Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Part the first: freeform poetry that’s not quite prose and not quite any good either about jonquils (aka daffodils) blooming in the snow, and something about ballet and dancing and flowers: “Life on ice, flowers in snow, blossoms in six petal tutus with matching trumpet leotards, jonquils, also known as daffodils, dance in the cold wind.... I am excited. My colon rumbles, wakes me with a familiar tune.”

No, that’d be part the second: IBS. Part dancing flowers, and part poo. Seems the first person narrator has irritable bowel syndrome, and the sample vacillates like a person doing the pee pee dance between rumination of spring flowers on frozen ground dancing with tutus, and chronicles of desperately needing to use the toilet and being unable to do so.

The narrator wants to wake her husband so he can give her an enema, but he’s old, he doesn’t feel well, and he’s sleeping.

Then there’s more about the dancing jonquils:

I watch my great granddaughter grow, dance a slow dance with her among the jonquils, and then hurry to the bathroom, my intestines rumbling.

Then the narrator jumps back in time a number of years, and all plot lines run through her colon. Her son enlisted in the army during what I believe is WWII, and the stress of it causes a new host of IBS symptoms. Then some ruminations about the Sun King, the French revolution, and how the cycle of contipation and diarrhea cause her to understand the political and social issues that erupted into a violent revolution:

The masses, deprived of dignity and toilets, deprive the royals of life itself when the suppression of constipation turns to the diarrhea of revolution.

According to the introduction, the author was inspired by a woman who was obsessively pleasured by both spankings and enemas, and this fictional first person account is based upon but not meant to be a literal interpretation of this woman. Whomever she is, I hope she’s pleased. I would be mortified, particularly by the story of a tour of an ancient French castle, colon-a-rumblin’, and the guide’s explanation of the latrine.

The narrator uses the ancient latrine after the party moves on, and while doing so mentally aligns herself with her bowel-irritated ancestors (the condition is hereditary, she wishes the reader to know many, many times). Then she unwittingly shits all over a laborer working to restore the castle. When the group is chastised by the tour guide for the indignity of crapping all over an unsuspecting man working on the wall beneath by saying, “Our workmen, peasants, are accustomed to being defecated on by the elite of our society, less so foreign tourists,” the narrator turns red and runs away, divulging her guilt to the rest of the party.

Then, the account of her lovingly administered enema in the hotel: “Why doesn’t my husband talk to me when I am having an enema?… Is there nothing to say after thousands of times over his knee? Is it because he knows how I feel? Is he leaving me time to go within myself, feel the love, as the water goes within me?”

I think Kenny Loggins’ autobiography details the love inherent in his wife’s giving him a high colonic, something about her love entering him. I wonder if this woman is a Kenny Loggins fan.

Then her husband tells her, mid enema, that she needs to have a life outside of him, their children, and the enema-tastic non-sex. He wants her to get a job. This upsets her.

Each syllable floods a cellar storing the canning jars of my life. Thoughts and beliefs held since childhood float off shelves, float in the muddy water within me.

He’s in her ass, changing her life.

All rivers run through this woman’s colon. I cannot bring myself to read any more. I never thought I’d say this, but the poo metaphor has truly, truly run its course.

Busy, I hear you loud and clear - from underneath my four calendars, each tracking a different member of my household and this here website. Seriously. SBTB has it’s own schedule and color tag on my calendar (pink, of course).

We heroines - er, we women, we do it all.  We save the day, lure the dude, solve the case, heal the angsty injury, possibly become a vampire or a werewolf or cure someone of the same, battle the aliens, face down the smarmy boss, outsmart the nefarious yet sultry enemy, have some nifty sex, and live happily ever after. I’m tired just thinking about it.

But look at it this way: in a romance, there’s a handful of things that you know will be resolved (one hopes) by the end of the story. Your plot threads will (one hopes) be all tied up and merry by the end.

So, let’s look at your plot threads of your life story right now. Job: I hear you. Not much you can do except maybe take a pad and pen with you on breaks, or hell, to the ladies’ room, to eke out a few moments to compose or doodle your ideas. Home: this is tough. There are a lot of home responsibilities that easily land on women’s shoulders - and what nice shoulders they are, too. Perhaps this is where your spouse or partner can come in to help: what are some things that you do that might be delegated to another person a few nights a week so you can free some time for yourself? I know it’s not necessarily a well-supported concept that you should ask for help to find time for yourself, but that’s what needs to happen here.

Further, examine your current daily to-do list and see where you can trim some activities. Where is the nearest trashcan into which you can deposit your feelings of guilt that your family dinner wasn’t the four course extravaganza you’d planned but maybe more of a whip-it-up-in-20-minutes feast? Find that trashcan and toss that guilt. If you want time, it comes at a cost, I’m sorry to say.

If you label your daily to-do list items with 1s, 2s, and 3s, indicating what’s a top priority and what’s not, you might find that some things can be shifted to secondary or even tertiary levels of importance - or you might be able to jettison them altogether. My point is, you need to move your desire to write more, and your goal to find the time to do so, to a higher priority on your daily list.

Or, invent a more-time machine. And if you do, call me. I’m all over that.

Got a conundrum you’d like Bitch advice on? - I won’t reveal your real name, I promise.

Marjorie Liu gets a nod and a merry tribute this week from Bill Willingham, author of the Fables comic series. Willingham writes:

Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men.

Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake.

[Thanks to Gail Dayton for the linkage.]

Aside from the doubting of Darcy and Elizabeth’s happy ending (and the misspelling of Sir Quiet of Pemberley name, what’s UP with that?!) there is some bad news in the Guardian’s book blog. If you’ve been hoping for the opportunity to have your post-mortem self scattered as ashes in Jane Austen’s garden, hope no more:

Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen’s House Museum, wrote: “While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!”

If there is one thing I do know about the British, it is that one ought not fuck with their knowledge of gardening. If the roses aren’t meant to be made out of people, then forget your ash-scattering plans, folks.

However, while I’m on this entry, this caught my eye:

...the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

It’s the holiday season, a time when I tend to diverge from my normally mellow self and get a good bit more cranky (Can we people STOP with the HOLIDAY shoving down people’s THROATS and with the CHRISTMAS music it is 6am and I just WANT to BUY DIAPERS, children’s Motrin and some theraputic CHOCOLATE for the LOVE of GOD - ahem. Sorry). So this totally rubbed me the wrong way with far more force than normal, like a cat being rubbed tail to shoulders with a really firm brush. Cult of Austen? What, that’s more of a problem than the Cult of Britney Spears or the Cult of Angelina Jolie Is She Pregnant Again or the Cult of People who Like to Be Online A Lot?

So the fuck what if she’s adored as the “comforting provider of romantic happy endings.” She’s not appreciated enough for her social satire and wit? You’re not happy because people don’t like her for the same reasons you do? Oh, bite me. The only thing more annoying than the Cult of Anything is self-righteous snotbags telling people they ought to know better than to like Something Awesome But, Oh Noes, For The Wrong Reasons. It’s a straight shot to Self-Important Asshat Land with an attitude like that, particularly since the foundation of your argument suffers from disintegration because you can’t spell “Darcy” correctly.

[Thanks to Rebecca for the link.]