blogorrhea

There is an amazing episode of "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" coming out this week, of which I've seen a preview. Neil Patrick Harris as the villainous "Music Meister" is simply brilliant. I had no idea he has such a fantastic singing voice. I think it is premiering on Cartoon Network tomorrow (Friday, 10/23, 7:30 p.m.) night.

I've been watching this because Ethan is obsessed with CartoonNetwork.com, and turned me on to this preview, which I viewed a couple of days ago with him.

Truth: I was stunned to hear that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this year. I mean, has he actually done anything worthy of the Peace Prize yet? I think not. Which makes one wonder why he was awarded this most prestigious prize. I've heard pundits say it's because of the promise that he shows. Okay. I kinda get that, although I don't agree with it.

What I think is that we of the isolated United States of America have seriously underestimated how much the rest of the world absolutely despised President George W. Bush and his policies. And they are so ecstatically happy that his administration is no longer in power that it's possible the Nobel Peace Prize would have been awarded to any U.S. President who followed GW Bush. Yes, I believe the sentiments were that strong around the world.

Women have sexual power. Men do, too, but for some reason, women's sexual power is threatening to men. I'm speaking in generalizations, of course.

I've read hundreds of historical romances over the past 9 months, mostly taking place in England or Scotland. They usually play out thusly: Girl and boy meet, sparks fly, passion ensues, boy can't live without girl because of her newly discovered wanton ways (she was a virgin, of course, or a previously unfulfilled widow), boy desperately desires to possess girl, girl succumbs and marries boy, now she's his property and gestating his babies, the end.

What's up with that?

I totally understand that in the period settings of these books, when a woman married a man English law decreed that the woman and all of her worldly goods became the property of her husband. And I think this possession primarily had to do with the sexual power that men felt that women held over them. So men, who always held the political power, used whatever means necessary to make sure that women never held any real power. The society matrons in these books always have the power to decide who's allowed to enter the hallowed upper echelons, but this kind of power seems petty and meaningless to me. In some of these books, there are wives of political men who delicately and cleverly manipulate situations to benefit their spouse or political party, but they usually have to resort to flirting, sexual innuendo and outright affairs in order to get what they want.

And this pisses me off. I've heard a statistic that the romance genre is 40% of the consumer book market in the U.S. Here's one that seems more reasonable to me -- "Romance fiction was the largest share of the consumer market in 2008 at 13.5 percent", according to the Romance Writers of America. And something like 78% of the readers of romances are women.

Historically, men can't stand women having any kind of power. Women are physically weaker than men. Before the 20th century, women weren't permitted to become educated; if they pursued knowledge through books and formal education, they were derided and often outcast from society. Nevermind that there have been female British monarchs who often turned out to be far stronger than the male monarchs.

So a woman's power often is reduced to the only thing she does have control over, and that's her sexuality. And sexuality is definitely a powerful weapon, when wielded or used as a deterrent. I think most women still feel as if their primary power is their sexuality, which is why romance books appeal to women. They're looking for strong female characters, which abound in romance books; it's unfortunate that many of these female characters primarily use their sexuality to achieve their ends.

Which makes me think about what exactly is sexual power. I'm starting to believe that sexuality may be the greatest power of all. Men have created and used an abundance of killing machines, they've wielded intellectual and political power to make others bend to their will, but it's sexual power -- whether used by men or women -- that dominates all other powers. Maybe it's the drive to procreate, the perpetuation of the species, that propels us to brandish our individual sexual powers.

And now back to men wanting to control women's sexual powers. They feel threatened by this weapon of mass destruction and will do anything to tame those holding the power. The irony is that it's only a threatening weapon if one treats it that way. Take the Taliban. They will do anything to subjugate women, take away their sexual power. They (and other religious zealots of all persuasions) are terrified of women's sexual power. So they resort to desperate and, frankly, immoral measures to keep women down. But they're validating women's sexual power by their actions.

Hmmmm.

OK. I'm definitely going to see "Bright Star", a film by Jane Campion about John Keats. Can you believe that he died at age 25? I have read bits and pieces of his poetry, but am now committed to reading "Endymion".

So what if it's been months (three, but who's counting?) since I blogged? Life got in the way, and I didn't feel like writing. I actually started working, part-time, for San Francisco Unified School District, as a trainer in the IT department. It's a fantastic job and I'm loving it.

Summer 2009 has been a pretty fantastic summer. Besides finally doing work that I love (and get paid for!), I started writing poetry and began some rough outlines for two completely different books. The year 2009 will go down as the year that Corey finally rediscovered her love of reading. I've been reading voraciously since January, thanks to my good friend Maureen McGowan. And here's the confession: I've been reading all sorts of stuff, but mainly the dreaded romances. Maureen turned me on to this genre, AKA "bodice-rippers", a genuinely disparaging term if I've ever heard one. There must be a reason why this genre is 40% of the total book market in the US.

Most of the writing I've read this year is not good. I have needed to read many different authors for comparisons, and to develop my own sense of what I like about this genre and what I don't. There are some true gems out there. Some of these gems have copious amounts of descriptive sex, some have very little or none. It's not the sex that makes a good read. For me it's the depth of character development, startling or terribly interesting plotlines, and not telegraphing what a reader should feel by describing in too much detail what is going on in a character's head. I'm looking for more subtlety, more nuance, greater variety in the interpretation. Leave it up to the me, the reader, to decide what I think about what's happening. Frankly, a well-written book is a well-written book, no matter how some book publisher decides to categorize it.

There's a rule that true romances are supposed to end "happily ever after". These books can be satisfying for a moment, like a crack habit, but they leave me strangely empty. I actually like the books that are somewhat unresolved. I've also decided that I don't really enjoy the thriller romance, where there's murder and intrigue. These are too boilerplate for me. At first I was reading paranormal, urban fantasy, and had a deep disdain for historical romances. I've since completely changed my mind, and happily. Reading historical romances has led me to other reading -- actual history books. Recently I've checked out books from the library on history and social life in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. And two books on English missionaries from the 1800s. I picked up a novel based in Singapore and one based in India. I've been inhaling books as if they're air and I can't live without them.

So here's a list of writers I've truly enjoyed this year, and a smattering of books from others:

Robin Hobb (not a romance writer, but I love her Farseer and Fool books)
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander series, really excellent)
Jude Deveraux
Laura Kinsale (has only written a handful of books, but they are things of beauty)
Sherry Thomas (new author, three published books to her name, all fantastic)
Joanna Bourne
Madeline Hunter
Lisa Kleypas
Gaelen Foley
Anna Campbell (has three books, all angst-ridden. Love it.)
Laura Lee Gurhke
Meredith Duran
Connie Brockway
Mary Balogh (The Secret Pearl, especially)
Eloisa James (I loved Duchess by Night)
Megan Hart's Broken (erotica, very explicit, but necessary to the story)
Iain Banks (definitely not romance, and not for the faint-hearted)
Robin Schone (Scandalous Lovers, Cry for Passion -- both are feminist works)

This voracious reading habit has given my mind so much to work with. I have to credit my reading habit with sparking my creativity. I haven't ignored the rest of my life, although my family might disagree, because I always seem to have my nose buried in a book or my iPhone (where I read many of my books). I may not keep the cleanest house, but I'm pretty sure we're all happy. Nat and I have found plenty of time to play video games together (primarily Monster Hunter), I still spend 2 days a week with Ethan plus the weekends, and Brian's been busy doing his things, especially with the SF Motorcycle Club. It's all good.

Brian and Ethan just came back from a kid birthday party in Dolores Park, SF. Sometime during the party Ethan had to take a -- coughs indelicately -- crap in the public toilets. Apparently not to be recommended, because Brian compared them to the former Athens airport toilet accommodations, which I strongly recall, and not in a good way. We briefly visited the Athens airport (Hellinikon) in 1993, and at the time Brian said it looked like they'd been slaughtering sheep in the public bathrooms.

Fortunately, there's a relatively new Athens airport, opened in 2001, that is much cleaner and receives good reviews. The magical interweb was the obvious source of this info, as was my discovery of the other WTO -- the World Toilet Organization. Each year there's a World Toilet Summit, this year being held in Singapore which, incidentally, has the airport (Changi) that received the 2008 Golden Pillow award from the website Sleeping in Airports.

For some reason, I'm fascinated with this other WTO. This is an entirely new world I've never even considered.

This sentence from page 71 of Iain M. Banks's The Algebraist made me laugh out loud:

"It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed that they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe."

This book is filled with these kinds of gems.

Nat turned 13 yesterday. 9:43 p.m., a Thursday night, after 44 hours of labor; these facts are burned into my brain for as long as I live. It's been a sweet 13 years with him. He's a beautiful person. Nat is thoughtful, loving, possesses a great sense of humor and comic timing, intelligent, and a calming presence. He has an understanding of many things before I do.

I hope the next six years of his teenage-hood treat him well. These may be the most difficult years of his life, with learning how to be an independent person, breaking away from his family, formulating his own identity and ideas, and gaining the confidence to be himself. Whoever he may be. Whatever he desires to be. He has the whole world in his hands, his whole life ahead of him, and I hope he's up to the task.

Nevermind the confidence-shattering peer issues. So far, he seems to be confident deep within and not subject to the whims of others. He loves his family, he loves his friends, he loves his life. And we love him.

I am not a weepy person. Not in the least. I never cry during movies. I didn't cry when either of my kids was born. It's just not my thing. Yet in the past few months I've cried during a video game (Lost Odyssey). And now I'm weeping over some fantasy books, written by Robin Hobb. The Farseer Trilogy knocked my socks off, even though it's written in first person. The character development is completely amazing; the world she has created is astonishing. I feel like I'm inhabiting the world as I read along. The Tawny Man Trilogy, basically a continuation of the story of the main character in the Farseer books, FitzChivalry Farseer, has been a revelation for me. Tears flow as I share the pain, agony, happiness, doubts, all emotions, of the people, seemingly real to me, in these books.

And now it's over. I'm going to read these six books all over again. Right now.

I really love using my iPhone as a portable book, for reasons I've elucidated in prior posts. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks is eye strain. I've found that it's not such a good thing to read with my glasses on, even though I have progressive lenses, which are supposed to magnify in the lower portion of my lenses. They just don't work for me. So I've been reading with my glasses off. I have increased the text size on both eReader and Kindle for iPhone, but am having problems focusing after I read for a while. Plus my eyes are getting very tired, very quickly.

If anyone has any suggestions besides going analog, please let me know. The Kindle app is not flexible, so I can't change text color/background color. eReader is better, but the book selection is not as good and more expensive.