Though you wouldn't know it from the cover, Death After Life is an emotionally moving and often intelligent read. It's (no surprise here) a zombie novel, but not just any zombie novel. Using a clever twist, writer John Evans injects the plot with a virus that slows America down considerably, but doesn't completely immobilize it.

Virus Control Cops control events and people ("there is no cure," billboards constantly remind people wherever they go) and there are euthanasia centers for ill and elderly people who might ("might" is used very loosely by the doctors who work at them) be vulnerable to infection, no matter that they haven't been bitten yet.

The economy has tanked, only the rich have money (which they keep  as cash, stashed in secret locations) and citizens risk going out for drinking and dancing most every night, desperate to find pleasure in activities that used to make them feel good. People still go to the movies as well, but finding enjoyment in anything (everyday things or not) is not so easy and numbness has become a way of life. Often, it's difficult to separate the zombies from the humans.

Death After Life is definitely well-written and more than worth than 99 cents it costs to download through Amazon. The problem is how disturbing it is...not so much in the violence (though that's hard to take) but in how eerily life manages to go on as close to "business as usual" during this particular zombie apocalypse.

Somehow it all reminds me of a quote by singer Zola Jesus, who said in an interview not too long ago:

"I want to write songs about things that are important, like why we're here, what the future holds and the apocalypse. Maybe the apocalypse has already started. If you look around in America, there's a lot of sadness and a lot of suffering. Most people turn a blind eye to it. I want people to come to terms with it." -Zola Jesus

 

In a way I much prefer the 1950s and 60s pulp fiction (even the sadder ones) to (most) modern lesbian fiction where romance can be over the top (and unrequited love always turns out to be requited), every woman the main character meets (even in a small town) just happens to also be a lesbian (statistically, that's almost impossible) and being gay is no big deal (how nice that would be.) 

 

The older I get, the more I realize reality is better for your heart than daydreaming ever could be. And in pulp fiction, there is very little daydreaming going on.

It often has a much more steady grasp of how hard it is to meet someone who would be a true kindred spirit in love and friendship. And the inner struggles (substitute the much smaller society of a conservative family for early 1960s America) echo the circumstances some women still find themselves in, even here in 2014. That alone can be comforting.

 

Another useful dose of reality with the pulps is how one-sided love is treated. The futility of it is eventually exposed, as is the idea that it's more like illness than love…to like someone until your heart aches…especially when that someone doesn’t even know you beyond a name and a face and you are absolutely meaningless to them in any way that counts.

 

Sloane Britain, who edited and wrote for a small publishing company called Midwood Tower in the early 1960s, did this very well in These Curious Pleasures. Her main character not only gets over her unrequited feelings, she goes on to meet someone who is able to love her back.

 

The writing is crisper, less nauseating in its sentimentality and more sincere, plus the universality (straight or gay, man or woman can relate) of feelings is pleasantly surprising. Some of the best passages from one particularly strong example (Valerie Taylor's Unlike Others) include:

 

-There’s no point in owning a double bed if you have to sleep alone.

-But she knew better. You couldn't tell the truth to straight people, ever; the best you could hope for was tolerance without understanding. They saw the different ones as emotionally retarded or, worse, guilty of some nameless sin against society.

 -Still vivid in her own mind were the twelve years of her misery: guilt, worry, daydreaming, trying to find out from books what no one would tell her.

 -She unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it into the hamper. I don't seduce teen-agers, she continued her mental inventory, I don't pick people up, I'm not promiscuous. I tell the truth and pay my bills promptly. I do an honest day's work in return for my pay. They ought to have a better name for people like me.

-If you have enough love, you don't need psychiatry.

 

-...but there were things that friendship didn't cover. She needed someone to dedicate herself to, someone to become involved with. She needed to be first with someone.

 -An office, like a home, has a climate of its own. It's dominated by the emotional content of the people who spend their time there.

- But even more than any physical relationship she wanted somebody who would come first in her life. A girl who would be more important to her than anything else in the world, a love that was emotional and spiritual as well as physical

-You've got it bad, she thought scornfully. Where do you think it'll get you? Carrying the torch for a girl who doesn't even know the score. How adolescent can you get?

 

-The solution was to find a good steady girl, who wasn't frigid or alcoholic or any more neurotic than the average run of human beings. Somebody warm and intelligent who would be glad to settle down and make a home. This would be about as easy as finding uranium in the back yard.

 

Valerie Taylor's novels ended up happily more than not, especially compared to her contemporaries at the time she was writing. She became instrumental in helping start one of the first equality rights groups in the country and in 1965 she met and fell in love with the woman with whom she'd spend the next decade. 

 

When her partner wound up seriously ill in the hospital, Taylor was not allowed to visit her and never got to say goodbye to her before she died. Heartbreaking incidents like that still happen to this day and is one reason gay people fight so hard for the most basic of rights. I can think of fewer things more tragic than to be denied the chance to be with your loved one when you most need each other.

Sometimes, the way people see us is not the person we are inside. We may appear idiotic, unattractive (I refuse to use the word "ugly" because it is such a mean, nasty word), even pointless. 

We may seem that way because we are just so bad at human interaction. We'd be better off never having to be around other people and yet we actually do like them. What we end up doing is not always what we set out to do. We try to fake it until we make it and often come up short.

I used to think having good intentions was enough but now I realize that's just not true. People aren't mind readers, they only have our actions to go by. 

They don't know the reason we might not be able to talk coherently with them is because we like them, not because we don't. It's always been hard for me to grasp (and frustrating) that the more I care about someone or something, the more I tend to flub what I most want to go well.

Terrified of saying something stupid, we can avoid them completely and be rude without meaning to be. There are occasions when it feels like I have lost the will to try with certain people because I realize (hopefully, not too late) that they just don't care for me and we are never going to be friends. I learned in high school the horrible consequences of trying too hard to win someone over.

Ever since I was a little girl I've been most comfortable away from others. Teachers tried to help and my parents were always telling me to stop reading and go out and play. I didn't like the real world, only the one in between the pages of a book.

When I was about ten years old, my grandfather put a copy of Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People in my hands. Whether breaking out into Elvis songs or grabbing an unsuspecting dance partner out on the floor, he had a way about him that suggested there was no one he was not comfortable being around, at home or parties. He could have written the book himself.

I didn't want to disappoint him so I did end up reading it, though I honestly don't think it helped much. I don't want to "win" friends or influence anyone. I just want to feel comfortable around people and not have to fake a way past my shyness, which I still have to this day.
  
(p.s. By "we," I really mean me. Most people I know have their acts together and if they don't they're doing a great of job of pretending they do.)

Sunday odds and ends, throughout the day...and on Monday

Who knew there is a small subset of self-help books that focus on using parallel universe theory to greatly improve your life? 

As hokey as it sounds it's definitely not boring...and (if it were real and worked) would be kind of nice to channel the positive aspects of an alternate version of you into this you. Instead of wondering whether there is another you somewhere out in the universe, you could be the person here.

I'm a bit ashamed to say I bought this for my Kindle, but the quantum physics-fascinated part of me just had to...and the part that likes to think somewhere I'm getting it right better than I am here. I

It's too soon to say good things, though. The author is using lots of science, but so far real world application of this seems pretty flimsy.




From the 2014 Fall Season Preview in the Wall Street Journal:

"I love to cry, and I love music that makes me really vulnerable. I like coming out of a show feeling ripped into a million pieces. When music can do that, then it's just an amazing thing."-Laurie Anderson

http://online.wsj.com/articles/35-new-yorkers-share-their-fall-arts-entertainment-picks-1411078936


Sunday turned out to be a busy day and I still haven't read the papers, but I am excited about some of the new tv shows ("Gotham" airs tonight at 8 on Fox), though these reviews make they seem "iffy."(I do love this part of the review for "NCIS: New Orleans;" it's absolutely true>>Scott Bakula is one of our great underrated TV resources.)

 http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/fall-tv-reviews-scorpion-forever-ncis-new-orleans

For more reviews, including one for "Gotham," read here:

 http://www.tvguide.com/News/New-Fall-TV-Season-Reviews-Gotham-Sleepy-Hollow-Forever-Scorpion-1087342.aspx

'But it wasn't safe to have dreams like that...that hurt too much, that cut to the quick in all the wrong places. The futility, the hopelessness of it banged like a cymbal inside her skull.'-Randy Salem

If you take away the horrible title and the oddly positioned figures on the cover, you've got the potential for a great book in The Sex Between. If you visit websites like Strange Sisters you'll notice that dozens upon dozens of lesbian pulp fiction titles were published in the 50s and 60s, most of them with the most outrageously lurid covers you could ever imagine, many of them actually written by straight men rather than genuine lesbians. If you go to the Kindle store, you'll also note that just a fraction of those have survived as bona fide worthwhile reads, written by women who truly understood what it meant to be gay in an era that condemned them as "perverts" or worse.

Though Randy Salem's T.S.B. is not the best "pulp fiction" I've read, it certainly is not the worst...and better yet, it speaks to the experience of being so different in the time of "love that dare not speak its name." I'm not sure which surprises me more about this book...the fact that the cover does not speak to its contents at all or that there is a happy ending. Maybe, in some way, the cover art was meant to throw people off from the fact neither woman is doomed to a life of unhappiness? I doubt it, but surely back then publishers did their best to titillate rather than educate readers on what it's actually like being gay.

Here Randy Salem introduces you to Lee and Maggie, two women who have known each other pretty much their entire lives yet have never told each other how they really feel. Lee, older and supposedly wiser, is sure Maggie would never return her feelings so she tries to be as content as possible with their roommate situation. Maggie also helps Lee with secretarial work and they live a fairly comfortable life together as friends and employer/employee. Lee is a love 'em and leave 'em type girl while Maggie has never been in love or in any kind of relationship, physical or otherwise.

Lee may be a jerk to all the other women in her life, but to Maggie she is quietly devoted, suffering in love from afar. Maggie looks up to Lee and discreetly manages to keep the chaos in Lee's life from snowballing. Only when intense meddling, in the form of family matriarch Kate, comes storming into their lives do things take a dramatic turn. What seems like tragedy that can only be met with futile resistance becomes so much more...with Lee and Maggie discovering things about themselves and family dynamics that are both terrifying and life-changing.

Having found much more substance and reflection in this genre by Ann Bannon or Sloane Britain, I couldn't quite warm to this 100 percent...nevertheless its ending had its own kind of power and Randy Salem chose wisely in having both characters become more than just stereotypes. 

Bad title and out-of-place cover aside (Maggie is nothing like the brunette on the cover), The Sex Between definitely deserved to be "rescued" by Cleis Press. The way each woman feels about the other and how everyone in their lives disapproves and tries to demonize their love deeply spoke to me, both the first and second time I read the novel.

You could ask what need is there these days for such books, but I'd have to counter: we very much still live in a world where gay people are demonized and lesbians suffer in silence with no family or friends to talk about things like this.