what's in a name / things I read

[oiran]

Lying about who I really am: So, I've got a contract in front of me (yay!) and now I need a pen name, maybe even more than one. I’m “saving” my own name for some future purpose—not so much for writing that’s less smutty, but for writing that’s still very smutty but much less fantasy-world based than what I seem to be working on at the moment. You know, just in case I eventually get something published that aims for the descriptive, lush, doom-ridden and sociologically stifling atmospherics of, say, Hardy or Flaubert, except with lots of dick. Or maybe more like if Balzac’s Cousin Bette had been a bitter old queen (though I suppose it’s possible that she actually was…).

So, a name: As a Nabokov fan, I’d love to be Vivian Darkbloom, but I’m only about the 1,020,307th person to think this might be a good idea (see: google search for countless sad examples of all the faux-obscurists who got there before me).

I’d like to use something that sounds like a name rather than something that sounds like a pen name--sure, it might be fun to be Sophronia Viande-Rouge or Tigerbelle* or Mistress Lux, but probably only for about 15 minutes before it turned around on me and became problematically embarrassing.

The problem is, so many of the names I like are ‘thing’ names—flowers, stones, and words that are vastly categorical themselves. It’s like trying to name a Bond girl, except demurely. I just don’t think a person can call herself Ruby Glass. I might as well as call myself Carnival Glass or Anchor Hocking or Tiffany. It’s almost parody, but there’s no actual punchline, which makes it worse than if it were just plain silly. Filly La Duce. Sashay!** Carmina Burana.

This past weekend in Knoxville, Rhi started reading the names in the ‘births’ column in the paper, and JJ finished the job, her sharp eyes picking out a name that’s lovely to the ears but has a most unfortunate appearance on the page: Darrah Rhea. Don’t see it? Here’s a hint: You know that story about the woman who gets the tattoo of Chinese letters and they don’t mean what she thinks? Stick a ‘Crazy’ in front of Darrah Rhea, and maybe it becomes more apparent how unwittingly cruel her parents are. However, I love the name Darrah, now, complete with the ‘H’.

So far, eliminating potential names that are 1) ridiculous in the context of me, 2) already being used for characters in stories I’ve written or am working on or will write someday, 3) Too purple in the sense of prose and not color, or 4) used by a friend for their baby’s middle name, I end up with the following list of names that are, to lesser and greater degrees, meaningful to me:

First names : Darrah, Selby, and the purples that are color, i.e., Iris and Violet.
Last names: Glass, Britton, Waterston, Blood, Sargent - artists, fictional people, and a real person I never met

I love Blood as a last name for this reason: one of my mother’s grade school teachers was named Mrs. Blood. I was told that she had flame-red hair, as did her husband and all of their children, and she wore the same cateye glasses as every woman did back then, but hers were the fancy kind with rhinestones (I asked for clarification, of course). That right there is basically the entire Mrs. Blood story, but I just loved picturing the Blood family and the red and the rhinestones, and those of you who know me might see obvious parallels between the presumed appearance of this woman I never met and myself. Additionally, my father is a redhead, my brother is a redhead, I am a fade-to-redhead, and there are redheads liberally sprinkled through both branches of my family tree. However, without being able to include the Mrs. Blood story, limited as it is, I hesitate to stick Blood on the cover of a book. The obvious connotation would be, unfortunately, something a little too Hot Topic-y and goth-in-a-box for my taste. Plus, it’s not vampire romance that I’m writing.

I’m tending toward Darrah because I’m newly infatuated with the name and, really, it’s not like anyone is going to be addressing me this way. I had a moment’s hesitation because I don’t think a Darrah wears glasses and I really like my glasses, but that seems a minor impediment. At this point, Darrah Britton is under serious consideration. What does anyone think?

[Poll #948127]

*name of actual Nashville street that is not, unfortunately, even remotely cute enough to justify its near-promise of Josie-style pussycatting. There’s a Cleopatra Lane in Seattle that is also a nothingish street when it should be a Taylor-Burton-reminiscent extravaganza of liquid eyeliner, blunt-cut bangs, and rainbow layers of nylon chiffon.

**The exclamation mark is, of course, part of the name.

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Books I know I’ve read this year and not last because they are near the tops of the piles of stuff that sit around our house:

I enjoy reading book reports as they come up on my f-list and so I keep meaning to do my own. I was doing a 2006 list back...oh, three months ago, I guess, but then I couldn’t figure out whether I read some of them in 2005 or 2006 and…well, I did what I always do, which is, um, nothing. So here’s a late start to 2007:

The Thirteenth Story – Diane Setterfield. Hated it. Hated, hated, hated. If I’d read more than ten pages in. I’d never have bought it. It’s not that the woman can’t write, but that she’s squandering her abilities on rehashing every histrionic 19th century “mystery” story that I’ve put down in disgust and annoyance. There’s no madwoman in the attic (and yes, yes, I know that the first time anyone shut a madwoman up in the attic, it was a pretty cool plot twist, but not now), but what there is is worse, and silly beyond any suspension of disbelief. And also predictable, but I cringed when the thought flitted across my mind and thought Surely…surely not!, but I was correct in my terrible premonition of unbearable melodrama. It was marketed (which is the key word here, and one I should be much more wary of) as being a sort of tribute to the love of reading—but that’s only true if you love reading CRAP. If there was some sort of po-mo distancing irony happening here, I missed it—and besides, that would be almost as tired as madwomen.

Verdict: Talented writer, hateful story. Read ONLY if you like histrionic Victorian-style “mysteries.” Otherwise, you will want to SMASH.

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The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova. An entertaining and superficial history of Ottoman-European struggles and Vlad Tepes told as a vampire hunt. The characters are all pretty much cardboard cutouts, but they’re not annoying, and they do serve the story perfectly well.

Much of the book is composed of letters, which is a peeve of mine: I have written letters that were upwards of 30 pages long (back in very early 80s, when no one had access to a computer), but I have never written out a conversation as dialog, and I don’t know of anyone who has, and certainly it would be unusual for anyone to do this for each and every conversation they happen to have, even with people of critical importance to the course of the events being relayed. When writing a letter and not specifically creating a fiction, you simply relay the general tone and content of a conversation, unless you’re giving special attention to something particularly amusing or (if you are a teenage girl, writing a letter in the early 1980s to another teenage girl) particularly damning to the speaking party (i.e., yet another teenage girl, who is your enemy, possibly). The letters read as if all written by the same person, but that actually makes it better in this case, since there are so many of them. The lack of distinction between authors allows the narrative to flow, although I did have to check every now and then to see whose POV I was supposed to be experiencing.

Anyway, it’s a surprisingly quick read considering that it’s over 600 pages long and it’s virtually impossible to care about any of the characters due to their lack of differentiation—except for the narrator’s last-minute boyfriend, who sounds like he’s about 10, although very polite. He’s got the smallest of the “major” roles in the story, and to me he reads as if he were added in much later in an effort to differentiate the teenage female narrator from her father and a bunch of other middle-aged men and women, as all of them speak, think and write as one.

SPOILERS: It ends in a rush and rather disappointingly. There are many hints throughout the book that the narration is delivered from an alternate reality wherein vampires have been proven to be real, and that there is a great deal of scholarship surrounding their existence, and that the narrator herself is a central figure in this grand and respected enterprise. However, there’s no further exploration of this where I expected it, i.e., at the end. I would have been much happier had there been a few token paragraphs, at least—if only to pad the ending and soften the abrupt landing. Also, one of two long-searched-for characters is finally found a few pages from the end of the book, only to die a handful of paragraphs later with little ceremony. There is a minor surprise that’s not all that surprising, especially since there’s a general buzz of exploitation around the book that pretty much demands a sequel, which I will probably not be in a hurry to read.

Verdict: Enjoyable effort with forgettable characters. It’s got a lot more Central European history than one has come to expect from a book that involves vampires, makes Central Europe sound like a place worth visiting sooner rather than later, and it’s about as scary as Goodnight, Moon, though probably slightly gorier. Better for those interested in history than in vampires. I mean, it’s not called The Vampirian, is it?

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Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl. Well, first off, I can’t decide if I like or resent the fact that her beeee-yoooo-ti-full author photo is quite clearly a picture of the same gawky, goofy-faced girl who appears in all other pictures purported to be of Marisha Pessl. I also look mostly horrid in pictures, but when I take a good one, it usually looks like someone else. So I’m kind of jealous of how angelically lovely she is on the book jacket and yet sympathetic regarding her tard-ish appearance in all the other pictures I’ve seen.

Also, she was compared to Nabokov in a few reviews, and I put off even picking this up for a long time because of that. I mean, come on--she couldn’t possibly be Girl!Nabokov, could she? Not only would it be unfair to the rest of us to be so gorgeous (if only in one photo), so young (26 or 27, I think), and now so rich (book deal!), but to be that good with words…I kind of hated the idea of her even existing.

But the book didn’t make me want to buy it when I finally picked it up, and that was something of a surprise. I was prepared for petty jealousy on my part, but not disinterest. However, week after week of seeing the thing on the “staff recommendation” rack at Borders with its accompanying discount sticker—and then considering my shopping day discount—it finally made it seem practically rude not to buy it. As it happens, once I got through the first few chapters, I did very much enjoy it. Ms. Pessl is no Girl!Nabokov (to which I can breathe a relieved sigh and say, “Well, duh?” Because, really, who is going to be able to do that to a nabokovian's satisfaction? [/lolita, zembla and blue butterflies]), but she’s still quite entertaining to read.

After the inauspicious start, I was very engaged once things got well underway. The story, though, is kind of…incidental? Stuff does happen, and from the beginning you know that a main character will die. There are, of course, mysteries and questions surrounding this event, but there are also a lot of side trips to explore aspects of various characters which manages to be interesting but not actually very illuminating, and ultimately these details add nothing substantive to the story. None of the characters, except perhaps the narrator’s father (and maybe the dead body), are developed enough for my taste. Ms. Pessl’s weird pen-and-ink illustrations (which I like) show a bunch of deformed-looking people, some more attractive in their deformities than others, and not exactly matching their written descriptions. The narrator’s “friends” are the elite group at her school, all oddballs of one sort or another, and it’s difficult to understand how they all came together because they are so disparate and seem to dislike each other so much. There are also a couple too many of them, who really don’t really seem to have a job to do in the story at all. It reminded me quite a bit of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in the group-y way, though in that story it became very clear what held that group together from beginning to tragic end, and if it ever was made explicit in this story, I’ve apparently already forgotten than part.

SPOILERS: While I couldn’t completely anticipate the end, there were too many mentions of a certain made-up radical group amongst all the real ones from the very beginning of the story for the reader to not notice its presence, and I started getting impatient with the narrator (dull-witted in only this one aspect, it seems), thinking Okay, okay, wtf, just get to the part about the Nightwatchmen, will you?

The ending is unbelievably breezy, unless the narrator has become a sociopath while we weren’t looking, but at the same time, it’s cute and sweet and I was overall happy with the outcome.

Verdict: Enjoyed it very much overall, but think it’s been a bit puffed up [/understatement]. While I think a lot of it was made charming and oddball just for the sake of same, that’s not necessarily a negative IMO. If you liked The Secret History, you’ll like this, but you’ll probably also think that Tartt’s book was better.