Feminist Fiction Friday--Shirley Jackson

The story I've always heard is that Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery" because her refrigerator had broken down and she needed money to fix it. I loved that idea, not just because the anecdote epitomizes a professionalism I very much admire--there is no writer's block in freelancing--but also because I love the idea that she was paid more than a pittance for her work.
"The Lottery" is probably my favorite short story EVER.  I first read it for a middle school English class along with Jack London's "To Build a Fire," and W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" and Saki's "The Open Window." The story led me to other writers of short fiction, particularly Harlan Ellison, whose "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is my second favorite short story.
I'm pretty sure after reading Jackson's biography on Wikkipedia that the story about the refrigerator is just that, a story. Jackson was vehement about not explaining her work or her process or herself. She famously refused to be interviewed. There are photographs of her, though, and those pictures send a chill through me.
Shirley Jackson and my mother could have been twin sisters. That picture in the upper left?  Substitute cats eye glasses and you have my mother.  Same eyes, same arched brows, same full lower lip.  The hairdo is the same one my mother wore most of her life, a faux tortoise shell comb holding her hair away from her pale brow.
Like Shirley Jackson, my mother was a heavy smoker but she managed to eke out an extra decade on the writer, who died at 48, of a heart attack in her sleep.
I wish Jackson hadn't left the party so early. I loved her novel The Haunting of Hill House so much that I can quote whole chunks of it.  The book is one of the best haunted house novels ever written (much stronger than James' Turn of the Screw), and Jackson's portrait of Eleanor, a woman slipping into madness, is profound. Julie Harris played Eleanor in the 1963 movie adaptation (called The Haunting, and not to be confused with the dreadful remake of 1999), and her delicate portrait of a woman whose life has passed her by is haunting indeed. (If you've seen the movie, all I need to say is ... that scene with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom and the door!  If you haven't seen the movie, you're in for a treat and if you haven't read the book, go get it now.) You can buy Jackson's novels and collected stories here.

Nine Ladies Dancing

Cover design by Joanne Renaud

I will be releasing a new collection of stories in the next few weeks, a group of Christmas stories loosely based on "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Joanne Renaud has created the cover for the collection, and I am very pleased with it. You may know Joanne as a writer; or an illustrator; but she is also now designing book covers. Check out her graphic design work here.

Here's a sample story...Nine Ladies Dancing, which originally ran as part of the Dark Valentine "Twelve Days of Christmas" fiction fest last year. 

Nine Ladies Dancing

There were four little cubicles crammed into the basement of Jake Mirzoyan’s club, each with a mirror, a tiny shelf for makeup, a couple of hooks for costumes, and two chairs. On Saturday nights, when all the girls were working, things got a little crowded in the basement. There was only one bathroom down there—the girls weren’t allowed to use the one upstairs, the one the customers used—so if someone ate a bad taco for lunch, everybody knew it.

They all knew about a lot of things—about Reva’s abortion, about Lanelle’s problem with her ex, about Kim’s relapse with the vikes. You get eight women in close quarters and they’re going to be all up in each other’s business. It was kind of like a family that way, a big dysfunctional family with an abusive daddy. The girls knew all about abusive daddies.

Jake was greedy but he wasn’t ambitious and he was bone lazy. He made a lot of money from the club—almost all of it cash, almost all of it untraceable. Girls came and went at the club but there were never more than eight dancers at one time. Eight was enough. Eight was a number he could handle.

And then Suki showed up. Suki with her pale, pale skin and her dark, dark eyes. Suki with the red hair right out of a shampoo commercial. Her real name was probably Susan or something but as far as Jake was concerned, she could call herself Angelina Jolie if she wanted to. She was tall—taller than him—and big-breasted, just the way his customers liked them. And they weren’t fake tits like Jude’s or Kitta’s either.

Even though Jake had a rule about not mixing business with pleasure, he would have chopped off his own dick to dip into Suki’s honey-pot. He wasn’t the only one. Brianna, who’d been dancing at the club since she was an underage runaway, took one look at Suki and fell in love.

Suki was too good for Jake’s little place, but didn’t seem to know it. The girls all knew it, though. They knew Suki could have been working the gentlemen’s clubs in L.A., somewhere she could maybe find a sugar daddy to take care of her. A lot of celebrities go to those clubs for kicks. A lot of money gets thrown around. The girls wondered why Suki would come to a rat-hole like Jake’s club when she had other options. None of the girls who worked for Jake had options. At least, not any more.

Jake let it be known that he would be firing one of the girls to make room for Suki but he didn’t tell them which one and suggested if anyone wanted to discuss the matter privately with him, then he’d be available in his office any time. Jude was the first to climb the stairs to Jake’s office. She had a little one at home that her mother took care of. She supported both of them. She needed the job.

Chocolate Cheesecake Recipe

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Kat, seriously, what's with the chocolate? Do you want to turn us all into diabetics? Do you have an evil plan to fatten us up like Hansel and Gretl? 

No. I love you too much for that.

What's going on is that I'm not going to do a lot of Christmas baking this year but I will be making this unbelievably rich and satisfying cheesecake.  I'd send you all a slice if I could but since I can't, the next best thing is to give you the recipe so you can make it yourself.

Henry Thoreau once said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”  Generally, I feel the same way about recipes that require special equipment or fancy pans.  In the case of this recipe, though, I will make an exception.  You absolutely must have a springform pan or you’ll end up with a really delicious dessert you have to scrape out of the pan because it’s sticking to the sides and no amount of Pam is going to unstuck it.

If you don’t have a springform pan, it’s worth buying one just to make this cheesecake.  (Sometimes you’ll see mini-springform pans and they’re great because you make several little cheesecakes and give one of them away.)

Simple and Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake Recipe

This is my go-to recipe when I’m asked to bring a dessert to a holiday party. It is really simple to make and quick as well.

Holiday Food Blog Appreciation

Photo by Vivan of Vivian's Blog-o-rama

Cupcakes shaped like sushi. And like burritos. And like pop culture icons like Firefly (with the Serenity on star-glittered chocolate frosting for her husband Keith). Vivian of Vivian's Blogorama creates amazingly inventive and imaginative cupcakes for every possible occasion (beer cupcakes; Canadian cupcakes for her friend).  The photos are tasty enough, but she also offers hints on how to replicate her creations yourself (jelly beans for the fish eggs, for instance.) Here's the post for the sushi cupcakes.
She does not post very often (only 1 post this year with her Firefly cupcakes) but there are plenty of archive posts and photos to keep you amused.

Christmas Noir--Wish List

A slightly different version of this story ran last year as part of the Do Some Damage Christmas Noir Challenge. I pulled it out to get myself into the Christmas as I finish up Twelve Nights of Christmas.

Wish List

Eddie always gets better stuff than I do because our parents love him best.  Last year I really, really, really wanted a Bakugan Brawlers Battle Pack and instead I got a Crayola wonder color light brush with a card saying I should explore my inner artist with it.  I guess it was a step up from all the “My Little Pony” crap I’d been getting for the last four years. 

Hello, I’m 11, not five.

Eddie always makes lists of what he wants and then types it up on the computer with links to where mom and dad can get the stuff he wants.  They think it’s cute.  He’s nine and they think he’s a genius because he can navigate Google. 

Photo by Canna W.

Please.  I hacked into mom’s eBay account when I was nine and messed up all her auctions.

She lost out on a vintage 60s dress she really, really, really wanted even though it was a size six and the only size six she wears are her shoes.

Eddie even gets better stuff from grandma than I do because he sucks up to her when she comes over and I don’t.  He doesn’t wrinkle his nose when she kisses him and he pretends that he doesn’t mind her old lady smell.

Excuse me, but if I smelled like pee and dead roses, I wouldn’t go around kissing people.

Mom says I’m an ungrateful brat and don’t deserve presents at all if I’m going to complain about what I get.  Dad, whose idea of a really great present is a book, doesn’t say anything.  But he doesn’t really like kissing grandma either.

Mom picks out books for us to give him; he gives us new copies of books he read and loved as a kid which was like a million years ago.  They always have little messages in them.

 Robert Francis Weatherbee, the Boy Who Would Not Go to School. Guess what that one’s about.

Eddie’s been making his Christmas list since Halloween, adding to it and subtracting from it.  This year he’s drawing pictures of the things he wants, just in case Mom and Dad haven’t seen the ads on television.

A lot of the things he’s asking for sound like totally good things, things that will help him do better in school.  Mom and Dad love that.  Remember, they think he’s a genius.  They don’t know that he used the chemistry set they got him last year to poison the neighbor’s dog.

No, their little genius wouldn’t do something like that. 

They don’t know that the Lincoln Logs Red River Express Building Set they paid $60 for got turned into a log prison for a kitten he found.  It was too little and weak to break out, so it starved to death.  And then he buried it in our mom’s garden.

I told mom about the kitten but she didn’t believe me, not even when I showed her the tiny grave in her garden.  When she finally dug it up and found the dead kitten, she blamed me. She called me a jealous little trouble maker and a liar and she slapped me.  I heard her tell Dad that she thought I was sick and probably needed some help.

Eddie thought that was funny.  Eddie thinks a lot of things are funny.

One of the things on Eddie’s Christmas list this year is a set of big cooking knives.  Our parents think that’s adorable and probably figure he just wants to be like the Iron Chefs Mom watches on the food channel. 

Seriously.  They’re that clueless. They might just buy him that set of cooking knives.

But I have a plan. If I find the knives under the tree, I'll open up the package and take out the largest knife.

Eddie's always on his best behavior right before Christmas.

He's always super nicey-nice to me.

I can get close enough to give him a hug,

 

Feminist Fiction Friday--Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction writer Octavia E. Butler is not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on women in speculative fiction but Samuel R. Delaney is and so is Robert Silverberg. She's not mentioned in an 1982 New York Times Book Review essay on women and science fiction. That's odd because by 1982, Butler had already published her time-travel novel Kindred and the two Earthseed books:  Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. When the Guardian commissioned a poll of readers' favorite science fiction novels, not one of Butler's works was mentioned, though L. Ron Hubbard made the list. (Butler wasn't the only female SF writer who didn't appear--neither did the multi-award-winning Connie Willis or Joan D. Vinge, though her ex-husbamdVernor Vinge made the list multiple times.) In all 500 readers responded and out of 500 books, only 18 were written by women.  I thought women writers were invisible in the crime fiction world. Our sisters in Sci Fi have it even worse.
Reading Butler's books now, particularly the Earthseed books,  is a bit of a shock because they seem so prophetic. They take place in a world dying of environmental pollution, a place where the underclass is educated just enough to provide employees to run the factories owned by the wealthy. Ordinary services, like electricity, are beyond the reach of most people and only the wealthy have refrigerators. The 1 %, one might say.
Class struggle is a major theme in Parable of the Sower, which was nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel but did not win. (The sequel, Parable of the Talents won the award in 1999.) In the Earthseed books (a third, Parable of the Trickster, was planned but never written), government has broken down and what order exists is a harsh and exclusive Christianity that does not accept any other world view. (Sound familiar?)
Race and sexuality are also constant themes. Butler's first novel, Kindred,  a time-travel book she referred to as a "grim fantasy," is a stark portrait of life in bondage and unsentimental in the way its heroine, Dana, is treated. There are beatings and rape and a complex web of inter-dependence between Dana and Rufus, a white man whose existence is keyed to her own. The book was published in 1979.

Her final novel, Fledgling (2005) revolved around Shori, a dark-skinned woman belonging to a benovolent, vampire-like race and touched on race and family and prejudice.
Butler won numerous awards in her lifetime, including the 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award in writing from the PEN American Center. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.
A scholarship in her name was established to create opportunities for writers of color to attend the Clarion writing workshop. Established by the Carl Brandon Society, the fund has awarded scholarships yearly since 2007.
The Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Fund link is here.

A Thanksgiving Thought

I hate the phrase "food insecurity." It's a weaselly way to avoid saying "hunger."  If you say, "More Americans are food insecure than ever before," it sounds like you're talking about people who wonder if guests at a dinner party are going to like their recipe for chicken in wine sauce.
Ten thousand people lined up in Los Angeles this week for turkey dinners given away by E.L. Jackson of Jackson Limousine.  Ten thousand people who would not have had a Thanksgiving dinner without his generosity. (He had help from donors this year, but for many years, Jackson footed the bill himself.) 
I have never experienced food insecurity a day in my life and I am profoundly grateful for that. I hope I never forget how lucky that makes me when so many other people are going hungry today.
And if I ever need to rent a limousine, you can bet I'll get it from Jackson.