Motley Kamuka

Rebecca. F. Kuang  is a 29 year old woman born in China, came to the USA when she was 4. She grew up in Dallas Texas. She went to Georgetown, Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. Yellowface is her 5th novel.  The novel raises many interesting questions. I went for a walk and listened to the first 4 chapters, and I was bewitched, amazed, thoroughly enjoyed it. Could be called Whiteface because it's an Asian writer writing from a white person's perspective, about a white woman who takes on the persona of a writer about Asian experience. The irony of that, with this narrative is one of the golden threads of the novel.  Didn't know Juniper Song or June Hayward was white until it was fully disclosed, though I did ask the question. It's a glorious tale of jealousy and envy. It's giving me all kinds of squishy uncomfortable feelings I associate with good writing.  I love the novel, it's amazing. It's a page turner, so well written.  I'm 1/3 done now but I absolutely lo...

I don't know if films are trying to make it more acceptable, or to talk about what is actually happening. I'm thinking of 2 movies and a falconer, and some stars. The Nazi Lazio falconer was dismissed after he got a penis implant. That's not fiction, that's real life. I'm not sure what a penis implant has to do with being fired, I would hope the Nazi bit would be what got him fired.  Nicole Holofcener has a man get plastic surgery in her last film You Hurt My Feelings (2023). Fellow gets the bags under his eyes taken care of. First time I've seen that in a movie.  Then I just saw The Materialist (2025) and the Pedro Pascal character got the heightening surgery. I can't unsee the horrible things they did to Val Kilmer's face. Not a fan of what they did to Mickey Rourke's face either. Or maybe I should say they chose to do to themselves. 

So I'm finishing up listening to The Woman Who Would Be King : Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt by Kara Cooney. What an amazing book! Enjoyed this book, because Cooney is good at saying, we don't really know, but with these circumstances we do know, they probably had some of these issues. Hatshepsut was a woman pharaoh and that was unusual. I like people who push the boundaries.  Went to the Met twice to see her statue, and the gallieries were closed! I looked through the Met book on her ( PDF online here ). Really enjoyed learning about Hatshepsut.  After I'm done with that, hopefully today, I'll start Yellowface for my book club. I went for a walk and listened to the first 4 chapters, and wow! I'm not sure I've enjoyed a novel like this before. It's amazing.  I feel quite a pressure to get through 3 books for my book club who have meetings early August. I've got to really crank and quit watching movies (my Letterboxd diary ) and Anime ...

I'm going to be reading The Cyberiad by  Stanisław Lem for my Sci-fi book club. I will write my thoughts as I get into this book here. My blogs are notes that are not finished on publication, I keep updating them, so don't be surprised if you come back to a post and it's been added too and edited, hopefully for the better. I should start a blog called Rough Drafts.  The introduction writes “ Soviet medicine was dominated by the eugenic theories of Trofim Lysenko,” Google writes, “  No, Soviet medicine was not dominated by eugenic theories, but rather by Lysenkoism, a discredited biological theory championed by Trofim Lysenko.  Lysenkoism, which focused on environmentally induced, heritable traits, had a detrimental impact on Soviet genetics and agriculture, but was not directly related to eugenics.  While eugenics did exist in the Soviet Union, it was not the dominant ideology in medicine, and Lysenkoism was a separate and distinct phenomenon.” So OK. No doubt...

All The Beauty In The World by Patrick Bingley  is the next book club book, and it's good it's short because I got it 13 days before we meet, and I had a day where I finished up another book for another book club.  I once did the NY Times challenge of looking at a painting for 10 minutes, so I look at the Greco painting for quite a while, while I notice a lot of things about it (See links below). The paintings kind of come alive when you take some time with them, and not just move on when they get boring. I'm often too interested in consuming everything, instead of really grokking one painting when I'm present at a museum. Moving forward I'm going to be more strategic.  He talks about being struck by the beauty, and having nowhere to put it.  He talks about windows into the world, Maria Theresa by Diego Velazquez . Of the 34 paintings by Vermeer , the Met has 5 of them. Frick has 3. Manhattan has 8 of the 34 Vermeers, 24%. You know, I think I'm going to create...

This is a readers response (ongoing, while I read it), not a summary or a professional review for Emily Tesh's book Some Desperate Glory. It's a rough draft that I keep updating as I read the book.  Emily Tesh: Mostly Off Topic Introduction: It's pride month, and a book club I've never gone to, I finally took the leap to join it, and they picked this book. Whether I even join, we will see, but this book has won awards, and seems to be of quality. On page 18, I had the feeling that this is a direct response to Ender's Game . A wonderful novel until you read about the author's horrible views. One way to respond to a rancid artist's viewpoint is write a better novel than they wrote, and include the element that would irk them. Oh, you like that novel, well, here's a better one, with a better human being author. Better on both accounts. I don't know Emily Tesh , but she doesn't expose her rancid views.  A note on canceling. There are so many options ...