Could do better?

I wasn't going to read Jenny Turner's essay on Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography — a book whose combination of wobbly science, new-age woo and TMI disclosures don't seem to have won it many friends — but the more-in-sorrow pull quote caught my attention:

Between jobs, I guess Wolf has never stopped trying to think big thoughts about women and politics and feminism. How some things change and others don't. How the same things need to be said afresh for every generation, and how hard it is to bear this, as you yourself get older and feel you've heard it all before. How much you'd like to warn the youngsters, except that all they hear when you try it is their utter conviction that they themselves will never end up like you. Exhaustion, irritation, frustration at all these goldfish-brain debatelets, repeating themselves, round and round. In a world with Jessie J and Jamie Clayton in it, Caster Semenya and the work of Judith Butler, why are we still letting one of the Anglophone world's most famous feminists waste everyone's time with all this burble about the "universal feminine" with its "Goddess-shaped" hole?

Ouch.

Sandman Slim

Following Cory Doctorow's positive comments, I decided to read Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim. Not the most profound novel in the world — although to be fair, that's not its aim — it's a fun, violent urban fantasy with a hero who has spent the last decade fighting in the arenas of Hell, something that has transformed him just another human into Sandman Slim, the monster that frightens the very worst of Hell's own monsters.

Eleven years after his supposed friends condemned him to the pits of hell, James Stark has finally found a way to get back to Los Angeles. Pausing only to mug a yuppie and hit a bar, he sets out to revenge himself on his former friends. Finding his old pal Kasabian in charge of a skeezy video store, Stark muscles in and takes. With the help of Eugene Vidocq, an immortal French alchemist, and Allegra, the clerk from the video store, he finds the second of his friends in charge of a high-class sex club and traces the third to a fancy gothic boutique, but his principal enemy, Mason Faim, remains elusive.

An enjoyable page turner, Sandman Slim seems to owe more than a little to the film version of Constantine albeit with a more physical, action heavy hero. Stark is a decent lead: prone to violence, often unreflective, and generally rather relaxed about taking other peoples' property, he's not exactly a hero, but on the other hand he's loyal to his few remaining friends, reasonably aware of his own damage, and unwilling to buy unthinkingly into the agendas of either Heaven or Hell.