Future Playlist

A newer version of this post can be found on my Substack 

Tougher Than the Rest by Dina Del Bucchia

DIna Del Bucchia is a tough customer. Is she tougher than the rest? Possibly! Is she tougher that the women in this collection of short stories? Maybe! But they are pretty tough. And, like I love Dina, I fucking love the characters in these stories fiercely, even the ones I don’t get, or don’t like very much (spoiler: there’s only one). These women are angry and sweet and weird and loving all at once - like most women I know.  

This self-described “weird girl” story collection exposes the tyranny of the neo-capitalist world we live in. The characters in Dina Del Bucchia’s new short story collection tougher than the rest, live in the Vancouver of the future; a slightly different (but not very different) future iteration of Vancouver where you work for a nameless corporation, all your friends have moved to the suburbs, “cheap rent” comes with sketchy power and you get your teeth cleaned by a robot. A great example of a capitalist dumpster fire!

Wait. Is the future now?

Here’s the playlist of this collection, please listen to it as an actual music playlist on repeat as you read (or before and after, if that’s too distracting)!:

Night Moves

A lonely, underpaid dental receptionist shops at a thrift store and discovers a lifelike sex robot for sale, and she is immediately fascinated. When her loneliness gets too much she ends up buying the robot and treating him like a less annoying easier to manage boyfriend. She doesn’t mind robots, she works with several at the dental office, but of course Matty (short for the unfortunate “Mattel” that the Thrift store woman named him) has small quirks and abilities that give her pleasure and make her feel nice. And loved. 

But soon, Matty develops a glitch and can’t stop asking her “how do you feel?” No one likes that. 

Poignant, tender and strange.

Tougher than the Rest

This title story is in my top 3 of this collection. A woman is a comment moderator for a company called Comment Custodian she monitors websites like EverEverStream (a YouTube type platform); she has to spend her days (or nights) checking on flagged comments and reporting them. or not as she feels necessary. She lives in a small room with a friend. Power is spotty so she sometimes has to steal wifi from the bar her roommate works at. She clocks a commenter on a EverEverStream who seems sad and lonely and not really stable, so against the policy of EverEverStream, she begins messaging them to check in. They begin to bond over their deep connection to classic rock and especially Bruce Springsteen (because timeless) despite the timeline and their youth.

Bleak but also extremely hopeful!

It’s all over now, Baby Blue

A functionally depressed woman struggles to cope with the possible suicide of her partner. On leave from her work, she meets with her manager (and friend) to try to come back to work but: no can do. They are worried about her mental health. She fills her time by going to Stanley Park and watching the wildlife, hoping to find clues, a sign, something to help her process her partners disappearance. Instead, select animals start talking to her to give her advice.  She becomes obsessed with the talking animals and the park and withdraws even further into herself, ghosting her boss after she is told she can return to work. She story culminates into a perfectly fantastical peak that I won’t spoil here. This story is dark and comedic, every sentence a treasure trove of zingers you’ll want to read twice. 

Wild and surreal.

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Poor Allie, trying to climb the ladder to a better job at Platinum Corp. This story was grotesque and funny. I could feel the sinister management structure trickling down and poisoning every worker in its path! Scarily believable! As soon as Allie gets the job as a Junior Executive Assistant to Lucien she slowly becomes infected with a corporate evil. Because what choice does she have, right? She needs this job. 

This allegory of corporate capitalist greed killed me.

I Want Candy

This story really starts showing us how vast the class divide is in future Vancouver. Written as Yelp-like reviews online, one reviewer (Jenny F.) writes glowing reviews of extremely high-end places and the other (Nic B.) responding to her reviews only to expose the insane privilege of people who eat at places like “Aprés Afloat” (“that has tables suspended from the goddamn ceiling like a production of Peter Pan.”) 

The result is a hilarious battle of reviews ending in violence. The writing was so sparse and the voices so clear, making the ending all the more jarring and impactful. 

Devastating.

Working for the Weekend

Three best friends are meeting in Harrison Hot Springs for a fun girls weekend and Paula is really looking forward to it. Her other 2 friends have fancy careers and family and Paula knows they have busy lives but getting together like this is like a balm for Paula. Before her friends arrive Paula has encounters with other guests at the hotel and Paula begins to feel a close connection to Joanie, an older woman with a luminous presence. When one of her friends end up bring their spouse the other her children along, a deep fury begins to burn within Paula. Quite literally. Antics ensue! Supernatural powers! 

Fun and Cathartic.

Here I go Again

This is the one! The story that made me mad! But I loved it. Kristie is infuriating: privileged, rich, naive, loves yoga pants - she thinks she is a #feminist but when she tries to join a feminist action group to “give back” things start falling apart almost immediately. 

Kristie seems incredibly lonely, married to her career in finance, and has a false nostalgia for her activism days in university. She remembers it as rewarding, but all the instances that she recalls are of others ostracizing her, while she was being great. She wants to rewrite the story with this new activism starring herself as the heroine, but her polished, overly resourced suggestions just serve to push these young activists away. I was so invested in Kristie’s arc. I wanted her to change, for the women in the group not to be cruel, like the others who had shunned her in university. Kristie made me feel sorry for her and disdainful for her cluelessness at the same time. 

Riveting. Made me close the book a couple of times because, COME ON, Kristie.

Dream On

Hmmmmm…. maybe this body horror story is the darkest story? I mean, it definitely is, who am I kidding!?

It starts innocently enough: 2 influencers making their way! One, Petra, is young and still paying her dues: getting more freebies than sponsorship, and the other is a 10 year veteran, Hazel, who is taking Petra under her wing. Hazel has developed an illness related to the beauty products she has been using as an influencer and while she undergoes treatment, Petra makes a judgement call and signs a contract to have a procedure done with a company called SkinSoYou. There are devastating consequences. 

The perils of the cult of beauty are split open and are brutally laid bare and the evils redeemed by the strength of women’s friendship.

Under my Thumb

Hahahahaha! I will only say this - this is a great fantasy and I am here for it! Another great character, but unlike Kristie, this woman actually uses her resources for true, grassroots activism, yes and violence, but guys - it’s just a story, ok?

The perfect endcap to this collection and on point to read post-municipal election in Vancouver.

Woven throughout these main stories is a moving narrative of a young 14 year old girl who has made it her mission to deface every development application sign in the city. She and her mom have been terminated from their home and her anger has been replaced with determination. It’s beautiful to read.

Catch Dina at Vancouver Writers Festival event 64 Dancing On My Own: Lyrics Night tonight at 8 pm at Performance Works on Granville Island! And subscribe to her Substack.

✌︎︎♡⃛📖

The Young in One Another’s Arms by Jane Rule

 

Forgive me. I should have read this 30 years ago when I first heard about it from my dearest and best lesbian friends. Sometimes, in the book world, when you are in it and living it and touching books everyday for all hours, folks tell you about books and you come up with a funny ideas in your head; that you will get around to it, that maybe somehow it’s not exactly the time for you, that it’ll come about when it lands in your hands. It sometimes is an arbitrary decision and doesn’t matter what the book is or how many copies you have come by or put in a customer’s hands.

This is what happened with me and Jane Rule. And finally on my birthday this year, a friend put a copy in my hands and said, read this.

So I did, as one does.

Here’s what’s interesting about the lore of this book: when I first heard about it from my lesbian crew they spoke of it reverently in the same breath as Desert of the Heart and This is Not For You as cannon lesbian fiction straight from Little Sisters, a bookstore subject to bombings, censorship, and lawsuits that went all the way to the supreme court. It is part of the “Little Sisters Classics” published by Arsenal Pulp Press  in conjunction with Little Sisters with the aim to revive lost or out of print queer literature. It is fully entrenched in the history and queer community of Vancouver. However, The Young in One Another’s Arms is considered to be a bit of a departure from the lesbian themes of her first 2 books.* Not knowing this beforehand, when I started reading it, it took a very long time to be clear to me why exactly it is so emblematic to lesbians in Vancouver. But the interesting things was, the friends who gave it to me were not part of that crew and recommended it because they had picked their own copy up a at the bookstore on one of the Gulf Islands. I was intrigued by the magnetism of this novel in particular.

It’s not a hard read, but it is a pensive read; a true slow read, in a you-have-to-read-the-whole-paragraph kind of way. No skipping around to the “best bits” — you have to read the words to get the picture, and the picture is everything is this book.

Ruth went out and returned at any hour, more like an animal than a human resident. She had always liked the friendly street she lived on, lined with mountain ash, open to the sky, its large old houses either converted into suites or used like her own as boardinghouses. There was more sociable traffic than in neighborhoods to the west, still zoned for single-family dwellings. But it was a street too close to the center of this young city to stay that way. The concrete canyon walls must inevitably rise against the hope of trees and sky. From wilderness to this edge where she was, Ruth had been moving closer and closer to that center. Was there any use in backing off now? The houses she walked by were for living in, high-rise apartments for jumping off, but where else was there to go? On the beach that opened at the end of the street, Ruth sat on a great log, one of the many washed up from booms broken up in sudden storms (Chapter 2, p33)

Ruth is the protagonist of the book, a landlady of a rooming house in Kits (the cornerstone of hippy culture in Vancouver in the 60’s and 70’s), a mother who has lost her only child, a woman living with a disability from that accident, a tough cookie, a friend to all. Ruth is straight-shooting and kind, a friend and surrogate mother to all the young folk who find their way to her. She has a complicated relationship with her husband, Hal who no longer lives with her but shows up, unannounced from his job pushing roads through, when he feels like it and she never turns him away even if everyone thinks he treats her poorly and is a know-it-all braggart. One reason she keeps him close is because his mother, infirm and needing care, also lives with Ruth at the house. Clara and Ruth are bound together in a closeness much more permanent and generous than Ruth and her husband. The house, this story, is about found family and the slow evolution of love with time.

Jane Rule’s form and storyline might seem simple to some. There is no complex jumping back and forth in time or changes in viewpoint; it’s a linear novel told in the third person omniscient closest to Ruth and man, was that actually refreshing. Beautifully done. The tension in the novel comes from the characters actions and in turn the plot revolves around and peaks because of their reactions. The main outside force that the informs most of the action in the novel is the impending threat of the forced sale of the boarding house and the eviction of its occupants: the main characters of the novel.

The characters are all foils to one another: a charismatic and vibrant teacher/activist (Gladys), 2 U.S. draft dodgers and deserters (Tom/Arthur), a secretary looking for a sugar daddy (Joanie)  a PHD student closeted lesbian (Mavis), a musician pothead (Stewart) a neurodivergent (I read autistic) loner who has been at the house the longest (Willard), and later in the book, a young black American man escaping the law (Boy/d). They all have one thing in common, they have cut ties or have been alienated from their past lives and have found solace and acceptance at Ruth’s.

What makes everything work so well in this novel is the guileless writing, the crafted sentences, the earnest dialogue: so satisfyingly cohesive to an attentive reader. 

The best part of this book for me is Ruth herself, a beautiful whole person who knows she is flawed but can’t help but give love, first and foremost. But without Clara there kind of is no Ruth, really. Clara provides the answer to Ruth’s question, always gently pushing against Ruth’s first reactions with a sage response. A measured and loving chide.

The second half of this book is brutal with action and really reveals the themes and community and loss: as the house needs to be vacated, all the occupants start to break up to find other housing. Since Clara has moved into an assisted living home, Ruth decides that she and Willard need to find a place as soon as possible. He has been resistant to this change but she thinks she has finally convinced him and they soon move out. No one expects Willard’s last stand in the face of the demolition of the house and it predicates much of the ensuing regathering of the former occupants who realize they must continue to hold each other as closely as possible. They mostly, save Joanie and Stewart, succumb to Tom’s idyllic vision of a house and a cafe on a gulf island. Tom and Gladys (now together as a couple) convince them to move in and they are caught up in the familial joy they find in being together. There’s more drama and sadness but so much more hope and perseverance when they are all together. And that’s what this book in about to me, pushing through with hope to the ideal. It’ll never be perfect but to resist the drag of capitalist inevitability is to live without that compromise. And we have this book to help us remember that. 

At one point at the beginning when Hal is in town for a visit and everyone is testy around the dinner table he says, “The house should have been torn down years ago[…] The whole neighbourhood should be highrises by now.”* 

1977. 

This book was published in 1977. 

While I am not a person who supports “no tower” nimbism because it threatens a view or heaven forbid has supported below market housing or addiction or mental health services, I don’t thinking increasing density is the key to fixing our housing crisis.*

Vancouver’s neighbourhoods now almost 50 years later are still charming and vibrant: Kits, the West End, Mount Pleasant, Strathcona, Commercial Drive. No one can tell me resistance is futile.*

All of these things: the political resistance, the portrait of Vancouver life. Jane Rule’s legacy* as a lesbian writer, and above all, the focus on found family and how it can enrich your life’s journey; these things hold and keep this book in a revered intersectional place in Vancouver’s literary cannon. So glad it finally made its way into my receptive hands.

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi: How I never knew I could love a mongoose this much.

A newer version of this post can be found on my Substack

I mean! 

Look, this book floored me. Everyone is always like, have you read Helen Oyeyemi - And I was like, have I? But now I know, of course I had not, because I would have remembered.

In praise of world creation

I don’t know if you noticed yet from my previous post about Library Of Brothel but I love me a bit of parallel world creation. I like it when I can be transported kind of adjacently to a slightly different version of a recognizable world. I love it because you can immediately suspend your disbelief - the same rules apply; everything must check out in context but you are learning the logic of the world as you go. Delicious.

I knew almost immediately that’s where I had landed with Peaces - so exciting and delightful when you don’t expect it! And - oh! the humour! Xavier and Otto are funny and in love and charming. And of course there is a mysterious woman who plays the theramin on their “honeymoon” train trip, with a bizarre and mysterious story that they must unpack. And the villain! Is he a shape-shifter? Is he a ghost? Does he even exist? I frequently had to reread passages in order to kind of, sort of know what was happening. 

Everyone’s backstory is mind-bendingly complex and binds you to them instantly.

Which brings me to…

Arguably the most interesting and charming characters in the novel, are Árpád XXVII and Chela, the mongooses. Chela belongs to Ava Lapoor (the mysterious woman on the train trying to prove her sanity) - or does Chela belong to her? Well, I won’t get into that now, but when we meet her she does.  Árpád belongs to Otto Montague, the narrator of the story and unraveller of the mystery, some would say of his own making. The mongooses are treated like the intelligent and important creatures they are with tempers and senses of humour and problem-solving skills. And when Chela and Árpád meet, let’s just say, they barely part again. It’s so romantic.

The structure of the book is meeting characters, then their backstory which invariably introduces a plot twist and another mystery and/or reveal including letters written to Ava by each character to explain their connection to her story. The language is hyper modern ( with an old-fashioned slant (a postal-sorting train car!). The references are pop-culture (soju milkshakes, Ted Talks, Instagram!) and old timey (pinhole cameras) or magical technology (a slate water wheel for sale in the bazaar that sings alongside you, and highly rare and perfect scrying balls), but funny. As you can see from this awkward sentence, it all is a little bit indescribable. 

Peaces/Pieces

You see the story itself is in pieces being woven together by the characters as it transpires, are they creating the plot with their actions as they move through the story? Well, yes, maybe! But still, you believe and are transported and above all can’t wait to see what happens.

Reading glasses rating of of 5: 👓👓👓👓👓 A genre all to itself: enchanting