One of my study group members (I’m in law school) was, er, less than enthralled with whatever it was we were supposed to be doing so took a moment out to look up the upcoming movies for this week. One of them was described as ‘hot Regency chastity,’ I think by the New York Times, and was clearly a costume drama, so we made plans to see it as soon as possible. Directed by Jane Campion, it starts Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne and Ben Whishaw as the poet John Keats.

Fanny is young — late teens or early twenties — and rather more interested in fashion than poetry when she makes the acquaintance of John Keats and his friend and collaborator, Mr. (Charles Armitage) Brown. The two come into closer acquaintance and then fall in love, despite the fact that Keats has less than no money and Fanny, whose father is dead, cannot marry him. Nonetheless, they enter into an affair of the heart, and although the world — and Keats’s health — conspire to keep them apart, they find ways to remain together.

The phrase ‘hot Regency chastity’ is pretty accurate; there’s no on-screen sex, but Fanny and John’s closed-mouth kisses are hotter than they should be — on a par with Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis’s character) removing Ellen Olenska’s (Michelle Pfeiffer’s character) glove in The Age of Innocence. To give a better comparison, they’re as hot as the pottery scene in Ghost. No, really. Campion, the actors, and the scriptwriters all do a very good job of putting those scenes, especially the first, together.

Fanny’s interest in fashion isn’t superficial; she spends many a scene in the movie designing and sewing her own clothing, and it’s obvious seeing her in scenes with the other women in the film that she is wearing clothing that is significantly different from theirs. She wears more colors; she shows up in a dress with sheer sleeves at one point; she makes a statement about how she is wearing the first triple-pleated mushroom collar in the area. While some of these outfits look a little silly to modern audiences (especially modern audiences raised on the bland, albeit accurate, clothing from other BBC adaptations set in this era), by the end of the movie, Fanny’s obsession with fashion is not only accepted but interesting. Because of her rapidly-changing wardrobe, we notice a bit more that Keats pretty much wears the same blue coat for the entire film. We also notice that his friend, Mr. Brown (they take great pains to pronounce his name differently from Fanny’s) looks moderately silly in a plaid suit for nearly the entire film.

I don’t know that we’re supposed to like Fanny at first; she comes across as somewhat snobby and abrasive. Eventually we come to realize that it’s just Mr. Brown to whom she is actually mean; she’s much milder to Keats, and is downright sweet to everyone else in the movie. Keats is quiet; I think we’re supposed to see Mr. Brown as causing at least as many problems as he solves. Fanny and John’s relationship builds amazingly organically. For a story with very little plot, it (as my fellow student said) kept our interest surprisingly well for the two hours plus of the film. I wouldn’t call it my favorite example of romantic costume dramas — it would take more than an ill-fated pair of lovers to knock Andrew Davies’s Pride and Prejudice off its throne — but it is absolutely worth watching and has fantastic acting, cinematography, and costuming. 4.5/5 stars.

This is, as the title says, a collection of new fiction and memoir by Black women (published since 1990; capitalization is the editor’s). It includes, as Ms. Danquah says in the introduction, younger authors: generally under 40 at the time of publication. The table of contents is fairly long and complicated, since many of the works are excerpts from longer pieces, so I will provide a link to the Google Books version of it: here. I had not heard of any of the authors prior to reading this volume, partly because the women included are all younger than the Alice Walker-Toni Morrison-Maya Angelou-Gloria Naylor bunch. Many of them were born after Dr. King was assassinated, and all of them have received acclaim as writers from many different sources.

Easily my favorite story in the book was Itabari Njeri’s memoir excerpt, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” from Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone. It’s about her relationship with a man who was willing to say anything to get into a woman’s bed, and while she certainly succumbed to his charms more than once or twice, eventually she found out that not only was he cheating on her, but he’d gotten two women pregnant in the same very short period of time (she was one of them). Her revenge — half of which was publishing this story — is sweet and well-deserved. If the author hadn’t indicated that it was memoir in her intro, and if the main character hadn’t had the author’s name, I would have assumed it was fiction, because it’s such a well-done tale.

A lot of the other memoirs are the same: I wouldn’t have known they were memoirs if the main character hadn’t shared the name of the author. It demonstrated for me the fluidity of the form; I’d barely read any memoir prior to this, and I think I had the idea that it was a drier form, more like a biography than fiction. Except for the first entry, which is an excerpt that reads more like a personal essay (on how the author could come to fall in love with a murderer), the fiction is nearly indistinguishable from the memoir. I say that, it should be noted, as a compliment: I love fiction in all its forms because it tells a story, and so do the memoirs of these women.

One thing that the editor elucidated in the introduction but that also stuck out to me in all of the stories was how disenfranchised these women writers felt, as in school they never read any books or stories written by someone who looked like them. I am about ten years younger than most of these women, and I went to a standard decent city public high school where about twenty percent of the students weren’t white, in the late 1990s, and I still can only think of two volumes that I read in four years of English class that weren’t written by a white man. (Black Boy, by Richard Wright, and To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. I do understand that the latter brings up racial issues, but the author is white and a white man is still the hero.)

It’s rather sad that things haven’t changed all that much in such a short period of time. I do know that I noticed the lack of class-read books written by women, and I did a report on Sylvia Plath to counterbalance this, but it’s still unfortunate that we didn’t read any of the aforementioned authors: Maya Angelou, who read a poem at the presidential inauguration when I was in elementary school; or Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, both of whom have won Pulitzers (the latter also won the Nobel Prize in Literature). To top it off, any of the stories in this volume would have fit incredibly well in the short-story fiction/nonfiction collection we called our English textbooks, and these are second-generation authors.

All that having been said, though, I am painfully aware that me noticing that we didn’t read enough books by women pales in comparison (no pun intended) to a young woman of color realizing that we read no books written by women of color. Overall, though, both experiences indicate a need for greater diversity in the books chosen for classroom use on a high school level. It’s almost amazing that so many young women of color had enough inspiration to become authors, in the face of overwhelming whiteness and maleness. The fact that these women, in general, decided to write realistic fiction or memoirs is quite telling: more than anything, it seems that they are compelled to tell their stories, the stories that are left out of American literature almost entirely. This collection comes highly recommended, but it is not a light set of stories. While some are more enjoyable to read, and even have happy endings, even those remind the reader of so many points that one might miss with a standard education. It will definitely cause re-evaluation of one’s own experience, but I wouldn’t have skipped any of these for the world. 5/5 stars.

This isn’t a novel, actually — it’s an autobiography. It’s 208 pages of Jack Vance being relatively candid and actually talking about his entire life. It will be published by Subterranean Press later this year. He had the fortune to live during a very interesting time — he was born in 1916 — and has traveled to an insane amount of places. In some ways, the book is sort of a travelogue. It’s relatively chronological — it starts at the beginning and ends with him describing his current situation — but doesn’t necessarily follow every event in order. He rambles a bit, and digresses often, but it’s probably the only source for so much of the information one might want to know about Mr. Vance.

As I said, he was born in 1916, to a family with money who was in the high society of San Francisco at the time. However, things happened, and by the time the Great Depression hit, the family was destitute. His mother ended up working at various jobs, especially after his parents divorced, to support herself and the five children (of which Jack was in the middle). Jack himself put off starting any sort of college for years because he couldn’t afford it, and he needed to work to send money to his mother. However, he did attend community college briefly in Porterville, CA (where, incidentally, my mother-in-law got her associate’s degree in dental assisting) and then, some years later, spent a year or two at the University of California, Berkeley.

After a stint in the Navy — actually, I think one in the Navy and one in the merchant marines — he met and married his wife, Norma, who was eleven years his junior. He kept working at odd jobs, but eventually started publishing enough fiction that he could live off that money. She was apparently enormously helpful in this pursuit, and not only could they live off the money, but they could afford, every five years or so, to travel around the world and stay for months at a time. (I think Mr. Vance is one of the more well-off science fiction writers.) They set up semi-permanent residence in Oakland, and built a house there — it took something like 30 years to be completed to their specifications.

I feel like I’m writing a report on Mr. Vance, but it’s a ninety-something-year-old man chatting about his life. What else can I do? He’s a very engaging memoir-ist, I’ll give him that, and he’s definitely had a varied and full life. His list of Weird Writer Jobs probably tops most people — he tried to pass himself off as a welder once, he worked as a carpenter for a while, and he worked in a ketchup-making plant. He’s spent some time in nearly every country I can think of (except Timbuktu), and at one point he was in possession of a VW Bug with a butterfly painted on its rear end. While this isn’t exactly a volume that I think everyone must snap up and read, it’s quite enjoyable and if one’s a big fan of Mr. Vance’s works, I’d say it’s worth a Sunday afternoon. 4/5 stars