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Tuesday, December 16th, 2003
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1:10 am - “Chickadees” by Stephen Young
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--at http://www.conversely.com/Stori/st036.shtml
This is a powerful story, one that derails from love and focuses only on the relationship of lust. Both young, a male bent on indifference and a girl who we later find out to contain the beauty of kindness. It’s after they have sex and she’s standing at the window telling him a story of how she let a bird eat out of her hand, the patience and time standing there to gain its trust and the power of her fingers poised there to either kill the bird or let it eat.
Below, I’ll paste a quote, pay careful attention to the last line:
“She got up from the bed, naked, and went to the window. The cold winter light haloed her body, produced an 'aura', as my older sister, the hippie, would call it. Her legs were thin and mostly hairless. I didn't want her anymore and so I studied her indifferently. With her back turned, I couldn't remember what her face looked like and that bothered me a little.”
With the ending, we find out our narrator, the male, is the closest we come to an antagonist, an indifferent boy who lacks maturity or patience. We can wonder the outcome if the roles were reversed and it was the male there holding the bird in his hand.
Beauty at its most eloquent, this one has the touch of something unique.
--Simon Owens
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12:55 am - “Girl” by Sarah Arellano
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--at http://www.conversely.com/Stori/st037.shtml
Nice little feminist story, a love story…almost. It revisits a common theme that has been played out a lot, but thankfully one that can still work with nice writing…in other words, even though it’s not the most intellectually stimulating kind of story, it gets the job done.
Boyfriend of the strip club type, late night in bars. Girl overweight. Boyfriend not exactly Mr. Gentlemen. Girl fed up but still in love. Girl overcomes obstacles. Ends with…well, read the story. I promise you’ll get your money’s worth for what you paid for it.
Oh yeah, it’s a free ezine.
--Simon Owens
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| Sunday, December 14th, 2003
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6:54 pm - “Employee-Manager Relations” by Aryn Kyle
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--at http://www.conversely.com/Stori/st038.shtml
This story takes the classic boss-cheats-on-his-wife-with-employee and ads a bittersweet flavor to keep the eyes reading. They are working in a bookstore, having sexual relations after-hours, the story continually returning to the themes of regret and contempt. It creates a beautiful hate relationship between the two, the employee seducing and condemning the boss at the same time, telling him his sins as the acts carry out. Yet beneath this hate is understanding and a kind of love. What this story does to surpass the other stories of its kind is focus more on the job itself. In other boss-cheats-on-wife stories, the occupation acts as mere circumstance, a background for the real story, while this one brings the bookstore to the front and shows how the employee’s interaction with customers parallels with her illicit acts. And finally, it shows an underlying goodness within the boss as his loyalty is played out.
A good example of the odd relationship between the two:
"You're a snake," he says. "Drive carefully."
Well worth the read, the bitterness of this story runs sour. But in a good way.
--Simon Owens
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| Saturday, December 13th, 2003
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12:51 am - “A Perfect Bethlehem” by Catherine M. Morrison
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--at www.ideomancer.com
The writing in this story was not very strong, I get the impression that it was accepted mainly because it was a Christmas story.
A master of origami decides to recreate the town of Bethlehem the night Jesus was born, but for darker reasons than the reader might think.
This story sat solely upon the success of its ending, without it, I don’t think it would have held together too well. Definitely not one of the best stories published this month.
--Simon Owens
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| Friday, December 12th, 2003
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10:36 pm - “Relativity in the Gospel: Five Looks at Matthew 2: 9-10” by Christopher Rowe
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--at www.ideomancer.com
This was an inventive SF story, a mixture of time-travel and religion. Despite the title, it isn’t written in biblical style, but is rather several one-way dialogue accounts from different points of view.
The night the Child is born, the wise men travel towards the burning star. Only we learn this star is something else entirely, a molten mass of alien substance, a ship.
The only thing that didn’t ring true for me was the time traveler’s dialogue. It contained a little too much angst that pulled me away from the story somewhat.
Otherwise, this story is worth reading.
--Simon Owens
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10:13 pm - “Twas the Night Before Global Economic Integration” by Bruce Holland Rogers
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--at www.ideomancer.com
This story was cute at best. For some reason, Bruce Holland Rogers has fallen into the cycle of telling fairy-tale type stories, most likely ever since the success of his story “The Dead Boy At Your Window.” While this type of storytelling works, when overused I grow less and less likely to read his work. He should at least write some stories with a little bit more depth every now and then (and perhaps he is, I just might be stumbling in on the wrong stories).
As you can probably guess by the title, this story combines Christmas, Santa, and business related jargon. A satire of sorts.
--Simon Owens
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| Thursday, December 4th, 2003
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11:47 am - The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston
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Feminism has taken on a unique perspective in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The WomanWarrior. In it, we are faced with a kind of autobiographical twist of Kingston’s life, a neat foray into Chinese myth and culture and the different aspects of culture clash when a Chinese immigrant comes to America. The story is told mainly through the eyes of a first-generation Chinese American born into a family whose mother and father waited until middle age to finally have children. The novel reaches over the span of her life, letting us look through both the eyes of a child and the more matured outlook of an adult.
As I said before, this is a feminist novel, and this becomes evident within the first chapter. The mother tells of an unnamed aunt who was persecuted for committing adultery and getting pregnant before throwing herself down a well and killing herself. Even though there are no real feminists in this chapter, the theme of the unfairness to women is apparent and does not escape the reader. It gives us a look into a patriarchal society, pointing out the dominant man, most prominently when “the other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders: she followed” (Kingston 7).
But the women are not always impassive in this novel. The next chapter soaks itself in myth and “tell-story” about a fearsome and deadly woman warrior. The main character takes on the persona and identity of this warrior and goes to the mountains to learn with the old people. After several years, she descends from the mountain and creates a powerful army and squashes all that is bad in the world. However, she does this in disguise as a man. Whether this is an insult to feminism or a statement that women are equal to men, is left up to the reader. Either way, her fighting and violence amount up to a strong sense of revenge, with red names of all those wronged on her “back covered entirely with words in red and black files,” she rides into battle and escapes victorious every time (Kingston 35).
The feminism then tones down and becomes somewhat obscure, but one can still find it hiding in the words in subtle ways. We learn more of the main character’s mother, Brave Orchid, and her past. She surpasses the expected gender roles and becomes a doctor, and we see that she is a kind of woman warrior of her own. In medical school, she manages to hide her older age and fight her way to the top of the class, studying in secret and committed to high marks. The story shifts to a ghost scene, in which Brave Orchid must prove bravery and manages to defeat and later destroy a sitting ghost who has come to take her away.
In older age, our view of Brave Orchid changes. She is a strong-willed woman in a world she doesn’t really understand. This confusion of reality is obvious with her own outlook on her children and American life, then later when her sister, Moon Orchid, comes to live in America. She is a stubborn, woman with a kind of matriarchal outlook on how a man should treat his wife, and a kind of dramatic, romantic vision of her revenge with Moon Orchid’s husband. She considers Moon Orchid to be a “weak” woman, and with this weakness, we are able to see her strength.
The novel is touching and beautifully told, a dive into poetic prose and simplistic style. Its both subtle and strong hints of feminism create a nice balance that doesn’t necessarily push the author’s views into the reader’s face, but at the same time we are not able to overlook the messages hiding within the text. After finishing it, we are able to find out that all the female characters were woman warriors, and for them the fight has just begun.
Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
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| Tuesday, December 2nd, 2003
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4:49 pm - Circus of Regret By Aynjel Kaye
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--at www.strangehorizons.com
This story have could just as easily been titled “Circus of Guilt.” As the title suggests, it does take place in a circus, the main character being one of the performers. Ebb, the widow, who has a spider curled up in the hollow of her neck, spins her own webs and ties them into knots of regret, a kind of feeding off the guilt and remorse of a mesmerized crowd. A love story, a venture into fictional poetry.
For some reason, this story just never really took off for me, it swayed kind of suspended there in the air, much like many Strange Horizons stories, but didn’t really take me to any level of wonder. However, there’s no doubt that the story is well-written, it’s just the feeding of regret isn’t exactly a new theme in fantasy literature. It’s something that can be found over and over again in the very magazine this story was published in.
--Simon Owens
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4:04 pm - A follow-up on Trumpet
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A Procession of Lies
The novel, Trumpet, seems to dwell most on the concept of a lie and the effect it has on the people involved. After reading the novel, one cannot doubt that each character comes away with different reactions to the lie of Joss Moody’s gender and copes differently to the evident truths and implications that rain down. Jackie Kay chose to tell the story by shattering it into pieces of glass before looking at the world through each shard. By doing so, she broke away from traditional storytelling to give us a more round and unique perspective of the concept of a lie and the way it touches each individual. Put together, the shards allow the skeptic to receive a kind of objective view of Joss Moody and how he stunned the world. Not every person comes away the same, and this paper explores the different reactions to let the reader decide whether or not Moody was wrong in telling so bold a lie, or whether he was telling a lie at all.
To Millie, his wife, it never was a lie. It was “[their] secret. That’s all it was. Lots of people have secrets, don’t they? The world runs on secrets. What kind of place would the world be without them? [Their] secret was harmless. It did not hurt anybody” (Kay 10). This statement is met with criticism, but Millie will readily come to Joss Moody’s defense. In their marriage, she never once considered him a woman or herself a lesbian. Evidently, Joss Moody had been born into the wrong gender and was simply living the life that he was meant to live. What did it matter that biology said he was a woman? He was still a brilliant trumpet player, a genius of musical form and jazz. He was still a wonderful father who raised a child in all fairness and responsibility. He was still her husband, and in her grief she could not understand why the media seemed so fascinated with her husband’s secret.
But Sophie Stones does not agree. She is a journalist set on writing a book on Joss Moody, and she will use all means to do so. She is one of the ones fascinated with the lie of Moody and wishes to find, and publish, the truth of that lie. She is a manipulative person who doesn’t seem to see the hypocrisy of her project; the fact that she lives an everyday lie herself and yet still manages to judge Joss Moody for his decisions. Sophie has always been curious and nosy in nature, even as a child. If “[she] heard [her] mum or dad hinting something about somebody, in those soft voices that went down then up, [her] ears would cock like a dog onto the scent” (Kay 125). She is convinced that Joss Moody lived off that lie, was fueled by it, was humored by it. She thinks he enjoyed it to every extent, that it was a kind of sexual turn-on for him.
As a means to an end, she takes on the aid of his adoptive son, Colman. He is one of the many who have learned the truth, and in middle age he is anguished and torn between a father he grew up with and a woman he’s never known. First he hears the secret, “then the life, the one [he] thought [he] knew [he’d] lived, [changes]” (Kay 125) This change is causing him to act irrationally and sporadically, much to his mother’s dismay. She has learned that her son is aiding the journalist in writing this skewed biography. Colman is confused and at first will not listen to the reasoning of his mother’s messages on his answering machine. Through constant interviews, he retells flashbacks and recounts the ambiguous dialogue of his father, back when he was still alive. Colman also feels as if he has no past, the lie has strengthened his convictions that he does not know who he truly is or where he has come from.
Doctor Krishnamurty is the first to discover the lie after Joss Moody’s death. Through her, we receive a kind of cold, scientific approach to the discovery. She is there to fill out the death certificate, and while doing so she discovers “many bandages wrapped around the chest of the deceased which she [has] to undo...Doctor Krishnamurty [feels] as if she [is] removing skin, each wrapping of bandage that she [peels] off [feels] unmistakably like a layer of skin” (Kay 43). Under this layer of skin, she opens up a chest of lies by finding a “preserved” pair of breasts. Further inspection and she determines that this is indeed a woman. To her, it is nothing but a lie, and the coldness of her profession causes her to “[cross] ‘male’ out and [write] ‘female’ in her rather bad doctor’s handwriting” (Kay 44). But she can’t let the lie rest there. She goes on to write the word ‘female’ in even larger, red letters.
Millie doesn’t see the correction, but the registrar certainly does. Mr. Sharif has seen his share of oddities, but the day Millie brings in Joss Moody’s death certificate his assumption that he cannot be surprised is changed. With him, we see someone between the media and Millie. He sympathizes with Joss’s lie, yet at the same time he is fascinated by it, and his sense of duty forces him to keep the death certificate as it is. “He had a problem, he confessed, in deciding what name to put on the death certificate, given the name Joss Moody was never officially sanctioned anywhere” (Kay 80). In the end, he is able to hold his sense of duty at bay enough to write down the name as Joss Moody, but not before he takes the time to mark the word ‘female’ in the gender box. With this action, we can see him as a kind of neutral character to aid in gauging the responses of other characters.
By now, the lie has become a chain of discoveries leading from person to person. Wherever the body goes, the lie goes as well. So naturally, the next person to unearth it is the funeral director. Through Colman’s eyes, we get the idea that the funeral director gets a kind of sick perversity at being the one who gets to tell him. Albert Holding thinks that the dead change, and that during Moody’s life he was a man, and only in death is he a woman. He considers some of the dead to “have spent their entire years on earth yearning to be on the other side” (Kay 102). After discovering the secret, “the face had transformed. It looked more round, more womanly. It was without a question a woman’s face” (Kay 102). So if the transformation didn’t come until after death, was it really a lie at all? Judging by Albert Holding’s perspective of the dead, the very fact that they can change personalities from their living selves, we get the idea that it was more of a metamorphosis than a lie. Joss Moody was simply a man during life and a woman after death.
So far, the only person who has sympathized completely with Joss Moody is his wife, Millie. And she’s always known the secret since before they got married. But with Big Red McCall, the drummer, we receive our first sympathizing perspective from someone who didn’t know. It is evident he has seen his fair share of clues, whenever a fan would remark that “Moody’s voice is high like a woman’s” (Kay 144), Big Red always met statements like these with anger and violence, leaving the reader wondering if he knew all along and was in constant denial. Either way, the truth of the lie does not affect his memory of Joss Moody, the man. Even after death, Big Red will continue to defend him just as fervently as when he was alive. When Sophie Stones calls him to gauge his reaction to the lie, he tells her, “you should concern yourself with the music. The guy’s a genius…it’s the fucking music that matters” (Kay 148). This one quote seems to sum up the irrelevancy of the lie, indirectly he is saying that gender plays no part in who Joss Moody was. He was a brilliant male trumpet player, and the media’s fascination with it reflects on the frivolous nature of the public.
Big Red is not the last to disregard the lie as something small and unimportant. Sophie Stones is reaching out to all family contacts in her quest for information. In that search, she finds Maggie, the cleaner. Through her eyes we see a rather simplistic approach to the lie, little memories floating to the top of her mind to give hints and clues to Joss Moody’s true gender. She feels a certain loyalty towards the family that treated her so kindly and fairly, “there was no way she was going to talk about her employers” (Kay 174). But as I noted before, Sophie is manipulative and convinces her that her participation will help the family rather than hurt them. In her retellings of past clues, she lets it slip that Joss’s mother is still alive and then immediately regrets it. However, Sophie hasn’t managed to completely break through her loyalty, and we find this out when Maggie deliberately lies to her saying that she no longer has the keys to Moody’s house. A lie to help hide Joss Moody’s lie; the irony does not escape the reader.
It seems up to this point that the lie has been explored through every angle. But what about before it ever was a lie? Sophie Stones has managed to find a woman named May Hart, and old school friend of Josephine Moore, who later grew up to become Joss Moody. May Hart has never forgotten Josephine, the little black girl she was so close to as a child. She still has dreams of her death and can still picture her vividly in her mind’s eye. “A very pretty girl. Beautiful teeth. Lovely smile” (Kay 247). There seems to be some lies and secrets of her own, some subtle hints to a physical attraction between May and Josephine, touched briefly upon but never fully explained. She is nonplussed when she stares at the photograph of Joss Moody, more amused than anything else. She is filled with a deep sense of nostalgia, and Sophie mistakes this nostalgia for frustration with the lie, when in reality May never really considers it a lie at all, just a matter of appearance. Like others, it has become a matter of circumstance and nothing else, reflecting nothing on Joss Moody’s character or personality.
And to give us a sense of resolution, the final chapter brings back a voice from the dead; Joss Moody, in a letter written to his son before his death. Up until this point Colman hasn’t been able to bring himself to opening it, but on the train ride out to meet his mother, he finally does. In the letter, Joss addresses the lie indirectly, touching on a childhood memory of Colman’s in which he asked of his family heritage. He starts it, “You wanted the story of my father, remember? I told you his story could be the story of any black man who came from Africa to Scotland. His story, I told you, was the diaspora” (Kay 271). This “diaspora” acts as a kind of parallel to Joss’s lie; it didn’t matter. It never really mattered, sex didn’t matter, our past didn’t matter. Pasts could be spliced and touched upon, cut and edited for content. Our past was just a story we told, and it never really mattered what the story was. The only thing that mattered was that any story told was the truth, and with these final statements we can finally understand the lie to be the truth of who he was. Joss Moody was a male trumpet player, a brilliant trumpet player, a husband, a father, and even with Sophie Stone’s desperate attempts to twist that into something different, it still remains the truth just the same.
After finishing the novel, one can wonder the definition of the truth, and if it is such an objective right or wrong. Everyday we pass people on our way to somewhere who are different from us in ways we’ll never know. Sometimes, it’s what you see that matters, for in most instances what you see is all you’ll ever know. Every human being holds secrets, and this novel touches upon the idea that keeping a secret does not automatically condemn it as a lie. After each of the shards of the novel come together, we can find the glass to be a mirror, one we should first turn on ourselves before unleashing it on others.
Works Cited
Kay, Jackie. Trumpet. New York: Vintage, 1998.
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