Fickle as a Woman, Part Infinity

Marinus gazes at the easy-to-swallow pill.

My evoked heart in my evoked body beats a little faster. 

I look back. Jonah puts a glass of Evian water by the dish.

“Thank you.” Still bleary, Marinus picks up the pill.

I look away. Swallow it, I think. Swallow it whole.

“No worries,” says Jonah, unworriedly, as if our metalives aren’t dependent on this fickle woman doing as he bids her.

–David Mitchell, Slade House

Fickle as a Narrator Demeaning a Rape Victim

Wow, Nabokov really knew how to create the most atrocious characters simply by letting them speak in his fiction. This quote comes from Pale Fire. Note that the gender of the “young creature” is most likely male. The fact that it’s hard to figure out the victim’s gender suggests that such details are less important to rape culture than whether victims are some combination of young, vulnerable, and/or forgettable.

I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem as one has for a fickle young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant but now again is safe in our hall and park, whistling with the stableboys, swimming with the tame seal.

The Trauma of Memory

 

 

In the long silent hours, I am trampled by memories, all happening in one instant, as if my entire life were a single, unfathomable image.

–Isabel Allende, Paula

Fickle as a Summertime

The fickle summer weather which, for the last few weeks, had provided a sample of every climactic condition known to the country with the sole exception of snow, now settled into the warm grey normality for the time of year.

–P.D. James, Cover Her Face

Good Writing Break: Karen Craigo

Hey, Fickle Readers! I’m back with a smidge of an update. I’ve been wrangling with all kinds of health crap recently (did I mention lupus sucks?), but I wanted to give all you writing and reading types out there a heads-up about one of the best poets, editors, and people around: Karen Craigo. She’s the former poetry editor of Mid-American Review and an amazing author in her own right. Her latest book of poems, No More Milk, is coming out in the summer from Sundress Publications, and she further has one of the best writing blogs around. Right now, she’s even becoming something of a viral sensation with this excellent post on the inner workings of Submittable, every writer’s favorite site to check obsessively. There is seemingly nothing Craigo can’t do, and for that I send her a virtual shot of tequila.

A toast and my best envy to you, Karen! Keep up the excellent work! God knows we all need it.

In Excellent Company: I Get Published in matchbook

Hey, Fickle Readers! Just thought I’d share with you that one of my pieces is featured this week on matchbook, a lovely flash fiction journal that posts one story at a time along with authors’ notes about how that story came to be.

I’m particularly honored by this publication because I’m in such amazing company. The wonderfully talented and remarkable Annabel Banks and Megan Giddings both have stories in matchbook. There are many other beautiful pieces in the archives, so if you haven’t already I personally invite you to go there and explore. It’s a marvelous venue for very short fiction.

Shakespeare Is Everywhere: Batshit-Crazy–and Look, There’s Even a Bat in this Passage!–Joycean Edition

Don’t ask me what Joyce was thinking when he wrote this. I have no idea.

A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

–James Joyce, Ulysses

Miss Fickle Critic: On Goodreads and in Hippocampus Magazine

Hey, Fickle Readers! It’s time for some blatant self-promotion! Those of you not among my personal cadre (and therefore not privy to my various lunatic rantings and blatherings) may not realize that I’m not only a creative writer, I’m also (surprise!) a budding book critic. I’ve just signed up for another year of reviewing at Hippocampus Magazine, an excellent all-creative nonfiction online journal. I’m also determined to write up more of my glorious opinions on Goodreads, because I really really want to keep getting free books to review. Really.

So here’s the latest on my fickle reading adventures:

One book you should definitely read, especially if you’re into creative nonfiction of the most intense, transformative kind, is Cynthia Barnett’s Rain: A Natural and Cultural History.

This is what the cover looks like. Go read this book immediately.

This is a book that steals into your life with a simple premise that, you soon realize, has gigantic, perspective-changing implications. Also, the title was long-listed for the National Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Tragically, it didn’t move on in the process, even though I wish it had. (Admittedly, the field was probably more competitive than usual this year. Hard to beat Ta-Nehisi Coates.)

Despite the awards game, though, this is book is worth every minute you spend with it. Go forth and read.

I wish I could say the same for Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time. Vintage Books has commissioned a whole bunch of high-profile authors to write novel adaptations of Shakespeare plays (it’s called the Hogarth Shakespeare Initiative, in case you’re interested). When I heard about the project, I was so thoroughly excited I signed right up to get an actual physical review copy of the book and I GOT ONE, sent to my actual real-life address. I felt so validated I just sat around appreciating the cover for a while.

And, yeah, it’s a pretty cool cover.

Much to my dismay, the book itself isn’t all that great. Granted, you may have to take my opinion with a grain of salt, since I have sunk a lot of time and energy into studying The Winter’s Tale, on which Winterson based her novel. And granted, it would probably give someone with little to no familiarity with the play a pretty solid introduction to the original. The problem is, if that uninitiated person ever got to read or see The Winter’s Tale, he or she would probably be ready to set the bear on Leontes right from the beginning. Because Winterson’s Leo is just that awful. He’s vicious, self-centered, and whiny and deserves none of Shakespeare’s (or anyone’s) much-vaunted forgiveness, which the original play is also known for. If you’re curious, I’d say get this book out of the library. Otherwise, wait for Margaret Atwood to write her adaptation of The Tempest.

 

P.D. James and the Fickle Sun

The mud-grey sea heaved sluggishly under a sky the colour of thin milk, faintly luminous at the horizon as if the fickle sun were about once more to break through.

–P.D. James, Children of Men

Oh, Those Fickle, Fickle Women: Part II

Now with fat jokes…

Nevertheless, in extremely confidential moments, he had sometimes been heard to avow, that at one stage of his career his very life had seemed to depend upon the smiles of a certain Emily. She had been fickle and false, however; still, he had survived her ill-treatment of him, and if injured in heart, had thrived and fattened in regard to other portions of his anatomy.

–“An Engaged Man,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts,

Saturday August 6, 1870