Mayra Lazara Dole Interview: "As a teen, I was a
gay club kid. I, and my gay male best friend who posed as my boyfriend, won every gay dance contest in straight clubs."

Mayra Lazara Dole's debut novel about a Cuban-American teen's coming-out was recently named one of the Top Ten First Novels for Youth in 2008 by Booklist. Here's a bit of the ALA review for Down to the Bone from earlier this year:

The dialog is fast and funny in this debut novel, which is set in Miami?s Cuban American community. Laura?s first-person, present-tense narrative shows and tells the farce and the sorrow at home, and teens will recognize some of the traditional prejudices, as well as the joy of friendship and the happiness of real love (?my smile barely fits in my face?). Supportive precisely because it is laugh-out-loud irreverent (in one hilarious scene Laura and Soli mock their tacky quinces with their pink-ruffled gowns), this breakthrough novel is sure to be welcomed.

I thought the book was fabulous when I included in in my column last August and it has stayed with me ever since. Here's is a bit of that review:

Dole has done an excellent job of taking a moment of teen embarrassment and upping the stakes in such a way that it is clearly devastating. She doesn?t give the reader any breaks with this novel, forcing you to work your way along with Laura through all the typical teen confusions and rebellions as she follows that age-old path of personally defining herself. The Cuban American culture is on full display here, along with its own fluid language and traditions that will entrance readers unfamiliar with this world. And for GLBT readers in particular, this will quickly become a book to treasure forever. Down to the Bone is an excellent choice for teenage girls looking for a charming coming-of-age story. Keep writing Ms. Dole; there are thousands of teen readers out there who need you.

As much as I want to point the social significance of Down to the Bone, both for its Cuban American protagonist (so under represented in teen lit) and sweetly intense story about a young lesbian finding her way to acceptance of her sexuality, I don't want to suggest in any way that Mayra's book matters because it is important. Most importantly this is a well written novel with a very engaging protagonist, some wonderful supporting characters and an emotional plot that moves forward at a speed that demands the reader's attention from start to finish. You get invested in Laura's choices and her pain; you want her to find love and happiness but mostly you want her to find herself. Straight or gay, teens are going to identify with this kid and they won't want to let her go. In fact - if you're reading Mayra - it wouldn't be such a bad thing to write a sequel so we could check back in with Laura, Soli and Tazer in the future.

Mayra answered these questions over a period of a couple of weeks from her home in Miami (and yes, she is also Cuban American).

Chasing Ray: The book opens in Laura's school where everything goes to hell in a hand-basket pretty fast. Why did you set the story in a Catholic high school? Religion doesn't play a big part of the story after the opening chapter so I'm curious as to why it began there. Is it realistic to assume that in a modern Catholic high school a student would be expelled for being gay? (And I really don't know but I've been asked by a couple of readers so I wanted you to be able to explain your reasoning.)

MLD: One scene in Down to the Bone is set in a Catholic high school because most Latino kids attend Catholic or Christian private schools--traditions and religion in our culture play a large role in homophobia. While writing Down to the Bone, I emailed with a Miami Latina/o teen and young adult focus group. Most of their LGBT Latino friends in Catholic high schools are closeted and terrified of coming out to anyone who isn't gay, especially the girls. Latina/o lesbian, gay and bi boys and girls act straight and have boyfriends or girlfriends of the opposite sex. One of the girls had been expelled from a Catholic high school for being caught kissing in a bathroom stall with her girlfriend. Her parents agreed with the suspension and thought her daughter and girlfriend were degenerates who ruined her family's life--if parents had disagreed with the administration, they could have filed a suit against them and perhaps won. Another girl was kicked out of the house after she came out to her dad and was homeless for a few months until a friends' mom took her in. Laura, my main character, wasn't expelled from Catholic high school for being gay. She was kicked out of school for three reasons: 1) Abstinence is a curricular mandate in Christian high schools. Sex of any type by teens--especially homosexual sex--before marriage is unacceptable. Sister Fart-Face and Mother Superior Sicko (the nuns from hell in my book) worded Laura's expulsion carefully, so as not to get into legal trouble, but deep down, the reader knows the true reason behind Laura's expulsion 2) A confiscated love letter detailing a sizzlin' love scene with Laura's first love, Marlena, which was read to the class and to her mom and 3) Laura wouldn't tattle the name of the "degenerate" girl she'd been having wild sex with at home while her family was away. It was "tell all" or "good-bye."

Three years ago, I contacted the new administration and faculty of my old Catholic high school that kicked my first love and me out of school due to a sizzlin' love letter. They were thrilled an alumni author had emailed them. The president and many faculty members congratulated me. The administrator asked for my home address, in order to send me their past yearly Alumni magazines where I'd "find old friends" and invited me to an event. I asked them about the event and suddenly, no one responded. Weeks later, I wrote again to let them know I hadn't received the alumni magazines. No one respond. Obviously, they did the research and found that I'd been kicked to the curb for being a lesbo and wanted nothing to do with me. I wrote one last time to no response.

We've come a long way but it seems there are still hate crimes against us, such as the murder of 15-year old Lawrence King by a classmate. This makes being expelled for being LGBT sound like a bad hair day.

CR: There are very few teen books on Cuban Americans and very few on lesbians. Did you always intend to combine the two minorities into one book? And why do you think there are so few teen books on lesbian characters? I have seen far more books on gay boys than girls and I'm curious as to your thoughts on this.

MLD: I never intended to combine both minorities in one book. I'm a Miami Latina lesbian and there were zero stories set in Miami with a Latino LGBT cast--a microcosm known to few outsiders. Most Miami Cubans don't think of themselves as a "minority." Cubans built Miami and many exiles who started with nothing are academics, doctors, architects, or business people turned millionaires and even billionaires.

It astounds me that in this day and age it's still easier for people to embrace male homosexuality and find lesbianism abhorrent and disgusting, or fun and games for mens' pleasures. Gay men are more open about their sexuality and in the media are praised as "fabulous" or "elegant" with "impeccable taste." In the past, lesbians were viewed as an ugly, perverted, strange breed of granola crunching, flannel, and Birkenstock wearing creatures who acted like men, or "whores" who have sex with each other for mens' pleasures. But that's changed due to AfterEllen.com, The "L" Word, LOGO, Exes and Oh's and lesbian authors who depict lesbians as "mainstream" and as "normal" as the hets with exact universal feelings and experiences. I recently received a comment on my MySpace page from a Spanish lesbian saying Spain allows gay marriages but lesbians are still "closeted and invisible" unlike gay men who are mostly all "out" and have gay role models in famous authors, actors, doctors, etc. I was shocked when she said there isn't a single "out" lesbian author, actress, or professional in Spain. Perhaps Latina lesbians aren't as accepted as gay Latino men because women's core is supposed to be deeply rooted in motherhood and we need to be seen as the decent, loving, bearers of life, instead of as being with other women without procreation. Perhaps Latina lesbians are seen as competing with straight macho men and that's where the hatred began, along with biblical passages against gays?

In Cuba, back in the fifties, the red light district was owned by the Mafia. American men feasted on seeing two women having sex, then joined in for threesomes. The term "Tortillera"--disgusting dyke--probably stemmed from the times when women who loved women were seen as immoral, grotesque, worthless, putrid "sluts" who perverted married men and gave them STD's. Hatred against lesbians was deeply rooted and it took forever to dispel the myths, especially the biblical ones. The more we come out, the easier it will be to become mainstream and accepted.

I too am amazed about the lack of lesbian YA fiction and particularly the lack of sexual, racial and cultural diversity in YA books. Out of the fifty-million Latinas/os in the US how can I possibly be one of the only authentic, Latin American-born lesbians writing YA LGBT books?--many authors have Spanish surnames but were born in the US and don't speak a word of Spanish and have never been part of a Latino culture so I'm not sure they count as authentic "Latina/o" authors. The current trend seems to be that most Anglo kids want Anglo mainstream stories, especially "white" Vampire novels, thus Latina lesbian authors like me need to struggle harder to get our books read, accepted, and appreciated. Luckily, Down to the Bone was nominated for the ALA Best YA Book 2009, garnered a starred Booklist review, was submitted to the National Book Awards, Lambda Literary Awards, and so on. Hopefully lots of people will give it a chance and read it! : )

In the past, YA lesbian books have been written by one Anglo lesbian and one heterosexual female author. Times have changed in the Adult fiction world, though, thus there are hundreds of lesbian adult books written by lesbians.

One of my focus group's young adults is a closeted bisexual at the University studying to become a psychiatrist. She said she wouldn't be caught dead reading my book anywhere for fear of people thinking she's a lesbian. Many Latina lesbians are married to men and closeted and many teen Latina lesbians have boyfriends and plan to get married and have children. If Latina lesbians started coming out, as gay men have, and feel no fear about reading and writing lesbian books, this will have a great impact on the publishing market. Many Anglo lesbians are free of the closet thus why they're doing all the writing. I have many married-to-men Latina lesbian friends. But the most shocking of all is that I've received hundreds of emails from adult Latina lesbians in their thirties telling me about their closeted lives and how utterly difficult and devastatingly hard it is to be loved by their family if they are lesbian. Their families have pushed them away and they feel alone and terribly lonely because they are terrified to find lesbian support for fear their family will never want them back if they find out.

CR: You reveal an amazing subculture of gay and queer teens in your book. Can you explain a bit how you learned about this culture?

MLD: Ha! I'm cracking up! I never "learned" the subculture. I've lived it and am still very involved in the LGBT community! As a teen, I was a gay club kid. I, and my gay male best friend who posed as my boyfriend, won every gay dance contest in straight clubs. We'd then rush to gay clubs to be ourselves. One of my best friends is a drag queen. I hung around in underground clubs with false ID's with drag queens, tranniboys, trannies, butches, Kings, femme lezzies, etc. Also, my LGBT teen and young adult focus group keeps me abreast of everything gay happening in Miami. I'm a reality show HO, watch every lesbian program, MTV, Current TV, LOGO and I'm up on POP culture and everything LGBT teen.

CR: I think part of what I found interesting was the language in your book - all the slang/short hand the teens were using. I know this might sound lame but for someone not part of the community you wrote about (either the Cuban American or GBLT) it was interesting to see how much I have missed. Is everything in this community as it exists in Miami - in other words did you create parts of this subculture or did you present it as it exists?

MLD: I presented it as it exists. In other words, I didn't create this subculture but did add fictitious characters and invented the way they'd each speak accordingly to our culture's slang and dialect. Most people don't know that each Latino culture has its own territorial colloquialisms. Hispanics all speak basic Spanish, peppered with our culture's sayings, slang, and street talk. My ex boyfriend (yes, I had one of those) was Argentinean. Most of the time, since we both spoke in our native dialect, we had no clue what the other was saying. For example, when he'd say my "colita" looked good in tight jeans, he wasn't literally talking about my tail! When I'd say, "Oye viejo," I didn't mean "Hey old man," I mean, "Hey man!" It took a while to get used to each others' way of speaking and It was exciting for us to learn a new "language." I think the same goes for people born in the US. If you travel to England, you might not understand most of their slang. A lot of people lump Latinos together but they have no clue that our language is as varied and distinct as our foods (every Hispanic culture's cuisine is massively different from the other, just as is our dialect).

CR: Tazer is one of the most complex and fully realized characters I've ever come across in YA fiction. He confounds all generalizations and assumptions - I loved him. Can you explain how you came to create him?

MLD: I created Tazer from my deep love for differences and tolerance. If haters could like Tazer, they'd open their minds and accept people of all kinds. I love creative/good people of all kinds and I wanted to bring an intelligent, handsome, well-rounded tranniboy into my novel not only to spice things up for Laura, but to make her think about her own ingrained homophobia.

CR: My friend Jackie Parker and I were talking recently about transgender characters in YA fiction and I wanted to ask a bit more about developing Tazer. This is a character who is biologically female, views himself as male and is attracted to and dates females. You did force Laura to ask some tough questions about herself and her own views by presenting her friendship with Tazer but I really worried less about Laura and more about Tazer. He was a really fragile person in Down to the Bone - or at least wore his feelings more on his sleeve. Can you explain a little bit about how transgender teens fit into the gay teen community and how significant you think this particular character is to Laura's character development over the course of the novel?

MLD: I wrote Tazer with warm memories of a teen friend who was born with female parts and believed himself a boy born in the wrong body--his brain received mixed messages in the womb. We were close friends until he became more and more male. After being thrown out of school, had a gun to my head, ostracized, treated like a leper, and all Miami knew about me, I became terrified of being seen with gay people, especially trannies. But boy, did I miss them! Laura, like many LGBT's, lived with ingrained homophobia. Trannies fit better into the LGBT teen community these days due to Gay and Straight Alliances, LGBT teen blogs, teen documentaries, MTV, Current TV, LOGO, and programs that depict them as normal as straight kids, just "different." Of course, there are still those who'll forever see them as "freaks of nature," and hate them so much they'll hurt them. Tazer is significant to Laura's character development over the course of the novel because like her, he's a great person with a good heart. He hurts no one and yet is misunderstood. Laura sees herself in Tazer and sees her homophobic mother and homophobe friends in herself. Laura could have kept shunning Tazer, but in accepting him, she begins to accept herself.

Transgenderd teens are very frail. Most of my trannie friends growing up either committed suicide, died of drug overdoses, were homeless, accidentally killed, or died in some tragic accident. Nowadays, they have GSA"s (Gay and Straight Alliances), LGBTQ clubs, and even an LGBTQ school. Gay kids are much more accepted. As I wrote Down to the Bone, I heard a lot of American kids saying they wanted to read books where LGBT's weren't wounded and ended having tragic deaths or severe beatings. They longed to read about fun mainstream trannies without the usual hardships, so I kept Tazer "light" in comparison to what really goes in trannies' lives (I did that for Laura, too. The days of people wanting to read books such as, The Well of Loneliness, are over).

CR: There's a strong thread of middle class snobbery that runs through the book - a deep desire by Laura's family and others to fit in with what society demands regardless of the high sacrifice those standards require. I really felt sorry for Laura's mother in a way as she was just so needy and it seemed like she was never going to get what she wanted/needed. Were you revealing something about Cuban American society with this sub plot or addressing a more universal middle class theme of fitting in at all costs?

MLD: What you picked up as "middle class snobbery" is right-wing intolerance (the majority of Miami Cubans are right- wing Republicans). The common words most Cubans-Americans grow up with here are, "What will people think?" Miami is a phenomenon in that living here is like living in a Latin American Country--we're almost all Latina/o and you need to speak Spanish in order to get by, not the other way around. I am revealing something about a part of our Cuban American society and also about intolerance and ingrained homophobia in every class, but especially in Latino right-wing communities.

CR: And young love. Man - I just hurt while reading parts of this book. You really put your characters through the wringer! Do you think maybe there's some misconceptions about GBLT teens in love and their relationships? What were you trying to convey with the many romance subplots?

MLD: Oh... a big part of me wished you'd also asked about the intense humor/comedy in Down to the Bone which is important because it's a tool that helps teens cope while laughing. Teen love is conflictive, but even now that things are more open for LGBT's, love can be brutal for closeted or "coming out" young adults because they understand the prejudice, hatred, isolation and intolerance for being "different." LGBT teens, young adults, and adults coming out, deal with a lot of other issues that straights are free of, thus love will be more intense and mean a great deal more to us than to straight people.

CR: And of course the question about what you are working on next - reveal how much or little you would like (or ignore this one entirely).

MLD: I'm finishing a YA novel set in exotic, hot Miami, filled with "out" Latina lesbians, bi's, and one handsome, intelligent, and talented tranniboy.

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The original is not Laura

Ever since the story broke, I have had no opinion on Dmitri Nabokov's incertitude over the fate of The Original of Laura. Every news update and every call to honour or disobey his father's dying command left me indifferent. And rather than force an opinion out of a concern to engage with the latest literary debate, I pursued disengagement. Now that he's resolved to publish, I realise why no opinion formed: to destroy or to publish is the same act.

In its spectral, unread presence, The Original of Laura is the promise we preserve even after a novel is read and discussed. As it is, unlit, waiting to burn, unopened, waiting to be read, The Original of Laura is always the great work it can never be.

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http://this-space.blogspot.com/2008/11/original-is-not-laura.html

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Hoping for a bad review

Like Mr Orthofer at The Literary Saloon, I want to see Novel 11, Book 18, Dag Solstad's latest novel in translation. Unlike him, however, I was disappointed by Shyness & Dignity, perhaps because Paul Binding writing in the TLS said that "Solstad ... shares [Thomas] Bernhard's galvanic anger" and I had expected something more than ordinary. I would not have been interested without that brief comparison.

Reviews often have this trip-flipping effect. Melissa McClements' exasperated reading of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady was enough to make me go out and buy the book. By happy coincidence, she's reviewed Novel 11, Book 18 too. Before reading it, I braced myself with hope and anticipation for another display of offended sensibilities. "It might be a profound exploration of philosophical ideas" she concludes after a plot summary "but as a novel it?s an emotionless and unsettling read." Oh. Isn't being unsettled an emotion, and are ideas anything other than philosophical?

It's impressive how well McClements uses key words to their full potential: "profound" is here freighted with so much disdain it glows. Still, I would have welcomed an explanation of the title which is what first excited me about his work. Harvill Secker can be forgiven its health-bringing truncation of Montano's Malady for the English market by retaining such a bleak heading. Like Michael Orthofer, however, I wonder why they didn't promote it by sending a copy to European fiction's most enthusiastic Britlitblogger.

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http://this-space.blogspot.com/2008/11/hoping-for-bad-review.html

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Its like an intellectual Harry Potter

“‘This is a difficult and very sad book, and adults rarely follow a literary author?s career the way they used to,’ reckons Mr Stein. ‘It?s like an intellectual Harry Potter.’”

- Lorin Stein, editor of ?2666? at FSG quoted at The Economist

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Its like an intellectual Harry Potter

“‘This is a difficult and very sad book, and adults rarely follow a literary author???s career the way they used to,’ reckons Mr Stein. ‘It???s like an intellectual Harry Potter.’”

- Lorin Stein, editor of ???2666??? at FSG quoted at The Economist

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Guest blogger Mike Nicol of Crime Beat (South
Africa)

Despite the vibrancy of thriller and crime fiction elsewhere, not much has happened in SA crime fiction over the last five decades. Until recently that is. This isn?t exactly surprising as the cops have been more or less an invading army in the eyes of most of the citizenry since forever. Certainly, come the apartheid state in the late 1940s no self-respecting writer was going to set up with a cop as the main protagonist of a series. It was akin to sleeping with the enemy.

So to get round this, in the late 1950s, a young woman named June Drummond (and she?s still writing crime fiction) found a way to enter the genre with a novel called The Black Unicorn that used an amateur sleuth to solve the mystery. Hers was the first crime novel in English, although some four years earlier, a popular magazine, Drum, that had a vibrant readership in the townships, ran a series of short stories featuring a character called the Chief. The author, Arthur Maimane, was hugely influenced by the US pulps and the stories were derivative but highly entertaining. Unfortunately they?ve never been collected although there is one to be found in the Crime Beat archives.

In Afrikaans crime fiction also took decades to reach maturity. During the 1950s there?d been cheaply printed novels featuring steak-loving, hat-wearing detectives investigating single murders. Often these stories were set in small towns and tended more towards pulp fiction than noir. After that Afrikaans crime fiction all but disappeared during the height of the apartheid era.
In English the thriller side of the genre was taken up by, most notably, Wilbur Smith and Geoffrey Jenkins, during the 1960s but it was not until the end of that decade that a major figure emerged ? James McClure with a novel called The Steam Pig. This book introduced two cops, Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi. They would feature in a series that spanned the 1970s, disappeared for the 1980s, and finally ended with a prequel in 1993, The Song Dog. McClure?s twosome have gone some way to setting a convention for SA writers: the clever underling Zondi, the unsubtle Tromp with his built-in racism. In fact the books were highly satiric yet only one was banned, The Sunday Hangman. McClure died two years ago, after spending most of his life in the UK in Oxford.

McClure?s absence during the 1980s was filled by a different sort of crime thriller, a series written by Wessel Ebersohn, featuring a prison psychologist, Yudel Gordon, as the protagonist. Ebersohn published five Gordon novels up to 1991. The 1990s, however, were to see a number of changes, not least the change in the country to a democracy with the 1994 general election that ended the apartheid state. Overnight, well, almost overnight, the cops became the good guys and our literature started taking on a different perspective. But it takes some time for a country to mature and give itself permission to write and read escapist books, especially as we?d been used to writing and reading as an act of protest.

For the current crime thriller writers, the 1990s were significant because of a man called Deon Meyer. His novels first appeared in Afrikaans and made it to the top of Afrikaans best-seller lists. Meyer not only revolutionised Afrikaans literature but he was well translated into English and these books opened the genre to new voices. All the same it took a number of years ? six in fact ? before Meyer was joined on his lonely platform. In 2005 Richard Kunzmann published the first of his Harry Mason and Jacob Tshabalala series, Bloody Harvests, and Andrew Brown won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for his Coldstream Lullaby ? proving that a krimi could out-write the literary reputations. Also new Afrikaans figures appeared: Francois Bloemhof, Piet Steyn, Quintus van der Merwe, and Dirk Jordaan among them.

As for the sort of topics that have engaged these writers, well, initially serial killers ? or to put it in a broader perspective, crimes of deviancy ? were the subjects of choice for both English and Afrikaans writers. Perhaps in this there was a desire to steer away from the political issues dominating a nation in transition although this attitude is changing. Social and political concerns are back on the agenda and the bad guys are now as likely to be politicians, business moguls, and figures of authority as perverts, drug dealers, serial killers and gangsters.

Recent titles include Margie Orford?s Like Clockwork and Blood Rose, Richard Kunzmann?s Salamander Cotton and Dead-End Road, Angela Makholwa?s Red Ink, and Jassy Mackenzie?s Random Violence.
======================
Meet Mike Nicol and his mates from Crime Beat here. For more information, reviews and interviews with SA crime novelists, check out the Crime Beat blog, which includes a who's who of South African crime writing.

Reliable online book shops selling SA crime fiction are: Kalahari.net, Loot.co.za and Exclusive Books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2008/11/guest-blogger-mike-nicol-of-c
rime-beat.html

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Frank Wilson on Montaignes method of self
Examination.

 Image from here.Frank Wilson on Montaigne:"The point of his writing wasn?t to advance a position, but to record aprocess of thought. This is writing as an act, first and foremost, ofself-examination, not self-expression (though it is that as well, ofcourse). I have long thought a great opportunity has been missed in thefailure to explore the [...]

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Is this legal

It's Saturday, time for us knitters to indulge.

Currently I am still wondering whether it can really be legal to sit and knit in daylight hours?

Mind you, would you just look at this miserable, wretched, depressed feline?

Rocky's had a very busy time of it, fireguarding. Finding it glowing nicelymuch earlier in the day than he is accustomed to he has taken it uponhimself to dutifully keep watch and I think the stress is painfully evident.

 

I've thrown in the towel and just surrendered to the startitis which has all gone hopelessly and recklessly over the top.

Some odd-shaped freestylesocks, on the brilliantly lovely bright and shiny and very very pointy Boye's 2.75 needles, socks to invent as I go along, so they will not be amatching pair, in fact fraternal socks according to Crafty. Incidentally check out what Crafty's up to with the Remains of the Sheep while you're there, "Rome wasn't spun in a day".

Love it.

Meanwhile I'm using the remains of the Wensleydale Sheep Shopwool-alpaca mix so I'm feeling virtuous, and at least have half-forgivenmyself for the first pair I made which inadvertently went through a hot wash and felted up far better than I could ever have managed tofelt something had I been intending to.

Age old Fair Isle tension issues abound, it's impossibly tricky to gauge and thread the wool loosely on four needles but insocks I find this doesn't seem to matter, once on the foot it all seemsto sort and settle. There is something quite exciting aboutfree range sock-knitting and I should go there more often.

But something equally pleasing about self-patterning wool, theknitting just flies along in anticipation of the next surprise colour change so I've dug deep into the stash and found this. It'sSchoeller & Stahl Fortissima Colori 75% wool 25% polyamide and,knowing I had Socktopus wool on the way I decided to get this on the needles too....well I don't justread one book at a time so why be any different about knitting.

This all proved to be in the nick of time as the little order fromSocktopus arrived. Don't miss Alice's blog  I've been discreetly drooling over those pictures of the new shop, we can but hope for a Devon branch. So my little bit of the shop arrived beautifully wrapped in tissue paper and suddenly Ifind myself effortlessly making new and instant woolly-attachments.

This is Bearfoot by Mountain Colours , all the way to Devon via Chelsea from Montana's Bitterroot Valley, hand painted wool, mohair andenough but not too much nylon. My colourchoice, Mountain Lake, sits very comfortably within my happy-knitter colour zone.

But I've also been doing some finishing off. I'm pleased enough with the Tank Top V neck, though even with just twopieces it was like wrestling with a lap full of fluffy heavyweight kittens. Big wool on 8mm needles always seems to equal big gaping 8mm holes when I reach the 'pick up and knit' bits, but a little judicious weaving in of ends seems to have plugged the worst of it. I'm also throwing caution to the wind and following the Stitch and Bitch advice to forget all that rubbish about pressing and blocking before making up.

Just join the thing up and then dunk it in water, it all feels like a merciful release.

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My Virtual Thanksgiving Feast Contribution

Cam is hosting a virtual Thanksgiving feast and there is still time to bring something if you want to join in. Today I am posting the recipes of the dishes I am bringing to the feast. On Thanksgiving I will post about a family tradition, a favorite memory, or something I am grateful for.When my [...]

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http://somanybooksblog.com/2008/11/21/my-virtual-thanksgiving-feast-contribution/

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The Road to Revolution

I mentioned that I'd read Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road last week, for part of my Masters course, and Lucy added in the comments that a film is coming out - which probably means the novel (complete with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover, no doubt) will be rocketing up bestseller lists again. Well, whatever small amount my influence can do will, I hope, give the book a start on its way.

Published in the early 1960s, Revolutionary Road was successful in some respects, but widespread popularity doesn't seem to have been one of them, at least not for very long - Yates' is now described as a 'writer's writer', whatever that means. Has to be a good thing, one assumes. Revolutionary Road tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, idealists who live in non-ideal suburbia. The novel opens with a play in which April plays the lead - and it is an unmitigated failure. So (watch out for the simple transferral of allegory) is April's performance as a housewife; so is her performance as a latent revolutionary. The Wheelers dream of better things, and think they are hiding their gold amongst dross - but the credentials of that gold come under question when April decides to put their long-held plans into action.

Revolutionary Road is unmistakably American, and I don't know why. It's not just the "Geez, baby"s that crop up from time to time, but... well, I just don't know. The American Dream in the background, perhaps. The striving for an achievement, even when that achievement is impossible - striving where the English would have cynically given up and put on a pot of tea.

Similarly, I don't know why this novel is so good. All the usual - writing that grabs you, situations which need resolution, a subtle wit throughout - though undeniably sad, too. As I was reading (and before I knew that the Titanic co-stars would be reuniting) I kept thinking the book would make an excellent film - the plot is so event-led. Lots of emotions on the surface, or lots of surface emotions anyway. Kate Winslet rarely does a bad film, and never turns in a bad performance, so I'm quite excited at the prospect of seeing this one on the silver screen. Hopefully Yates will become a readers' writer.


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http://stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com/2008/11/road-to-revolution.html

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