It Smells Like Melted Kid Hope
I had to read Dora: A Headcase by Lydia Yuknavtich for school. It was incredibly painful. It is supposedly a retelling of Freud's case of his patient Dora, though I have never read that and can't comment on the comparison. What I can comment on is that's all fucking updated and everything, for, like young adults? And if there ever was a hipster book of an author trying to be too cool? This it. I hardly know where to begin.
Dora has to see a shrink, her dad's having an affair, her mom is absent, and she has a posse of friends, all weird of course, one bulimic, one fat gay boy, one American Indian lesbian, Dora is a lesbian herself (this galls me). Her best friend is a "tranny" from Rwanda -- and yeah, I kid you not, she uses the term "tranny," which I've been told is highly pejorative unless used by a transperson.
They are almost all rich. Dora whines about everything; at one point she even recognizes that her problems are minuscule compared to her best friend/mother figure's life. But she keeps whining. Sorry about how random this post is. I hardly know what to say about this book I hated it so much. Dora is a so-called feminist who constantly uses the term "pussy" for something or someone weak, who constantly uses the word "tard"or "retard" for something stupid. The book chronicles her adventures as she -- as she what? Spends a few days doing things to her therapist, who is an ass, that she shouldn't do (and she is sooo cool she has to film everything and record everything in her life so she and her friends can create art attacks all over Seattle, except they don't actually do anything, apart from the film she makes of her therapist). It's basically a lot of Dora whining, explaining to the audience how to use certain recording devices, her experience with her kind of creepy parents and creepy therapist, but a little more than halfway through, the book that seems to be trying so hard to show a certain glimpse of the reality of outcast kids takes a sharp turn into stupidly implausible. All kinds of folk are after Dora's film of her therapist (who even makes a deal with her that he can get her into Tisch School at NYU if she hands the video to him-- a full scholarship, no less!). She's offered half a million dollars to hand her video over to some slick PR guy, whose goons kidnap her friend from Rwanda as a means of coercing her. She breaks out her girlfriend from a juvenile detention center (that scene is so believable you can next convince me the Earth is flat), and in the "Epilogue Thingie" we see how everyone has turned out all right. Although Dora comments that she and her friends need to get out of this "pop money death culture's gaze," it is tons and tons of money that is the only thing that allows her and her friends to have a good life. Like all hipsters, she says one thing to sound cool but is full in on the trappings of the dominant culture.
I was also disgusted by her snotty attitude toward animals.
Perhaps even more annoying is how you can feel the author trying to be all hipster German and Writer with a capital W as she comes up with compound words, as well as... Well, here, I'll give you some examples:
The title of this entry
My laugh riding hers like a girl on a pony (oh yeah, she is also constantly delineating between, say, a laugh and a girl laugh, or puke and girl puke. I've never been a guy but I guess my puke is little different from a male vegan's puke. I just find it irritating, pretentious and actually sexist)
We danced so hard every night we baptized ourselves in bruise.
...shooting for [aiming] not American mouthed
You can hear wind in the urban
Blushsmiling
Vodkahoney
Neckrock
Starbomblets
Lushofamother
My eyes are watering like a girl's [ironic, since she is one]
Crowwaiters
Girl teen standstill
I'm girl clear
Through the black crayola of night
Throatsong
Numbimbo
UGH. This book just sucks so much.
Dora has to see a shrink, her dad's having an affair, her mom is absent, and she has a posse of friends, all weird of course, one bulimic, one fat gay boy, one American Indian lesbian, Dora is a lesbian herself (this galls me). Her best friend is a "tranny" from Rwanda -- and yeah, I kid you not, she uses the term "tranny," which I've been told is highly pejorative unless used by a transperson.
They are almost all rich. Dora whines about everything; at one point she even recognizes that her problems are minuscule compared to her best friend/mother figure's life. But she keeps whining. Sorry about how random this post is. I hardly know what to say about this book I hated it so much. Dora is a so-called feminist who constantly uses the term "pussy" for something or someone weak, who constantly uses the word "tard"or "retard" for something stupid. The book chronicles her adventures as she -- as she what? Spends a few days doing things to her therapist, who is an ass, that she shouldn't do (and she is sooo cool she has to film everything and record everything in her life so she and her friends can create art attacks all over Seattle, except they don't actually do anything, apart from the film she makes of her therapist). It's basically a lot of Dora whining, explaining to the audience how to use certain recording devices, her experience with her kind of creepy parents and creepy therapist, but a little more than halfway through, the book that seems to be trying so hard to show a certain glimpse of the reality of outcast kids takes a sharp turn into stupidly implausible. All kinds of folk are after Dora's film of her therapist (who even makes a deal with her that he can get her into Tisch School at NYU if she hands the video to him-- a full scholarship, no less!). She's offered half a million dollars to hand her video over to some slick PR guy, whose goons kidnap her friend from Rwanda as a means of coercing her. She breaks out her girlfriend from a juvenile detention center (that scene is so believable you can next convince me the Earth is flat), and in the "Epilogue Thingie" we see how everyone has turned out all right. Although Dora comments that she and her friends need to get out of this "pop money death culture's gaze," it is tons and tons of money that is the only thing that allows her and her friends to have a good life. Like all hipsters, she says one thing to sound cool but is full in on the trappings of the dominant culture.
I was also disgusted by her snotty attitude toward animals.
Perhaps even more annoying is how you can feel the author trying to be all hipster German and Writer with a capital W as she comes up with compound words, as well as... Well, here, I'll give you some examples:
The title of this entry
My laugh riding hers like a girl on a pony (oh yeah, she is also constantly delineating between, say, a laugh and a girl laugh, or puke and girl puke. I've never been a guy but I guess my puke is little different from a male vegan's puke. I just find it irritating, pretentious and actually sexist)
We danced so hard every night we baptized ourselves in bruise.
...shooting for [aiming] not American mouthed
You can hear wind in the urban
Blushsmiling
Vodkahoney
Neckrock
Starbomblets
Lushofamother
My eyes are watering like a girl's [ironic, since she is one]
Crowwaiters
Girl teen standstill
I'm girl clear
Through the black crayola of night
Throatsong
Numbimbo
UGH. This book just sucks so much.