Viannah Duncan

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen

beth — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen by Kathleen Rowe Karlyn is a fascinating look into the movies and television I watched as a kid. As a woman in my mid-twenties, I can safely say that my age group, for the most part, was the target audience when the films and television shows mentioned in the book were being produced. Or, at least, one of the target audiences. Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers is a companion volume to Unruly Women, published in 1995 by the same author. (I have not read Unruly Women, so some of my thoughts about Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers may have responses in the earlier work.)

According to the back cover and introduction, Karlyn’s purpose in writing this companion volume is to “ask whether today’s seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional characters as the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.” The book is more than 250 pages long, plus twenty pages of endnotes, eighteen pages for the Works Cited, and an index for ease in looking up specific information. It’s clear in reading that Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers is an academic work, but the author thankfully did a good job of keeping my attention with her writing style, relevance of the subjects, and accompanying photographs.

The book is split into an introduction, an afterward, and eight chapters which comprise the bulk of her argument. The first few chapters delve into the worlds of Clueless, Titanic, American Beauty, the Scream trilogy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mean Girls, and The Devil Wears Prada. It really helps to have seen the aforementioned movies (and the others Karlyn discusses later) or some of the series in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For example, I could really engage in the parts about Titanic, American Beauty, Buffy, and The Devil Wears Prada because I’d seen those multiple times, remembered details, and could grapple with Karlyn’s assertions about each piece. (She says American Beauty has a strong incest motif, and since I’d seen the movie multiple times I was able to disagree at first and then maybe see where she was coming from.) But for the others I mentioned—especially the Scream trilogy, which I’ve never seen—it was much harder to understand what she was even talking about; I had to take her at her word that one character did something and then another did something else, etc. It wouldn’t be unthinkable, I suppose, to sit down and watch (at least some of) the pieces mentioned in Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers to have a basic understanding of the author’s starting point, but until I have time to do that, I can’t fully engage with some of the text. I suspect other readers will have similar issues.

Nonetheless, the movies and characters with which I was familiar provided me with plenty of brain fodder. There’s an entire chapter on Reese Witherspoon’s ability to “walk the line” between feminine and feminist in her film portrayals, and in real life, a chapter about teen melodrama that focuses on My So-Called Life and Thirteen, and a chapter about girls and women of color in film. I’m not sure how I feel about having only one chapter about girls and women of color; I don’t know if Karlyn could only work with the movies she had and most of them just leave out people of color (i.e., the entertainment industry is racist) or if she picked and chose the films that fit her thesis and the ones that most easily fit didn’t include people of color in important roles, or some combination thereof. (I suspect it’s the third option.) That said, someone could write an entire book about just girls and women of color on screen, so I’m not sure how I’d have written it differently in this book.

Overall, I’d say that Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers is a great reference text; it has a lot of relevant, useful information for Third Wave feminists (and parents of said), and it may open up someone’s eyes when they ascribe to feminist beliefs that begin with, “I’m not a feminist, but…”

Written by: Viannah Duncan, March 29th 2011

The Pious Sex: Essays on Women and Religion in the History of Political Thought

gita — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Andrea Radasanu

Lexington Books

I could comment extensively on each of the essays in The Pious Sex, but seeing as there are eleven in total (not counting the introduction) and I have limited space here, that will not be possible.

At the beginning of the introduction, the editor, Andrea Radasanu, immediately apologizes for calling to mind “the worst of the prejudices associated with women over the ages: the characterization of women as superstitious and inherently irrational creatures that must be kept firmly in hand by the patriarchal establishment.” I admit the first thing I thought of when I read the title (and subtitle) was the injustice levied on ‘the fairer sex’ by the religious order(s) of the day. This set of essays tries to untangle the mistreatment of women by religious sects and leaders and more fully examine the relationship of women to religion (and vice versa) in the history of political thought. In other words, it’s sort of like reading a meta-history: history about the history of women and religion.

The titles of the individual essays hint at what kind of education (formal or otherwise) the reader must have in order to fully grasp the essays themselves. For example: “The Piety of Esther,” by Clifford Orwin, requires having read the Book of Esther in the Old Testament of the Bible; “Love and Piety in Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” by Catharine Connors, assumes prior knowledge of Machiavelli and his work, or La Mandragola if nothing else; “Jane Austen’s Education of Women: A Study of Mansfield Park,” by Amy L. Bonnette, requires having read Mansfield Park, if not other works by Jane Austen as well as information pertaining to the author.

Each of the essays has endnotes for further reading in case you, like me, aren’t as well read as the writing assumes you to be. (Actually, I would have preferred footnotes over endnotes because it’s annoying to have to keep flipping back and forth between the page and the note, but at least the endnotes for each essay are at the end of said essay and not at the end of the collection.)

All that said, I really benefited from reading and learning about the relationship between women and religion in a more complicated way than, “Eve ate the forbidden fruit first; therefore she is the root of all evil.” Also readers should note that the essays are written from a Western philosophical viewpoint and focus primarily on ancient Roman, Jewish, and Christian settings. I would be interested to read a similar collection about women, piety, and religion that are written from a more Eastern viewpoint and focus on other world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American and native African religious traditions.

Overall, I recommend reading the introduction before you commit to the bulk of the collection. I was able to enjoy most of the pieces, but I would have to be much more well-read to understand these essays at any great depth. I got the gist of it, but I think I was hitting the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, February 6th 2011

Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

annette — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

SUNY Press

I learned a lot about Black Greek-letter organizations while reading Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, specifically about the title sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA). The author, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, does a good job of laying out the socio-political arena in which the members lived, from the importance of stepping to the brown paper bag (skin hue) test to the members’ activism in the public sphere.

Disciplining Women is split into five chapters and includes copious endnotes for the dedicated reader. Whaley introduces us to Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) generally in the first chapter by referencing the recent movie Stomp the Yard and Spike Lee’s School Daze. She notes, however, that neither film is historically complex and both are about men’s organizations, not women’s, which creates kind of a vacancy in popular imagination about the specifics and importance of Black sororities. The first chapter is a stepping point from BGLOs by and large to AKA in particular.

The second chapter focuses on placing AKA and, by extension, other BGLOs into a historical context by connecting the sorority to other culturally significant events: everything from anti-lynching activism at the turn of the last century to1990s AIDS activism and all the way up to the present. Whaley duly notes AKA’s members’ good deeds but also mentions with caution that the sorority’s “politics of respectability and reform ventures” may actually have hurt (and continue to hurt) Black Americans as a whole. One step forward, two steps back, it seems.

The third chapter was the most interesting and informative to me because it covered stepping, something I’ve been interested in since I learned about it in college. (My school had no historically Black sororities or fraternities, but the Black Student Union often hosted groups from other schools, many of which included step performers.) Whaley briefly analyzes stepping by centering it in the step performances of the African diaspora and then centers on how stepping has evolved on college campuses and how young women reproduce and recreate gender, sexual identity, and ethnic loyalties through public ritual. Though other publications have covered stepping more thoroughly, Disciplining Women expands upon Black women’s contributions to discussions of femininity and sexuality.

In the fourth chapter, from which the title of the book is taken, Whaley tackles the minefield that is hazing in a BGLO (or any Greek-letter organization). The primary AKA case study about unofficial pledge activities that resulted in a criminal trial in Kent, Ohio, provided a dark, complicated look into sorority initiation rites.

In the last chapter, AKA sisters and alumnae comment on the future of BGLOs and raise three main points of concern: “class, gender, and racial struggle; regrets and mistakes pertaining to pledging and hazing; and maintaining hope through action in the Black public sphere.” Including the voices of women in AKA proved to be an important point for Whaley; she lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions by setting historical narrative and present-day socio-political and cultural discussion side by side for review.

Disciplining Women does not work well as an introduction to Black Greek-letter organizations and seems more easily approached as a case study of one such organization, Alpha Kappa Alpha, so long as the reader already has some background knowledge of Black fraternities and sororities, stepping, and/or hazing on college campuses. The reading is verbose and intense; more than once I had to reread a sentence to understand what it really meant. Essentially, it’s an academic text rather than a popular history or easy-to-read guide. Any one of the chapters could have been exponentially expanded and, when I was able to follow the author, I often wanted it to; the discussion, when I understood it, was all too brief for my taste. Disciplining Women provides a lot of great information, but make sure you’re prepared to focus and engage in the reading without interruptions or distractions.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, December 5th 2010

Amandine

gita — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Marlena de Blasi

Ballantine Books

Set in 1930s and ‘40s in France and Poland, Amandine is Marlena de Blasi’s first work of fiction. The title character is a girl without a history. Or, at least, a history she knows. When she was just five months old, a mysterious woman deposited her in a French convent with Solange, a lay sister. Mater Paul, the head nun there, was given directions never to tell anyone claiming to be from the child’s past anything about the child, or to tell the child anything about her past or heritage, even what little that she knew. When the mysterious woman left her at the convent, the child didn’t even have a name.

Solange names the child Amandine. Although Amandine has a defective heart and is not expected to live very long, she survives, and Solange virtually never leaves her side. They live in the convent in France until Amandine is almost ten. Mater Paul has been barely hospitable during this time and, after one of the other nuns starves Amandine almost to death in a misguided attempt to protect Mater Paul, Solange and her young charge decide to leave the convent and travel to Solange’s mother’s farm in northern France. Just before they board the first train, they find out France has offered a complete surrender to Nazi Germany. Amandine spends the rest of the novel trying to reach Solange’s family.

In the meantime, Amandine’s mother finds out that her daughter, who she thought had died as an infant, is still alive. The major subplot of the story, then, is her search for her daughter amidst the chaos that was ensuing in Europe during World War II.

In reading Amandine, I found a few things distracting. First, it’s written in present tense, which is extremely difficult to write well. In this case, unfortunately, it’s more irritating than anything else.

Second, it is mostly in third person, but switches to first person perspective inexplicably two-thirds of the way into the story and switches back to third person less than thirty pages later. When I got to that part, I had to go back to make sure the perspective really had changed, and this took me out of the narrative.

Third, entire sections of many of the chapters are a single character's thoughts. While I don’t mind reading a main character’s internal dialog every now and then, especially when the character is the one narrating the story, reading pages upon pages of italics (which indicate thoughts) is a huge turn off for me. Not only that, the various thoughts are not just from one character but many characters, which makes it more difficult to keep straight without rereading earlier chapters.

Honestly, this was an okay novel; it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, either. After I got past the three major detractors, Amandine kept my attention well. There’s just enough background on the war to ground the novel, but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed, with only one exception: at one point—a few SS soldiers kill one of the major characters, though there’s barely any foreshadowing to speak of. On one page, the character is alive, and on the next, dead. This speaks to the seriousness of war even for people who have not been directly affected by it.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, October 8th 2010

Made in India

mandy — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Directed by Vaishali Sinha, Rebecca Haimowitz

Chicken & Egg Pictures

Made in India is a documentary about the growing trend of infertile American couples who outsource a surrogate pregnancy to a woman in India. The film follows one such couple, Lisa and Brian, from San Antonio, Texas, who have experienced seven years of infertility. They don’t have a lot of money (“by American standards, anyway,” they say) and are taking their last chance to start a family of their own on by using a “medical tourism” agency based in Los Angeles called Planet Hospital.

Made in India also follows Aasia, the woman chosen to become the surrogate for Lisa and Brian. She is married and already has three children. Her sister-in-law introduced her to the idea of surrogacy, and when asked about her choice, Aasia says (in Hindi), “A child without a man?! How can that be? There has to be some kind of a… ‘relationship,’ right?!” Nevertheless, she decides (against her husband’s wishes, no less) to become a surrogate in order to help provide for her children, especially her daughter.

The American couple visits India twice: once to have their egg and sperm extracted and deposited into Aasia (who they never meet during the trip), and a second time after their twin daughters are born. The babies are born more than a month earlier than anticipated in a hospital that doesn’t have a direct connection with the Planet Hospital agency. Lisa, Brian, and Aasia have to convince the hospital's administration that the babies belong to the American couple, not the Indian surrogate. It’s such a mess that even the American Embassy has to get involved.

I was surprised by how much this film made me care about the issues it brings up. I have never tried to have a child, and I hadn’t thought much about the lengths couples go to in order to start a family. Lisa and Brian made clear that, although they had thought about adopting, they decided against it until they had exhausted all the other biological options. Since having an Indian surrogate was an option they could afford, they went for it.

Made in India was well made, and thoroughly covered the couple’s journey from their commitment to Indian surrogacy until they got their daughters home. The film complicates the typical equation of becoming pregnant, giving birth, and what it means to be a mother. Even though she hadn’t carried them to term, the twins are Lisa's daughters, genetics and all.

Made in India gave me a lot to think about in the debate over who has a right to women’s bodies, surrogacy and adoption, and outsourcing employment to other countries from the United States. One may not fully agree with the decisions that are documented in this film, but it is thought-provoking nonetheless.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, October 6th 2010

Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Alison Weir

Ballantine Books

Alison Weir is first a historian, and it shows in Captive Queen. She studied Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1970s and 1990s and realized one day that “the nature of medieval biography, particularly of women, is the piecing together of fragments of information and making sense of them. It can be a frustrating task, as there are often gaps that you know you can never fill.”

Captive Queen explores Eleanor’s life from just before her marriage to Henry FitzEmpress (later Henry II, King of England) until just after Henry’s death in 1189. There is also an epilogue that covers her death in 1204. At the beginning, there’s a map of lower England and Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany, and France, which are all parts of present-day France. Also included is a helpful flowchart of Eleanor and Henry’s genealogy, which I referred to numerous times when I was trying to remember minor characters.

The novel itself is split into five parts, each representing a stage in Eleanor’s life and marriage to Henry. The first part is a rosy depiction of Eleanor’s early life with Henry. At the time of their wedding, he was eighteen and she was twenty-nine and already had two daughters. They were married just two months after the annulment of her marriage to the King of France, Louis VII. Eleanor’s marriage to King Henry was tumultuous: she fought with Henry often about his rule of her lands. At the same time, however, it was steamy; it wasn’t even twenty pages in before the first bedroom scene occurs. Still, it’s clear she wanted a partnership of equals, not a man to rule over her as husband and lord, which was the norm at the time, especially for women in royalty.

The following four parts accentuate her desire to be included in affairs of state, rule her lands equitably, and be treated as more than “the wife of King Henry and mother of his children.” The second part covers her apparent rivalry with Thomas Becket. In the third part, Weir writes about Eleanor and Henry’s sons: Young Henry, Richard (who would become Richard the Lionheart), Geoffrey, and John (later to become King John, best known for signing the Magna Carta and for being a primary antagonist in most Robin Hood legends).

After encouraging her sons to rebel (unsuccessfully) against their father, Henry placed Eleanor under house arrest for more than fifteen years, most notably in Sarum, Wiltshire (the earliest settlement of present-day Salisbury, England). There, she received very little news from outside the confines of her imprisonment but was finally freed upon Henry’s death in 1189. In the novel, she says to her gaoler, “Master Berneval, I command you, in the name of King Richard, to set me at liberty at once.” And he does.

Two things irked me about Captive Queen, and neither are the author’s fault. The first is Henry’s repeated insistence (and everyone else’s assumption) that women are meant to be child-bearers and nothing more. Eleanor herself even notes that she is most proud of her daughters when they produce children—hopefully sons—for their husbands. The second is that Eleanor’s life revolves around the men in it, no matter how much she wants to rule her lands herself or how intelligent and magnanimous she is in acting as Henry’s regent. The first thing is the unfortunate sexist reality Eleanor had to deal with during her lifetime. The second is related; Weir’s frustration at being able to find only a very few fragments of Eleanor’s life basically forced her to study the men surrounding Eleanor and often make conjectures about her based on what was written about them.

It’s clear in reading that Alison Weir did a lot of research before penning Captive Queen as a fiction. After all, she writes, “What is the point of a historical novel... based on a real person if the author does not take pains to make it authentic as possible?” For fans of medieval Europe, this book is a must read. Just beware that the author made it as authentic as possible, right down to the sexism of the time period.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, July 18th 2010

A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen

Snow Lion Publications

I guess I was expecting more of a “Buddhism for idiots” type of book when I picked up A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path by Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen (a title which means, roughly, “great abbot”). For better or worse, that’s not what this book is. Before I read the book, I knew nothing of Buddhism except that some people call it a philosophy rather than a religion and Buddhist nuns have to shave their heads upon joining their order. I don’t know why I knew those two things and nothing else, but nevertheless I was pretty ignorant of all things Buddhist.

A Complete Guide to the Buddhist Path is commentary based on The Jewel Treasury of Advice: A Hundred Teachings From the Heart by Drikung Bhande Dharmaradza (1704-1754). Each of the 103 verses—plus some introductory verses—is taken as its own piece of wisdom and expounded upon in one to four pages by Gyaltshen. I read through it as one would a novel—not something I’d recommend since there’s a lot of material and quite a bit of repetition from one verse’s exposition to the next. (The preface by the editor warns of the repetition, but I didn’t pay much attention to that until I started thinking, “Hey, didn’t we go over this already?”) In fact, the author and editor anticipated reading the book in sections so that each verse would be contemplated fully before going on. Each verse and commentary is a complete thought and could have its own review, so writing about the entire book in such broad terms is difficult.

Most of the verses in The Jewel Treasury of Advice end with the words, “This is my heart’s advice.” Gyaltshen writes, “[Bhande Dharmaradza] is giving this advice from his heart, completely for the benefit of others. So we should sincerely take it into our heart.” I liked the Advice about the Six Perfections the most. The six perfections are: generosity, moral ethics, patience, perseverance, meditative concentration, and wisdom awareness. While I don’t think reading this book all the way through like a novel is a good idea, I also don’t think a reader should read the verses out of order. The author of the commentary mentions words like samasara, dharma, and skandha, and only defines them the first time. If the book is read out of order, those definitions are lost to the reader, although there is a glossary of terms and names at the end.

This book works better as a meditation tool for those who have already been introduced to Buddhism. It does not work well as an introductory text, despite what the title might suggest.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, May 15th 2010

Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Phoebe Tsang

Tightrope Books

Phoebe Tsang’s Contents of a Mermaid's Purse is somewhat like a real purse a modern woman might have: familiar and, at the same time, exotic—and so is what it holds. Dumping the purse’s contents onto the table to sift through proves to be an exercise in strange beauty—an alluring siren’s call fulfilled. From the seemingly mundane poems like “My Mother’s Bread”—in which I’m intrigued to keep reading after learning that her mother’s bread is as hard as soapstone—to the fantastic, watery world that comprises almost all of the second section, Contents of a Mermaid's Purse does not disappoint.

Tsang’s work often deals with an undefined “you”, who I assume to be the speaker’s lover, though it’s unclear and may change between poems. Alluding to an other in her prose poem “Fox Fire,” she writes, “I rise early to spin stories by the kitchen window until the heartbeat murmur of footsteps begins to fall like rain at my back...”

I was talking with a friend about the collection and she asked me what I thought of mermaids in general. We discovered that she and I have conflicting ideas of what a mermaid actually is and what it represents, and my idea of one was/is more sinister than hers. So, she asked, in the poem “In Love with a Mermaid” who speaks these lines: “the spell uncast on my lips / so you wouldn’t be netted”—the mermaid or the lover? Such are the questions and intrigue winding itself through Tsang’s poetry.

As someone who likes rich, visual poetry, I really enjoyed reading Contents of a Mermaid's Purse and recommend it to those who are fond of such a bold foray into daring writing. Expect unusual metaphors and dangerous beauty, and expect to have lines haunt you long after the last page is turned. I especially liked the previously mentioned poems “My Mother’s Bread” and “Fox Fire” as well as “Black Cat,” “The Fox and the Lady,” “Blood Roses,” and “Lady Luck.”

Written by: Viannah Duncan, March 2nd 2010

The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Stephen J. Ceci, Wendy M. Williams

Oxford University Press

I’ll be honest. I was scared of reading The Mathematics of Sex. I am not the kind of women they’re writing about, and I know very few women who are. I’m not a mathematician, physicist, chemist, computer scientist, operations researcher, or engineer. Without the subtitle, “How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls,” the title is somewhat misleading; it’s not so much about sex between the sheets as biological sex. It’s not about the math of sex so much as the math surrounding women… or the lack of it surrounding them.

Ceci and Williams note that boys and men perform better than girls and women on standardized tests. (They use the SATs and the Putnam Mathematical Competition as examples.) Interestingly, girls and women earn better grades than boys and men in math and science classes. “For example, a man with the same SAT-M score as a woman seated next to him earns a grade nearly two letter grades lower than her in a mathematics course—he gets a C/D versus her B.” Still, even though women do better in classes, “the ranks of professionals in math-intensive fields are lopsidedly male.”

There are three supposed causes of the under-representation of women in math-heavy fields of work: comparable innate ability, social and cultural bias and barriers, and women’s lack of interest. The authors cover these arguments thoroughly in chapters two and three, which they call “opening arguments.” Then, in chapters four and five, they challenge those arguments with their own research and data.

Ceci and Williams conclude that women are not in math-intensive fields as much as men because of _non_biological/ability factors, including the tendency for “women with high mathematical talent…to enter non-math fields such as medicine, veterinary medicine, law, and biological sciences.” They analyze evidence across multiple fields of expertise: “the cognitive psychology of mental rotation, the social psychology of stereotypes, personal preferences, discrimination, and hormonal bases of behavior, econometrics of hiring and promotion, and cultural comparisons of mathematics achievement.”

Overall, The Mathematics of Sex wasn’t as scary as I expected it to be, and it was worth the read. To those people who say, “All these worrying women; I don’t know what the big fuss is,” I say: this book has the answer to why women aren’t in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) professions. It’s important to promote women in fields in which there are few female representatives so that future generations will continue to come to the radical conclusion that women are also human. Ceci and Williams do a good job of encouraging that in this book. Kudos.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, January 11th 2010

Mijeong

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:29:00 +0000

By Byun Byung-Jun

NBM Publishing

Mijeong is a collection of short stories by Byung-Jun Byun in manhwa form. In a word, Mijeong—a Chinese word meaning “pure beauty”—is moving. No matter what the story (there are seven) I was encouraged to think critically about men and women, adults and children, and their relationships to one another. Although the stories don’t seem to overlap, each is about a young person or young people dealing with the realities of their harsh urban world. Whatever else the author does, it’s clear the manhwa is striving for the beauty the title implies.

“Manhwa” is the general term for comics, print cartoons, and graphic novels in Korea. In other parts of the world, it’s usually marketed as Manga, a Japanese term meaning the same thing. One way it’s certainly different from Manga is that it’s read from left to right—the same direction as books in English—not right to left, as Manga traditionally is.

The author’s artistic style is more realistic than most Manga I’ve read. Characters’ eyes, for example, don’t seem to be a dominating facial feature. The art is more expressionist than I was expecting, and each page seems fuzzy, as if I was reading it through a dream. Most of the stories are in black, white, and grey. The one in the middle, “Song for You,” however, is cast in pastel hues and shows Byun’s artistic progress in the representation of space. Over all, the writing is sparse, letting the art speak except in cases of character dialogue.

I was struck most by “Yeon-du, seventeen years old,” which is about a young woman who acts in a porn film in order to be able to pay for a piece of art that a childhood friend of hers loved. We learn that the friend was killed trying to protect her from rapists at a young age, and now she lives to avenge him.

In “Utility,” a group of friends finds one of the girls' siblings hanging in her apartment after committing suicide. Because they’re afraid someone will come in and think they killed the young woman, they try to decide how to dispose of the body. It is, like Byun’s other pieces in Mijeong, very thought provoking.

This collection is quite an undertaking, and it left me with a sense of Korean urban life as well as the life of young people today. It’s not an overtly feminist collection, but it touches on some serious issues and treats them with respect. I’m looking forward to reading more of Byun’s work in the future.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, August 24th 2009

Woman Into Wolf: A TrueCrimeTale

admin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:55:00 +0000

By Alysse Aallyn

The Midnight Reader

I haven’t read a true crime story in a long time, and I was really looking forward to it. I was mildly disappointed, then, to learn that Woman Into Wolf “combines the events of several real cases, but other than Digger, who was a real dog, and the Bird Lady, who was a real person, characters must be considered inventions of the author.” It’s not true crime, I don’t think, if it’s been made up, even if the events purportedly did happen. Nevertheless, I put my reservations aside and sat down to chapter one: “The Animal Bridegroom.” Well, this could get interesting, I thought.

And interesting it certainly was. Lucky for me, both Digger and the Bird Lady have prominent roles in this fictional “true crime” novel. Persephone, Persey for short, is a housewife who suffers though a detective’s complaints about a murderer whose victims have never been found because his bosses won’t listen to him and go out looking. The next morning, she hikes off the trail a ways with her dog, Digger, into virtual no man’s land and finds not one, but two bodies. One is a skeleton that has probably been around for a long time; the other is “fresh” and still in the process of decaying. She calls the detective and a whirlwind begins.

The characters seem stock at first, but at least Persey grows into her own, and that’s a relief. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to put this book down as another bodice ripper or “all women are victims” type story, and thankfully, it isn’t (though it threatens to stray into that territory more than once). Persey deals with her husband, Roy, and his mother, Babe, who wants her to have a baby so badly that she is always on the lookout for a “baby-bump.” And though Persey may start out as “just a desperate housewife,” after she takes initiative and searches for the cadavers she finds on her hike that morning, it’s clear that she’s anything but weak or in need of protecting. It’s nice to have strong women characters every once in a while.

I was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of writing in Woman Into Wolf, and would recommend it as beach reading for those who have a thing for true crime. While it still rankles a little that it’s not actually a "true" true crime story, Alysse Aallyn does a great job at braiding the plot together in its various forms to reach a relatively satisfying conclusion. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s still pretty good for “guilty pleasure” read.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, August 2nd 2009

The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:35:00 +0000

By Malina Saval

Basic Books

The Secret Lives of Boys is exactly the kind of book I love to read. It is a collection of well-written case studies that give the reader a snapshot of teenage boys that most adults today don’t see. Although I’m no longer a teenager, and I’m not male, I do have a younger brother—someone just heading out of his teenage years—and I found myself identifying in some way with each of the ten boys Saval highlights.

Each chapter is one boy’s story—from “The Mini-Adult” to “The Teenage Dad” to “The Sheltered One”—and they are all as compelling (and surprising) as they are heart wrenching. Whether “The Troublemaker” or “The Rich Kid,” all of these boys have stories with common themes: lackadaisical views on religion and their part in it, the belief that they are smarter and more mature than their peers (which some experts call narcissistic and some say is under-estimation by adults), and a desperate desire to be understood and have a close friend with whom they can share their lives. They all had (and have) struggles unique to their respective situations.

Saval writes, “There is a general consensus that American culture has failed our boys, and they have failed us.” The book is a direct attempt to disprove that. We look at boys today, she says, and see Columbine and absentee teenage fathers—boys who are emotionless and, at the same time, on the verge of exploding. The boys in this book truly help us see their secret lives—they are not emotionless or about to explode, and they know about as much of life as the rest of us do, which is to say, very little. I think the book’s premise succeeds; Saval’s fact-dropping is backed up by solid research and her dialogue with the ten featured boys seems fair-minded and, at the same time, conversational.

I thought it was interesting to note that Saval allowed her subjects to title their respective chapters for themselves. She says, “These titles also reflect archetypes or genres of adolescent male youth. Some are self-reflective…whereas others reflect how they feel society views them. In coining their own terms, these boys are making is clear that they, not we, get to decide who they are.”

I will be giving The Secret Lives of Boys to my father as a gift. I want him to read it and discover that maybe my younger brother is more than only college degree potential. I hope that everyone with a teenage boy in his or her life (or a boy about to be a teenager, or a young man who’s just finished his teen years)—or who is a teen boy, for that matter—will read this book and see that boys are just as human as the rest of us.

All boys have secrets to tell us, if we will just listen.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, July 3rd 2009

Shattered Innocence: The Error of Revenge

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:47:00 +0000

By Kimberly Whitner-Hill

Outskirts Press

I was less than impressed with Kimberly Whitner-Hill’s Shattered Innocence: The Error of Revenge. I found this book to be not very well thought out and poorly executed.

The first chapter begins with a scene in the life of the main character, Kayla. That scene is never revisited, however, and within two pages the clock is turned back to her father’s childhood. For the next nineteen pages, the narrative focuses exclusively on him, which wouldn’t be such a big deal—after all, every good story needs a decent back story—but the entire book is only fifty-five pages long.

After the main character’s birth on page twenty, the story skips forward six months in just one paragraph, and then four more years in the span of a few pages. Kayla only manages to take hold of the narrative on her own merits on page thirty-six after she turns eighteen and her father dies of a brain aneurysm. After her father’s death, the story revolves around Kayla trying to find a man good enough to deal with her immaturity, although I question whether it actually is her immaturity and not just the author doing a poor job of developing the characters.

The characters in this story are flat and uninteresting and a lot of details are glossed over: Kayla’s childhood abuse, her mother’s emotional breakdown, her father’s death, her military career, the birth of her son, and marriage to a man she doesn’t love. Whitner-Hill writes, “After [Daryl] broke off the wedding, she left. They were separated for a short time when he realized that he could not stand being without her, but he was still not ready for the ultimate commitment: marriage.” A few pages before that, Kayla and Daryl learn that Kayla is pregnant. It is only after their son is born that they start thinking about getting married. (Their son is only mentioned for a few pages.) I have a sensible view of marriage, but it seems to me that having a child is a much bigger commitment than marriage.

Some of the issues that Whitner-Hill needs to address to make _Shattered Innocence _a feasibly interesting read are spelling and grammatical errors, unexplained characters popping up for just a few pages, and illogical jumps in time. If a story is actually there, it’s buried under really bad writing, and that’s regrettable. As it is right now, this is not even a good first draft.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, March 25th 2009

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda (4/13/2008)

admin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:18:00 +0000

Phoenix Theatre Ensemble

New York, New York

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda is an amazing two-person play set in London, England in the modern day. It chronicles one Rwandan refugee’s struggle to write about what happened to her in 1994, and the Englishman who helps her.

While living in England, Juliette (Susan Hayward) meets an aging poet, Simon (Joseph J. Menino), who works at the refugee center part-time. She comes to him for help in getting her book about the Rwandan genocide published. After reading her work, Simon notes that the book is completely—and only—historical and factual, so much so that he asks, “Where are you in all of this, Juliette? Where is your story?”

The rest of the play follows Simon and Juliette as they create a much more personal account—Juliette’s account—of the genocide. They are the only two characters we ever see, but Simon’s wife and Juliette’s younger brother are important off-stage recurring characters. The theater itself is set very sparsely; only a small table and two straight-backed chairs adorn the stage while most other props are brought to life through the actors’ movements.

I found two things especially interesting about the way the play is performed. First, Simon and Juliette tell the audience their thoughts. At one point, Simon “reads” his poetry for a group of people, but instead of the poem, the audience hears an inner monologue—what Simon is thinking while he’s reading aloud to the imaginary audience. He and Juliette both speak as though directly to the (real) audience throughout the play, whether or not the other character is present. Hayward and Menino, however, do a great job clarifying the separation between personal thoughts meant only for their characters (and the audience) and dialogue with one another.

Secondly, even when Juliette and Simon face each other, they also face the audience. For example, when Simon is reading his poetry to an imaginary audience, he faces the actual audience. Juliette, who is part of the imaginary audience, sits near him, but is also facing the real audience. The effect is notable; though they are not looking at one another (or even facing each other), the actors did a great job making the connection between the two characters clear.

Running for ninety minutes without an intermission, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda is a beautiful tribute to the humanity within the inhumanity in the Rwandan genocide. I don’t want to spoil the play for those who would like to see it, but let me say it’s certainly worth the watch. I was brought to tears more than once. The play ends with Juliette and Simon reading her the beginning of her book to an imaginary (and the real) audience: “Once upon a time…” belays their hope for a good and humane future. I congratulate the Phoenix Theatre Enemble, Sonja Linden (the playwright), Joseph J. Menino, and especially Susan Hayward for putting together a truly remarkable performance.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, April 23rd 2008