I counted Rikki's storms just like I counted God's.

A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
A Quiet Storm is the story of the Moore sisters, two African-American women growing up in Los Angeles in the 70s/80s. Stacy (short for Anastasia) Moore is a de facto caretaker and off-and-on babysitter to her sister, Rikki (short for Arika) as they try to navigate from their teenage years to adulthood. Rikki struggles with mental illness, though the exact nature of her trouble is not clear, since her parents (her mother, in particular) is averse to seeking help. They try other methods (like that good old tried and true exorcism, for example) and eventually Rikki seeks help in her college years behind her mother's back. There are good spells and bad spells for Rikki, who seems to suffer from manic depression, bipolar, or a bit of both. She is prescribed lithium, among other drugs, but she has a variety of challenging side effects from many of the drugs, so she frequently stops taking them. Stacy is caught in the middle: largely invisible to her parents and completely beholden to Rikki's needs. As the two women mature, and even marry, Rikki's issues in trying to navigate her life fade, then reappear, and Stacy's life is generally the one to suffer, in addition to Rikki's herself. Stacy's husband, Eric, tires of coming second to Rikki, and they separate. Rikki's husband, Matt, eventually disappears, after she's heard rumors of him cheating on her. At first, we think perhaps he has actually disappeared, but it soon becomes apparent that Rikki was involved. Stacy defends Rikki for some time, thinking her capable of many things, but not murder. But when Rikki's suicide note comes in the mail, Stacy realizes that Rikki poisoned Matt and hid his body. It's all revealed when Matt's body is found, and the world reels from this news which is surprising to everyone but Stacy. In the end, Stacy is grieved by the loss of her sister, but also relieved by the release of caring for her. 
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

This book was good. It wasn't quite all the way to the 'best books I've read list', but it definitely carved out a place for itself in my heart, and I'm really glad that it exists. A few brief thoughts:  

I do not believe in snow!
I knew I would like Stacy when she says early on in the book that even though she lives in L.A., 

"I was a child who believed in snow." 

I love a good snow girl, myself. 

Things Stacy and I have in common
Though in some ways I have more in common with Rikki than with Stacy, I enjoyed the various points of alignment that I had with the protagonist. 

• Miss Mary Mack - Stacy plays 'Miss Mary Mack' with her sister in the closet during thunderstorms, and it reminded me of playing the game with my friends in elementary school. 

• Nanas and lithium - Stacy and Rikki have a Nana who they know is not totally mentally sound, and who is eventually institutionalized. From that point on, she's overmedicated and essentially disconnected from the world. While my grandmother was able to function and navigate the world outside of an institution, she had rough patches and her own mental particularities, and I wonder to what extent our privilege, our whiteness, our relative wealth, or our family's protectiveness all acted to keep her from a different life, one more like Stacy's Nana. I'm deeply grateful that I was able to love my grandma and she was able to live her life the way she did, and I hope that everyone can have that same right as we move forward as a society.

• Comparative literature - Stacy is a Comp Lit major in school, because obviously it's the best major. (#notbiased)

• Omnivores - Stacy is constantly dealing with and reeling from Rikki's latest swing in attitude and mood, and at one point, Rikki is living with her but decides she no longer wants to eat any meat. Stacy plays along for a little while, but eventually decides she has no desire to be a vegetarian, and she cooks herself and her mom a nice juicy burger. I respect vegetarians and vegans everywhere, but I have to say I loved this moment. 

POC at private schools
When Rikki's on her upswings, she's a star student, and she gets accepted to private school. Hearing about her experience there reminded me of the complexities of navigating Breakthrough students toward private/independent institutions, which tend to be largely white: 

Rikki fit in and stood out in her new environment. She was black. She was pretty. She was sassy like Nell Carter or Florida Evans, but not disrespectful like Florence the Maid or Wilona the Neighbor. Smart, but not Harriet Tubman/Oprah Winfrey start-a-race-war smart. She was black, but not too...black. So they liked her.

What a challenging line to straddle. 

We're getting there. 
While I am always glad to see more works of fiction dealing with mental health and raising awareness for the full personhood of people with any number of afflictions, reading this book made me feel a little like this, the SEPTA motto for Philly's public transit system. In some ways, it's just a reflection of the book being a little dated already (published in the early 2000s, referencing decades prior). In any case, I would love for us to be able to just speed up the timeline and raise awareness for all populations around mental health like yesterday. Here are a few bones I'd like to pick: 

Psychiatrist ≠ Therapist
Some psychiatrists do talk therapy with their patients, but in today's society (and in my experience) this is rare, and is very much not the norm. In general, psychiatrists deal with medication management and are the actual prescribers (and medical doctors) in the mental health field. Therapists can have a variety of different backgrounds (social work, PhD in psych, etc.) and cannot prescribe medication. There is a marvelous collection of supports that each brings to the table, but it bugs me to no end when people use the terms interchangeably as if the two are synonymous. It's a lot of work to find people to help you navigate your own brain, and I guess I just want people to see how hard you have to work to find your team. It's not a once and done kind of thing, generally.

"You can't inherit something like that."
At one point, Rikki's trying to get pregnant (and sort of not telling her husband, which is a separate issue) and she tells Stacy that maybe she shouldn't get pregnant, because what if she passed her brain on to her children. Stacy comforts her and says 'you can't inherit something like that', and I wanted to throw my hands in the air and raise alarm bells, because you most definitely can. I'm not saying that Rikki shouldn't be empowered to make whatever decision she likes around procreating, but it's SO important, especially in this day and age, that we as women make thoughtful decisions with full information as we attempt to reproduce. 

Title Possibilities

• Stacy: I counted Rikki's storms just like I counted God's.

• On Rikki and Stacy: You two are always keeping secrets from the rest of the world. 

• Stacy, on Rikki: Nothing she does really shocks me anymore. 

Lines I liked

• A draft lifted the curtain's hem the way the wind lifts a lady's dress: innocent, but voyeuristic.

• I added that comment to the other bones of contention that I had collected over the years. There were so many, I almost had a skeleton. 

New Words or References
buppies - a young, upwardly mobile black professional. [1980–85, Amer.; b(lack) u(rban) p(rofessional), on the model of yuppie

Porcelana - skin lightening cream

Well, this has been a short and perhaps not so sweet post, but a good addition to the collection, methinks. I'm off to metamorphose and see what it is that I become. Join me if you dare.

Keep each other safe! Keep faith. Good night.

As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.

Watchmen by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Watchmen is about a group of erstwhile superheroes who are targeted in a conspiracy by an unknown foe. We pick up the trail of a murdered superhero with Rorschach, the only one in the superhero crew who seems to still be out and about. He tries to rally the rest of the group and make them aware of the imminent danger, but he's mostly ignored or ridiculed by his former peers. The Comedian is the one who was murdered in the opening scene. Other superheroes in the group include Doctor Manhattan (aka Jon Osterman), Dan Dreiberg (formerly Nite Owl, version 2.0), Laurie Juspeczyk (second Silk Spectre), and Adrian Veidt (formerly Ozymandias). Only Doctor Manhattan has actual superpowers (garnered, of course, like all good super powers, from a lab accident). Some people love each other (Jon and Laurie, Laurie and Dan, Jon and Laurie again), some people are deeply ostracized and low-key brutalized (Rorschach) and some people turn out to be not so much super heros as super villains (ahem, looking at you Adrian). According to the interwebs, I was supposed to realize this was an alternate reality where we won the Vietnam War and Watergate never happened (I noticed one weird comment about 'winning the war' that I thought was odd but I did not feel this was clear). In the end, the rest of the crew finally wises up and listens to Rorschach, but they are too late to stop Adrian's evil/sort of not evil plan where he blows up like a gazillion people to distract the US and Russia from fighting and thereby "avoids" World War III.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I wanted to like this book. 

I did not like this book. 

Again, I don't feel like I got a lot of what I was supposed to get. Some of that may have been temporal distance from when it was published (1986-1987) but I feel like some of it was just classic smart white guy "I'm gonna talk in this weird esoteric space and expect you to follow my line of thinking" nonsense. You know, Joyce-ian. Pynchon-ian. Vomitorious. 

Anyway, it was fun and a new experience for me to read a full-length graphic novel. Here's a list of things I liked (and ones I didn't): 

Liked
- That at least some (one) of the superheroes were ladies
- Rorschach's super cool and scary face (see right)
- The nuance of the storyline

Did not like
- That while it read as subversive or irreverent in places, it didn't stand up for things I think have clear moral 'right' and 'wrong'. (Ex - The Comedian tried to rape Laurie's mom back in the day, but eventually the storyline comes down in this place that's like, oh, but it's okay, it was a really long time ago, and maybe she wanted him to do it, a little bit. WHICH IS SO COMPLETELY NOT OKAY. Blame the victim narrative is never acceptable.)
- Graphic, depressing violence - it was just kind of brutal and hard to read. And it didn't feel like it was grounded in reason - I didn't see the necessity for it, it just felt arbitrary and extreme.
- Weird, "the world is awful and morally bankrupt" vibe from Rorschach, which felt like it was also what the author(s) felt. It had a real 'holier-than-thou' (and slightly racist) feel to me. (Ex: 

The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. charming, right? ;)

- The only female superhero still has a ridiculous body shape and preposterously sexified costume. 

Sooooo yeah. By all means, feel free to read and generate your own opinion - it would appear I am deeply in the minority in not having been wowed by this book TIME called "one of the best English language novels published since 1923". 

I'll leave you with one of the lines I did like, which is apparently a common translation of a quote from Juvenal - "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" or...

Who watches the watchmen? 

Moving on to more wonderful words! Here's hoping the next one resonates a bit more with me. 

He had agreed with each of them in turn, though what it was they wanted him to sanction he did not know.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This is a story about people looking for connection. We follow a variety of different characters over the course of the novel, all inhabitants of a smallish town in the American South. They range in age from adolescent to elderly, they span both sexes, they represent different racial backgrounds, and they have strikingly different lived experiences despite living in the same place. Each of our narrators finds a point of connection in John Singer, a deaf man who has become increasingly lonely after his only friend, Antonapoulos, another deaf man, was sent away to an institution. Singer still visits Antonapoulos, and while he seems to enjoy the company of his motley crew of companions, his visits to Antonapoulos seem to be the only thing that bring him real joy. On his last visit to the institution, Antonapoulos has died after a liver illness, and Singer is bereft. He returns to the town only to kill himself, and his 'friends' are left at loose ends.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well. 

This book was a bit of a downer, though it had pleasurable moments here and there. I love this idea of an American Gothic South, but I just didn't quite get all the way there with this book. I didn't see a lot of Carson in the book (maybe in Mick?) and honestly, I didn't care that much when things happened to the characters. The whole book felt a bit like it was looking at people under a microscope from a distance, which I guess is an achievement in its own right, but it didn't leave me feeling wowed. In reading descriptions of how the book was received (voice to the oppressed, revolutionary) I guess it's just not ringing those bells for me. Maybe it's not the right temporal context. Anyway, here are my thoughts...

Athelstane + Antonapoulos = BFFLs
If you read my last post on Ivanhoe, you may remember Athelstane, the man who adored his meals. In reading the first descriptions of Antonapolous, I think he would have gotten along very well with Athelstane: 

For, excepting drinking and a certain solitary secret pleasure, Antonapoulos loved to eat more than anything else in the world.

One of the issues I had with the book was that I just didn't get the connection between Antonapoulos and Singer. Singer says "Nothing seemed real except the ten years with Antonapoulos." And I thought, really? Hunh.

I thought I got it at first, in that they were the only deaf people in town, so of course signing and having someone to communicate with on that level would be profound in ways I can't imagine. But then later Singer meets some other folks who sign and it's exciting at first, but then he just doesn't really connect with them. So I guess it left me wondering what was so great about Antonapoulos, since he seems like kind of a doofus. Was Singer in love with him? Was I missing some big other level to their relationship? 

Nothing gold can stay
One of my favorite scenes is when Mick, a tomboyish girl is playing with her little brothers at a house under construction. 

The house was almost finished. The carpenters would leave and the kids would have to find another place to play.

It reminded me of playing on the dirt piles and sledding on the dirt hills behind my house before the development was built there. I guess kids and construction sites just go hand in hand, no matter the decade ;)

HP isn't the only one who listens to the radio under people's bushes...
This was my other favorite scene, also with Mick:

When she walked out in the rich parts of town every house had a radio. All the windows were open and she could hear the music very marvelous. After a while she knew which houses tuned in for the programs she wanted to hear. There was one special house that got all the good orchestras. And at night she would go to this house and sneak into the dark yard to listen. There was beautiful shrubbery around this house, and she would sit under a bush near the window. And after it was all over she would stand in the dark yard with her hands in her pockets and think for a long time.

Doesn't that just make you want to go into nice neighborhoods and sneak under a bush and listen to the radio? 

Toys that sing songs
One of the characters, Biff, sings a song at one point, and it cracked me up, because I'm 100% positive that one of my nephew's toys sings this song. I had never heard it anywhere else, and there it was! Apparently it dates back to the late 1800s. 

I went to the animal fair.
The birds and the beasts were there,
And the old baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.

Lol. I love the image of a baboon combing his auburn hair. 

Next, since the book really revolves around this quintet, I'd like to give you snippets to paint a portrait of each one. 

Jake Blount, revolutionary, proselytizer, "Red"
Jake enters the scene super duper drunk, and while he cares a whole lot about the 'common man', he can't quite get his head around the fact that black folks are also having a lot of challenges in that day and time. He spends most of the book drunk, shouting, or both.

• Biff, the bartender, on Jake: Never had he seen a man change so many times in twelve days. Never had he seen a fellow drink so much, stay drunk so long.

• It was hard to tell what kind of folks he had or what part of the country he was from.

• He was like a man thrown off his track by something. 

• Jake, to others: I'm one who knows. I'm a stranger in a strange land.

• Always he felt someone was laughing at him. 

Mick Kelly, tomboy, responsible for several younger siblings, likes listening to music under bushes and playing the piano, from a pretty poor family
Mick was probably my favorite, though I honestly didn't even care that much about what happened to her. It's not that she wasn't well written, I just kind of felt that observational distance from all the characters, which made me far less invested in them as individuals.

• She wanted to think for a long time about two or three certain people, to sing to herself, and to make plans. doesn't this sound like a lovely list of things to do? 

• To her older sisters - "I don't want to be like either of you and I don't want to look like either of you. And I won't. That's why I wear shorts. I'd rather be a boy any day." you do you, Mick!

• Portia: Mick has something going on in her all the time.

• Sometimes she hummed to herself as she walked, and other times she listened quietly to the songs inside her. There were all kinds of music in her thoughts. 

• She wasn't a member of any bunch.

Singer, deaf, magnet for outcasts, friendly, inscrutable, super into Antonapoulos (for reasons unknown)
Singer was interesting, but I thought it was odd for a hearing author to choose a deaf protagonist, especially because it felt like Mick was the actual star of the book. It also raised my feminist hackles that even though she was a phenom and she got published as a lady in her 20s in the 30s, she still had a MALE LEAD CHARACTER. What is it with women and writing stories with leading men? Where are our leading ladies? EH?! I'm all for representation here, and we certainly need more spaces for deaf folks in literature, but I'm still looking for the ladies.

• Jake, on Singer: It was like the face of a friend he had known for a long time. 

• He was never busy or in a hurry.

• This man was different from any person of the white race whom Doctor Copeland had ever encountered. 

• His hands were a torment to him. They would not rest. They twitched in his sleep, and sometimes he awoke to find them shaping the words in his dreams before his face.

• On Jake: He thinks he and I have a secret together but I do not know what it is.

• He had agreed with each of them in turn, though what it was they wanted him to sanction he did not know.

Dr. Benedict Copeland, an elderly black man, father to a daughter and two sons, tireless proponent of moving forward the black race, doctor to the town's black folk
Dr. Copeland was oozing nuance, but he also felt like such a sad character. I mean, for sure, being a black man in the South in the 30s can't have been anything resembling easy, but his sadness was like, fathoms deep. Like a personal kind of 'everyone lets me down' vibe, from his family to his country. It made him a pretty hard character to like. Maybe I wasn't supposed to like him? Idk. 

• Of all I have put in nothing has remained. All has been taken away from me. 

• The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. 

• All that we own is our bodies.

• We spend our lives doing thousands of jobs that are of no real use to anybody. We labor and all of our labor is wasted. Is that service? No, that is slavery.

• He could think of no white person of power in all the town who was both brave and just.

• If I were a man who felt it worth my while to laugh I would surely laugh at that. Dr. Copeland says this to Jake about Jake's idea about how to inform people about inequity and such, and I thought it was such a fantastically wry burn. 

Biff Brannon, bartender, uncle to a young girl named Baby, self-appointed investigator, possible pervert?
I honestly didn't know what I was supposed to think about Biff. He seems to be into Mick, but Mick is not that old, and later on, he's like, oh, and then that passed, and I'm like, what passed? Your pedophilic feelings? It was creepy, and made it strange to know where I was supposed to stand with him. Which I guess is kind of the point? Once again, hands in the air. Idk.

• To his wife, Alice: You never watch and think and figure anything out.

Title Possibilities

• When us people who know run into each other that's an event.

• It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

• The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.

• Of all the places he had been this was the loneliest town of all. 

Referents and Reverberations
Books always make me think of other books, and this one was no exception.

Even though he was also sometimes creepy, Biff had a line about androgyny that I liked that reminded me of The Left Hand of Darkness:

By nature all people are of both sexes. Often old men's voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches. And he even proved it himself - the part of him that sometimes almost wished he was a mother and that Mick and Baby were his kids.

This line: 

One night soon after Christmas all four of the people chanced to visit him at the same time. This had never happened before. Singer moved about the room with smiles and refreshments and did his best in the way of politeness to make his guests comfortable. But something was wrong.

Reminded me of this line from Swann's Way - "I hear that things worked out badly again today, Léonie; you had all your friends here at once."

And yet again, my books make unexpected connections with each other! Came across this line:

At Vocational when they read about the jew in 'Ivanhoe' the other kids would look around at Harry and he would come home and cry.

about Harry Minowitz, a friend and one-time lover of Mick's, who happens to be Jewish and is a neighbor of the Kelly family. 

Words that were new for me:

flying-jinny - a simple, usually homemade carousel

hard-boiled eggs (already stuffed) - I thought it was funny that they kept referencing bringing 'already stuffed' hard-boiled eggs to picnics and such. I think they mean devilled eggs, or maybe they were stuffed with something else, but it never said what they were stuffed with, and it made me very curious!

isinglass - a kind of gelatin obtained from fish, especially sturgeon, and used in making jellies, glue, etc., and for clarifying ale

miry - very muddy or boggy

I'll leave you with one final line, from an exchange between Jake and Dr. Copeland: 

We have talked of everything now except the most vital subject of all - the way out. What must be done.

I often feel like we're looking for a way out, especially in this America in this day and age. We (or at least some of us) know that something is very wrong, and now we must come to agreement on what must be done. So I suppose that even though lots of things have changed since 1930, this - this need to find a way out and agree on what's to be done - hasn't gone away. 

So ponder the way out, dear readers, on this breezy, sunny, warm Friday evening. I'm off to the world of Watchmen. Join me if you dare! Read my blob if you care! Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Good night.