Book Review: Out of Practice

Title: Out of Practice

Author: Piper Finley

Date: 2025

Publisher: House of King

Quote: "Well, if anyone can spot early recovery signs, it's you."

Emma is a physical therapist who thinks outside the "box" both of hospital practice and of her stuffy boyfriend's social expectations. 

Although it was marketed as a romance, this "prequel" to a series of romances is actually what I used to call an anti-romance, and wish there were more of. "Book boyfriends" are usually about as believable, or not, as their "book girlfriends," but the whole idea that physical attractions always lead to happily-ever-after is not believable. Don't any of these women, I used to think after reading a few of what used to present themselves as novels "with a love interest" and read like romances, ever notice that even men who look attractive aren't necessarily all that we ever wanted in life? Where are the stories about the relationships that don't have to lack good will, but are not and will never be True Love? Publishers used to allow women to be rescued from marrying Mr. Wrong only by meeting Mr. Right, and romance publishers, especially, didn't make a clear difference between the two.

So, Out of Practice ends with a promise that Emma is going to meet Mr. Right in the first full-sized novel in the series; what happens in this mini-book is that she recognizes that the co-worker she's been claiming as a boyfriend is not someone she wants to marry. Hospital protocols are too narrow to work for some of her patients, and his family, although apparently a good family, are too image-conscious to offer much hope that living with them will be fun. 

As a woman who likes to read what other women really think about life and relationships, I liked this novel. Women who like to read romance novels as a marital aid may want to skip ahead to the full-length book about Emma and the man she will decide to marry.

Book Review: A Practical Application of Dark Psychology

Title: A Practical Application of Dark Psychology

Author: Cole Pearce

Date: 2023

Publisher: Cole Pearce

ISBN: none mentioned

Length: 140 e-pages 

Quote: "[E]very human has a dark side--some people just use this darkness more than others."

That's from the second paragraph. The first "beep" of alarm went off in the explanation of the title! Of course this use of "dark" comes from Jung's idea of the shadow sides of life and self, at which we avoid looking, pushing them back into the shadows. Of course it's not intended to be racist. Of course the majority of humankind who prefer to associate words for our complexions with visual appeal, who revel in being dark-eyed or dark and handsome, and do not actually want to be blond, ought to tolerate the use of "dark" as a euphemism for "selfish"...or should we? 

I call foul. The fact is that although most of us are not consciously evil, most of the time, we are selfish. We're not usually motivated to harm other people but we are usually motivated to pursue what seems good to us at the expensive of what may seem or be good to others. The truth in the premise of this book is that many people can make our experience of Other People a little less like Sartre's Hell if we acknowledge our own selfishness and that of others, and defend our boundaries against selfish, manipulative, even abusive people. 

Nobody's likely to dispute that this premise is true...so why package it in a way that only the blondest ten percent of humankind can like? Psychological writers have too often been tone-deaf in choosing words and phrases for their ideas. This book's "Dark Psychology" is an example. It means the psychology of embracing our own "shadowed" selfishness and using it to protect ourselves from other people's selfishness. When we mean "selfish" it would be better to say "selfish" rather than "dark," even if "Selfish Psychology" in a book title would be unlikely to sell the book.

Anyway, this is a book of encouraging peer-counselling for anyone breaking an "addiction" to a relationship with a selfish, manipulative, exploitative or abusive person...whether, as Pearce mentions, that's the person who became an ex-lover because person hit you, the client who treats you like dirt and owes you money, the church or even (it can happen) recovery group that was driving you crazy, the friend who's slick-talked and guilt-tripped you over what you recently realized has been thousands of dollars over the years...or even the corporation that's continuing to profit from harmful products while stalling and denying and failing to pay the penalties awarded to customers who were just like you only now they're sicker. Most of us have a few relationships like that, if only the kind with corporations and governments. If you're trying to put more healthy distance into those relationships or break them off altogether, it's nice to have a supportive friend who's gone through the same process. Cole Pearce is there for us all. That's a good thing.

The usual problems with peer-counselling apply. It's hard, as Pearce mentions several times, to draw a clear line between "narcissistic personality disorder" and ordinary selfishness. I think any second edition of this book should try to make the line a little clearer than this edition does, though.

In fifty years I've had one friend whom I'd describe as a narcissist reined in by her sincere Christian practice. One. And only recently I've come to realize that I've finally found a living sociopath. People who really qualify for the labels clinical psychology applies to "personality disorders" are rare. But the disorders are, of course, ordinary behavior carried to extremes. As in the old joke:

Psychiatrist: "Can you tell me why your family wanted you to see me?"

Patient: "I...well...I like pancakes."

Psychiatrist: "Well, that's nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people like pancakes. I like pancakes myself."

Patient: "Oh, then you must come and see my collection! I have seven TRUNKS full!"

I may have met more than one narcissist and not known them because active narcissists don't  usually expose themselves in friendship with healthier personalities, unless a lot of material gain is involved. But true narcissists are not just selfish in an ordinary way. They are extraordinary. They carry selfishness to levels most people never imagine. While planning to throw you under the bus they will get you to buy the bus and pay for a special insurance policy exempting them from having to pay if the bus runs over you. 

Narcissists can leave their victims hypervigilant. That's the trouble with this book. Though I've known only the one narcissist in fifty years, as I read this book's description of the selfish behavior that can identify a narcissist--which frequently fails to mention that a person with "narcissistic personality disorder" carries this behavior to extremes--I kept thinking, "That sounds like Jane...that sounds like John..." and "That's something faultfinders have accused me of doing." And of course it does. While only a few people really have "narcissistic personality disorder," the people who become the victims of narcissists' epic scams and abuses are likely to be people who allow ordinary relationships with ordinary selfish human beings to become, if not abusive by any legal standard, at least draining and unsatisfactory. They don't set boundaries. They want to "be nice" so desperately that that friend who's taken thousands of dollars from them over the years can say "But person gave me a new car, person urged me to wear per grandmother's diamonds, so naturally when I wanted to build a dream house I let person help me out, because I knew person would want to!" 

Recovery from an abusive relationship with a narcissist involves learning to set boundaries and it's possible that Pearce, like many survivors of abusive relationships, started setting boundaries that are narrower than more fortunate people ever want or need. Among the tools in narcissists' arsenals are legitimate everyday "tricks" that narcissists' victims can ethically learn to use for themselves, like listening to people and focussing on the interests we share with them. True narcissists may seem to be doing this more effectively than other people do, because they may not have as much of a life of their own and may genuinely be more interested in enlisting a new friend (or victim) than in any actual projects they might accomplish on their own. But at times this book seems to suggest that listening closely to a prospective friend, client, or lover is always and only a narcissistic scheme to recruit another victim, rather than honestly opening the door to a mutual process of bonding as friends--which, at least among introverts, is more likely to be the case. 

It's possible, too, that this tendency for survivors to overreact is what can make some support and recovery groups so toxic. I once knew a man who said he was living in hiding from an Alcoholics Anonymous group he'd joined. He was an alcoholic, he said, and by focussing on his relationship with God rather than his relationship with the group he was staying sober, but his relationship with the group had become toxic. Group members weren't interested in a level of spiritual commitment beyond vague general talk about a Higher Power. They resented that he still had the mental capacity to concentrate on advanced Bible study; when he wanted to go to classes instead of group meetings, they accused him of narcissistically trying to do something "better" than the group. Well, studying for a second career is better than sitting around endlessly rehashing addiction stories. So the group had started actively sabotaging his efforts to stay in school and find work. Hello...who was the abusive narcissist, again? 

In fact spiritual teachers have long recognized that it's our own selfish, prideful, even narcissistic, tendencies that make us hypersensitive to any possibility of those tendencies in others. Narcissists want to believe they are superior to others (some of them genuinely do, and some only want to do); they want to believe that the losses they've survived and the hardships they've overcome are greater than those others have survived and overcome. Right. But people who need help, as you'll see if you've been able to start reading Althea yet, may in fact be superior to others in many ways and have survived and overcome more than others; they may still need help, and although social workers should in theory feel no need to worry about which disabled senior citizens' incomes are furthest behind their requirements, if they do it is their own narcissism that causes them to want to proclaim that, e.g., a world-class athlete is "no better than" or "no different from" a drug whore. Inability to deal with the fact that people are not in fact equal either in talents or in achievements, and although some of us meet our natural superiors more often than others do it's always possible that the next person you meet may do something better than you do, is narcissism. 

So, if Pearce were hiring an office assistant, and a well qualified applicant says, "I didn't fit in with the crowd at the big firm I'm leaving. Well," (preening), "looks might have had something to do with that," person might be telling the truth, no narcissism needed. Or person might be deluding perself in a non-narcissistic way; person might have been envied and shunned less for per looks than for per superior productivity--productive people can easily be so focussed on how much they can enjoy accomplishing (for the sake of accomplishment, no narcissism needed) that they don't even notice how much less others are accomplishing. Or it's possible that the person, let's say an average yuppie type who does look better than average just because person is young and rich, was neither perceived as better looking than others nor in any danger of being resented for being more productive, that "interviewing well" is per only outstanding talent, and that person is in fact a narcissist, and also an embezzler. How can you tell? 

You can't. There are few guarantees in this world. That's something Pearce can help you with. You can protect yourself from being chosen as a victim, if the person is a malevolent narcissist, by learning to stand your ground in conversations with more aggressively selfish people, cultivating a confident assertive manner (it's not spelled out in detail, but what "mainstream" Americans consider a confident assertive manner may be what you were brought up to see as a conceited obnoxious manner), cultivating a social cushion of friends so that nobody can exploit being your best or only friend, and taking care of your physical health so that mood swings don't overwhelm you. And handle your own money.

I would have liked to have seen more about self-care in this book.

So, is A Practical Application of Dark Psychology all that a psychological self-help book should be? No, but if you still have a copy of Your Erroneous Zones or Co-Dependent No More, by now you'll notice the ways in which they're not all that they should have been either. We do not live in a perfect world. For someone who has, say, escaped from an abusive family into an abusive group house, close friendship may be found in reading what like-minded people have written before it can be found in actually working with congenial people. Pearce is as good a companion on that sort of journey as most.

Book Review: Love Comes

Title: Love Comes

Author: Drew Beyson

Date: 2023

Quote: "Sarah felt certain that she was meant to be with him."

But love doesn't come to Sarah and Dan. In this "prequel" story, Dan is the ex-boyfriend Sarah dumps before moving to the small town of Moon View and finding a better man. 

Beyson's intention is to show her characters "becoming better versions of themselves," but her hasty writing style doesn't promise very effective descriptions of this. The copy of Love Comes I have was not even edited for verb tense, so a character "is" doing something in one sentence and "was" doing it in the next sentence, in the same scene. It's not one of those novels where a character is probing into the past, so that it makes sense to write things like "While she waits for Jack to come home, Jill curls up with a book on the couch. An old postcard falls out from between the pages: a beachfront hotel in Bermuda. January 1954. 'Jane, wish you were here...Jo & Jim.' Jo married Jim in 1950. They were doing well..." It's just careless writing; when Beyson writes that "when she looked at Judith, there was nothing but genuine concern for Sarah in her eyes. It is one of the reasons they were still besties," she's not even made a decision on the question of whether she's trying to create a trendy effect of "immediacy" with "when Sarah looks at Judith, she sees genuine concern for Sarah in Judith's eyes. It is one of the reasons they are still besties," or a traditional effect of a complete story being told after the fact with "when Sarah looked at Judith, she saw genuine concern for Sarah in Judith's eyes. It was one of the reasons they were still besties." 

Anyway, in college neither Sarah nor Judith is a particularly attractive "version of herself." They're roommates. Sarah drinks wine, Judith drinks beer. They have "boyfriends." Dan is Sarah's. Whether they're having safe sex only, like real people who are worth educating in college, or relying on pills and gadgets to prevent the act of baby-making from making a baby, we're not told. In this story we learn that, although Sarah wanted to believe that what she and Dan had was love, at the time, she's not able to believe that for long.

In Love Comes we're not told exactly whether Sarah is a sensible, wholesome girlfriend, or Dan is a responsible, worthwhile boyfriend--friends whose common interests include enjoying their hormones and finding out how long a physical attraction lasts, without doing what makes babies so that any "relationship counselling" they need can come from elders rather than lawyers. Most young people find the opposite sex interesting. If they can keep the interest in one another as human beings, without trying to rush into the big commitment that ruins the lives of those who go too far too fast, they can enjoy each other's company without setting up a lifetime of regrets.

We do see some danger signals. Sarah blurts out that she thinks she's "in love" when Dan has not said anything about his being "in love." For some men who are not "in love," women who think they're "in love" first are fear triggers the men want to avoid. For others, they're cows that can be milked without having to be fed or sheltered. Dan is in the second category. Sarah is setting herself up for some very unpleasant emotions whenever she has to realize how selfish Dan and his relationship with her have been, all along...but she did ask for that selfish relationship. A girl who wants an unselfish lover who will follow her when she thinks moving to Moon View is a great career move should not tell the nearest cute guy that she's "in love" before she's seen that he's capable of unselfish love. Few young men are.

So, Love Comes is a story that does not fulfill the promise its title makes, in which a shallow, callow chick selfishly grabs for what she wants to call "love" with a shallow, callow fellow who probably privately calls it "benefits." Oh, such a sad, common, really rather tedious little story. Buy it if you want to find out how much more mature and realistic Sarah can grow up to be in the next volume.

Book Review: Night and Day

Title: Night and Day

Author: Virginia Woolf

Date: 1919, 1971

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: none

Length: 471 pages

Quote: “It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying them­selves.”

Katharine is one of six young single adults in her neighborhood. If they were alive today, this little group would probably be a polyamorous community; they’re all young and hormonal enough to enjoy sex with practically anything, or anyone, and any of them could obviously enjoy a night with any other of them—at least, in a heterosexual pairing. They’re so hormonal, in fact, that they don’t even care that at least four of them are cousins to each other. This detail puts me off the whole pack of them, but Virginia Woolf managed to write almost 500 pages about the difficulties these incestuous Brits have in restricting themselves to one formal courtship, leading to one marriage, at a time. What a scandal it is that Katharine and William, who announce their engagement first and break it off first, actually remain friends and help each other marry the people they really want to marry.

Pet names aren’t used in this crowd. The girls are Katharine, Cassandra, and Mary. The guys are William, Henry, and Ralph. Katharine’s and William’s engagement was favored by their elders at least partly because they stand to inherit more money than Henry and Cassandra, and much more money than Mary and Ralph.

I find this tasteful, yet hormone-driven, study of youth very tiresome. I tried to read the whole novel in the 1990s, gave it up, and have only just finished it. The book qualifies as a study of why modern-style dating displaced traditional-style courtship in the twentieth century, why the rules of nineteenth-century-traditional courtship served our six characters so poorly. As such, it subjects readers to levels of impatience almost comparable with those the characters suffer…so caveat lector!

If you like long-drawn-out novels of manners, if you’ve always wished Jane Austen’s novels didn't try to be funny but just went on twice as long, if you're into incest and appreciate that in real life Virginia Woolf knew something about taboo relationships even closer than with cousins, then Night and Day might be your cup of tea. If you’re making a study of Virginia Woolf, you’ll need to refer to this novel. For readers in these two categories Night and Day is recommended.

Woolf is sometimes considered an important writer. I'm not sure why. She wasn't the first representative of any group; Pearl S. Buck, Rose Wilder Lane, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, even Mary Roberts Rinehart were writing better books, and the subcategory "suicidal women writers" was much better represented by Sylvia Plath. Call me heretical but I suspect Woolf's place in the twentieth century literary canon, such as it was, was created for her by grieving relatives in the literary community. Now they're all dead and gone, and Woolf's fiction has my permission to go and lie down among them.

 

Advice I'll Always Remember

It was in the "relationship advice" category: A poll of couples who agreed that they'd been happily married for a long time asked the couples for their "secrets," and the wives' advice to women was "Always hold something back."

That didn't mean not giving in to the joys of marriage, they assured single baby-boomers. The joy of cooking, the joy of sex, the joy of running marathons together, and much more, were shared freely. But it's always a good idea, they said, in any relationship, to leave the other person wanting something more. 

The hint of further intimacy that's raised when people show a fresh side of themselves to their loved ones, a hidden talent, a life outside the family.

The absurd extravagance, with time if not with money, that never quite fits in to the schedule or budget. 

The "other story" that's not told in the story you tell.

The additional information that will be included in your next report, article, book.

The piece or touch you sell separately from the main product or job.

Some writer presenting this information to young ladies asked us what we were holding back in our primary relationships. I was holding back something with the boyfriend, of course. Nice girls my age took that as read and did not spell it out. I zoom-focussed on someone's claim that she never let her boyfriend know for sure whether she really liked him or not, and it seemed to have the desired effect of making him act "crazy about her." I thought "dizzy" was enough for my boyfriend to be, and although I liked his dizzy infatuated grin, very much, I scorned tricks like fake breakups and "lovers' quarrels," not calling back, and flirting with other men to aggravate the infatuation. 

Keeping courtships friendly and low-drama was recommended by my elders. I'd heard a few stories of what had happened when people let the excitement of courtship get out of hand.  A large bland slow-moving eighty-something had played another young man against the one she married--just a little--when they were in their twenties, and when the engagement was announced he'd committed suicide. A little soon-to-be-grandmother had pulled an Insane Admirer up short as he was explaining the detailed plans for the elopement, "But, Freddy, I never said I was going to marry you," and he'd gone home muttering that if he couldn't marry her no one else would, and been found, the next day, lurking in her closet with a knife. 

Anyway what I liked about my boyfriend, when I was twenty-nine, was the sweetness and light of hanging out together, being friends. Concerns about money, the illness and death of elders, and the possibility that either a minister or a bridegroom existed who'd seriously consider marrying our sisters, added quite enough drama to my life. It was just very pleasant to know a nice, stable, employed engineer who always had ideas about things to do for fun, often involving our parents, young children, and animals. 

As long as we were just hanging out and having fun, he and I got along very well. When we thought about our future careers, well, we were taking different roads in life. Compatible values; different priorities. I wanted to live in the country and write, and maybe adopt children if a partner who could afford to feed them came along. He wanted to live in the small city where he'd grown up, and add more wealth to what he'd started with, and adopt children if a partner who liked them came along. 

We even had a child in mind. His parents were professional foster parents; one of his foster sisters had grown up and had a baby she was always leaving at their house. Both of us liked that baby--toddler, actually. Her mother taught her to call us "aunt" and "uncle." His mother, who was the managing type, was prone to visions or visualizations of other people's futures. In her visualization, upon marriage he and I were going to adopt the baby. Of course that produced instant problems. The mother of the baby screeched "Nobody's taking MY baby away from ME! Youall are not that much 'better' than I am!" I thought we were making better life choices than she was, anyway, but I wasn't interested in fighting for custody of a child, and said so. 

"You don't realize how unfit that girl is to be that baby's mother!"

I realized she was nineteen years old. When I was nineteen years old, I thought, I'd been a child, and a wretched mess of one at that, in different ways than the baby's mother. When I was twenty-one, I was not ready to be anyone's primary parent, but being a secondary foster parent ("There's no way I'm old enough to be your Mom. If you want to adopt me, call me Sis!") to my adoptive sister had worked out well and helped me grow up. "It's a gruesome age to be. Our sisters that age are mixed-up kids, too, though at least they don't seem to be taking drugs or having babies. We survived being nineteen. So will they. By staying on good terms with the baby's mother, we can try to be a good aunt and uncle to the baby anyway." 

So things went for about a year. Then my twenty-ninth birthday party was ruined when the baby's mother and one of her boyfriends got into some sort of disagreement. While preparing to bring the baby to the party, apparently, they started yelling at each other and each gave an angry tug on the baby. The baby screamed and kept on screaming. Apparently they'd tugged hard enough to damage a leg. X rays showed a "spiral fracture." 

"They all but literally pulled that child apart! Now do you think they should have custody?"

The hospital social worker had apparently told the teen mother that she couldn't take the baby home, herself. "So, do you want to send her home with your foster mother, brother, sister...?"

"None of them," the teen mother apparently screamed in one of those emotional storms that happen to nineteen-year-olds when they get themselves into stressful situations. "Send her to some other foster family! Anybody but them!"

"That poor baby," I said. "If that's the way the mother feels, that's the way she feels." I thought my potential mother-in-law ("I'm not saying the mothers of the fellows I've dated were witches, but two of them were called Wanda and Glenda," and that one was Glenda) had probably contributed a lot to the situation. Not that she was consciously class-ist. I thought the way she took it as read that all of her foster children were capable of going to college and having careers was classy, actually, on the whole, but it wasn't working for all of them as well as it was for some. The corporate glass ceiling was an issue at the time, but a separate "women's issue" was that many women have zero interest in climbing corporate ladders. I had none. Glenda had none. So why should Glenda push foster daughters toward corporate jobs they didn't want, either, when she didn't even want one for herself? I thought the baby's mother might have trusted her foster brother and his fiancee if she hadn't always seen us as dutiful guests in Glenda's house, but the situation was what it was.

So then the toddler we loved was sent home with some other people at the far end of the county, and Glenda decided I was just too laid-back for her son. She thought he needed an ambition-driven managing type, someone like her, to push him up the corporate ladder. I thought human beings make enough mistakes for ourselves that we ought to know better than to try to make choices for others. So Glenda made it her goal to come between her son and me. 

"The Bible says 'A man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.' Of course that's not a reasonable thing for him to do. His whole life, his job, his position in his community, are all wrapped up in his extended family in Tennessee. If he did want to give up all that and live on a poor little hill farm, and always be 'the one from,' and drive fifteen miles to and from his job, he'd be 'crazy about me' enough that I'd have to marry him. If he's not, well, I'm certainly not making any commitments to try to live among, or please, people who find fault with me." 

"But he's such a prize..."

"He is a prize and a prince, but if he continues to listen to that Glenda, after the way she's spoken to me, then as far as I'm concerned he just turned into a toad." 

Maybe I should have played games, let the boyfriend wonder whether I still liked or respected him at all, that winter. I didn't want to play games. I didn't want a marriage that would depend on driving a man "crazy." I assured him that I still loved him, but I thought his mother might do well to wake up and realize how much harm she was doing with her demands that everybody fit into her mold. I was not going to spend time around people who did not respect and appreciate me, just as I was. He just had to choose between his family and me.

Of course a lifelong family man was not prepared to cut himself off from his family, not even for a strategic year or two. I didn't blame him, then or now. We had taken different roads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEE3ycDH9_8

How much should women hold back, before marriage, to avoid smothering the man's need to pursue and "win" a mate? I thought withholding the act of marriage was enough, and hadn't planned to withhold anything else, in particular, beyond that. What stuck in my mind was that, within a month of saying that I thought saying "I love you" before marriage was appropriate, I was saying it in a different way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0bEZH6ZqG4

Later that year I started flat-sitting, in exchange for the use of my future brother-in-law's address as my business address in Washington. Later I met my husband. All I have to regret is that he really had had cancer, though he'd come to believe he didn't have it, when we met, and the cancer came back and killed him ten years later. 

I came home. I met the man I would have married first if I'd met him first. There were six good years of working together, waiting for his foster son to be "full grown and on his own" because I didn't think teenaged boys needed to have to live with stepmothers. The lad was just about to join the Army when my Significant Other went down with Lyme Disease, and since it was easier for the 6'2" lad to lift his 6'4" foster father than it would have been for anyone else, the lad ended up staying around, providing family care, for what was mostly a phone friendship for the next eleven-plus years. 

"No woman should stay engaged to a man for more than two years! If he wants to marry her, he'll do it. It's a disgrace for a woman to let herself be used for years of engagement that don't become a marriage..."

Hello? I wasn't being used. I was not "ghosting away" from a friend who developed a long boring illness--that really is a disgrace. I said Lyme Disease didn't I? The relationship was postsexual. I've not been altogether postsexual, all the years I've been blogging, but I might as well have been. I met men my age who were still single. When a fifty-year-old man is neither homosexual nor postsexual and is single, the reasons why he's single are usually obvious on first sight. At best they've been divorcees who seemed as if there might have been some hope that their wives and children would take them back. I can live without the drama of a bigamous marriage.

So, now my Significant Other's gone too. His foster son, born a more distant relative but blessed with much of the same peculiar DNA, is the sort of young man the older generation have to respect. 

I think the idea of holding something back is basically good, though how it works in marriage is hard to explain. Some of the wives in that survey said that what they thought they were holding back was a level of emotional intimacy somewhere beyond having and rearing children together, which might or might not even exist in this world. 

Do all husbands fantasize about that? I don't know. They wouldn't say it if they did, would they? Mine used to fantasize about spending a whole day in bed. That was not the way either of us was brought up, nor was it something we really wanted to do, until he had cancer. Then it seemed to be time to act out that fantasy, so during his last months we did. 

What is held back is not, of course, something the person can reasonably expect not to be held back. The story is complete; there's another, basically separate, story that's not told in the same book. The marriage is consummated; the mysterious "ultimate intimacy" may actually be dying in the arms of the one with whom one has lived, when the time comes. I don't imagine any of the happy couples did the sort of teasing some people dump boyfriends or girlfriends for doing. 

What needs to be held back in friendship and courtship is the kind of eager haste that, even when it charms the other person, also alarms because it sounds either desperate or, at best, infantile--as if the person doesn't understand what person appears to be saying. 

When I was in college someone stuck for a topic of conversation would say "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" I'd say that I had a sister and we'd lost a brother, and more than one eager puppy of a boy said at once, "Oh I could be your brother!" and I felt like saying, "Child. I doubt you could have kept up with my brother in any sport, on any job, much less in conversation." 

I had a distant, so distant we couldn't even work out how distant, cousin to whom I gave the screen name Oogesti. He had some disadvantages in life. For one thing he was as biracial as the rest of the clan but it didn't show; he had a nicer personality, but still, quite a strong resemblance to Donald Trump. For another thing he suffered from extroversion, had some talent--he sold paintings regularly, in "retirement," and had sung with a band that sold albums--and even did pretty well in elementary school, but he said that in high school all he wanted to think about was girls. Eventually he married one, lived happily, had children, and then when they were about eighty years old his wife died. When he started going out and talking to people again, he mostly talked to women, and even if they were married, even if they were relatives, they were "girl friends." My Significant Other was very nice about it ("He's eighty-five years old--humor him!") but some older people lacked that sense of cheerful detachment.

"Be careful! That nice old church lady might actually like you, if you don't scare her off acting desperate." 

"I don't like her!"

"Then why talk as if you did?"

"What else am I going to say to her?"

Maybe if a person's goal is not to have to go out on any actual dates, openly rating people as potential dates before the person has demonstrated crucial abilities like making conversation and keeping appointments would be a good strategy to cut off conversations the person feels unable to make. All I can say is, if a man actually wants a date with me, he needs to demonstrate competence and reliability first, as a client or co-worker, then a friend. He may look good, but I don't want a relationship that's all about "looks," so the better he looks, the more he needs to show that looks haven't spoiled his character. 

Men, too, need to hold some things back...not to tease or score points, but to show respect for themselves and others.

Book Review: Do It for You

Title: Do It for You 

Author: Vanessa Ooms

Date: 2022

Publisher: Vanooms Media

ISBN: 978-1-7387471-1-5

Length: 188 pages

Quote:  "I knew in my heart of hearts that this moment was the culmination of choices I’d made that were not in my best interest; in which I had ignored my intuition and red flags, and done what I thought others would view as “right.”

If you missed the insights North America received, almost en masse, from the bestsellers Co-Dependent No More and Your Erroneous Zones, this book is for you. "How to Stop Being a People-Pleaser" is still the advice some people need. 

If you remember what was helpful, and not helpful, in Melody Beattie's and Wayne Dyer's mega-sellers, and their many follow-up books and many imitators, this book may disappoint you. It's not that Ooms doesn't go beyond what Beattie and Dyer had to teach us. She does...but not necessarily in the direction you most wanted to see. She's updated the list of resources available to recovering people-pleasers but she's not come to any useful insights on when to stop fretting about being a people-pleaser and just be a helpful friend, or what to do if you've realized that your family actually have a pretty good sense of balances and boundaries, that it's government institutions (e.g. your school, your children's school, the Social Security Administration) that you're experiencing as oppressors and abusers. 

One thing Do It for You has that Co-Dependent No More and Your Erroneous Zones didn't have is workbook pages. People-pleasers sometimes feel overwhelmed by the idea of making decisions about what they want to do. They may have a general idea ("drop out of the accounting course, hitchhike to California, get discovered, and become a movie star") but they've never dared to think about exactly how they might make it work. Thinking about this sort of thing can help. Some people actually realize that there might be some benefit in completing the accounting course while Daddy's union fund is paying for it--they can always hitchhike to California as certified public accountants--and thus feel at peace with themselves about doing the sensible thing. 

One thing no guidebook for people-pleasers had, so far as I know, is any useful information about life beyond recovery from pathological people-pleasing. People who have already grown backbones quite often report that the things they want, for themselves, include happy families, satisfied customers, successful students, healthy patients, even a spiritual "discipleship group" where people encourage one another to build better habits of life. And relationships like that don't always make our lives perfect, either. Sometimes what we choose to do in relationships we've chosen to maintain is disgusting. Nobody likes disinfecting bedpans. On the other hand nobody likes being a person who abandons a sick relative. Choosing to disinfect bedpans is not being a people-pleaser. Quitting a dead-end corporate job in order to homeschool a deaf child is just about the opposite of being a people-pleaser. On a happier note, completely abandoning yourself to your spouse's pleasure in bed is the height of self-indulgence. The therapists who help people-pleasers probably would be prepared to discuss this in real life, but it would probably be too confusing to put into the books. At least Melody Beattie did spell out, in later editions of Co-Dependent No More, that most people can feel the difference between being helpful and generous or being exploited. 

All self-help books have some built-in limitations but they can help some people. If you are in a classic people-pleaser situation, like having spent your whole adult life pursuing success in a corporation that has gone bankrupt or a husband who has eloped with a younger man, this book may help you. 

Book Review: Conversations Across America

Title: Conversations Across America 

Author: Kari Loya

Date: 2022

Publisher: XK Productions

ISBN: 979-8-9861258-2-4

Length: 276 pages

Quote: "To families facing Alzheimer's. Find moments of joy."

In his seventies, Merv Loya (the name is Finnish) was in better physical condition than many teenagers. But his mind--which had been a good one--was starting to go. The family reached that terrible, traumatic decision, which so many families seem to be buying into these days, that it was necessary to sell his house, throw away most of his belonging, and put him in a nice private instritution, where he'd be able to stay only a short time before deteriorating enough to be moved to a differen institution.

I don't understand why people make this decision, though Mr. Loya seemed to be part of it. I can understand blind people selling their pictures and mobility-impaired people moving to smaller quarters without stairs, but if I were losing my memory I'd want to stay as close to as many memory triggers as possible; don't start "downsizing" my belongings, don't even dare to move them, if I'm going to remember them I'm going to remember them where I put them. 

But we as a society tell people that they "need to" be packed into barracks with a lot of strangers, and apparently some older people think there is some rational reason for this. 

 Anyway, before the move, Merv Loya and his son Kari did the Last Great Road Trip together. By bicycle. They trained and tested themselves for fitness and started pedaling their way across the continent, from Virginia to Oregon, along the Trans-American bike route. Of this trip Kari Loya made a book.

The format and content of the book may surprise, perhaps disappoint, readers. I do not recommend the e-book version. The publisher opted for two-column formatting, which is a pain to read on a screen. I sighed, I started typing a samizdat copy, I told myself (on page six of the samizdat version) that this review was overdue already. Nobody likes a reviewer who doesn't take the time to read a book properly, properly; a reviewer who takes more than a month may be even worse. Scroll up, scroll down. Read half a paragraph, scroll up, realize you needed to scroll down first. See half a picture. If you buy this book, it's worth buying a printed copy. Columns and pictures can actually work on a printed page.

But then another decision was made, apparently by Kari Loya, that the best way to capture the memory of a road trip with Merv Loya was not with literary essays, maps, reviews, or pictures of scenery, but mainly with snapshots of random people the Loyas met on the trip. Each state through which they rode gets a chapter; the longer part of each chapter is the pages with one, two, or three snapshots of faces and quotes from what people said during their conversations.

At his father's memorial service, Loya tells us, he pictured his father approaching the gates of Heaven. While others introduced themselves with their achievements and what they thought they had to offer to Heaven, Merv Loya would say, "Before I tell you what I've done, let me tell you about these fifteen other people I met on the stairs here, and why each of them will be a great addition to Heaven..."

Most of the people who contributed a face picture and a paragraph of conversation to this book aren't making the case for their admission to Heaven. Most don't even tell real stories, beyond where they came from and how they came to be on the route. They're making casual conversation with people they've met on the road. Some are fellow long-distance cyclists; some are hikers; some are local people or even motorists. Apart from a couple of aggressive drivers, Loya says, the people they met were friendly; cyclists are perceived as non-threatening, eccentric but not violent, not competing for jobs, likely to spend money freely, in the towns along the route. One man talked freely about his involvement in vice and crime. One woman talked about her experience in ministerial school. People provided abundant evidence of the current craze for travel-for-its-own-sake, even nomadism; in each state the Loyas met someone from a different state along their route. 

Though Finnish and Norwegian rather than Irish, Mr. Loya had been diagnosed as having celiac disease. Historically the celiac gene was spread through continental Europe, but it was extremely rare in the coastal countries and almost unknown as far inland as Finland. The diagnosis of celiac disease is often made by a simpler blood test rather than a DNA study. With so many non-Irish people showing celiac reactions on blood tests, it would be interesting to know how many of these people do have the celiac gene (via Norway, it's possible) and how many are having pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate residues in grain. The level of general understanding of either condition, along the trail, seems to be pathetic. One restaurant employee was able to assure the Loyas that everything on the menu was gluten-free; most of them didn't know what that meant. 

Mercifully, the Loyas, whose home base was near Tillamook, were lactose-tolerant and able to enjoy Tillamook ice cream. Burning off calories on their bikes, they apparently enjoyed a lot of it, though in one town they found only Ben and Jerry's and, apparently reacting to its novelty appeal, managed to consume two pints each. 

Trans Am cyclists, we are told, like to sleep cheap. One of the first things every cyclist learns is how to drape rain capes across bicycles to make a sort of tent, but after one miserable night in the open the Loyas discover phone apps that connect them to people who offer roofs and floors, even warm showers.  

And there's a mercifully terse vignette of another way a Last Great Road Trip can end, with the younger woman pleading for "an obese man" to stay with her, meaning alive...People do plan these things, cruel though it is to the younger women, who may not realize that the sugar-daddy type singing "I want to die in your arms tonight" just might mean it literally. Women at least seem to want to spare younger men that experience. 

Apart from those, the book gives few details about the actual trip. Mileage is charted in the appendix. I enjoyed Loya's vew of Wytheville, Virginia--not sure why a gluten-free diner would go to the Mexican restaurant when there used to be such a good Chinese one--and was disappointed that he found so little to say about Berea, Kentucky, or almost any other place between Virginia and Oregon. This book really is about what other people told the Loyas. 

Despite its shortcomings as a travel book (there are so many travel books already), this is a heartwarming story of family love. It will remind all readers who have parents who like road trips to share a good one now, while they can. 

New Book Review: Charlie Utopia

Title: Charlie Utopia 

Author: Nowick Gray

Date: 2022

Publisher: Cougar

Length: 363 pages

ISBN: 9781990129230

Quote: "He had even plotted the end of his autobiography, envisioning life after fifty as icing on the cake."

Why read this novel? It's funny in a dry way, but not too funny to read in public. It's sad in a dry way, too, but not so sad as to be depressing. Mainly it's nostalgic. Charlie Utopia is a baby-boomer who lives in his utopian dreams, brings them into life in most ways--he succeeds at all the different things he wants to do as fun jobs, doesn't have to give much time to jobs taken just to pay bills, builds his own house, travels with a band, gets into all the beds he seems really to want to get into. Yet he's always just slightly depressed, because for all the self-help books he reads and all the trendy roads to happiness he follows, something eludes him.

And what that something is, is Love. Charlie's always loved himself and arranged for his own comfort. He's a decent man, and his own comfort includes doing honest work well, being a satisfactory bedmate, and providing for his one positively known child. But his good will fails to extend beyond the end of his own nose. He seems to keep track of the names of the women he's married or lived with, but beyond their different demographic profiles he's aware of very little about them, so it's hard for the reader to remember which fits into which part of his story (and that plus the philosophical fads are often the only indication of what year it's supposed to be, from scene to scene). He doesn't abuse his daughter, but he seems to know nothing about her except as baggage that comes with one of the women he's given pleasure yet failed to know. People always drift away from him and he never knows why. He has no religion. He hopes being a left-winger will appease the envious masses of people who have less than he and his friends have, but never gets to know any of them personally either. Determined to use his talents to preserve the space for the rich interior life his introvert brain needs, he fails to find the working partnership his introvert brain craves next. Many people seem to agree that he's a good neighbor, but he has no close friend, male or female.

It doesn't take 363 pages to paint a credible portrait of a man who has everything but love, so reading this book is mainly a nostalgia trip for those currently over fifty. If you have or have had a Partner For Life, you can enjoy feeling sorry for Charlie. If not, you may enjoy sharing his richly detailed life travelogue of work, thought, passion, and the sense of mild depression that sets in just when Charlie is in his workshop enjoying the other things. 

Book Review: America's Loveless Age

Title: America's Loveless Age 

Author: Noel Terry

Date: not shown; text indicates 2021

Publisher: Noel Terry

ISBN: 978-1-66784-1-243

Length: 266 e-pages

Quote: "[M]ainstream politics can impact dating politics."

How would they not? How many of us are liberal enough to be happy with a spouse who, even if a couple can agree to vote in different States, can be counted on to cancel our presidential vote? Fortunately, the author of this partisan screed doesn't seem to be American or to understand the public events he records in this book, so there's no reason to believe he is accurately describing the social scene for today's twenty-something. He reads only one side. With regard to "mainstream politics" that's the anti-Trump side, the side on which people are astute enough to know that nobody positively supports the unworkable ideas to which their foreign funders have chained them, so they just keep screaming "racism." With regard to "dating politics" it's the computer dating sites at which, if young people seriously seek dates, something is badly wrong.

What are dating sites all about? As a Kingsport Times-News article once reported, under the headline news that a real couple had actually used personal advertisements to find each other, relying on blind-box ads or fractionally more sophisticated computer versions can help people in very small social niches find one another. If you are a Seventh-Day Adventist ministerial student in search of a young woman who's not part of the S.D.A. prep school crowd but is friendly to S.D.A. religious beliefs, a personal ad mentioning why you're still available may be right for you. Otherwise, dating sites are bedtime reading for people who don't want real-world dates (the conversations with strangers, the expense, the need to bathe). 

I did some research once. I wanted to write a novel about a couple who bond by acting out each other's fantasies. From popular fiction I'd taken the idea that the woman wants the man to listen to her stories and put positive spins on them like an ideal therapist. There's no end to the young-adult novels where one can imagine the protagonists getting into serious difficulties, having sexual relationships when what they're really looking for is psychotherapy. Well, in this novel the woman recognized what she was looking for and the man was willing and able to do it. So what did he want that she was willing and able to do in return? What did men want besides the commercial exploitation narrative of the billionnaire playboy who buys whatever's being advertised for the top rates of the season, since anything looks good on him in any case, and theoretically fights crime but always wins? Could James Bond have a believable job (in exchange, he'd get to have hair) and Bobo rather than yuppie taste? Was that something men wanted? 

So I called a few of the phone chat lines that were popular in the 2000s, where it was generally agreed that men just wanted to talk about their fantasies, and invited men to share their fantasies with me. My first clue that men who want to talk about their fantasies are somewhat out of touch came from the hostility men showed when I introduced myself with the truth: "Hi, I'm a writer researching men's fantasies. Tell me one." Nooo! They wanted to believe that a woman to whom they were confiding their fantasies was looking for dates with men who call phone chat lines (say what?) with the same panting, audibly drooling avidity they were. They wanted to imagine that a woman who was that desperate would be unincarcerated, have a job, weigh less than 500 pounds...

And, popular though James Bond movies are, these guys did not noticeably want adventures. No fighting crime, no outsmarting enemies, no fortuitously having invented just the right tool to foil the enemies' evil schemes, no competitions, no need even to impress the fantasy gal. They all described almost identical fantasies. They all wanted to find an attractive female body somewhere--most didn't even care whether it was indoors or outdoors--and immediately start making babies. Ohhh. Slurp.

These were not coal miners or assembly line laborers. This was Washington. These guys not only read but were likely to be mentioned in nonfiction books. At least one of the callers claimed a name that hadn't been in the headlines but had been mentioned, if you read far enough into the story, in the news media. More or less by choice these guys were in places where James Bond adventures could happen, to the extent that they could happen at all. And they still had the same fantasies as thirteen-year-olds who are just starting to notice that the changes in their bodies may have uses beyond impressing schoolmates with how fast they're growing up.

Feminists deplore the poor-spirited and unimaginative heroine who, like Cinderella, can do nothing to help herself but needs only to get herself to the party (no mention even of having learned to dance) to be seen and whisked away to live happily ever after. Rightly so. But Cinderella was a model of cleverness and ingenuity compared with these poor-spirited and unimaginative men. 

And that's the demographic from which Terry thinks we can predict the future of American civilization.

So it's comforting to note that Terry's English is British. Though he says he spent some time travelling and talking to people in American bars, he probably wasn't here when most of the events he discusses took place. All he knows about those events is what he read in partisan papers/

The results can be as disastrous as Merkel's lax immigration policy. Flinging wide the gates served everyone well in Germany, Terry cites sources having written, apparently before the mass rape event in Berlin. If Terry had been paying attention to any feminist concerns other than the entertaining-catfight potential of "sisterhood wars," he'd know that that event was pivotal in flipping women's positions from "Let us help these poor refugees" to "How much are we, individually and as a nation, being paid to serve as a prison for other countries' criminal outcasts?" 

Basically Terry's argument seems to be:

1. Socialist programs that depended on population growth must be kept going and must not be refitted to a finite world where human population is already more than double what it needs to be. 

2. Therefore, even as we see overcrowding suppressing the reproductive instincts in the young, we must keep packing more people into overcrowded cities 

3. There aren't enough jobs for the existing number of job seekers already. 

4. Nevertheless, socialism might be able to buy ten years if young women would just go home and have more babies, which would keep them from doing health, education, administrative, and communicative jobs so much better than young men do. 

5. But they won't, willingly, go home and have more babies unless they've found men who can afford to keep them and their babies in the style to which they are, or would like to become, accustomed. 

6. Among young single Americans who are still willing to risk having babies, this leaves a majority of the females in unladylike competition for a minority of the males, and a lot of young men (currently) unsatisfied, blaming us mean old feminists for calling attention to things like the way mass immigration did not serve the people of Berlin well.

7. Although Americans noted these things long before Donald Trump could afford to run for President as The Candidate Who Did Not Ask Voters For Money, it has to be Trump's fault, anyway, because no party that claims to appeal to the masses wants to leave those masses time to think about the fact that ca presidential candidate won without asking them for money every few hours.

8. So this book has to keep blaming Trump, in all ways, always, and at whatever risk of making  the Democrats look like the sorest and sorriest lot of losers-even-when-life-handed-them-a-win the world has ever seen.

9. So, Trump's a Nazi, all of his supporters are White male haters whatever they may actually look like, and people who observe rationally that the Trump Administration accomplished good and bad things don't caaare enough about the people the Trump Administration hated and hurt. And the reason for their lack of caaaaring needs to be worse than "They looked around and couldn't see any such people." 

10. When your argument is very weak, like this one, polarizing people is a good strategy because it motivates them to throw their tomatoes at one another rather than you.

11. Therefore, women who criticize each other's opinions or strategies are not engaging in debate but locked in a deadly "sisterhood war," young men who aren't meeting Miss Right on dating sites don't need to go to church or temple or join a social club and talk to real women but need to blame older people (both feminists and non-feminist Trump), everything is all because the United States have that pesky Constitution that says the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, and readers of a book that supports a weak argument with misreported facts and comes to no meaningful conclusion should at least picture Terry dodging bullets as he fled back to Britain.

12. Whatever. Just don't anyone ever vote to re-elect Trump.

Apart from a tendency to use "struik," which Google says is a Dutch noun meaning a bush or shrub, as a verb meaning to speak or say, Terry's writing skills are good. However, because his research skills leave so much to be desired and his persuasion skills seem to have been developed in a partisan echo chamber, I don't expect this book will cost Trump a vote if he insists on running in 2024. 

Great books do not come out of echo chambers; they are written by reading all sides and, if writers want to oppose someone, opposing ideas in a more rational way than just screaming "ooohhh, ooohhh, the people who don't agree with us are all such horrible people." This web site did not endorse Candidate Trump, found abundant reasons to criticize the Trump Administration, and would have been receptive to parting shots from the less-brave while Trump is out of power, but in this case the parting shots miss their targets. 

There is, however, a throwaway line in this book that I like. It's on page 203, in the context of a woman's suggestion that perhaps women who get drunk or stoned in public places shouldn't be able to press charges against men who take advantage of their condition: "[M]en take care of their wasted buddies who have drunk too much; why wouldn't the same caring principle apply to a woman?"

Book Review: The Joy Luck Club

Title: The Joy Luck Club

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Putnam

Date: 1989

ISBN: my copy shows none

Length: 288 pages

Quote: “For a long time the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, ‘…it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.’ And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.”

Or should I quote the just slightly disreputable line I first heard on NPR, where one of the older Chinese women has to evict a tenant who calls her a @#$$% landlady, and she wails to her daughter, “He knows I’m not from Fukien!” I’ve never forgotten hearing Amy Tan read that quote; but more than the pun, I think, it was Tan’s dialect switching. Tan sounds like an American baby-boomer, but as she quoted the Chinese-born character’s line she suddenly sounded like a much older woman, her mother, perhaps, or grandmother, who was born in China. An author’s happening to have a gift for improvisational acting should probably be considered separately from the author’s books.

But there’s never been any question about Amy Tan’s books. I think Tan is on every critic’s Top Ten List of American Writers of the Baby-Boom Generation; either she or Barbara Kingsolver may be the closest analogue we in the United States have to Margaret Atwood. If you like lively feel-good stories with vivid details, an exquisite ear for dialogue, characters who are not noticeably Christian but whose stories manage to reflect Christian values (Tan is a Presbyterian), you’ll want to read all of her books.

This was the first novel that made Tan famous. Ironically, I think, it may be her weakest one. Four Chinese women who moved to San Francisco at about the same time have become friends; each of the four women has a daughter, and what happens in this book is that each mother and daughter tells her story. The stories naturally intersect but they don’t form much of a plot. They affirm that to some extent each woman has had an American Dream and made it come true; each one has a US-born daughter who’s grown up, found some success in life, and become mature enough to love her parents as an adult daughter should. They celebrate the richness and variety of life, both in old China and in modern California. Each of the older women has survived some very bad things. (One of them, as a girl, was supposed to be watching a baby brother at the beach, and he drowned.) Each has preserved the abilities to laugh, to love, and to learn. None of the women is supposed to be a perfect person. All of them are likable.

Women usually love The Joy Luck Club. Men sometimes gripe because it’s realistic. Real women’s stories are not romances. The eight protagonists in The Joy Luck Club mention having loved men, but the story is about their female bonding, mothers and daughters. Some of the men they’ve loved are still on the scene; some are not. Lindo Jong, whose unusual but understandable love for her first husband, Tsun-yu, is mentioned first in the book, is content with her current husband, Tin; and so on. This is not feminist bitterness; it’s realism, like the way Lindo Jong never changes her own name to Lynn or Linda, though other people call her Linda, but names her daughter Waverly.

One important theme in the book is how much of the mothers’ stories, which the reader knows, are and are not shared with their daughters—and how much of parents’ life stories should be shared with children. (In some Chinese families children weren’t supposed to know their parents’ history or even pronounce their parents’ names; elders were to be pampered while living and worshipped when dead, all in the single category of Honorable Ancestors.) One of the characters describes how her feelings are hurt when someone tells her what her stepfather’s family think of his relationship with her mother; she still feels, looking back, that that was the kind of thing a daughter shouldn’t have to know.

Each of Tan’s novels can be identified, not with a “moral,” exactly, but with a beneficial effect it should have on an attentive reader. For The Joy Luck Club that would be love of parents. Given half a chance, this novel will remind you to call or visit your mother, if you still have that opportunity. Father, too, if you think about it a little longer. Respect their privacy, and cherish what they choose to share of their stories.

Book Review: Hollow

Title: Hollow 

Author: Jazalyn

Date: 2020

Publisher: Jazalyn

Quote: "A ghost spirit of dark's universe falls in love with a ghost spirit of light's universe." 

They can't meet or consummate their love; they pour out their emotions through some sort of never-quite-explained equivalent of social media. Though the poems in this e-book are arranged in a sequence as the ghosts recognize that they are at least communicating, there's not really a plot that can be resolved, according to the constraints of this piece of fiction. It's a pretext for a series of poems about adolescent yearnings for love at an age when love can't be fully consummated. 

Adolescent yearnings are of course as real as anything can be, and these poems express them vividly, sometimes lyrically. None of the poems is bound to a pattern of rhyme and meter but some of them have solid enough logical structures to be singable. 

Here is another book from an interesting new writer that expresses the feeling of being a teenager, if anything, too well. Readers needed to be expressly warned against the assumption that the "different universes" motif is not just a way of saying "We hang out with different crowds," autobiographically, since we're not told much about the fictive universes or whatever it is that allows the ghosts to communicate (they don't reply directly to each other's poems).

Could this book inspire those who are starting to think about making their own special "Valentines" for their own Significant Others? It's possible. Messages of raw yearning-for-love are not positively recommended before marriage, but part of "being in love" is that feeling that the loved one belongs to a different "universe," a lighter and happier world or a darker and more interesting one or something that makes the person especially special. 

To buy this book and its two companion books, visit jazalyn.art or goodreads.com/jazalyn.  

Bad Poetry: Hearing Kelly Weber

This poem struck a chord, you might say.

https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-kelly-weber/

Some men think they want to be sex objects.

Some guys even say they want to be women

so that they could be sex objects.

Reconsider this, guys.

I know what you're thinking:

bodies pleasures pleasures bodies 

but this is what it is:

Nobody wants to hear anything but the body.

The deadly boring body

when everything of interest in your life

is going on in your mind.

And they "loved your show"

but don't remember what you sang

or, for that matter, whether you were the one who sang

or the one who played classical guitar

because what they noticed was your body.

And you might be, 

like the character in Kelly Weber's poems,

asexual. You might be asexual

because of a disease condition that may kill you.

You might be sitting with your very sick mother

in the hospital every day, watching her die,  

and she might be telling you about

how horrible your birth was for her,

because the dying want to tell all their stories before they die,

and people still think "sex object" when they look at your body

and that is all they think. 

Nothing like: are you so tired you can't see straight?

Nothing like: did you eat breakfast on any day during the past week

and, if so, did any of it seem to have stayed down?

Nothing like: do you have positive pains in the places

of greatest interest to the people who only ever think about your body,

or do those places just feel sort of numb?

Nothing like: is it cancer

or is it mononucleosis

or is it merely lactose intolerance

or maybe Lyme Disease

or maybe multiple sclerosis

or any combination of the above?

Nothing like: and are you managing to write stuff, anyway,

however much of it you are burning, or will burn,

because you want to write all your thoughts out before you die?

Nothing like: and did you have a boyfriend,

before all this other kind of body-drama started,

and do you ever hear from him, or want to?

Nothing like: and if there was a time for kissing 

in your previous life, was it age-appropriate,

because you're only just barely old enough for that sort of thing now,

or was it premature and guilty and traumatic,

and was it, in any case, profoundly private

because when introverts kiss we don't tell,

and which is worse: betraying someone you still love

by talking about a private moment with person,

or remembering why you stopped loving person?

No. None of that. It's just 

body body body 

hey baby you have a body

I asked you a question but never mind, I was looking at your body

I don't care about anything about you but that body

so who else is doing what to your body

and are you constantly, obsessively,

remembering what they've been doing to your body

and if not, can I try to make myself more memorable

to your body, of course, I don't care about anything but your body

I'm sure you're a good person because you have a beautiful body

or maybe you're a bad person in an interesting way, because oh that body

I don't give a flip about the content of your character, anyway

I might prefer to believe you were evil after I've used your body 

but at the moment I don't want to think about anything but your body.

I once told a young man I had just walked 35 miles

and what he said, edited for Google, was: 

So, can I use your body?

I once told a young man I was going to the hospital with my husband

and what he said was "I can be a nice friend, too," 

meaning I want to use your body.

I once had a cardiac reaction to chemical pollution

and fell over headlong on pavement

and a man who was old enough to know better

said, edited for Google, 

Golly, I want to use your body.

"Well, know, you," Lewis Grizzard

once said, in the biblical sense

but that's the last thing one wants to say to them.

They would say Is that a promise, then?

So maybe the words one wants are more archaic

like Blast your bones and sear your skin. 

And they think to themselves 

You don't mean those hard words, because you have a soft body

and they say, unhearing,

body body body body body.

Guys, even women 

cannot deal with this and 

even a small amount of blood testosterone, at the same time.

You lose all sympathy.

You lose all empathy.

You lose all sportsmanship.

You stand there and laugh in their faces.

Do not try to transition into a woman

with an expensively surgically enhanced body

that would interest other guys, guys.

It will destroy the only pleasure you have in life.

Book Review: The Oracles of Our Stars

Title: The Oracles of Our Stars 

Author: Serge Elie Seropian

Date: 2020

Publisher: Serge Elie Seropian

ISBN: 978-1-7771404-1-0

Quote: "Love is not blind / When it sees all / And yet loves anyway." 

I don't know how old Serge Elie Seropian was when he wrote these poems. I didn't know how old Tanya Mills was when she wrote Worthless, either...I'm not trying to trigger another adolescent emotional outburst here, but those two books have much in common and could be read as companion books. Both are in-depth studies of the "broken hearts" of very young people, very talented, sensitive, insightful, well-intentioned, but losing the game of Romantic Love. 

Both really are the kind of thing that should be written when one is nineteen and aching with frustrated passion, then dug out, polished up, and published as a cautionary study when one is old enough to laugh at one's mistakes.

Poetry tends to appeal to the young so no aunt could possibly proceed any further with a review of The Oracles of Our Stars without a bit of the kind of preaching that so upset Mills. I'm sorry, Seropian. This is absolutely required by the laws of aunthood:

Before going to college, or even going out on a date without a parent driving the car and waiting outside the hosts' front door, every girl should be warned about guys like the narrators of Seropian's romantic poems. They say lovely things about their spiritual love and friendship and admiration and so on and so on. If you take these things seriously and spend nights with them, inevitably it will become "impossible for [the two of you] to be together" and at best, if very lucky, you'll receive letters about their broken hearts written from the faraway places they go. More likely you'll be bitterly blamed and shamed for whatever flaws they can remember or invent; one of Seropian's poems describes the girl as "a free spirit," but non-poets usually have non-poetic names for it--the important thing is that it's usually not true. Sometimes the motive for leaving is to take advantage of real jobs or scholarships, too, but mostly it's to get away from you. And the baby they're afraid you might have. And the disease they may not want to know they've shared with you. Guys really do not want to think about the fact that contact with a harmless little wart they don't see as a serious disfigurement can cause a particularly insidious, asymptomatic, deadly form of cancer in women. 

If you are a young woman you need to condition yourself, any time a young man mentions spending a night together before the wedding, to think "cancer." After that you can still spend nights, as it might be at the homes of relatives, close enough together to find out what interesting people are like when they're at home, as long as you don't do anything that could cause cancer.

("But I wouldn't cause cancer!" guys will scream, if you set good clear boundaries. "I'm a very special snowflake! You're a horrible person for even thinking that I would ever..." If they even start telling you what a horrible person you are, for saying no or for anything else, the essential thing for a girl to remember is to move on to the next. If they confine themselves to the claim that they are very special snowflakes, they may actually be special, but let them melt a little just to find out. And don't do anything that could cause cancer, or pregnancy, anyway.)

Spiritual love and friendship and admiration between young unmarried people are beautiful things, and should never be sullied by carnalities like prolonged hand-shaking. One quick shake on the way back from a college Cultural Enrichment Event is enough. 

There is not enough attention to the concept of "enough" in The Oracles of Our Stars, though there is some apparently belated romantic renunciation. There is no mention of all of the way courtship, in which a man proves his worth as a provider and protector, starts by protecting a woman from even having to ruin a moment by saying no to anything that could cause cancer or pregnancy. There is also a noticeable lack of attention to the love of brothers, sisters, parents, or family generally. There is only one poem about the love of country, although it's one of the best in the book. There are some good poems about the love of friends, the love of humanity, and the love of God.

The country Seropian's speaker loves, in this book, is Lebanon, which the speaker wants to see "arise with love in [its collective] heart." In the case of war-torn Lebanon it's easy to interpret this phrase as "put the senseless civil war behind us." The value of meditating on what this phrase might mean for other countries or communities is probably worth the price of the book.

Lebanon was the home of Khalil Gibran, world-famous for his poetry collection The Prophet. Reading Oracles brings The Prophet to mind; I suspect this was intended. Rhythm and rhyme occasionally happen, but seem to be tolerated rather than sought after. Lines may or may not be end-stopped. The English is fluent but neither British nor American. The topics, the lack of differentiation among the kinds of love considered...Many of my generation liked The Prophet and may be interested in reading the work of a contemporary admirer of that classic book. For us it's safe. We're past temptation by the misguided romantic poems ("if you are not insane you are not in love") and prepared to appreciate the reflections on the love of humankind.

"[L]ove is its own poet

And its nature is its mystery."

"And what is the great love but the shadow of God's love for you?"

"It's the most confident ones

that are the most broken."

Seropian still sounds young, but his insights on these topics are worth consideration.