wildcat

I feel disturbingly productive. I worked hard all day, went to the market, came home and made myself a sinful risotto with salmon and shrimp while listening to Nina Simone. I watched a movie while I ate and now I'm going to clean the apartment, wash the dishes, and then slip into bed to read the Justina Robson book (it's good so far), wrap a birthday present for Michael, and work on the character bible or the opening sequences or whatever of this thing which currently lives inside my (nameless) notebook. And I'm not going to think about how I woke up with the Fear this morning, full-force, for the second day in a row.

Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was all right, as short story collections go. I really loved "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," which definitely had the jazz (as Joy and I used to say) but the other stories - while many of them hit a lot of buttons for me and seemed like content that I should love - seemed to skate along the surface of something much bigger or deeper or darker or passionate but didn't quite crack the ice. Her narrative voice was all over the place, I didn't always believe the characters' offhand remarks, and Russell continuously mixes up incubi and succubi (incubi are male sex demons, succubi are female sex demons - Russell seemed to reverse them), which is possibly a minor point but it threw me off every time it came up and was occasionally important to the plot. "Ava" is definitely an engaging story with a likeable main character, and Russell's ideas and casual lines are absolutely beautiful but the book failed to come together for me. I can trace out the George Saunders influence and the McSweeneysness of the book but it didn't quite click, for me at least. I'd be certainly curious to read other things by her, though.