The Faunboy is Done. He has a collection.

Yes, it’s true: I am finally about done with the MFA (four weeks!), and that means that my limited edition thesis manuscript is going to press shortly.  People have started asking how they can get their hands on a copy of The Book of Broken Hymns, which is fantastic. Right this minute I am trying to figure out how many to print for this limited edition, so you should get your name on the list sooner rather than later.

Here’s all the Big Pertinent Info:

The Book of Broken Hymns is my MFA thesis collection, and I am printing it in a limited edition short run.

It will cost $10 plus shipping (it’s small enough to fit in a Priority Mail envelope, which is not quite $5 in shipping, or I can ship it media mail for less).

You can pay with PayPal or with good old fashioned Checks.  Email me (or message me on Twitter @ponyonabalcony or Facebook) for the right address.

The Book of Broken Hymns will be available starting May 6th (perhaps a little earlier) and will stay available as long as I still have copies (probably not very long).

If you have other questions, email me or Twitter me or FB me. I look forward to adding you to the list.

(this is mostly crossposted from ponyonabalcony)

theoretical me

A few weeks ago, upon the publication of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation with my little snippet included, one of my favorite people was all, “Yay, now you are a published gender theorist!”

This has been bothering me ever since.  I don’t want to be bothered, because he was so genuinely thrilled for me, but…

Folks, I am NOT a gender theorist.  I don’t read gender theory because I find it unbelievably boring.  I’m glad many of you do read it, because it’s important to understand what is or is not gender, and ways in which our current world is terrible for people of any or all genders.  But I don’t want to read it.  And I REALLY don’t want to write it.

Also, while I often write about characters who are transgender (including, sometimes, myself), I am not writing theory.  I am writing reality (even for made up characters in poems or fiction).  I also write about kittens, pirates, long road trips, family dynamics, swamps, the Civil War, magic, alligators, AIDS, snow, faith, Rilke, dogs, coffee, blow jobs, diner food, lions, and many other topics.  Nobody has yet suggested that I am, say, a published coffee theorist (although that would be AWESOME).  Nobody has suggested that I am a kitten theorist, although I may in fact be.

Dear dear friend, I hope you read this, even though it will annoy you.  You need to understand the difference between my view on gender and your view on gender, because performativity and reality do not always overlap (go read Julia Serrano’s essay in Gender Outlaws).

And I can’t wait for the day that you, dear friend, ARE a published gender theorist.  I am all prepared to toast you.

(cross posted to Pony)

A Review: “Voyage of the Dawn #Headdesk”

This afternoon I abandoned my remaining schoolwork (not much at this point in the end-0f-semester flow, but still) and hied myself to a nearby moviehouse to take in the brand new Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third installment in Walden Media’s Narnia series.  Normally as you know I don’t write movie reviews (although it has been suggested that I start), but this one is going to take some processing on my part so I thought I might as well inflict it on you. OH how lucky you are.

Caution: Ahead lie spoilers. Possibly LOTS of spoilers.

So.  If I were someone who really loved all the Harry Potter movies and liked the Lightning Thief movie a lot AND had not read the Narnia books, I might have really enjoyed Dawn Treader.  It’s shiny and fun and has lots of Exciting Adventure and Action.  It also has the ever-more endearing Georgie Henley as Lucy, the ever-more broodingly handsome Skandar Keynes as Edmund, and the ever-more dreamy Ben Barnes as Caspian (although he is starting to look like a finer-featured Keanu Reeves).  Will Poulter, the newcomer who plays Eustace Scrubb, is awfully good as the Pevensies’ priggish cousin.

But casting has, I think, never been one of the problems in the Narnia movies.  What bothers me is the changes that the writers have been weaving into their adaptations.  In Prince Caspian, the second Narnia movie, they turned the Battle of Aslan’s How into the giant centerpiece of the film, and took out a lot of the smaller pieces of story before and after.  This was annoying, but I could at least sortof understand WHY they would do it.

SOME SPOILERS COMING NOW.

Not so the changes in Dawn Treader.  We didn’t need to have Lucy being so inflamed with jealousy about Susan.  We didn’t need quite so much of the White Witch (please leave us alone now, even though we really can’t get enough of Tilda Swinton).  We didn’t need a purely gratuitous Lucy-as-Susan-in-a-World-Without-Lucy dream just so we get to see that Anna Popplewell, who plays Susan, still looks much as she always has, while William Moseley, who plays eldest brother Peter, has taken an odd Windsor turn and from some angles is completely unrecognizable.  Those are small quibbles though.

BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR SPOILERS HERE, FOR REAL:

There are two big things that the writers have done which neither streamline nor improve the original story, and these two things happen to advance the purpose of a third big thing, really a gigantic thing, that is completely stupid.

The first is the addition of a man and his daughter who join the Dawn Treader on the slave-trading island to go and rescue their wife/mother, who has been given as a sacrifice to a weird green mist thing (the fact that this is not the gigantic thing may have you worried).  We don’t need the man and his daughter; the only thing they do is give us the weird green mist thing, plus a chance for Lucy to go all Girl Power at the daughter (lesson: I, Lucy, don’t have to be Susan to be pretty, and you, Gail, don’t have to be me to be awesome!).  Do we need the green mist thing? Read on!

The second is the dramatic alteration of Eustace’s dragon adventure.  In the book, he becomes a dragon because he’s greedy (as in the film), but he learns to be useful and pleasant, and then Aslan shows him how to become himself again.  His redemption is slow but reasonable.  In the film, he becomes a dragon because he’s greedy, but then he remains a dragon so that he can pull the ship through still waters.  Really.  Also, though, he fights the sea serpent! Then, wounded by the fight with the serpent and a misunderstanding with a crazy person, Eustace flies sadly off to die, but Aslan puts him through an oddly Phoenix-like rebirth.  Redeemed and reborn, Eustace is the vehicle for the great big problem I had with the movie.

Which is:

In the book, Caspian is sailing off to the East because a) he has tasked himself with finding and saving (if possible) the lost lords who left Narnia because of his evil uncle, and b) he is bored and young and wants an adventure.

In the movie, Caspian is sailing off to the East because he needs to go find the lost lords.  But then he is charged with SAVING ALL OF NARNIA FROM AN EVIL SPELL (the green mist, of course) BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE ZOMG.  If he vanquishes the evil green mist, all the Narnians from the Lone Islands who have been sacrificed to said mist will be FREE (weirdly, they are all just sitting there in their little boats the whole time, waiting for rescue).  In order to STOP THE EVIL, he needs to gather the seven swords of the seven lords and place them all at Aslan’s Table, on the Island of Ramadu.  It is in the process of searching out the seventh sword that they find the Dark Island, in which the sea serpent AND the evil green mist live.  If Eustace is not a) a dragon, b) wounded at the Dark Island during the fight with the sea serpent by means of the seventh sword, which is then stuck in his arm, and c) salvaged by Aslan on the shores of Ramadu’s island, he cannot possibly get the sword to the table before EVIL WINS.

Are the changes effective?  I don’t think so.  I found them intrusive and annoying, especially this focus on Saving Narnia from Evil.  The book had plenty of adventure, and does not need this weird “OMG Harry Potter has to fight evil, so we’d better get with the program” problem.

More, though, I found this episode much more pastel-colored Jesus-y than the others.  This lingers throughout the whole film, but the Carrie Underwood song over the final credits (about how we will find a Kingdom where we will Belong) was the icing on that particularly sticky cake.

I guess this is more a long complaint than a review.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  My issue is that Dawn Treader is my favorite of the Narnia books, not least because of the long redemption of Eustace (which says a lot more about wanting to belong than a Carrie Underwood song ever will), and this movie does not match what I need from the story.

It’s pretty, and the 3D works reasonably well (I hate 3D, because it makes me feel like rabid weasels are being shoved into my eyes, but…).  The casting continues not to fail.  And really, if I had not known what I wanted out of it, I probably would have liked it quite a bit.  Under the circumstances, though… Yeah. Not so much.

Special Wednesday Poetry on Account of the Weather

Hello avid readers.

It’s late Wednesday evening, and IT IS STILL RAINING. I might as well be in Seattle. Feh.

You will forgive, I hope, my ongoing inability to keep up with this. End of semester, the Mac died, I am stuck with a gigantic Dell on which I do not presently have admin status, and so to which I cannot presently download things like updated Flash players and other interesting plugins… Which makes doing things with movies rather challenging.

But. The semester, as I said, she is nearly over. Year one, MFA, check. Tomorrow I have my first poetry reading ever. I have read fiction, a couple of times. But poetry? Never. Even when I won a poetry award once, there was no reading of poetry. Of course, I was seven. It was Boulder. I accepted my certificate, and my $5 prize, wearing boots and a big down coat. This time I plan to be less scruffy.

I plan to post the poem, also, but I am not clear on the timing. If it appears someplace else, and they have, presumably, first rights, that probably means I shouldn’t put it up here until AFTER it is officially out. So I will post it Friday, or maybe I will make everyone wait and post it Monday for poetry day.

Meanwhile, I will put up something else of mine tonight, to make up for no poetry this past Monday on account of the Mac disaster.

This is called “High Desert Sutra.” I wrote it for my poetry workshop (workshops are weird, but you can read better thoughts than I could come up with on the blog of one of my MFAmigas (I just made that up), at http://nervousmurvis.blogspot.com/), in the persona of a poet some of us made up, a guy by name of Leonard Hayworth, who hailed from Buffalo orginally and had a thing for the Beats.

Anyway. I can’t tell whether this is any good or not, but it sure was fun to read aloud. It is definitely not as queer as some of the other poems, especially not the one I will post AFTER it’s officially out in the world.

High Desert Sutra

I rode a carousel with allen
it led me here dropping me off the unicorn in the
city of tall rocks, not broad shoulders,
far from the urbane glistening lovemusk of
streets cars subways

in the cactus and sagebrush I look for
my own sweat tasting the wind
seeking the visions, dying, just aching and longing
stand staring into the night
on a quest to find the
lost pink nipples of civilization.

where is jack now, or billy?
the sky never darkens
pinpoints of stars in the wornout denim of the firmament
yea and I speak unto you,
you, o cactus, o kit fox, o beaded lizard, o antelope
I become coyote, the renegade trickster pimp slave of the universe.

use me up and call me done, call me yours,
a vessel, a vassal, dying to please the muse,
hoping to find myself in the baked out scrub of
red pink orange blue
the earth stinks of sage

the gods implore me to forget them, me,
unready with their message. I

balance with pan on the rocky mesas,
washout of arroyo floods like the afterbirth of mother nature
day after day after day and
pan says, shut your mouth, brother, shut your eyes,
listen to the king of spunk and madness tell you how it is, brother, and become one with
this rock here,
the one shaped like the way you loved your father,
bask in the distance from the ocean.

no million miles of water here, brother,
pan says, and he smiles
festooned with deity
all knowing
through the stench of truth.

***********************************

So that would be this one. I don’t even know how I feel about it yet. But now it is out there for you.

Pax.