Girl in a Cage

Raintown Playlist

So, okay--I know nobody really wants to hear anyone whine about the weather, but really, this has been a tough month for those of us who live in New England. Especially those of us who live in New England and have anxiety and depression.  We count on banking some sunny days in the summer against the long gray winter. We've had 24 days of rain since June 1st, and rain every day for the last 12 days.  For me, the citalopram is barely holding the line against the gloom these days.

So I did what I often do in tough times:  I made me a little playlist.  It's still gross out, but I feel a little better.  It turned out to be exactly a hundred songs, so I took this as a sign that I should share.  I called it Raintown because a)that's where we appear to be living and b)that was a Deacon Blue song from when I was in Scotland that I don't own or even particularly like that much (Still have a soft spot for "Fergus Sings the Blues," though) but which kinda sticks in my head. There's no significance to the order--it's just how itunes shuffled 'em. I've added some notations where I felt like. 

Mermaids 3:04 Paul Weller
Candy Man Blues 2:47 Mississippi John Hurt
Would You Love A Monsterman (2006 Version) 3:05 Lordi
Cattle And The Creeping Things 3:46 The Hold Steady "Mackenzie Phillips doesn't live here anymore."
E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) 3:43 Blue Öyster Cult
That's Entertainment 3:17 The Jam The superior demo version from the Snap! compilation
The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite 4:09 R.E.M.
Over the Sea 3:48 The Minus 5
Bang Bang You're Dead 3:32 Dirty Pretty Things
Rose Island Road 2:44 Squirrel Bait
Across The Universe 3:38 The Beatles From the Let it Be...Naked album. No strings!
Smash You 2:22 The Ramones Right up there with "Babysitter" as one of the best Ramones B-sides. Written by Richie!
Born Under A Bad Sign 2:49 Albert King
 Let My Freak Flag Fly 2:35 Caesars
Save it For Later 3:36 The English Beat
What Do I Get? 2:55 Buzzcocks In this case, a whole shitload of rain.
Season of the Witch 4:56 Donovan
Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying (Live Version) 4:02 Belle & Sebastian From the live If You're Feeling Sinister from itunes, which is superior to the studio verson.
Crimson And Clover 3:17 Joan Jett
Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love 3:47 Van Halen
That's When I Reach For My Revolver 3:53 Mission of Burma
Taking It All Away 2:25 The Edge Not the U2 guy.  The Cincinnati/Boston band from the 80's.
Hideous Mutant Freekz 7:21 Axiom Funk
Red Tan 3:48 The Raveonettes
Even the Clouds Get High 2:10 James Kochalka
Return The Favour 3:10 The Hives
New England 2:25 Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers Just to remind me that it doesn't always suck to live here.
Ugly Truth Rock 2:57 Matthew Sweet
MTV 3:28 Hawaii Mud Bombers
Over 'Fore It Started 2:51 Caesars
Paper Planes 3:24 M.I.A. Still not sick of it yet.  Go figure.
Who Will Save Rock and Roll? 2:59 The Dictators
Smile (Version Revisited) [Mark Ronson Remix] 3:13 Lily Allen Prefer this mix to the original
 LoveSign (Shock G's Silky Remix) 3:53 Prince
A Good Idea 3:47 Sugar
Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam (Album) 3:31 Vaselines
Big Time Sensuality (The Fluke Minimix) 4:55 Björk My favorite Bjork song, though I don't like this mix as much.  Bought it by mistake and don't have the other one.
Stop Your Sobbing 2:06 The Kinks Because, after all, it's only rain.
All Going Out Together 3:02 Big Dipper It could be worse--it could be the apocalypse!
13 Stitches 1:55 NOFX
When It Rains, It Really Pours 2:03 Elvis Presley get it?
Oxford Comma 3:16 Vampire Weekend
Here Come the Girls 5:08 Andy White
Calhoun Square 4:47 Prince
Keep A Knockin' 2:20 Little Richard
Mellie's Comin' Over 2:12 Letters To Cleo
The Card Cheat 3:50 The Clash
Handle With Care 2:57 Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins Traveling Wilburys cover!
Shaking Through 4:30 R.E.M.
 Down But Not Out 3:31 The Mooney Suzuki
Mr. Soul (LP Version) 2:52 Buffalo Springfield Just about the only song that involves Steven Stills that I can stand.
I Feel It All 3:40 Feist
Dark As A Dungeon 3:01 Johnny Cash not just down in the mine, but pretty much everywhere these days.
(Now And Then There's) A Fool Such As I 2:38 Elvis Presley
Maggot Brain 8:27 Funkadelic
Dancing On the Lip of a Volcano 4:18 New York Dolls
Of It 1:28 Sluggo
See No Evil 4:05 Television
Drinking About My Baby 3:01 The Damned
Sick Of Myself 3:39 Matthew Sweet
 Let There Be Rock 4:19 Drive-By Truckers A really profound song about death hiding behind a song about drug-addled teen exploits.
You Don't Know What Love Is [You Just Do As You're Told] (Album Version) 3:55 The White Stripes
Feel Good Inc (Live Sarm Radio Session) 3:44 Gorillaz Unclear to me how a cartoon band can have a live version, but it's good anyway.
Benny and the Jets 4:07 Beastie Boys with vocals by Biz Markie!  Everyone should own this right now!
Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) 3:12 Pixies
Mr Blue Sky 5:23 Delgados ELO cover. No idea how I got this song, but I like it.
I Saw The Light 2:44 Hank Williams I'm probably less religious now than at any point in my life, but I still like me some country music songs about Jesus.
Street Fighting Man 2:55 The Ramones
Rocks Off 4:34 The Rolling Stones
Everybody Wants Some!! 5:09 Van Halen Two exclamation points!! Because everybody really does want some!!
Gold 7:23 Prince He's tried to duplicate "Purple Rain" a few times, but this one comes the closest.
 I Wanna Destroy You 2:31 Uncle Tupelo
I love Livin In the City 2:12 Fear This song never fails to crack me up.
Lost in the Supermarket 3:47 The Clash
I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine 2:29 Elvis Presley "I get my lovin' in the evening time."
The Rebirth of the Countess 2:01 Lordi I adore these monster-costumed Finns, and this is the only one of their songs that I actually find kind of creepy.
Every Time You Say Goodbye 3:18 Alison Krauss & Union Station "just like my tears, fallin' down like rain on the ground."
Rainfall 2:44 The Apples in Stereo
Waltz #3 4:40 Elliott Smith Probably a rainy day mix cliche at this point, but I like it anyway.
Mystery Train 2:26 Elvis Presley
Tokyo Storm Warning 6:26 Elvis Costello & The Attractions
The Hawg, Part One 2:54 Eddie Kirk Obscure Stax track I discovered in the box set (Thanks, Eric and Karl!).  I suppose Eddie's instructions to "Root!" disqualify this as an instrumental, but if they didn't, it would be tied with "Walk Don't Run" as best instrumental ever.  Dig the drums on this track!  Outta site!  I posted this on mog.com a while back where I think you can probably still hear it.
Unchained 3:29 Van Halen
Johnny Come Lately 4:10 Steve Earle featuring the Pogues!  Love it, even with the bad chronology (if you fought in Vietnam, it was pretty unlikely that your granddaddy fought in WWII)
Baby Britain 3:14 Elliott Smith
Die You Zombie Bastards 3:25 Count Smokula Brilliant song, absolutely shit movie I had to turn off after 6 minutes, which, if you know my tolerance for bad horror movies, is really saying something.
Stack O'Lee 2:58 Mississippi John Hurt
I Wanna Be Your Dog 3:05 Uncle Tupelo
21 Reasons 5:41 Frank Black
It's True That We Love One Another 2:43 The White Stripes
Substitute (Single Version) 3:48 The Who
No Go 3:03 The Ramones
Mas Y Mas 4:45 Los Lobos
Space Angel 3:23 Human Zoo
Keep on the Sunny Side 2:54 The Carter Family
If It Takes All Night 3:20 Frank Black
Raw Power 4:16 Iggy And The Stooges It's sure to come a-runnin' to you.  Despite the weather.
Nearly Lost You 4:10 Screaming Trees
 She's Always In My Hair 3:27 Prince Prince's best B-side.  Absolutely killer song. Baffled as to why it never made it onto an album.
Sparky's Dream 3:15 Teenage Fanclub

Year One

Suzanne and I took advantage of our temporary kid-free status and saw Year One over the weekend. 

This movie has been lambasted by critics, but we both really enjoyed it.  It's pretty much exactly what you think it is--Jack Black being Jack Black, Michael Cera being Michael Cera.  Also featuring David Cross as Cain, Paul Rudd as Abel, Hank Azaria as Abraham, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Isaac, and, in what's really a star turn for a criminally underappreciated actor, Oliver Platt as the High Priest of Baal.

I suppose it's true that the movie is not pee-your-pants funny, but it is a lot of fun.  So if I wasn't roaring with laughter the whole time, I had a stupid grin on my face throughout the movie. I thought of it as kind of a cross between Spies Like Us and History of the World Part 1. Works for me!

And here's something else I enjoyed: this is quite a subversive little movie.  A lot of reviews have acted like it's really dumb to have these primitive hunter/gatherers cavorting around in Biblical times, but they've missed the whole point of the movie, which is this:  religion is stupid.

I ahven't seen a movie that so thoroughly holds religion up to ridicule since, well, maybe ever.  Our heroes encounter three distinct religions:  their own hunter/gatherer religion, early Judaism, and Baal worship.  All are shown to have ridiculous ideas and silly prohibitions that our bumbling heroes break, usually intentionally, with no consequences whatsoever. 

It's very clever on the part of the filmmakers--since Judaism is the only extant religion they mock, and Jews, even the conservative nutcase ones, can pretty much take a joke, they managed to avoid the kind of huge controversy that would have ensued if the conservative nutcase Christians thought they were being made fun of.

I give it a big thumbs up--not brilliant, but a fun night at the movies.

Boston to Alice Hoffman: Alice Who?

I've been intrigued by the recent controversy on twitter.  This one concerns one Alice Hoffman, who apparently is a best-selling novelist, though I can't say I've ever read one of her books.  I saw the movie based on her YA novel Aquamarine.  It was putrid, but that doesn't really say much about the source material.  I guess another one of her books was made into a Sandra Bullock movie.

So, okay, ol' Alice has had a whole lot of success.  Each of those movies is a six-figure payday, and that's on top of whatever she makes in advances, which is probably quite a bit if she's a reliable brand.  I say all of this to point out two things. 1.) I am jealous of her and 2.) she's not some struggling writer, suffering for her art. Nor is she new to the whole publishing and reviewing process.

And yet she went completely apeshit over this review in yesterday's Boston Globe.  It's not a positive review, and I suppose there's too much plot summary, but it's really pretty respectful as these things go.

Not so respectful, though, was Alice's twitter stream after she got her Globe and, presumably, at least two cups of coffee too many.  Gawker walks you through, tweet by tweet, here. There's a lot to hate: posting your reviewer's contact info and hoping sycophantic fans will complain for you; dissing Boston as a town where a barking dog is the second biggest news story; (stupid, especially because it has no bearing on whether the book sucks or not.  If one needs to be from New York in order to appreciate Alice's genius, why on earth does she permit her books to be sold to us rubes in other places?); and, yes, the "I am woman, hear me roar" pseudo-feminist defense.  (Way to go, Alice!  Don't let that servant of the patriarchy who, um, happens to also be female, silence you!)

The received wisdom for writers is that you don't respond to negative reviews, and Alice's tweets from yesterday show the reason why:  it makes you look really pathetic.

Even more pathetic is the hackneyed non-apology she issued today, via a publicist, because apparently, after urging the reading public to harass her reviewer, she's taken her ball and gone home--she's deleted her twitter accounts, and the contact info on her website leads you only to agents and publicists.  Because we should apparently harass reviewers, but not authors. 

"I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.”

Tip!  Here's how you spot a fake apology:  it says "I'm sorry if" not "I'm sorry that."  She's not sorry that she asked fans to harass the reviewer, she's not sorry that she said crappy things about Boston, she's not sorry that she acted like a two-year-old.  She's only sorry if any of this offended anyone. 

Not to worry, Alice!  I'm not offended!  But I am sorry if I won't be reading any of your books in the future.

Battle of the Idiots

If you've been paying attention to real news for some reason, you may have missed the Perez Hilton vs. Will.i.am throwdown.

In brief, they had words, and Perez claims that somebody in Mr. I.am's entourage punched him in the face.  Seems pretty clear that somebody punched him in the face, but of course Will denies that part.

Aside from occasioning a number of really lame "Boom Boom Pow" jokes, this little dust-up provoked two stupid, self-serving videos from the principals.  Here's Perez's video . If you can make it through all 11 minutes, you must have even less of a life than I do.  And here's Will.i.am's , which is shorter, but which I still couldn't watch all of.

I have no opinion about whether this happened like either of these guys say it did--they each cast themselves as the rational, calm one while the other one was out of control. 

I do want to take issue with something in Perez's video, though.  He goes on and on and on about how people can say anything they want, but no one should ever hit anyone. 

I agree about the whole violence is wrong part, but I'm not sure that there's as hard of a boundary between verbal violence and physical violence as Perez suggests.  If you look at Perez in his video, he's hurt, angry, and humiliated.  It's not the pain of his clearly very minor injuries that sticks with him--it's the humiliation. 

Do you think anyone has ever felt such humiliation upon seeing their doctored photo on Perez's site, accompanied by his bitchy prose?  I do not think he deserved to get punched, but I don't think you can make a career out of hurting people and then suddenly get all shocked when you get hurt. 

Words are powerful.  Nobody would write if they didn't believe this.  I think most people, other than those who have been the victim of serious violent crimes, of course, would tell you that the hurts they still feel most keenly even after years have elapsed have come from things people have said to them.

I say this as a former bully--since I was physically small and weak, I thought of myself as a victim, when actually my nasty, sarcastic mouth inflicted a lot of emotional harm on people. I couldn't have beaten anyone up, at least not anyone in my general age bracket, but that doesn't mean I didn't hurt people. 

Again, I'm not justifying anybody punching anybody.  I'm just saying that people who use words to hurt people really can't get high and mighty about how moral they are in comparison to people who use fists to hurt people.

Well, ten days since my last post! Both of my loyal readers must be wondering what's happening!

Not much, which may be why I'm not blogging much.  My writing seems to go in a feast or famine cycle--either I'm working on 2 books, 2 blog entries, and an essay all at once, or I've got nothing much going on.

Also, it may well be that twitter is killing my blogging.   It's actually somewhat challenging to me--it turns out that many things I want to tell the world can, in fact, be boiled down to 140 characters, which calls into question this entire blogging enterprise. (wanna follow me on twitter?  all the cool kids are doing it!)

Or possibly I'm still smarting from arguing with a humorless zealot on the interwebs.  Which is of course like banging your head against a brick wall--the wall doesn't care, and it feels good when you stop.

It may also be the fact that my dog has been recovering from surgery.  I often find myself talking to fellow dog walkers about various pop cultural phenomena, and those ideas often make it into the blog

Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Anyway, enough metablogging. 

My wife and I sat down to watch The Bad Seed the other night, and may I say, holy crap, what a movie!  (Here is the trailer, which apparently predates the idea that trailers should make you want to see the movie.  Still, it will give you a lil' taste of the flavor of the movie)

Now, I've seen evil kid movies before, but this one really took me by surprise because of the psychological realism.  So it's not enough that the evil titular character kills a classmate (in a fashion most awesomely cruel that only comes out at the end)--we actually see the dead kid's mom, half-mad with booze and grief, show up and spill her raw emotions all over the place. 

This was actually a bit hard for me to watch--it poked me in uncomfortable parental places--but it impressed the hell out of me because it was fundamentally more serious than a lot of movies like this. Most movies that involve death don't really deal with the messy grieving process of the people left behind, and this one did.

Adding to the psychological realism was the way the mom dealt with discovering that her kid was a sociopath.  She was genuinely tormented and never stopped loving the kid, which also felt authentic. 

Great performances and far less stilted acting than you often see in old movies,and the music is great--they use the little angel's piano practice melody to great and creepy effect.

Yes, there are some quibbles--long, dull scenes discussing the possibility of children being  born bad, which were interesting only in a historical sense--they really show how different our understanding of things like that is now.  A couple of characters talk about how it's just complete hogwash to imagine that anything other than environment is involved in shaping character, and this newfangled idea that heredity might be involved is just crazy.

And--SPOILER-- the last three minutes of the movie should really be chopped out.  It's clear that because it was 1956, they were afraid to have evil triumphant at the end of the movie as it obviously should be.  Again, it shows what a different world this movie takes place in.  After decades of movies where the bad guy lives to fight another day, or evil triumphs entirely, we're used to the idea, but apparently it was so shocking in 1956 that they actually had to have an almost literal Deus Ex Machina ending, as the Bad Seed (her name was Rhoda, but that name will always belong to Valerie Harper in my mind) is struck by lightning, as though the presence of such evil in the world was such an abomination that the Lord himself decided to eliminate her.

Fight to the Death!

Finally just finished Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games.  I've written before about its similarity to Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, but now that I've read them both, it's time to throw them into the arena for a head to head battle to the death.  Only one book survives! (And may I add, man, this would be a lot easier if I knew how to do columns on this blog.)

Round One:  Originality

Battle Royale, a tale of teens forced to fight each other to the death in a dystopian future by a totalitarian government, hits print in 1999.

The Hunger Games, a tale of teens forced to fight each other to the death in a dystopian future by a totalitarian government, arrives in 2009. 

Battle Royale 1, Hunger Games 0

Round Two: Characters

Battle Royale features cardboard characters who never seem real.

Hunger Games features skillfully drawn, interesting, three dimensional characters.

Battle Royale 1, Hunger Games 1.  (ooh, this is getting interesting!)

Round Three: Prose Styling

Battle Royale is so poorly written it's hard not to cringe on every page. Wooden dialogue abounds, and the book features this, the single worst simile I've ever read.  During a car chase, "The truck spun around like a car in a car chase." 

Hunger Games is very well written throughout, thus allowing the reader to get lost in the story and not be distracted by the colossal ineptitude of the prose styling.

Battle Royale 1, Hunger Games 2!

Round Four: Moral Quandaries.

Battle Royale:  I've said this before , but one of the things I most admired about this book was the way in which it made all of the things that merely seem like life-or-death issues to 14-year-olds actually be life-or-death issues.  Since it's a class that's been together for years that is forced to fight to the death, all the alliances and old hurts resulting from crushes and tween/teen cliquishness become key to the action.

Hunger Games: Overall, I felt that the main characters never really have to confront the moral quandaries involved in what they are doing. Through a variety of plot contrivances, the kills we see end up fairly clean from a moral perspective.  I think this is a missed opportunity.

Battle Royale 2, Hunger Games 2!

Round Five: Gore

Battle Royale: Incredible, stomach-churning gore all over the place.  Every kill described in vivid, technicolor, blood-spattered detail. To the point where it's over the top and starts to seem like a desperate plea for attention on the part of the author.

Hunger Games: Some descriptions of wounds dripping pus, but, overall, the book is pretty clean.  I think this is actually a weakness--I think killing should be gross.  I think the violence is a little too clean, which makes it somewhat dishonest.

No points awarded this round.

Battle Royale 2, Hunger Games 2!

Round Five: Editing

Battle Royale, despite taking place over three days, clocks in at a staggering 624 pages.  It's just way way too long.

Hunger Games: A comparatively trim 374 pages

Battle Royale 2, Hunger Games 3!

Round Six: Putdownability

Battle Royale:  Definitely a compelling read, but I had to take a lot of breaks, primarily to rest my brain from all the bad writing.

Hunger Games: Compelling doesn't even begin to cover it.  I read this faster than I've read books half as long.  I simply couldn't put it down.

Battle Royale 2, Hunger Games 4!

Round Seven:  Sequel Hunger

Battle Royale: Ends with definite sequel potential, but I really don't think I would pick up the sequel.  Without the kill-or-be-killed scenario that carries this book, I don't think you'd have much left.

Hunger Games: The sequel, Catching Fire, is already making the rounds in advance reader copies.  I can't wait to pick it up and find out what happens next.

Battle Royale 2, Hunger Games 5!

The Victor:  The Hunger Games!

And so, with the sun setting over the arena where our books had been unjustly shipped to battle to the death, Hunger Games stood victorious over the immobile body of Battle Royale. Hunger Games pulled out its knife and sliced Battle Royale open, pulling the steaming intestines from its abdomen.  With deliberate cruelty, it unwound the intestines and streteched them tight, then wrapped them around Battle Royale's windpipe and slowly squeezed the life out of the unworthy book.

The Hunger Games stood over the bloody corpse of its dead opponent and loosed a cry to the heavens.  A cry of triumph, certainly, but also of pain at the horror it had been forced to endure, and of impotent rage at the authorities that had forced it to become something it never wanted to:   a cold-blooded murderer.

Hey, that was fun!  Let's do it again sometime!  Suggest other competitors if you have some good ideas!

How To Save Publishing

Okay, so I woke up this morning having just had a brilliant dream about how to save publishing.

It's much later now, and the dream has mostly faded, and maybe it was one of those ideas that seemed brilliant in the dim crepuscular light of early morning but which isn't actually brilliant at all. 

But, anyway, here it is.  I think we need small publishers to establish themselves as lifestyle brands.  With merch and stuff.  I mean, we've got plenty of lifestyle brands, where people are dying to announce their affiliation with a brand because of what it says about them.  So, like, people will spend way too much on a Starbucks travel mug, because it says, "you know, I'm not a Dunkin' Donuts person." 

Writers, most of us anyway, can't establish ourselves as brands because we simply don't have enough product.  The most prolific of us will put out one or two books a year, and they'll be read once if at all.  Compare this to bands who can put out an album a year that people will listen to over and over again.  Also they get to tour and remind the public of their existence, and the live show is another product, and the t-shirt is yet another product.  So if writers can't really create brands that stick in the public consciousness, why can't publishers?  Right now very few publishers have any kind of brand identity at all--do you pay the slightest bit of attention to which of Bertlesmann's subsidiaries published that book you're currently reading?  Can you tell a Harper book from, say, a Random House book?

So what if you had publishers who specialized in a certain type of book, and maybe they owned some retail establishments, or maybe they were also record labels (!), and all of their products allowed consumers to feel something about themselves--I'm a hard-workin' American!  or "Je suis un citoyen du monde!" or "I'm an annoying hipster who can't shut up about Brooklyn, like anybody else in the world cares about Brooklyn!"  or whatever.

McSweeney's comes closest to this--certainly the brand has a message that is reinforced by the magazines.  But there's a lot of room in the market for different niches. Tor is trying to establish a social networking site at tor.com, but their identity is pretty much, "We publish science fiction," which I think is actually too broad.

I'm probably not explaining this incredibly well, and, so many hours after I woke up, I'm not really that sure it made any sense to begin with.  But if you can't put some half-baked idea you came up with while half-asleep on your blog, well, where can you put it?

The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Home with my sick daughter and feeling like a pile o' excrement myself, I had some time to finish Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth today.

Last week I caused a bit of a kerfuffle by suggesting that this book's cover might scare away male readers.  Apparently not seeing the boy appeal in this cover makes me some kind of horrible anti-feminist, or anti-boy, or just an idiot. 

So let me say this:  this is an action-packed thrill ride of a book that also happens to be thoughtful and well-written, two qualities that are all too rare in my beloved horror genre.  And it is poorly served by a dull cover that suggests, all questions of gender aside, that the book is dull and contemplative.  Honestly, this could have been the cover of The Shipping News or something.  I know, that's about a guy, but you know what I mean. This looks like a literary novel in which emotionally cold characters do a lot of thinking instead of a novel in which our axe-wielding heroine cuts down scores of zombies! Couldn't we at least have Gabrielle's menacing flash of red in the distance or something? 

This is an excellent horror novel.  It does not transcend its genre.  It exemplifies all the best that horror is capable of--not just cheap thrills but a real examination of issues of life and death that other genres often shy away from. It's also got a lot to chew on with regards to love, religion, and the power of stories.  I recommend it to kids of both genres or anyone who enjoys a good, suspenseful story.  No one should be scared away by the incredibly crappy cover.

Given that the blurb at the top of the back cover calls this "a postapolcalyptic romance", which I don't think is accurate, and the cover is all about wisps of blowing hair, it seems fairly clear that the publisher was trying to position this as a kind of "You've read Twilight, now read this!" book.  "It's like Twilight, only, you know, with zombies instead of vampires!"  This, again, is inaccurate and frankly looks desperate on the part of the publisher.  I don't know why they didn't have confidence in the book as it is, but you should:  it's a really good book.

Briefly, ladies and gentlemen, let us now pause and praise George Romero.  I'd be hard pressed to name a single person who's had a bigger influence on popular culture.  (But maybe one springs to your mind--leave a comment and say who it is, then!)  I think I saw this metaphor somewhere else, so apologies to whoever I'm stealing it from, but this is the man who created the sandbox that so many other artists have been playing in for 40 years.  There were movies with "zombie" in the title before Night of the Living Dead--movies like White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie, which is fantastic, but the shuffling undead hungry for your flesh who can turn you with a bite is Romero's invention.  In addition to his own living dead movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Untitled Dead Sequel Currently Filming in Toronto), he essentially created the universe in which the following movies take place:  Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Fido, Quarantine, the forthcoming Dead Snow (with Nazi zombies.  Nazi zombies, I say!  I want to see this right now!) and the Resident Evil movies, which spring from the Resident Evil videogame.  Other videogames that I know of are House of the Dead 1-3, Left 4 Dead, and the iphone's wonderfully addictive Zombieville USA.  I'm sure there are many more as well.  Books include Nightshade Books' Living Dead anthology, Max Brooks' World War Z, the amazing comic book series The Walking Dead, and Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

You get the idea. Usually we wait until somebody dies to praise them and their body of work, but let's not do that with George Romero, okay?  If you've enjoyed any of the above entertainments, you owe hours of fun to George Romero's imagination. He rocks.

Finally, a quibble about the book.  SPOILERS!  THIS PART IS ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY READ THE BOOK!  GO READ IT AND COME BACK!

Despite another blurb on the back advertising this as "sexy" (I disagree), sex is absent to a pretty weird degree in this book.  When Travis is sick and Mary hides in his bed and straddles him briefly on her way out, yeah, we can feel the heat.  But then later, in their 3-story home, they live together, and it's not clear whether they've done it.  Sexual congress, I mean, not zombie killing.

Anyway, given their whole forbidden love thing, it seems odd that when they are finally alone with only a dog for company, Mary and Travis are not all over each other all the time.  To be fair, this may have been mentioned in passing, but I was reading very quickly.  I guess I expected a few pages about how, alone at last, they finally got biz-ay.  This is not just because I'm a perv, but because in the context of what's come before, it seems odd that we don't even really see them kiss here, that their love doesn't appear to have a physical dimension at all.  I know a lot of publishers are very leery of sex in YA books for fear that librarians in areas where thoughtful people live in fear of religious fanatics won't stock the books, so this may well have been an editorial decision.  Given the Twilight fetish in the marketing, they may have wanted to put out another abstinence fable. 

I would like to see more models of responsible, loving sexual behavior in YA books.  In the current climate, it seems it's  okay to write about sexual assault, or sexual behavior as a pathology that must be overcome, but not just the regular old sex that so many teens engage in. 

Graduation Speech

                       Last night I delivered the graduation speech at my alma mater, Seven Hills School in Cincinnati.  Here's the speech.

                        Good evening class of 2009, students, faculty, staff, parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends.  It’s a thrill for me to be here tonight.

                        If anyone had told me twenty-three years ago that I would one day be standing here delivering the graduation speech at Seven Hills, I would have totally believed them. 

                        This is not because I was especially arrogant—I think I was only mildly arrogant, though I suppose my classmates and teachers might dispute that—but because the education I got here led me to believe that anything was possible for me. It was years before I fully understood how incredibly rare this is. 

                        When I attended Seven Hills, we were led to believe that we mattered, that we could do anything we wanted, and that what we did would probably be great. This, unfortunately, is the exact opposite of the message that most people receive from their high school education. I know this from working in a variety of high schools; many high schools are education factories in which the students are treated like numbers at best or criminals at worst.

                        So.  Those of us who graduate from Seven Hills start with a tremendous advantage over most of the world.  I’m not talking about money here—I had none when I graduated, and I don’t have much now—I’m talking about the point of view that life offers endless possibilities, the idea that the entire world is full of doors that are open for you.  I know that this probably just seems normal to you, but believe me, it isn’t.  Most people look at the world and see a whole bunch of closed doors.  I would argue that starting out with such tremendous advantages implies for us an obligation to help everybody else see the doors as open to them and perhaps to help them walk through. 

                        But this is a celebration, so I’m not going to wag my finger at you about how you should devote your lives, or at least a substantial chunk of your future income, to serving people less fortunate than you.  Well, not much anyway.  Wag, wag, wag, please try to spread some of that sense of possibility, that sense that every person matters, to people who have had their importance negated at every turn.  Please remember when you see people who are struggling that it’s very hard to succeed when everyone and everything in your life has told you that you don’t matter, and please try to help out. Thank you.

I know you’ve all got parties to get to, so I’ll try to be brief with the rest of this.  I can, as most graduation speakers do, give you advice and platitudes all night, but what I do best is tell stories, so, because I’m the guy at the podium, I’m going to tell you mine.  

Let’s return to 1986, shall we?  Facing down graduation from Seven Hills, I was panicked about which college to choose.  Because if you don’t choose the college that is exactly right for you, and get chosen by them in turn, your life is over! 

So I visited a bunch of colleges and applied to a bunch of colleges, and I picked the one that felt good with a name that would allow my mom to brag.  Also, it was a really nice day when I visited.

Once I got to college, I had to pick a major.  Because if you don’t pick the right major, you’ll never get the one career that will make you happy, and then your life will be over!

I ended up picking English for the following reason:  I met a guy who was in the U.S. on an exchange program from Scotland, and he told me about it, and I decided I wanted to go there. Since British college students only take classes in one discipline, I could take all English classes, finish my major in a year, and then spend my senior year of college studying whatever I wanted!  Also, I liked it and, compared to other disciplines, it was easy for me.  Since I would continue paying for college for ten years after I graduated, I figured why waste my time studying stuff I hated?

“What are you going to do with an English major?” people asked me.

“Frame it and hang it on the wall,” I answered, pretending to look down on them for their mindless careerism while secretly fearing that I was squandering my meager chance at happiness by choosing a major that would lead nowhere.

All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to teach.  Because the second annoying question people asked me about my major was whether I wanted to teach, I pretty much ruled it out from sheer contrariness.

Facing graduation from Penn, I had no idea what I was going to do, and I was terrified.  My classmates were getting accepted to law school, getting jobs with a future, and getting on with their lives, while I had no idea what I wanted to do, much less how to get there.  What if I made the wrong choice?  I would squander my meager chance at happiness!

Well, some people in the international programs office where I worked were setting up a program to send graduates to Taiwan to teach English. This was in April, and they needed someone to leave for Taiwan at the beginning of June.  Well, fortunately, I had nothing else planned, so I, along with the woman who would later become my wife, went to Taiwan to teach English.

I was excited beyond belief about the possibility of living in Asia for six months; I was less excited about the teaching part.  But, I figured having to do some job I hated was a pretty small price to pay for an opportunity like this. I was familiar with doing work I didn’t enjoy in order to do stuff I did enjoy: I’d worked summers at an insurance company in order to have some ready cash to go to Reds games and on dates (sadly, many more Reds games than dates) for the last four summers.

Except for this:  it turned out I loved teaching.  So, finally, at age 21, halfway around the world, I had a vague idea what I was going to do with my life.  I would teach, and the brilliant thing about this was that I could spend the summers writing, and soon I’d be a famous writer guy!

Well, the problem was, I couldn’t even be a teacher right away.  I returned home in 1991 to the first Bush recession.  I had missed most of the deadlines to apply for graduate school, and since I hadn’t majored in education, I had no teaching credential.  Fortunately, I had a degree from an Ivy League university which allowed me to get a job that really used my skills and talents:  sorting the mail at a computer company.  Well, that job did involve extensive use of the alphabet, which, after all, is the cornerstone of an English major. 

But that was okay, because having a not-very demanding day job allowed me lots of time and energy to pursue my writing.  I wrote a series of thematically complex short stories in which I explored the following ideas:  sex is fun and work is not. Shockingly, none of the publications I submitted to could perceive my genius, and I accumulated stacks of rejections. 

I know the typical writer narrative goes that I was sure of my talent and my dream and I was undeterred by rejections, but the truth is, I was deterred by rejections.  It seemed I wasn’t as good at this as I’d thought, so I gave up.

Finally I got into grad school. I had, at that point, lived my whole life in cities, and I was just starting to understand all the advantages I’d gotten from my Seven Hills education that so many of my classmates from Clifton Elementary School were denied at their middle and high schools.  I wanted to spread some of that sense of possibility, so I decided I wanted to work in an urban school.  I was one of the only volunteers to do student teaching in the Boston Public Schools, so I was all set to be an urban education warrior. 

Except I didn’t get hired in any urban schools.  I ended up getting a job fifty miles from my home.  A job that did not pay me enough for me to afford to pay my student loans and have a car.  So I took the subway 40 minutes, then hopped in another teacher’s car and rode for 45 minutes to school.  And was teaching by 7:40 every morning. 

As soon as summer came, I found my plan to write thwarted by complete mental and creative exhaustion.   And, anyway, I’d already gotten an official stamp of disapproval from many publications, so there wasn’t much point in writing because I clearly wasn’t any good at it.

Well, after five years of teaching, I finally found my way into an urban school.  I was married to my best friend, we had a beautiful baby girl, and I was working where I wanted to work.  After three years of living upstairs from a folk singer with serious anger management issues, we had moved out and found a much better place to live. Writing had been a youthful dream that died, but, finally, after all these years, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with both my professional and personal life, and I was doing it.  Life was perfect.

And then my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

I remember very clearly the weekend when we were waiting for the test results, feeling very keenly the fact that our entire life together was balanced on a knife edge.  If it’s not cancer, I thought, we’ll continue along just as we have been, and we’ll occasionally reminisce about the cancer scare and what a horrible weekend that was.  And if it is cancer, that will be the day that our lives change forever, and the weekend of worrying won’t be just a bump in the road but the beginning of whatever comes next.

So, it was the beginning of what came next, and what came next was three years of uncertainty.  Or, rather, certainty that neither Kirsten nor I could face until the very end. I’m not going to take you through all the ups and downs of those three years, because it’s depressing, if also funny and heartwarming, and there’s a lot to tell that simply wouldn’t fit here.  Really, I could write a book about it.

Oh, wait—I did.  Kirsten suggested that I write about my experience during her treatment, primarily I think because she had neither the energy nor the inclination to listen to me fret about about her.  So I wrote some chapters and sent them off to some friends.  One of my friends, fellow 7 Hills alum Daniel Sokatch, who won just about every award one can win at our graduation despite never having completed all of his senior challenges, not that I’m bitter, knew a literary agent and asked if he could send my chapters to the agent. I said fine, and two weeks later I had a contract with Random House.  After all of my unsuccessful struggles to get published in my 20’s, I got handed a book deal with almost no effort on my part ten years later.  If it hadn’t come out of the worst experience of my life, I would have felt guilty about how easy it was.

Once I knew that someone would actually read what I wrote, not to mention pay me for it, I was off to the races, which is why I’ve written ten books in the last nine years.

Kirsten died in 2003, just over three years after her diagnosis.  I was fortunate to be able to take some time to write full time, which really meant grieving one third of the time, writing one third of the time, and parenting the other third of the time.  I was 35 and widowed, but I had a plan: I would grieve for a respectable period, at least a year, then play the field with bespectacled cuties for a decade or so and ultimately settle for someone I could comfortably and boringly grow old with when I hit my mid 40’s.

Seven months later, I fell in love with Suzanne, a single mom who is beautiful and full of life and the furthest thing from boring I can imagine. And who wears contacts. We were married just over a year later, and now we are raising our children—my one and her two became our three—together.

This was an amazing second chance at life that I am still grateful for every day, and when I thought about how much had changed in just a few short years, my head would spin.  I went from being a high-school teacher who had given up on writing and was married to Kirsten with one kid to being a full-time writer married to Suzanne with three kids. 

I was happier than I ever really imagined I could be again, and I felt and still feel incredibly lucky.  And the whole thing still feels kind of surreal to me.

So I was planning to be a full time writer for the rest of my life, because it is an incredibly sweet gig, never let anyone tell you different.  I worked three hours a day, took the dog on long walks, worked out, napped every afternoon, vacationed whenever I wanted, and answered to no one, except for my wife Suzanne who always wondered why I couldn’t squeeze more--or, let’s be honest, any--housework into my packed schedule.

I missed forming relationships with my students, but I didn’t miss grading stacks of papers, having to be civil to a room full of sullen teens at 7:30 in the morning, and beating the love of reading out of students by dragging them through works of literature they hated. 

So I had it all planned out.  Except two things happened.  One was that I started to get bored.  I missed having contact with other humans, and I really missed the daily sense I had when I was teaching that my work mattered.  The other was that my books weren’t selling enough copies to keep me solvent, and I was going broke. 

                        So I began a half-hearted job search and almost immediately landed a job at the best place I’ve ever worked, a program where I get to work with motivated students, do work that matters, work alongside smart, funny, caring people, and basically get a lot more wins than I have in any other urban setting.

                        I’m still alive, so that’s not where the story ends, but that’s where I’m going to stop it for tonight.  I have four conclusions.  You, of course, have been well-trained by your English and History teachers, so you may draw your own. They will expect your thousand-word papers on my desk on Monday morning.

                        1.)I almost never had a plan when everybody else was running around telling me I had to have a plan.  And things worked out okay anyway.  I wish I hadn’t let their panic and insecurity affect me. In the immortal words of the Ramones, “next time, I’ll listen to my heart.”

                        2.)When I did have a plan, when I thought I had it all figured out, everything changed immediately, and I suddenly didn’t have it figured out anymore.

                        3.)Life hands you happy surprises as well as horrible ones.  You can’t prepare for either kind. All you can do is try to adapt. 

                        4.)Life is unpredictable, paradoxical, ironic, and occasionally cruel.  So be nice to people.  In the end, that’s really the only thing that matters. 

                        Thank you.  Be safe tonight, be nice to people, and enjoy the amazing universe of possibility that awaits you.

And They Wonder Why Boys Don't Read

Finding myself in possession of a generous bookstore gift card, I went out Monday night and stocked up on YA books. 

This is because, career-wise, YA is where the action is for me, but also, YA books require less of an investment than adult novels, and they tend to get right into the action and not waste my time with the author showing off their sentence-crafting skills or setting the scene for twenty pages.  (Exception:  Twilight, where nothing happens for the first 250 pages.)

One of the books I bought was Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, because my twitter pals and the people on the librarian list I subscribe to have been talking for months about how awesome it is. Oh yeah, and it's about zombies.  I haven't read a good zombie novel since Max Brooks' World War Z.

I scanned the YA shelves until I got to the R's.  And here's what I found:

Are you freaking kidding me?  This is a zombie book! You might as well have hung a sign on the cover that says, "NO BOYS ALLOWED WITHIN 10 FEET OF THIS BOOK!" 

Honestly.  Publishers say boys don't read, and they don't know how to correct this, and blah blah blah, and here's a book with obvious both-gender appeal (female heroine, but it's about frickin zombies, people!), and it sports a cover that makes it look not only girly, but also boring.  Even as an adult man who is quite secure in his masculinity, I was reluctant to buy this when I saw the cover.  Perhaps, I thought, it's not as awesome as I've heard!  Why would they put such a lame cover on an awesome book!

Here's hoping the paperback will feature a rotting shambler with fresh intestines hanging out of his mouth and a still-beating heart in his hand.