel Jones and the improbably resurrected Mira Wonderful Star. Oh, and she is confined to a peculiar spacecraft, because her existence is already a spacetime anomaly and she cannot simply exist outside of this support system.

 

The spacecraft is a nod to the Bistromath (a Douglas Adams creation): it resembles a kitchy 1950s diner, complete with overrated food and angsty wait staff. 

 

The first third of the book is filled with a lot of digressions and the plot itself takes a while to get going. Fair warning there. Philosophy and backstory first, plot second. Which, well, that sounds like Adams too. 

 

One other reference is that we are introduced to Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, which is an analogue to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both are fascinating, witty, and pretty much useless as what they claim to be. 

 

Once we get through all of this, we find out what the actual plot is going to be about. 

 

Decibel Jones is bored, so he asks the ship to take him “somewhere interesting.” That place turns out to be Eta Carinae - a real place in our galaxy that is indeed (mostly) as it is portrayed in this book. The chapter (yes a whole chapter!) describing it is so much fun, both scientifically accurate and zany as hell. 

 

In the book, however, there is, improbably, a planet with sentient life on it. Which nobody knew about except its inhabitants. 

 

And, well, you know what that means! 

 

Time for the song contest yet again, and a chance for the new life form to sing for its survival. 

 

But there is a problem. This life form doesn’t seem to actually care about anything. It’s singing is karaoke, apparently, and the existential ennui overwhelms everything else. Heck, it can’t even feel emotions without weather dictating them. 

 

So what is to be done? 

 

Well, that is the problem that Decibel Jones and Mira Wonderful Star have to solve. Is inter-species empathy enough? 

 

Overall, I thought this book was a bit less coherent than the previous one. A few too many digressions, a plot that took too long to start and then had to hurry at the end. And perhaps a bit more philosophizing than necessary. 

 

But that said, it was enjoyable, and the best parts were indeed very good. 

 

I find that I took a lot of notes, perhaps because there are so many pithy quotes and fun observations. 

 

Let’s start with one of Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts:

 

Peace is civilization’s problematic follow-up album that never quite works…because all it takes to prevent us from having nice things, over and over, is one single person. One single person who doesn’t want to play the same game everyone else is doing pretty bloody well at, so they won’t give over the ball even though everyone is yelling at them to get over themselves, because eventually that person will figure out that setting the ball on fire works a treat.

 

Hmm, can we think of anyone like that? Or perhaps an entire political movement that is throwing a bloody tantrum because other people want them to share? 

 

Related is another observation:

 

Whole hemispheres insisted that white things were categorically good, and good for you, despite the obvious existence of arsenic, rum raisin ice cream, and European expansion. And despite how distressingly often those purely and nobly devoted white swans (and/or ever-expanding Europeans) tried to bite the entire faces off various unsuspecting bystanders who had not in any way bothered them. 

 

And this one:

 

People really will do the most frightful things to feel special, you’ve no idea. Marvelous things too, but the frightful ones are a lot easier to pull off. The most dangerous being in the universe is somebody who’s never felt special in all their lives. If you encounter one in a dark alley, run. 

 

Man, I could practically do a whole series on that stupid stuff my parents inflicted on me in their desperate quest to feel special. Sigh. 

 

Also fun is the description of how every species has its meltdown after discovering they aren’t alone and are definitely not the center of the universe. Much like humans do at an early stage of development. 

 

Historians, emergency medical staff, and serious debris collectors call it First Contact Syndrome. 

Everyone else calls it the Blowout.

This term of art began with the famously understatement-prone Smaragdi, ten-foot-tall non-Euclidean bone sculptures who never met a sacred rite they did not yearn to flick in the forehead. It was quickly embraced, due to the near-universal experience of witnessing tiny, shrieking infants, regardless of species, helplessly eliminate their waste with almost unbelievable force and volume into a nappy far too small to contain the sheer tonnage of poo. Eventually the deuce in question burst its bounds, jetting into places all laws of fluid dynamics should forbid: between toes, fins, tails, and antennae, spattering eyelashes, hair, scales, and any relevant forehead protuberances, contaminating parent, child, floor, ceiling, and somehow, the front doorstep. 

Of a neighbor.

Several doors down.

 

As a parent, if you know, you know. 

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this description of Mira, in the opening scene of the actual plot (after that epic first chapter of philosophy…), which might best be described as an epic hangover. 

 

Once upon a time (a phrase that’s going to be doing quite a bit more work in this sentence than it’s used to) in a very large, very elegant, shockingly normal human hotel room, there snoozed a hardheaded, glamdrunk, exquisitely eyebrowed, emotionally available (for a limited time only), tinsel-hearted, assigned fabulous at birth, technically impossible and existentially toxic biped about whose precise medical status, legal identity, and, most importantly, temporal coordinates, no one could quite agree, except to exasperatedly admit, at the conclusion of a number of private think-tank brainstorming sessions, that her name was Mira Wonderful Star, nee Myra Strauss, and she was supposed to be dead. 

…ish. 

 

Decibel Jones, of course, is equally hung over, plus he has more of an existential crisis going on than Mira, who is surprised to be alive again. A Keshet assign to keep an eye on him notices he needs help. 

 

“It looks like you’re trying to cope with the sudden catastrophic breakdown of your entire self-conception. Would you like help with that?” 

 

We also get introduced to another Unkillable Fact, one that I think is in a lot of ways, the core idea of the book, and also of life itself. 

 

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. 

 

Valente goes on to note another truth about the forces of stupid.

 

And the forces of stupid are bound and determined to unbalance that immortal equation forever, if they can possibly manage it. That is their highest goal. No more beauty. All stupid all the time, as far as the eye can see.

 

That’s MAGA and every other authoritarian, fundamentalist movement in history. Beauty is different, and must therefore be suppressed. The existence of beauty is offensive to those who embrace stupid. 

 

There is another fun discussion (digression…) on the problems of teleportation. Namely that it will eventually be used to teleport weapons. Just sent bombs via the ultimate delivery system. But this like is also good:

 

Not because it’s not possible to disassemble an organic being to his, her, or otherwise, constituent atoms, fax them across the inky void, and reassemble them on the other side.

It very much is possible.

And not because doing so technically kills the original person and reassembles a clone, or a golem, depending on how you like your metaphysical toast buttered. 

It absolutely does that. But it’s still better than flying economy. 

 

The first third has a lot of anti-war philosophizing, as I mentioned. There are some good parts. Another one from Gorecannon:

 

The most dangerous phrase in the universe is this time will be different. Those five words are a nasty little trap. This time is never different. It can’t be. It’s only possible to say that foolishness after you’ve royally fucked something straight up to the gills and are plainly standing right there in the middle of the blastmark fixing to do the same damned thing again. 

 

While Gorecannon also notes that the opposite is true - hope that you will get it right next time is a good thing. But still, too much bad comes from repeating the same thing, hoping for a better result. 

 

There are many variations of this next line, but Valente certainly makes it fun. 

 

English is not a very complicated language. But what English lacks in sophistication, it more than makes up for in pure belligerent criminality. 

That English robs other languages blind, saws off their best vocabularies, and wears them stapled, still dripping, to its own face, is both well-known and not much of a problem for man, mushroom, or Meleg. But English, inasmuch as it has rules, is so constitutionally incapable of obeying even itself that virtually every possible sentence contains some exception, some rude gesture of pug-nosed defiance toward the concept of order itself, some precious bit of spelling or syntax that thinks it’s so special it doesn’t have to behave like all the other children. You can hardly turn a phrase without being accosted by silent letters lying in wait for innocent spellers-by, half-dressed homonyms beckoning with come-hither stares, red-light district infinitives doing the splits, some dubious fellow in a trench coat lined with irregular verbs, delinquent subclauses loitering in the night, delusional plurals insisting they’re perfectly normal, broken sentence fragments desperate for the love of a good subject, unhinged apostrophes clinging to your clothes, and roving gangs of wildly disparate diphthongs all pronounced eh.

 

There are so many terrible (or great) puns in this book. And so many cultural references. For example, a travelogue written by a norovirus entitled “Eat, Pray, Irrecoverable Symptom Cascade.” Or TGIF: “Thankfully Gamma Irradiation has Faded.” 

 

Part of the drama is in the friction between Decibel and Mira. As we learn in the first book, just before her untimely death, she had proposed to Decibel, who turned her down. Now, she is back, a decade younger than the aging Decibel, but somehow still more emotionally mature. I love Mira’s quip at Decibel during one argument. 

 

“If one of us is a baby, I’m reasonably certain it’s the one who can’t even get up in the morning without a full team of therapists, a hostage negotiator, and an emotional support cocktail.” 

 

Speaking of people with issues, how about another Unkillable Fact?

 

The most important things only ever happen at the worst possible times. I don’t know why, it’s not my fault, and it’s not very nice of you to imply that it is. It’s just tangled up in the spaghetti code of the universe with centripetal force and atomic decay and desperately wanting your father’s approval even though he thinks seat belts are a government plot to oppress him specifically. The spaghetti code of the universe is just drowning in store-bought jar sauce, I’ll tell you what.

 

This caught my eye in part because back in the day, my father really did resist wearing a seat belt. Until he was in an accident that put his head into the windshield and damaged his neck muscles in a way that still bothers him. Notably, I am alive because I took my mother’s advice to heart, and walked away from a serious accident - we left paint six feet up on a light pole - without injury. I do find the part about desperately wanting one’s dad’s approval even when you realize he is pretty bat-shit about a lot of important things. Sigh. 

 

Once the new life form is discovered, it turns out that galactic rules task the discovering species to make first contact and “chaperone” the new species as it prepares for the contest. There is a hilarious list of rules for this role, starting with “Two Drink Minimum.”

 

No one should have to answer questions as egregiously stupid and egregiously numerous as you are about to without a healthy support system, namely gin. And/or its vast family of quirky cousins.

…

If you test clean, you will be terminated in favor of someone who more fully understands the gravity of this sacred duty. 

 

And, under #7, “Do Not Tell the Truth”:

 

Throughout the infinite variety of cultures, morals, and entertainment options, there is only universally unforgivable hurt. 

If you make a person feel small, and stupid, and embarrassingly unloveable, if you make them feel like they’re not worth seeing, if you do it on purpose, if you do it with intent, that person will, sooner or later, rip your and/or your whole society’s face off and eat it with ice cream. 

Or write children’s books and cry a lot. Could go either way. 

 

It is time for yet another Unkillable Fact:

 

The more alike people are, the more they’d rather staple their thumbs together than get along. You’d think it’d go the other way, I know, but have you met siblings?

 

The author also makes an amusing observation about human nature:

 

The galaxy was slowly waking up to the horrifying truth about humanity: no matter how hideous, dangerous, pustulant, inanimate, awkward, oozing, or wholly indifferent to and incompatible with the continuation of life, in specific or in general, there was a human who would not only love it, but cuddle it, build it an elaborate play structure, dress it up in a hand-knit sweater, call it their pwecious sweetbaby cutiebutt, spend far too much money on accessories for it, maintain a webpage in its honor long after its death and/or recycling, even let it sleep on the bed against all hygiene recommendations. 

And if their human life partner objected, it was never once the xenomorph who had to sleep on the couch. 

 

That’s comedy gold. As is this one, about what “la, la, la” in music stands for, as explained by Decibel to the new life form, who just doesn’t get it. 

 

“Sorry? Oh, la, la, la.” Dess laughed a little. “Well, in songs on Earth, almost all the songs, going back to before electricity and plumbing and the intro-verse-chorus-bridge-verse structure, the la, la, las were sneaky little bits you could sing when you meant something naughty and the Church or the lord in the manor or your dad wouldn’t know what you were on about.”

 

And also this exchange with Mira, which is fascinating. 

 

“We are sentient,” Brief Experience of Being Tavallinen said simply. “I am not a philosopher. But it is clear sentient beings frequently do things for no reason.”

“Animals do plenty of things for no reason. By definition, they don’t understand the reason for anything they do. Why they migrate or molt or chase this gazelle rather than that zebra. Why they choose one mate and not another.”

“Animals do those things for no reason they understand. Sentient beings do things for no reason at all.” 

 

This one is good too:

 

“You can hate yourself almost to death for hating most of all the fact that you can’t stop being the kind of insufferable beast who hates that they hate themselves for hating themselves. Or you can package it with some liner notes and a beat and sell a million copies.”

 

I should mention that there is a character in the book seems directly related to the kind of non-living characters that Adams writes. There is a “Protagony Mine” named Gadramadur the All-Knowing. Now this requires a bit of an explanation. Basically, if it explodes, it creates in everyone with a certain radius the belief that they are the protagonist.

 

First of all, my manufacturer’s suggested use case is to drop me into a crowded public space so that I set off hundreds of protagonists all at once. Usually, they all kill each other in a quarter of an hour flat because fate told them there could only be one or some faff. I interact with specific deep-gene sequences to gin up a culturally appropriate narrative for each target. Even a single serving of me can be totally devastating to local wildlife and economies!”

 

And, like in the case with someone who wants to matter, if you see one, run…

 

However, given the problem of arms treaties and stuff, this particular mine is now reduced to the duty of showing people around the vast office building that houses the committee that runs the song contest. 

 

And that leads me to the Board Meeting From Hell chapter. Which is hilarious and terrifying and all too real. I’m not even going to try to describe it. It must be experienced. 

 

Of course the book has to contain a plethora of imaginary but hilarious song titles. Two of my favorites are “Anarchy in the Modqueue” and “Smells Like Teen Disaffection with a System in which Extrinsic Factors Beyond Their Control Are the Sole Determinants of Their Worth.” 

 

Another good anti-war line seems particularly apropos to our endless meddling in the Middle East over the last 25 years. (And really, a lot longer, but particularly the last 25 years.) This one too is from Gorecannon.

 

Dead eyes, broken hearts, can lose. Terribly glad I killed a bunch of strangers and then not one single thing got better.

 

Preach.

 

Anyway, that’s the book, and it is a good read, even if not quite as great as the first one. 

 

***

 

Unusually, in both of these books, the “liner notes” at the end are well worth reading. In this case, I noted four things I wanted to highlight. 

 

First, Valente talks a good bit about Douglas Adams and the influence he had, not only on these books, but on her life as a whole.

 

There is a great story in there about how she and some friends, when they heard that Adams died, bought a bowl of geraniums and tossed it off the library roof. Even if they were a bit to sad to remember to say “oh no not again” as it fell. And that is just one of so many sly references in the book - you really have to pay attention. 

 

The next is a section in which she acknowledges her kid, who is a character. She notes that it feels weird to “give birth to your own protagonist.”

 

In another acknowledgement to a writer who passed before he could see the book, she talks about “loving advice wrapped in f-bombs wrapped in deep cynicism that is always a mask for a soul that longs to be an optimist, and is always looking for an excuse to try out hope.” I think I can relate to that. 

 

Finally, I’ll end with this thought:

 

Sentience, in the end, is only a little about being clever. It’s about how we handle each other. How we see one another. How we help. How we share. Howe we protect and how we love. How we catch someone when they stumble, and whether we can believe we will be caught when we fall. 

 

That’s a perfect way to end it. 

 

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I will confess, I mostly know Alison Bechdel from the litmus test that bears her name. 

 

If you aren’t familiar with the Bechdel Test, it was created by Bechdel to analyze movies. In order to pass, a movie has to have (1) at least two named women in it, who (2) talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. 

 

This is, obviously, a bare minimum, and yet somehow hundreds of movies fail to pass. Even really good movies. 

 

One can apply this to books or other art forms too, of course. 

 

I probably read an article or two written by Bechdel over the years, but wasn’t really all that familiar with her writing or art. 

 

So, I decided to grab a copy of Fun Home for a quick read on my most recent camping trip. 

 

The book is a graphic work, not a novel, but non-fiction. It is all about the author’s childhood, with a particular focus on her father. 

 

It is safe to say that the book isn’t nearly as “fun” as the title - it is very much sarcastic. 

 

In addition to the fact that quite possibly everyone in her family is on the autism spectrum, there was a lot of dysfunction. 

 

Her father could be violent and abusive, but mostly he was just emotionally absent. He was obsessed with the renovation and decorating of the old decrepit mansion he bought in his hometown, and intolerant of kids being kids. 

 

But there was more than that, as Alison eventually found out as an adult. Her dad was a closeted homosexual, who had a series of relationships with teen boys, nearly ending up in prison for one of the liaisons. During family visits to New York City, he would go out cruising, leaving the family behind. 

 

Alison didn’t have any idea about any of this as a child. It was well hidden, for the most part, and wasn’t talked about. 

 

What triggered everything happened when Alison went off to college. There, she realized she was a lesbian, and eventually came out to her parents. They weren’t horrible, but they weren’t entirely supportive either. 

 

Weirdly, her father wrote her letters that seemed to assume she knew his secrets, but since she didn’t they were just puzzling. At the same time, her mother decided she was going to file for divorce - again, something that Alison didn’t know. 

 

A few months later, her father was dead, hit by a semitruck. In Alison’s opinion, it was a suicide, but having read the book, there is plenty of grey. It could have been an accident. It could have been a spontaneous suicide. Or it could have been carefully planned. 

 

After this, all the secrets came out. 

 

I am skipping over a lot here, though. There is quite a bit more to the story. Alison and her father weren’t exactly close, but they did have the shared bond of literature. So many of the literary references were to books I have read and enjoyed - it would be a long task to list them all. 

Her mother was an amateur actor, in addition to teaching, and the scenes where she practices being Lady Bracknell are rather amusing. 

 

Oh, and I should mention that her father taught high school English, but also managed the family mortuary business part time. So, yeah, it was a weird upbringing even without the secrets. 

 

It is no wonder that Bechdel ended up with OCD and a few other tics. 

 

The incidents of childhood are told in such a recognizable way - any of us who remember being kids can see themselves in this family at least a little. 

 

The book is full of delightful illustrations - Bechdel is really good at portraying human emotion in simple drawing. The stories are fun, heartbreaking, and deeply human. 

 

 

The book has also been the target of bans, in significant part because of the gay themes, and the semi-graphic depictions of lesbian sex and masturbation. I say semi because there are naked breasts and butts and pubic hair, but no visible genitals.  

 

While I wouldn’t say the book is a light read, exactly, it is fast paced, and can be read in a single sitting if you wish. 

 

I was kind of surprised that the book was made into a musical, but at this point, what hasn’t? 

 

Anyway, I didn’t write any lines down, because it isn’t really that kind of a book. It needs to be experienced, not quoted, if that makes sense. I’d definitely give this one a read. 

 

And yes, it does in fact pass the Bechdel Test.