Wednesday Words: Is that what they’re calling it these–oh, that’s just what it’s called

[They were] known to make out while eating shepherd’s pie, which is not a euphemism[.]

– Maureen Johnson, THE NAME OF THE STAR

Wednesday Words: Survival of the misfitest

I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now.

– Jo Walters, AMONG OTHERS

My Hunger Games movie review

…is right here.

There’s a long tradition of Socialist Worker movie reviews generating major debates, so I am eagerly awaiting responses.

Wednesday Words: Obvious truths newly learned

I whirl around to face him — again, surprised by how confident I sound, considering that my heart is rushing, tumbling. Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys — maybe you just have to be angry all the time.

– Lauren Oliver, DELIRIUM

(Side question: why is YA so full of constructions like “rushing, tumbling”? Have you ever seen this in a book for adults? Now that I think about it, I think this is even more quintessentially YA than the long-short cadence I wrote about recently. What are the other stylistic quirks of YA?)

Caletti does Dessen, or: The one rule of humiliation

I tagged this as Book vs. Book, but it’s really Book vs. Oeuvre, because Sarah Dessen, to me, is her own genre.

SimonPulse emblazoned the front cover of Deb Caletti’s THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE with an SLJ blurb comparing it to the best of Dessen, and a glance at the back shows that all of Caletti’s books have Dessen-esque covers in overall look even if they lack the emphasis on disembodied body parts.

“Their marketing strategy is to trick you into thinking you’re buying a Sarah Dessen book,” I told Emily (we were at Books of Wonder; I’d never read Caletti). “Works for me.”

And I know why the SLJ blurb said that: it’s that narrative mix of emotional over-articulation, rendered in very deliberate, almost trite, imagery, blended with quick and astringent judgment, so you understand right away that the smart girl who’s narrating is knowing and wry, but not so knowing and wry that she doesn’t think her high school experiences are worth metaphors. And it’s that cadence where the sentences come long and then short, like it’s all flowing out of that girl faster than she can control until she’s pulled up short by her own realizations. I thought nobody did sentence-level pacing like Dessen; Caletti sure comes close. Well. It’s tone and pacing and character fused, because it always adds up to a girl who is looking, looking, looking, and wanting, and there’re reasons why these books, despite their fundamental similarity, never get old for me.

So that’s all to the good, and Caletti maybe isn’t edited as well — multiple passages, especially early, feel overwritten in a way that Dessen rarely does — but at her best she’s quotable as hell in the way of Meg Rosoff or John Green.

But I actually think Caletti does the big picture better than Dessen usually does, and it’s because she lets her protagonist fail harder. Here’s the core piece of my favorite scene:

I wanted to open that smile up wider, to see the Hayden of the afternoon back again. But I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the smile was retreating. He was retreating. I could feel the moment of connectedness passing, my chance being lost. I wanted to play and volley and be back in that place we had been together before, that great place. I needed something, something quick — I grasped and caught something silly and lighthearted. Silly and lighthearted would do.

“So, Hayden Renfrew. What was your most embarrassing moment?”

It sounded workable until I said it. As soon as the words slipped out I knew I had done something horribly and terribly wrong. A humiliating misstep. I felt it all in one second of pause. The night, the cigarette smoke lingering in the air, the heaviness of his thoughts — my words were inappropriate and idiotic. Oh God, why had I said that? Why, why, why? And why couldn’t you take back a moment sometimes? One little moment? Is that asking so much? God, I suddenly sounded thirteen. My red shorts and my white tank top felt young and shameful, my feet in my flip-flops did too. I felt so ashamed of my painted toenails in the streetlight.

The rest of that scene and what comes of it is perfect. And you can see everything here: that Dessen probably would’ve written this scene better, with more economy and precision (and certainly less pleading*), but also that probably she wouldn’t have written this scene, because while each of her characters is allotted her one emotional failing to work through by the book’s end, their humiliations are never really their own. They get humiliated by their mothers or their sisters or their boyfriends’ mothers, but not by their own sudden recognition of their immaturity. That’s what Caletti gets right. She gets growing up, the way it feels to look with contempt (long before affection) at where you’re coming out of, and the way you mostly can’t see very clearly what you might become, and when you do glimpse it it might be with shame and terror.

There was that whole dust-up last year about how dark YA can be, and I always figured that books in the Dessen genre, serious subjects though they all have, were imagined as the counterpoint. But maybe if you do it right, if you let the characters fail and flounder in the humiliation that they made themselves — if you don’t just let your characters feel inadequate, but you let them actually be inadequate to what’s ahead of them — then this little corner of YA can be darker, and richer, than it seems.

* I mean, that’s really pretty awful, right?

Wednesday Words: They can add that to that?

Shiny, overconfident clothes you could never imagine yourself wearing hung along the walls. I felt some sort of clothes-store consumer shame creeping up my insides. It was all the insincerity of high school with the added humiliation of mirrors.

–Deb Calleti, THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE

Wednesday Words: Necessity-Only Sex Ed

“I don’t know many rules to live by,” he’d said. “But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles — drug or tattoo — and… no inessential penises, either.”

“Inessential penises?” Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. “Is there any such thing as an essential one?”

“When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,” he’d replied.

– Laini Taylor, DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE

By the way, I cannot recommend this book enough, but I warn you: the first couple chapters make it seem like it’s going to be a less good book than it is. Just keep going, and then thank me (and Bethany, who told me) with all appropriate effusiveness.

Good thing a dog doesn’t get stuck in that tree.

I gave my five-year-old cousin Luke — yes, that Luke — STUCK by Oliver Jeffers a few hours ago, and so far he has asked us to read it to him three times. He laughs uproariously and shares his opinions about the protagonist’s errors each time, and pointed out an awesome joke in the artwork that I’d missed. I am declaring STUCK a big success.

Just now Luke and his older brother were watching a video that involved teasing a cartoon dog and Luke became extremely upset that someone was being “mean to a dog.” In the midst of his enraged stomping off, he yelled, “Dogs helped us stay alive!” (The New Yorker a few months back says Luke is right about that.) To avert the tears that were forming, his dad offered Luke the chance to pick the next video. Brightening immediately, he said, “Let’s watch cat teasers!”

I love that kid. Let’s hope tomorrow’s presents (for these kids) and the next day’s (for my niece) are as successful.

Wednesday Word – It’s good to have a skill

Aunt Emily had spent a lifetime interfering–days–weeks–years.  There was nothing she could do better, or that she enjoyed more.  To thrust her finger into somebody’s pie and wreck it–that was Aunt Emily for you.  Lucinda’s grandmother, having died when her mother was a very little girl, had left Aunt Emily the oldest of the family; and to her had descended that divine right of putting her finger into family pies.

–Ruth Sawyer, ROLLER SKATES

P.S. Just so there’s no confusion with regards to the name, I’d like to state for the record that the above quote is not about me.  You can tell because I have no siblings.

Catching Fire and Collective Action

HUGE SPOILERS for THE HUNGER GAMES and CATCHING FIRE!!!

(note, this is the first of several semi-related posts on the Hunger Games trilogy – stay tuned for more!)

So, I love the whole trilogy, but CATCHING FIRE is my favorite, and here’s why – its about organizing.  And I’m an organizer and activist, and thus love and appreciate books (non-fiction or fiction alike) that actually show the organizing process – the how of how change comes about, which mainstream history and a lot of fiction tends to skip past.  CATCHING FIRE doesn’t get into as much detail as I personally might like, but I recognize I’m probably on one extreme of that preference spectrum in Collins’ overall readership, so I’ll cut her a little slack.  Because what she does quite well is thread in bits and pieces throughout the book that make two things clear: a mass rebellion does not occur “spontaneously;” and depending on your personal experience and context, you are going to see and understand (or not see and not understand) what is happening very differently.

We get a number of glimpses of organized resistance before Katniss re-enters the Games, which we see primarily through Katniss’ perspective, but which we also get important alternative interpretations of through other characters.

The changing of the head peacekeeper and general crackdown in District 12 bring to light the extent to which the underground economy centered around the Hob was in fact a set of organized survival mechanisms within an oppressive regime – ones that have not, in Katniss’ memory at least, been used to challenge that system and thus were permitted to exist, but which actually put in place the kind of networks of communication, mutual support, and solidarity upon which more overt resistance movements build.  Which is why it makes sense that the Capitol immediately does what it can to wipe out the whole underground world of District 12 upon the emergence of resistance elsewhere and small signs that at least a few individuals in District 12 might have similar thoughts.  Of course, burning the Hob to the ground and electrifying the fence doesn’t destroy deeper community networks.  In fact, Katniss’ mother makes it clear that the period of laxness has been relatively short (although apparently long enough that Katniss doesn’t clearly remember the last harsher time), and she and others seem to return pretty seamlessly to the roles they played previously.

Katniss interprets the crackdown as largely a personal retaliation by the Capitol against her.  She has no clear memory of previous similar situations, so unlike her mother and some other townspeople who seem to see the lax period as an exception and the crackdown as a more of a return to what came before, Katniss sees the opposite.  Furthermore, without context for understanding how collective action happens, how and why people respond to oppression in various ways at different times, Katniss sees both the acts of overt resistance that seem to her eyes to crop up out of nowhere, and the Capitol’s response, as direct consequences of her defiance with the poison berries.  President Snow, of course, encourages that line of thinking and its corollaries: that she is personally responsible for any and all actions that follow down the line, and that she has the capability to stop others’ resistance. (More on this in a later post).

Gale provides an important contrast here, because at the start of THE HUNGER GAMES his perspective is actually quite similar.  He’s portrayed as a more rebellious personality than Katniss – he sees the system as unjust and unfair, and it makes him angry, and more than anything else he comes off as frustrated.  Which makes sense because the only solution he’s able to present is for him and Katniss to run away and live in the woods.  Which they can’t do, because they’re each primarily responsible for feeding their families.  While Gale may be bolder than Katniss in stating his feelings towards the Capitol, he’s no more equipped to do anything about it than she is.  It’s after he leaves school and begins to work in the mines that his perspective shifts.  When Katniss tells him about seeing the District 8 uprising on the Mayor’s TV, his immediate reaction is completely different from hers:

“And it’s my fault Gale.  Because of what I did in the arena.  If I had just killed myself with those berries, none of this would’ve happened.  Peeta could have come home and lived, and everyone else would have been safe, too.”

“Safe to do what?” he says in a gentler tone. “Starve?  Work like slaves?  Send their kids to the reaping?  You haven’t hurt people–you’ve given them an opportunity.  They just have to be brave enough to take it.  There’s already been talk in the mines.  People who want to fight.  Don’t you see?  It’s happening!”

Whereas Gale proposes running away early in THE HUNGER GAMES, and is willing to try running away at Katniss’ suggestion moments before the conversation above, he’s able to see collective rebellion as a viable third option beyond the status quo and running away, at least under the right circumstances  For Katniss it doesn’t register that way, even after Gale presents it.  While there are many things that I think go into explaining Katniss’ reactions (which I will write about more fully in future posts on the series), what seems to me to explain the shift in Gale’s outlook is that he’s gone to work in the mines.  Presumably Gale is learning from others at his job who have been in that context longer and may have previous experiences acting collectively.  Katniss doesn’t get that education.

The other two examples of organized rebellion Katniss encounters are her glimpse of riots in District 8 on the Mayor’s TV, and the District 11 response to her and Peeta’s stop on the train tour.

In both cases, Collins made it clear to me as a reader that the people of those districts had chosen to organize against the Capitol.  Perhaps Katniss’ berry moment provided inspiration or created a moment in which people decided to take that step into defiance, but between that moment and the scenes Katniss witnessed they have clearly done significant collective organizing work to create and then attempt to carry out a plan for active rebellion against the capitol.  It’s that in between part that Katniss, unfortunately but also very realistically, doesn’t have the context to recognize.  When, after her speech honoring Rue and Thresh in District 11, the audience offers a salute, she realizes, “What happens next is not an accident.  It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison.”  But she doesn’t seem able to get deeper into what that means.

Likewise, when she sees the District 8 uprising on the mayor’s TV, her response is: “I’ve never seen anything like it, but I can only be witnessing one thing.  This is what President Snow calls an uprising.”  She doesn’t seem to have a sense of what must have happened to lead to the violent, frightening scene she’s seeing, nor, importantly, does she seem to latch onto what it might lead to, other than the immediate effect of people being hurt or killed, and the threat to her family and loved ones because of her conversation with President Snow.

Katniss evaluates what she sees based on what she knows – she doesn’t know any system other than the one she grew up with, and she doesn’t seem to have learned about or latched onto the idea of substantial change as a real-life possibility.  That makes sense because she doesn’t know collective action, she doesn’t understand organizing, and without some sense of that she has no context for thinking about how what seems like a complete fantasy (ie, overthrowing the Capitol) could occur.  Without some idea of how, its hard to imagine it as real.