Fuck Allegory - the case for directness

Everyone knows that SciFi and Fantasy stories are allegorical. And usually they're pretty fucking political too, just in case you wanted to get yanked off about the Hugos. The Beyond Anthology basically says "fuck allegory, we're going to tell our fucking stories."


There have been LGBT characters in SciFi and Fantasy as long as those genres have existed. Look at Frankenstein, for fuck's sake. The relationship between Victor and his creation is way more important than any other relationship in the story, it was written by someone who spent a lot of time hanging out with Byron, and it's about forbidden explorations of humanity. It's clearly a queer novel. But for some reason stodgy folks in classrooms like to sidestep that and talk about god instead. So Beyond is a relief. There's no question here that the characters we're being shown fall under the queer umbrella. There's no room to claim that a character's transness isn't canon because transness is made explicit. So sexuality and gender identity in these stories aren't hidden under layers of outdated pear-clutching, which opens up some fascinating fictional possibilities.

It's also remarkable how little difference something so impactful makes to the stories. These are all great SciFi and Fantasy stories that ALSO allow LGBT readers to see themselves represented. The plot isn't sidelined by the backgrounds of the characters, the characters simply are who they are and the stories are amazing. It isn't labored, it doesn't ring false, it isn't a big deal - it's just great stories that happen to include LGBT characters, which is kind of a big deal.

I'm not making much sense, I know. I'm kind of too excited to make much sense. Beyond is fantastic. It's a joy to read. At least 5 of the stories were so touching they made me weep as I turned the pages. The art alternates between gorgeously realistic and unexpectedly cute from page to page, and it all works. This is a great collection, I love it, and I've gotta go find myself a copy because I borrowed this one from a friend.

So fuck allegory, at least some of the time. We shouldn't have to have straight/cis/white/male as the default in our SF&F anymore, we know those aren't the people reading the stories, writing the stories, or filling up the world. It's time to let everyone shine.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Monster, Sfe R. Ed. Various Authors. Beyond. 2015.

Everything is sexy and adorable

I was lucky enough to be able to contribute directly to the Kickstarter campaign for Smut Peddler 2012 but I just didn't have the cash for the 2014 edition. In spite of that I was able to get my hands on a physical copy by buying directly from Megan Rose Gedris, one of the artists included in Smut Peddler 2014.

Last time I reviewed a Smut Peddler I went through and talked about each story briefly. I'm not going to do that this time because, holy shit, there is a lot of excellent porn in this collection and I'm not going to be able to do each story justice in this format.

But it's super good porn. Just so you know.

The book is full of delightful erotica from a bunch of artists I adore, it's got a wide variety of body types and pairings/groupings represented. There are queer comics, trans comics, straight comics, witch comics, and basically just everything you could ever ask for when you're looking for a fun, slippery wank.

Go find Smut Peddler. Do you like being horny? Do you like to masturbate? Do you like to have pictorial representations of all sorts of horny folks/robots/supernatural beings while you masturbate? Smut Peddler is for you.

And seriously, the art is just fantastic. Everyone puts their best work forward when they're pitching for this collection - the stories are spot-on and the illustrations are staggering.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Various Authors. Smut Peddler 2014 Edition. Iron Circus Comics. 2014.

Wibbley-wobbly, plotty-wotty thing

Dear anybody who ever gives me books for any reason: I really want to like the books that people give to me. I like liking books, and I especially like liking books that other people think I will like. But sometimes I just can't do it and that usually makes me feel terrible.

So I'm sorry, little sister, I didn't like The Shakespeare Notebooks, which you gave me for Christmas. In fact I really disliked it and ended up being pretty fucking angry at the whole thing by the end.

I really WANTED to like this book. So much! And I know exactly why she gave it to me as a present - I raved about the Ian Doescher William Shakespeare's Star Wars books, I'm a huge Shakespeare nerd, and my sister knows that I'm a newbie Whovian who is a big fan of the twelfth Doctor - but the combination of elements in play here just made The Shakespeare Notebooks awful.

The reason that Star Wars worked in a modern-pop-culture-meets-Shakespearean-drama mashup is that it was a whole, complete story full of Shakespeare-ready characters. Luke is a clear hero, Han and Leia are a perfect bickering couple, Yoda and Obi-Wan are sages, and the entire dark side is all ready to go for Hamlet-like introspection and Richard III-like outright evil. Doescher spent a lot of time and effort on building up his interpretation, working the characters' conflicts into stunning dialogue and having a lot of fun playing with the language.

The people who wrote The Shakespeare Notebooks didn't do that. They said "well, what if there were sonnets about Daleks?" then wrote those sonnets and called it a day.

The format of this thing is really hard to explain. There are several selections that are supposed to be deleted scenes from plays that Shakespeare was supposed to have written the Doctor into. A couple pieces are supposed to be from a journal of Shakespeare's. One section is supposedly written in a grad student's footnotes on Julius Caesar. Another bit is a "transcription" of a time-traveling Alexander Pope having an argument while watching the premiere of a lost play. Both of those last two, by the way, include complaints about how the imbic pentameter isn't perfect enough to have really been Shakespeare - 'perfect' meter is much more rare in Shakespeare's writing than 'imperfect' meter, which is a thing you learn in Shakespeare 101 and NOT something that either a grad student or Pope would ever fucking say.

Does this seem a little disjointed? It is. It should be. That's how the damned book is.

There is one part that I liked, a short story at the end of the book. It doesn't pretend to have been written by the Bard, it's not supposed to be historical, it's not giving high-fives to itself. It's just a short story about the Doctor, the Bard, and a Bed. And it's not bad, really.

But the rest of the book is kind of shit.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Gross, James; Jonathan Morris, Julian Richards, Justin Richards, and Matthew Sweet.
     Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Notebooks. Harper Design. New York: New York. 2014.

Critical voices and cherry pie

Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks is a comforting book for me - it serves as a very good reminder that I'm not the only one who gets dangerously obsessed and over-analytical about pop culture.

I've had this book for more than a year now but have had a hard time making myself read it; literary criticism is frequently dry and more frequently useless and for a while I just couldn't get into the collection. When I did I was sorely tempted to play a game for the rest of my life that involved never looking up either "hermeneutics" or "semiotic" simply because of how frequently the words got tossed out in these essays, but I just lost that game to myself and I'm satisfied that they're both the sort of four-dollar words that are useful only in identifying people who don't really have that much to say.

That's not to say that all of these essays were bad, or that there's no value in examining pop culture, but I do think this book has inspired me to go back and re-write all my college essays in a clearer, shorter, less bullshitty format.

"Introduction: The Semiotics of Cobbler - Twin Peaks' Interpretive Community" by David Lavery
Lavery makes the case for Twin Peaks as a cult phenomenon based on the definition of cult as ordered by Umberto Eco and discusses the series as a same-kind-of-different Soap Opera. 

"Bad Ideas: The Art and Politics of Twin Peaks" by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Rosenbaum examines what he considers to be the artistic devolution of David Lynch with Twin Peaks as the culmination of bad taste and watered-down art.

"The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What happened to/on Twin Peaks" by Marc Dolan
Dolan does a very good job of picking apart exactly what kind of TV show Twin Peaks was and why this led to its downfall - network representations and audience expectations converged with a changing narrative style to create a perfect storm of perfectly predictable failure.

"'Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?': alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery" by Henry Jenkins
Jenkins describes his experience with usenet group reactions to Twin Peaks as well as the fascinating early analysis of the show documented in the groups. He explores the investment of alt.tv.twinpeaks contributors to the show and their pernicious relationship with Lynch and Frost as intentionally screwball creators. *The unintentionally hilarious first three pages of this essay are a wonderful time capsule of an era when an academic would have to explain what things like email and the internet are to their audience, and made reading the entire collection totally worthwhile for me*

"Family Romance, Family Violence, and the Fantastic in Twin Peaks" by Diane Stevenson
Stevenson gets bonus points for excluding a colon from her title, but also for making a compelling argument about Lynch's evolving presentation of family violence and child abuse in his films and the role that society allows family violence to have in its fiction.

"'Disturbing the Guests with this Racket:' Music and Twin Peaks" by Kathryn Kalinak
Kalinak's essay is wonderfully original and unexpected - she takes a look at Angelo Badalamenti's bizarre score and explores its unique and disconcerting use of exhausted musical cues to undermine the reality of the show and create the strange world that obsessed so many viewers.

"The Canonization of Laura Palmer" by Christy Desmet
Desmet attempts to find Laura's place on the Madonna/Whore sliding score and argues that Laura is built to break down the trope while existing in a fictional universe that relies heavily on the stereotyping of women.

"Lynching Women: a Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks" by Diana Hume George
Hume George skewers Twin Peaks as an attempted-subversive work that ends up reinforcing the ideals and strictures of the patriarchy. I'm inclined to argue with her but I guess that's an entry for another day.

"Double Talk in Twin Peaks" by Alice Kuzniar
Kuzniar explores puns based on sense words in this essay. I'm not really sure why, though she comes to the general conclusion that the sight/sound puns contribute to insidious sexism. A funny essay, but rampantly incohearent.

"Infinite Games: The Decentralization of Detection in Twin Peaks" by Angela Hague
Hague makes a fascinating study of detective tropes in this essay and attempts to place Dale Cooper as outside the scale of traditional detectives, showing that he is neither wholly intuitive nor rational but comfortable in a blending and blurring of traditional fictional detection.

"Desire Under the Douglas Firs: Entering the Body of Reality in Twin Peaks" by Martha Nochimson
Nochimson explores the atypical maleness of Cooper and why his non-standard comfort with emotions and intuition both makes him vulnerable to the darkness in the woods and a brilliant avatar for the town.

"The Dis-Order of Things in Twin Peaks" by J.P. Telotte
Telotte has a hell of a lot of sign-siginfier going on here that is both obvious and a bit of a fucking reach. There's nothing inherently wrong with a lot of the arguments, but why make them?

"Postmodernism and Television: Speaking of Twin Peaks" by Jimmie L. Reeves, Elizabeth Brent, Richard Campbell, Herb Eagle, Jennifer Jenkins, Marc C. Rogers, Lisa Saaf, and Nabeel Zuberi
Fuck all of these people. An edited transcript of a several-hours-long conversation that can't come to terms about what is or isn't postmodernism and whether or not Twin Peaks does or doesn't fit that not-definition isn't a critical essay worthy of publication, it's a perfect example of why engineering majors make fun of the humanities department. Congratulations: for anyone who's been searching for the origin of the irony conversation that hipsters are so wrapped up in, I've found it. This piece was so bad that the fact of its publication makes me embarrassed to have a degree in English Lit.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Ed. Lavery, David. Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Wayne State University Press. Detroit: Michigan. 1995.

USDA certified cruelty-free porn

I think porn is just peachy but sometimes I have trouble finding ethical porn. I know that a lot of the actors in pornographic films are exploited or addicted or not given too many choices in life outside of doing porn, and so porn with real people in it is kind of a hard pill to swallow. So if exploitation kills your lady-boner (or regular boner) what can you do? Well, one option would be to pick up this excellent collection of pornographic short comics by some of my all-time favorite webcomic artists.

There are actually only a few of my favorite artists featured in Smut Peddler but pretty much all of the art is fantastic. The stories are erotic (and graphic!) while still being silly and sweet and funny.

There's not a hell of a lot to say about this book because so much depends on the audience when you're talking about porn. If you like porn there's a good chance you'll like Smut Peddler but if you don't like porn the book isn't for you. There are a variety of relationships illustrated, from m/m, m/f, m/m/f, to m/tentacle robot and f/android. It's all very fun and sex positive, there are no non-consensual pairings, and pretty much every comic features a moment that's just completely adorable. It's like mixing cupcakes and boners and I don't really see anything wrong with that.

Cheers,
     - Alli
(added bonus - if you flip to the acknowledgements in the waaaaaaaaay back of the book and look under M you'll find MissDemeanor, which means you can thank me for donating money to bring this wonderful book into the world)

Ed. Spike. Various Authors. Smut Peddler. 2012.

I should have been reading more SF in 2000

I'm always a bit leery of "best" collections because what determines good, better, and best is highly subjective. My mom kidnapped this book (see, I'm not the only one who steals books) from a shelf in a staffroom where it had been languishing for years. She passed it on to me because she knows I'm a SF nutbag and it would have a good home with me. I'm really happy she found it and really happy that I broke down and read it - it was chock-full of refreshing, bite-sized SF that were tinted with the strange optimism of the millennium. I had a great time reading it and now I've got a good, healthy list of authors whose work I should check out.

Paul J. McAuley, "Reef" - A slightly scary story with interesting political implications that takes place against the backdrop of a bacterial-engineered reef asteroid.

David Brin, "Reality Check" - A call for you to check your reality. There are exits all around if you know when and where to look. This supershort doesn't have much story going for it but is pleasantly jarring.

Robert Silverberg, "The Millennium Express" - Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway destroy culture for shits, giggles, and the chance to let the future have its own culture. I am sympathetic to the bombers, which is totally understandable and very disconcerting at the same time.

Tananarive Due, "Patient Zero" - Legitimately freaked me out. A lot. This is a zombie story without the zombies which just makes it an epidemic story and a thousand times scarier than shambling ur-people.

Ken MacLeod, "The Oort Crowd" - A super-short that tries to read the messages from the stars and warns that if they don't understand our responses soon there could be trouble coming from closer to home.

M. Shayne Bell, "The Thing About Benny" - Kind of really adorable. In a world where plant species are going extinct in the wild, Benny and his keeper have to track down exotics in office buildings to the soothing strains of Abba. There's an interesting commentary here about autodidacts and their place in the world, too.

Brian Stableford, "The Last Supper" - A middling sort of man proposes to his girlfriend at the ultra-chic bio-engineered bistro she favors and gets more than a refusal for his troubles. Funny and freaky, this story scoots along and gives you just enough details about the universe to leave you wanting more.

Joan Slonczewski, "Tuberculosis Bacteria Join UN" - A supershort written as a news article about the statehood of Tuberculosis being recognized and accepted into the UN. It could happen, I guess.

Howard Waldrop, "Our Mortal Span"

David Langford, "Different Kinds of Darkness"

Norman Spinrad, "New Ice Age, or Just Cold Feet?" - A very, very funny supershort that is a caustic commentary on climate change. It pins down the hue and cry of the debate with a tone that is spot on.

Stephen Dedman, "The Devotee" - You rarely see noir stories set in the blinding sun of the Australian desert and that's too bad because it makes a surprisingly good setting. A detective follows the path of a knockout dame with only one leg and her devoted lover. Dark in places, funny in others, the story jogs happily along and wraps itself up tidily.

Chris Beckett, "The Marriage of Sky and Sea" - I've started thinking of this story as The Unauthorized Biography of James T. Kirk. A space explorer gets sick of his voyages and courts the daughter of a primitive king, not realizing that in doing so he's also courting disaster.

John M. Ford, "In the Days of the Comet" - Men and Neumanner travel through space but only one subset of that group is subject to disease. A super-short, this story doesn't answer questions, only asks them.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Birthday of the World" - Sometimes I really hate Ursula K. Le Guin but I'm thinking I should give her a second (or fifth, or seventh) chance because I ended up really enjoying this story, but on reflection it still has the same problem of simplicity that I usually find so irritating in her work. It's a very Le Guin story and if you like Le Guin you'll like it.

Greg Egan, "Oracle" - True facts: this story (almost a novella, really) made me do more research about Alan Turing than I had done before and it made me very, VERY sad. The last few years of Turing's life are all the proof we need that we're still a barbaric species and even our greatest thinkers, even those thinkers who have done great work at war, aren't protected from the barbarism of our species. But this is a re-imagining of Turing's later life that saves him some of the strive he suffered here. It's also really cool and makes a totally believable (and somewhat pitiable) villain out of a C.S. Lewis analogue.

Nancy Kress, "To Cuddle Amy" - Kind of crappy? I know this story is supposed to be about the potential problems of genetically engineered humans but it just came off kind of campy and melodramatic.

Brian W. Aldiss, "Steppenpferd" - A not-terrible far-future fic about a divided earth and the possibilities of divergent evolutionary paths fucking us over as a species.

Stephen Baxter, "Sheena 5" - This story is SUPER COOL and seems like a not-too-impossible but seriously problematic ethically solution to the issue of asteroid mining. Plus there's an obvious commentary about why breeding species that are smarter than us and evolve faster than us is generally not a good idea.

Darrell Schweitzer, "The Fire Eggs" - Wonderfully creepy, this story explores the way that humans react to the unexplained, especially when science fails them. It's an interesting examination of spirituality in scientists.

Robert Sheckley, "The New Horla" - This short is halfway between cute and pathetic, which I think is exactly the point. I HATE the narrator, which is totally intentional on the part of the author, but I'm sympathetic to him and his very strange evening in spite of how unlikeable he is.

Dan Simmons, "Madame Bovary, C'est Moi" - This faux-journal article is fucking hilarious. What would happen if writing was actually creating, how can you tell if something is literature or trash, and where do suicidally depressed Scandinavians want to live are all questions asked and answered in this very funny story.

Robert Reed, "Grandma's Jumpman" - I'm pretty big into Heinlein so I was feeling pretty defensive as I read this story. Heinlein was unapologetic about the war-heavy, uber-macho aspects of his work and this story is a pretty good way of calling out that style of writing. It's like a film that Paul Verhoeven would make if he tried for sincerity instead of satire (though his satire is hilarious and brilliant).

Charles Dexter Ward, "Bordeaux Mixture" - I think this is a story about genetically modified crops becoming the dominant species on the planet but that could just be the tomatoes talking.

Robert Charles Wilson, "The Dryad's Wedding" - What is language? What is communication? Are we capable of understanding messages from alien intelligences or would those messages seem like noise in the system to us? Wilson writes a sad story with a missed message and potentially damning results.

Michael F. Flynn, "Built Upon the Sands of Time" - Oh, Christ, what a depressing story. Confusing to follow, full of hard and terrifying numbers, it's about the loss of something you can't remember losing. A severe mind-fuck and a good read.

Ted Chiang, "Seventy-Two Letters" - Hell yes! Hell yes. This novella is a discussion about all the various despicable -isms we live with seen through the lens of an alternate nineteenth century full of golems. Even if the science is different humans are the same - just as terrible and wonderful as they are here, always trying to make the world better for some and better for everybody in turn.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Hartwell, David G., Ed. Year's Best SF 6. Harper Collins. New York: New York. 2001.

An enchanting collection

I've found another mystery book in my library - I have no idea where it came from, when I got it, or if the cover was missing when I found it or fell off later. I'm going to go with fell off later because the back cover is falling off too.

Faerie Tales is exactly as advertised - a collection of stories about fairies, but with a modern twist. The stories all take place either in our world or in the future. I won't say that they're uniformly charming tales, but the collection as a whole is very entertaining.

"Sweet Forget-Me-Not" by Charles de Lint
A bullied boy meets a group of gemmin, fey girls who collect memories of a place and then move on. He rapidly falls in love with one of them and lets her go.

"The September People" by Tim Waggoner
An old woman returns to a place that she had found once in her youth, trying to unearth answers about the curious thing there that defined and changed her life.

"Judgment" by Kathryn Rusch
During the Nuremberg Trials one of the Folk who has abandoned the People to live as a human experiences the city as a war photographer, wondering all the while about his People and whether they are still in the ruined woods beyond the city.

"Changeling" by John Helfers
Though he has been loved all of his life by his family, Trent knows he is different and one day he finds out why.

"Yellow Tide Foam" by Sarah A. Hoyt
Children are disappearing from the city and a tough narcotics detective wants to know why. As she investigates she loses an informant to the strange scourge and begins to believe in another world, but is unsure whether that world is cold or kind.

"He said, Sidhe said" by Tanya Huff
Titania is tormented by Puck after bringing a skater home to meet the fairy court. She wonders whether she may just have truly terrible taste in men. This is a delightfully irreverent but somewhat painful-reading update of Shakespeare's fairyland.

"A very special relativity" by Jim Fiscus
If Einstein was right, how is the ship going where it's going? An enslaved crewman finds out and there's a great joke about an ill-advised king in the middle of a cockfight.

"Witches'-broom, apple soon" by Jane Lindskold
A young coyote doesn't really understand what the people and fauns around her are up to, but at least she knows better than to mess with the trees. This was a WONDERFUL story, maybe my favorite in the collection.

"Wyvern" by Wen Spencer
Is racism interdimensional or interpersonal? It doesn't have to be either, at least not when you've got a wyvern to worry about.

"A piece of flesh" by Adam Stemple
This is another changeling story, and a much creepier one to boot. If everyone in it wasn't terrible I might give a shit about it.

"The filial fiddler" by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Two old ladies come to the hospital and one young nurse has trouble chasing off a midnight fiddler who haunts their room.

"The stolen child" by Michelle West
What happens to the people left behind when someone dances in a fairy ring? And can you ever get back home? Not the greatest story here, and not the one I'd have chosen to end this collection, but interesting enough at any rate.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Davis, Russell and Martin H. Greenberg, ed. Faerie Tales. Daw Books, Inc.
     New York: New York. 2004.

It's just not cricket

 Punch Magazine understands that women don't care 

about sports - they just want to secure a good husband.

A few weeks ago I went out to lunch with my husband when we were both bemused to find cricket on television at the restaurant. We got through our meal somehow, though we were both looking over the other's shoulder at big-screen TVs and trying to make sense of cricket; there was so much discussion of bowling and padding and wickets going on between the two of us that it's surprising we managed to put any food in our mouths.

My knowledge of cricket is limited to a vague recollection of a few pages from In a Sunburned Country where Bryson narrates the surreal discovery of Australian Cricket Radio. I struggled to remember anything other than tea-breaks and ovals to explain the odd things happening on the TV (the broadcast was in a language that I couldn't identify, let alone understand).

After this strange, awkward lunch I devised a kind of personal challenge. I want to see if I can figure out cricket without looking it up on Wikipedia or watching English broadcasts. To this end, I decided that the second book I would read on my Kindle was to be Mr. Punch's Book of Sports: The Humors of Cricket, Football, Tennis, Polo, Croquet, Hockey, Racing, &c. so that, through the humor of Punch, I might better understand cricket while also getting a laugh or two in at the society that produced the sport.

Unfortunately, now that I've read it, cricket makes less sense than it did before and I'm pissed at the Victorians.

About half of the book is directed at making fun of athletes and the sports obsessed; the remainder of the book was devoted to making fun of women who had the poor manners to pretend to be athletes in order to find a husband, who just don't understand sports, or who had the gall to actually be competent athletes.

I know that this book is supposed to be humor from another time. I know that it is compiled from a 19th century men's magazine. I know that I'm a woman in a different century looking behind the curtain into the boy's club and I shouldn't be surprised to find that it's rather a mess. But holy shit, the "battle of the sexes" jokes got old fast in this book. And what's even SADDER is that some of these jokes are still bandied about and thought of as having a basis in reality.

Let's get real for a second here - I'm something of a jock, even though I didn't realize it until my mid-twenties. I like to do push-ups, I like to hike, I like to lift very heavy things and intimidate the living hell out of my male co-workers with my badass biceps. I have a uterus, but that is IN NO WAY going to stop me from tackling you.

My little sister, who is cute and girly as hell, who wears pretty nail polish and who is obsessed with cupcakes, is the biggest football fan that I know. I've seen her jumping up and down on furniture during a grueling drive, screaming like a champ to support her team, and, oh yeah, being in the marching band for 3 years at USC (where she played a tenor sax that was about a third her size, and was a jock in her own right).

I may not like baseball, I may actively dislike basketball, and I may not understand the appeal of soccer, but I'm still a hell of a lot more into watching them than my gigantic, bearded, manly husband is, and I'm probably better at playing them too.

Yet, in spite of the fact that women play, watch, and enjoy sports on a daily basis, we STILL have to deal with condescending "don't worry your pretty little head about it, I'll explain it in small words with martinis and dancing" women's sports clinics offered as a service to us so that we have something to do other than worry about cocktail weenies on game day. And condescending bosses who didn't think you would want to be included in a lunch because it was a "sports thing". And condescending male friends who ditch you because they think of watching the game as "a guy thing" and didn't want you to be bored. And any dude who has ever been a condescending prick about sports because "girls don't like sports." We get to experience the dual joy of being excluded from an activity we appreciate as well as from all the nice socialization that surrounds that activity because we have vaginas that might be offended at the sight of cleats or something. It's idiotic.

So I guess the humor in a 114 year old book fell flat because a lot of it is based on sexist jokes that are still being told, and are still not funny or true, today. What I'm trying to say here is don't be sexist, sports people. It's just not cricket.

Ed. Hammerton, J.A. Mr. Punch's Book of Sports. The Educational Book Co. Ltd.
     London: England. 1910.

Do you ever read a book and just go "what the fuck?"

 Showed up from nowhere, impossible to photograph well; must be full of horror stories.

Borderlands 4 is one of those rare books that I own but have no idea how I came to own it. It's part of a series of horror anthologies that I've never read before, I have no other books in the series, I've never heard of the editors, and I'm not much into genre fiction. One way or another, I probably picked it up because it had a Peter Straub story in it and, because I'm a huge fan of The Talisman and Black House, I wanted to read some stuff that he'd written without Stephen King. So, ignoring the aphorism, I bought a book because it had "Peter Straub" in fine print and a positive review by Harlan Ellison on its cover.

Two things about Harlan Ellison: 1) It sort of seems like every story in this anthology was written by someone who read "I have no mouth and I must scream" and decided "Yes, this is what I want to do forever." and 2) the quote on the cover is "This series puts every other anthology and its editor to shame," to which I say "Hahahahaha, fucking SERIOUSLY" and have to admire as either a wonderful sense of humor or balls so big that they're the cause of the flyby anomaly.

But Ellison has nothing to do with this collection other than his review. The book is a collection of horror stories (this was a surprise to me) which seem to have nothing in common except that most of them raise the question "why is this happening to this person?"; in none of the stories is that question answered, which I guess is fairly standard in the horror genre but is a bit unsatisfying over the course of a dozen or so stories.

I enjoyed reading the book, but I feel like there are only a couple of stories that I'll revisit in the future - those stories, though, I think that I'll be revisiting often, if only to banish them from my dreams.

"A Wind from the South" - Dennis Etchison
A woman alone confronts youth and possibility while wondering about the shifting realities around her. Spooky and distant, this story suggests wonderful things of the novel it's excerpted from.

"House of Cool Air" - William F. Wu
This story makes me want more and more and more of it to flesh out the world that Wu offers only a tantalizing glimpse of. Reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale in its tone and character, the story raises more questions than it answers and allows the reader to fill in their own blanks.

"Morning Terrors" - Peter Crowther
What the actual fuck? I really wanted to fall into the world of this short, and by the end I just couldn't manage it. And again: what the actual fuck?

"Circle of Lias" - Lawrence C. Connolly
Feels like a horror story as told by Phillip K. Dick - a fascinating exploration of onrushing madness brought about by stress and a random encounter with a cult.

"Misadventure in the Skin Trade" - Don D'Ammassa
I really like it when someone gets a look inside of a crazy person's head right; the obsession and suspicion that fill the pages of this short do a pretty good job of making you feel just as crazy as the narrator.

"Watching the Soldiers" - Dirk Strasser
A very interesting modern fable that makes a wonderful commentary about the allure of war, the reasons we fight, questioning authority, and exploring deeper reasons for peace. I'm not sure how this fits in the horror genre, but I really enjoyed finding this little gem.

"The Ocean and all its Devices" - William Browning Spencer
This feels like Spencer's ode to Lovecraft and if it is it's a wonderful one. Creepy, dark, and sad with just the right overtones of overwhelming, incomprehensible horrors hiding under the surface of the world.

"One in the A.M." - Rachel Drummond
I hated this story. The anthology editors make note that part of the problem with short-short stories is that the surprise is predictable. The problem in THIS story is that I didn't care about the surprise. I just wanted to finish it and be done with it. Fuck second person voice. The only person who I have ever read who has done second person voice well was Italo Calvino in the prologue to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and that was largely because he was making a wry commentary on second person voice in particular and literature in general. Seriously. Fuck second person.

"A Side of the Sea" - Ramsey Campbell
I'm not sure where this story wanted to go, and I didn't particularly enjoy the route it took to get there. The language was nice, but it didn't make up for the lack of a plot or a motive.

"Painted Faces" - Gerard Daniel Houarner
Houarner's short was a page turner, but mostly because I wanted to find out what was going on so I could figure out who in the story I hated and who in the story I pitied. Interestingly he managed to write it in such a way that I ended up hating everyone.

"Monotone" - Lawrence Greenberg
I really enjoyed this story for the story, but couldn't stand the way that it was being told. This feels like an authorial experiment to write to the title, but the staccato sentences distracted from and were less interesting than the fascinating subject.

"Dead Leaves" - James C. Dobbs
This was a WONDERFUL story about how different people react to impending death. I didn't really like the (rather sexist) portrayal of female reproductive drive, but I liked everything else - the nature, the embalming procedures, and the remembrance of a life not quite over yet. And the dog. It's hard for a story to go too far afoul when the dog is okay.

"From the Mouths of Babes" - Bentley Little
Icky, surprising, and fun this story made me cringe and it made me curious. Good stuff and bad feelings all around.

"The Long Holiday" - William Ellis
An interesting little piece with a "shocker" that I might have enjoyed more if I hadn't seen it done better in a Neal Gaiman super-short a few years ago. I suppose it's not really fair to compare anyone to Gaiman, but the concept is tired even if it hadn't already been done by the best.

"The Late Mr. Havel's Apartment" - David Herter
There is something REALLY COOL going on here that unfortunately isn't given any legs - this could be the core of a great novel, or even a really good short story, but I feel like too much attention is paid to minor details and the best possibilities go unexplored.

"Union Dues" - Gary A. Braunbeck
What makes "factory men" out of generations of people who should know better, who have lived through the sufferings of their fathers? Some really creepy shit, is what. I had a lot of fun reading this short; it did exactly what it needed to in the space that it had, and managed to be surprisingly heart-wrenching at the same time. Some of the dialogue felt a little surrealistically slick, and sucked me out of the story for a couple of minutes, but what are you going to do? I got sucked back in, so the story worked overall.

"Earshot" - Glenn Isaacson
An appealing mechanism that left me cold. Maybe dehumanizing women holds some appeal for some horror readers, but I guess it works better when you don't already feel objectified by random people in your life. Upsetting because it could have worked in a million other ways, but objectifying a woman was the direction the story went.

As a side note, just a general tip for authors: about 50% of your potential audience is made up of women, most of whom have been told at some point in their life to "just sit there and look pretty" or "not to worry your pretty little head about it" or to "ignore it, it's just guy stuff" - we're used to the idea that some people think of us as subhuman: we don't find it shocking or horrifying, we just find it exhausting and boring. Find another trope.

Fee - Peter Straub
If I wanted to know what Peter Straub writes like when he isn't teaming up with Stephen King, I found out. It is awesome.

Fee was a surprisingly long novella tucked away at the end of this collection, just waiting for you to march through the preceding pages so that it could arrest your attention and drop your jaw. It tells the story of a little boy living with a terrifying father, an incapacitated mother, and the slowly creeping insanity that grows in the back of his mind as you follow him through truly horrifying situations. On top the great sense oh-my-god-that's-awful that pervades the novella there is a wonderful, surreal, and sickening story-within-a-story that seems to concentrate and focus the horror - so much of the rest of the story is dream-like, as it's written in a child's voice; the story-within-the-story is disturbingly plausible in contrast while still capturing elements of wonder and magic (these elements are subsequently debased and abused, which seems to crystallize the whole novella into an inescapable nightmare). I enjoyed the hell out of this story, and I'll be keeping an eye out for more opportunities to read Straub in the future.

Ed. Elizabeth Montelcone and Thomas F. Montelcone. Borderlands 4.
     White Wolf Publishing. Clarkson: Georgia. 1995.

The De-Textbook; maybe not all it's Cracked up to be

First of all, I'm so sorry for that pun.

I love Cracked. I read the website almost daily, I cite their articles in conversation all the time, and I think it's a great way to fill time and learn more about all kinds of things. However reading this book has made me realize that there's one huge difference between reading the website and swallowing the same factoids that are presented here in book form. That difference is the internet and the wide, wonderful world of hyperlinks.

When you see BS on the web, especially if it's got a link to the cited study right there in the text, it's pretty easy to jump up and go "BULLSHIT!" and then proceed to be an asshole in the comments section. When you're reading the same BS in a book, you've got to remember that you've seen this bullshit before, where you've seen it, hope that you're able to fight your human nature enough to argue against something that you want to believe, and be contentious and pedantic enough to make the effort to write a blog that no one will read just for the sake of proving your point (this is sort of my deal, in case you couldn't tell yet.)

Two things in The De-Textbook jumped out at me right away as problematic for a book that's supposed to break down myths and replace them with totally awesome facts.

The first one comes early in the book, when talking about your body and how you don't know shit about it because all of your teachers lied (or were at least very misinformed). A lot of the information in the chapter is pretty spot-on, but when you get to the end of the Discussion Questions section and the questions turn to medicine, you are given this gem: "Sugar pills and other forms of fake medication have been found to help and even cure everything from warts to heart disease to asthma if the patients just believe that they're taking real medicine."(The De-Textbook, p. 15) Asthma is what really caught my attention here, because the holistic medicine industry is doing its best to convince asthmatics that they don't need inhalers, they just need homeopathy. The problem is that the article that this came from (click on "warts" to see it) links to a Wikipedia page of disorders treated by placebo, which in turn links to a psychological study done on asthmatics (please note, that's a psych study, not a medical study) that proved that placebo worked to treat asthma! Cool! Except that the study was done on 12 people. In 1986. And that recent similar studies have shown that patients may feel better, but their lungs aren't actually performing any better with placebo. Which, if you have asthma, is not really comforting because now you know that you can feel just fine and still end up straight-up dead. And Cracked should know better than to promote this kind of bullshit because just two days ago they published an article that discussed how the majority of medical studies are critically flawed - you know, like the ones they just used to justify telling you that no one knows how medicine works on page 15 of their book.

The second thing that really jumped out at me probably wouldn't have if I hadn't just finished reading a Pulitzer Prize nominated biography of Benjamin Franklin. It's in the American History section of The De-Textbook, and much of it is based on this article about how the founding fathers were dicks - which, while often true, is not really true based on the reasons that the article gives. There is SO MUCH that's wrong, or misleading, or purposefully obfuscated in the book and the article that I'd have to write a few thousand words to explain exactly the ways that it's wrong in, so let's focus on the analogy they use in the book, that England is a patient father with a rebellious son who causes him problems and costs him money.

In the book, the son is rebellious and starts the French and Indian war because he wants to grab Ohio. In the real story, France and Canada are also father and son, and England and France have been at war for a few centuries, and France has encouraged his son Canada to stab the Colonies' in the junk as frequently as possible. Because of this, the Colonies decide to beat the living shit out of Canada, eventually getting the support of his loving Father to stop getting stabbed in the junk (by which I mean seeing hordes of farmers and families slaughtered by Native Americans encouraged by the French at the borders of the Colonies). When it's all done and the son's junk is starting to heal, though one testicle will never be the same, the father says "Dude, I had to come all this way and I hurt my shoulder. You should pay my medical bills." Meanwhile, the son is cradling his swollen, stabbed testicles, which are bandaged with dirty gauze and washed with the sweat of war, and saying "maybe I'd pay for your poor shoulder if I hadn't gotten stabbed in the balls for a year and STILL been the one on the front lines." The father gets pissy and essentially sends his son to a re-education camp, sending in royal governors to take charge of the people who had no political voice and forcing them to pay for the room and board (so mansions and feasts) of the hated re-education governors and generals. All of this is going on while the son's hands are broken and he can't earn a real income because the father broke his hands and took his clothes so that he wouldn't get too independent (the British didn't allow the Colonies to do things like build foundries or make hats because it might allow the Colonies to make their own shit and thus hurt trade in England, so things like beaver fur came from the Colonies, were shipped to England where they were made into hats, and were then shipped back to the Colonies where they not only had to pay the fur-to-hat markup, they also had to pay the two trans-Atlantic crossings markup in spite of the fact that there were perfectly able haberdashers in the colonies). So long story short, portraying England as an indulgent father and the Colonies as a crazy, rebellious, expensive son is more than a little disingenuous.

So these are two big problems that I found in The De-Textbook. Can anyone guess the bigger issue that they raise?

 If this book is supposed to be factual it helps to be, you know, actually factual. There are some things that I know it got right; Longfellow's Paul Revere poem was totally propaganda, the tongue map is stupid, Victorians were into some freaky shit, and Kellogg's Corn Flakes were created by a madman. There's a lot of stuff in the book that is provably true and well documented, but the inclusion of stuff that is provably false and supported only by 30 year old studies on tiny groups of people puts a whole lot of sweet, sweet facts under the suspicion of being bitter filthy lies.

Again, I love Cracked. I think the site is fantastic and there is a lot of information on the site that is well worth reading - some of that ended up in the book (almost verbatim, in a few places) and is good information to have. You SHOULD learn how to poop the right way, and that Einstein was a freak, but you shouldn't have to question every single page because there's no way to verify the information that you're being handed. There isn't even an index, which there REALLY should be because a) the entire construction and marketing of the book is built on it being a TRUE textbook, and I dare you to find a textbook without an index and b) because it would be SO FREAKING EASY to cite your sources in an index or footnotes or something because you are the people who run and curate the website where all of these facts are compiled, though maybe you need a fact-checker and I will selflessly volunteer to be paid for that job if you really don't have enough fact-checkers on your staff.

Also? I know that Cracked is used to having to rely on advertisers and so they edit photos on the site, but pixelating the nipples off the Venus de Milo is a confusing editorial decision. Especially when you DON'T bother to censor cartoon boner drawings photoshopped behind Einstein, or to blur out the side-boob and butt-crack off of the lady who you've added Ulysses S. Grant's head to (and by the way, when you call him a fancy lady instead of an antisocial nutbag because he won't shower with his troops during the war, it comes off as kind of sexist, as does the whole cartoon dicks vs. ancient artwork tits thing).

Oh, there's another reason to have an index instead of just a picture credits page - I couldn't find the uncensored drawing from page 69 (heh). That would be useful. And one of the great things about not having advertisers: here is the results of my search for that drawing, the greatest Wikipedia page I never knew about (NSFW).

For all the issues of fact, the book is funny. And it ends with a great message that the staff is totally right about: the world is incredible and you should go explore it because holy shit, is there a lot of awesome stuff out there.

ED. O'Brien, Jack. The De-Textbook. Plume Books. New York: New York. 2013.

(This post is for Skoolstah, my awesome brother-in-dick-jokes, who sent me The De-Textbook as a gift that I was happy to criticize, but even happier to read. Thanks man!)