Minnesota Reads

The worst part about waiting for the artist behind your favorite graphic memoir to make her magic again is, unfortunately, reading the new release when it finally happens.

So. I didn’t like Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel. This comes after loving, seriously loving Fun Home so much that I can’t stand that idea that I would never again read it for the first time. For me it was, and still is, the gold standard and the perfect 10. It stands alone as a novel; It stands alone as illustrations. It is as good as it gets.

Bechdel aired the family’s multi-layered laundry in the coming-of-age debut. Her father had secrets — including, possibly, flings with teenaged boys and a death that might have been on purpose; her mother was emotionally distant. In the follow up, Bechdel grabs her microscope and considers her relationship with her mother. The lack of hugs, the there-but-distant, the seeming lack of curiosity her mother seems to have for Bechdel’s life.

The result is a circular and clinical evaluation of Bechdel’s life and relationships with not so much the navel gazing that goes with memoirs, but a navel poking, prodding, and dissecting. She takes the words of her two favorite therapists, as well as Virginia Woolf and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott as a sort of decoder ring for solving the mysterious case of Alison and her mother. And, in turn, the universal experience of having a mother.

It’s super boring. Like restless reading, big sighs, annoyance. Itchy brain reading. If this book had anyone else’s name on the cover, I wouldn’t have even finished reading it.

Bechdel’s mother is a chilly character, short on hugs and long on conversations filled with the nitty gritty of her days. She’s smart. She reads a lot. Any affectionate inkling is locked in a vault. She seemingly forgives Bechdel for Fun Home. She’s also cute the way moms are cute. She’s just a person in the way we are all just people with blisters and bumps and bruises and failings and quirks. While their relationship isn’t what Bechdel specifically wants, this barely seems like something that needs to be dissected as much as it just needs to be understood: We’re all just people.

Bechdel chooses scientific evaluation over cohesive narrative. And while her study is thorough and she finds some sort of resolution, she buries the narrative. I really wanted the narrative. She’s good at narrative. Her last narrative was super great. There are glimpses of story here that she doles out occasionally, then rips out the rug when things start to get interesting.

This is worse than having someone tell you about a dream (which Bechdel actually does on a handful of occasions). This is having someone tell you about a dream and then analyzing the dream for you. Oddly, this book feels like the most personal of memoirs, but it also feels like it dances around any sort of intimacy. It’s like sitting down to meet someone and instead of starting with small talk and burrowing deeper, Bechdel just unzipped her chest and splayed her organs on the table.

In the epic battle of The Beatles vs. The Stones, I come down firmly in The Stones camp. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t also love The Beatles. In fact, I’d say The Beatles were the soundtrack to my 19th year. That’s not how I old I was when Beatlemania hit US shores. No, it was 1991 and I had discovered old Beatles’ records at the Chippewa Falls Library. I played The Beatles so often the winter of 1991 that one of my younger sisters still loathes their music to this day.

Even with that small-scale Beatlemania, much of what I knew about the band is the kind of information you get from pop culture osmosis. The kinds of facts you’re not sure how you learned, but know nonetheless. From Liverpool, played in Hamburg, screaming girls on Ed Sullivan, Maharishi, Yoko, Lennon shot in 1980. . . that kind of stuff. Also, who hasn’t heard about the mysterious “fifth Beatle?”

If you read Baby’s in Black the fabulous graphic novel by by Arne Bellstorf, you’ll learn all about one of the candidates for fifth Beatlesdom, Stuart Sutcliffe and the time The Beatles spent in Hamburg.

For real Beatlemaniacs this book might be old hat, but for me it was a revelation. I knew nothing of Stuart Sutcliffe, the brooding artsy Beatle who falls in love with a German art student Astrid Kirchherr.

The book focuses on Astrid and Stu’s relationship and how despite a language barrier, they fall in love. It’s really sweet. Astrid’s pretty rad. She’s a photographer who hangs with all kinds of artists and convinces Stuart to go to art school in Hamburg. She’s the woman who took those early Beatles’ photos where they all have Elvis-y pompadours, before they adopted the mop-top look that was popular with the Hamburg artsy crowd.

As Astrid and Stu’s love grows he has to make a choice between the woman he loves and the band. As you know he didn’t choose The Beatles. If you’re already familiar with this story you know how it ends. I had no idea. After finishing the book I proclaimed, “that’s the saddest fucking thing I ever read.”

It is and it’s good. Baby’s in Black is one of those great books that are engrossing and entertaining while being totally educational at the same time.

The highly gifted, pretty precocious student Julia Severn is studying at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology and lands the coveted gig of recording professor Madame Ackermann’s dream-like psychic episodes in Heidi Julavits’ novel The Vanishers.

Sounds great, except Madame Ackermann is blocked. Nothing is happening when she is in this state. She is especially not finding out the file number of a film canister she’s been asked to locate. So Julia doodles away the day, finds some answers without even trying and pretends Madame Ackermann conjured them herself. Also great — until Madame Ackermann catches on to her little tricks during a routine dinner party game and then all hell breaks loose.

Julia is struck with bloating and skin conditions and all-around discomfort, seemingly the victim of Madame Ackermann’s psychic attack. Julia returns to pedestrians-ville and takes a job as a person who sits in a room pretending to talk on the phone and is hopped up on all sorts of prescriptions that dull her extra sensory perceptions. Then she comes into contact with a handful of people whose interests interlock with her own — including finding her mother, who killed herself when Julia was a month old.

Along the way Julia learns of people who vanish — as opposed to killing themselves — and go on to lead lives away from anyone and anything they know. Many leave behind a last video as a sort of farewell (or, potentially a pornographic eff you). They often spend a bit of time at a spa-like place shared by those recovering from plastic surgery. There is also a hunt for Dominique Vargas, a great filmmaker who disappeared in the mid-1980s, who seems to have ties to Julia’s mother.

This book has that wonderful trait of being something that makes a person sound dizzy and confused when the plot is explained aloud. It’s fun to be reading, but doesn’t stick to the ribs. Every time I set it down I had to backtrack at least six pages when I started again to remember this mess of people and their ticks and motives. Ultimately, this book will be remembered as having a lot of scenes spent in country rehabilitation centers and that at one point things seemed awfully Scooby Doo-ish in a moment of reveal.

The writing is fresh and quirky and descriptive, though sometimes Julavits fishtails into too cute. “Madame Ackermann telescoped her cigarette in an ashtray and stood over me.” That sort of thing.

How much did you like The Hunger Games? The extent to which you’ll enjoy Catching Fire hinges on your answer to that question.

The second novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about the dystopian world of flinty heroine Katniss Everdeen retains much of what was good about the first book and adds one or two new facets, but it also introduces some unwelcome new elements.

Catching Fire sets Katniss on the journey of finding out that the world of Panem, a country that has rebuilt itself from a small-scale apocalypse through violent suppression of dissent, is larger than the 1984-esque Capitol would have its subjects believe.

By now, the horror and grimness of The Hunger Games, the televised fight to the death Katniss won in the first book and must now compete in again, are no longer novel and that’s a blow to Catching Fire. Katniss is still Katniss – uncompromising, resourceful, driven – but this book has her wringing her hands too much over whether she should choose Peeta, the sweet and capable baker’s son with whom she competed in The Hunger Games, or Gale, her brooding childhood friend. Her constant indecision is annoying. When she’s in the throes of her questioning, she seems flimsy, like a damsel in distress who belongs in an inferior work of fiction, but not here.

But on a large scale, Collins knows what she’s doing. Catching Fire moves at the same breakneck speed of The Hunger Games and retains its cold command of violence, which is impassively described and frequent. She’s also added some sexual appeal and friction here, which is good in light of the odd sexlessness of her first book.

I haven’t gotten to Mockingjay, Collins’ third installment, but I’m hoping Catching Fire will prove to be a necessary expository bridge that will take me to a knockout punch of a finale.

If you care at all about Rock & Roll or Pop music you should read Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. If you ever subscribed to Spin or Rolling Stone you should read Out of the Vinyl Deeps. If you ever searched for most of your adult-life for a smart, female perspective on being a Rock & Roll fan and all but gave up on it, you should read this book.

To say Out of the Vinyl Deeps changed my life sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. I don’t listen to music the same way after reading Ellen Willis. And I definitely don’t read music criticism the same way.

For those who have no idea (like me), Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1975. She was a contemporary of Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus. The fact that her name doesn’t roll as easily off the tongues of rock fans everywhere as those other names is a damn crime. On a personal level I feel like it’s a crime that I’ve had to wait thirty-nine years to discover the genius of Ellen Willis. Thirty-nine long years where I actually begged everyone I know, and most of the Internet for rock and roll writing from a female perspective.

It is really hard for me to write about this book and what it was like reading it without breaking into tears. Reading it filled a hole in me that was much more profound than I thought. Ellen Willis’ writing put a social, cultural, and, most importantly, feminist perspective on Rock & Roll that my soul needed. I didn’t realize how much, until I finished.

Take this for instance from a 1971 piece:

When rock was taken over by upper-middle-class bohemians, it inherited a whole new set of contradictions between protest and privilege. The new musicians are elite dropouts and, as such, tend to feel superior not only to women but to just about everyone. Their sexism is smugger and cooler, less a product of misdirected frustration, most a simple assumption of power consistent with the rest of their self-image.

How can you not weep. Have you ever seen a paragraph like that about rock music coming from anyone? Ever? I haven’t. Granted, I gave up on rock writing a long time ago. I’ve had my fill of Chuck Klosterman, Steve Almond, Rick Sheffield, and Pitchfork kinds of rock writing. Basically I’m sick of hearing what privileged white men have to say about, well frankly, most anything.

If there are women writing like Willis about today’s rock music please let me know. I will start up the fanclub immediately.

The essays in Out of the Vinyl Deeps cover the late sixties and early seventies music scene: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, and The Sex Pistols. And unlike so much writing today it’s not fawning “OMG DYLAN!” it’s an actual, critical, thinking person’s look at what the music means and what it says about the person/people who created it.

What you won’t find is a ton of female musicians which is more a reflection of the time than of Willis’ preferences. She goes in search of women rockers and does a piece on an ill-fated women’s music fest as well as a long-forgotten woman named Miss Clawdy.

One of things I really admired about Willis’ essays is that she was a genuine fan the way so many of us are fans. She talks about ridiculous ticket prices (which granted seem positively dreamy now. At one point she talked about how $3 was reasonable to see The Grateful Dead and Joe Cocker but not “proletarian”), and poor sound, and lyrics. She never talks about being a fan like, say, Steve Almond does as he drives out to hang with Dave Grohl. You know?

She writes about how at 33 Elvis is the “grand old man” of rock & roll, how Carly Simon arouses her class antagonism, and how despite the sexism in punk rock, she loves it.

I often joke about how I keep a copy of Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help under my pillow so I can read “How to Become a Writer” whenever I need it. This Ellen Willis book is going under the pillow too.

(and it’s only a joke in so much as the book doesn’t go under my pillow but rather on the floor next to my bed)