Barely Touching the Brush on the Canvas: Neila Mezynski's Men Who Understand Girls

She started dancing. She liked dancing with short quick steps. She liked being at rest on the floor, body suspended in a certain position, waiting. She liked to start up again rapidly with the next step. She liked when the music skipped a beat.

She started painting. She liked painting with all different types of strokes. She sometimes liked to form the base with long heavy strokes, fill it in with short quick strokes. She sometimes liked to start with violent undersized strokes, finish it off by barely touching the brush on the canvas. She liked to paint trees. She liked to paint dresses.

She started writing. Words sentences stories and poems. She definitely started writing. Leaning words against more words to form sentences that curve and twist when read. Forming the basis for a new way of understanding how words relate to language to a reader to a page. Short bursts quickly are over and then commence again in sometimes longer but usually just as short bursts.

In Men Who Understand Girls, she writes about relationships. How those relationships emerge into something. Something that is unique to men and girls and also something that is not unique to men and girls. Something rather that is understood by all as long as there is a relationship between one and another not necessarily being men and girls. She also writes about how those relationships fizzle into nothing. Nothing that is understood by all as long as there was a relationship between one and another not necessarily being men and girls.

In Men Who Understand Girls, she writes about writing. Her writing is art. Her writing is dance. She writes about how writing is a thing and a concept. She writes about how writing may be the only that is a thing and a concept. She uses ideas from dancing and painting to show her words to a reader. She uses devices from dancing and painting to explain her words to a reader. Her dancing and her painting are important to her writing. How she dances and how she paints shapes the center for how she writes.

She writes about men who understand girls and girls who understand the men who understand girls. Miniature relationships made large.  She understands that men who understand girls can sometimes not understand girls. She understands that men who understand girls can understand but then girls may not understand men back. She understands that it does not always work out as planned for men who understand girls and the girls that they understand.

And sometimes it does. And sometimes it does.

Carry-on Baggage: A Review of Mel Bosworth's Freight

Freight I Found:

If you hang around for long enough and don't destroy yourself properly with gallons of gin or various other poisons or inhalants, you get lucky and come across those good bits that Hansel and Gretel left behind in that scary forest. A few weeks ago on my run through the woods I found a bicycle. It was abused, wounded, and abandoned there in the soil, wet and dirty and rusty (as all found things seem to be), screaming to be taken and nursed back. Shortly after that, I found Mel Bosworth's novel Freight delivered to my door. It was also just waiting there screaming to be taken, but on my porch, crisp and clean, and not at all rusty or abused; wrapped up nicely with a personalized bow. And so I took it.

Freight I Ate:

I devoured Mel Bosworth's Freight quickly (read it in one day), but not without digesting it properly. It sounds like a contradiction of terms, but believe me . . . it settled down just right in one session. I ate Freight without adding any salt or pepper or chili flakes or Tabasco. Because it didn't need any of that. It was perfect as it was served. I ate it alongside a bottle of red wine. And then alongside another bottle of wine. So it could break down properly, you see.

Freight is the elegant, sensitive story of a man who carries things with him. Within him. Around him. And sometimes even above him. Freight is the story of every man. Or . . . Everyman. Sometimes he discards things because the burden gets too heavy or because it sickens him, and sometimes he takes on too much. But he really doesn't discard all of anything. Bits of things remain for him to haul along. Things. You know these things well. They're life. Your life.

The construction of Freight is pretty interesting; it’s crafted as an homage to Edward Packard’s series of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, in which the reader assumes the role of the protagonist and makes choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot outcome. It only hints at Packard’s concept, however, as the plot doesn’t majorly deviate from its course, despite the cross-referencing and jumping to ideas either foreshadowed or recounted. Being the unmotivated, indolent swine that I am, I chose to not pick my own adventure, and just trusted Mel to guide me through it. For me, the novel settles to a logical construction just fine without the Packard-like literary device.  But that isn’t to say others won’t enjoy re-reading the book in different ways, jumping forward through time, and experiencing the story in a different order. Y’all drink coffee or tea; I drink benzene.

Freight I Destroyed (epilogue):

I did no such thing. Well . . . at least not Mel Bosworth’s Freight; for the book now resides quietly and comfortably on my shelf in my living room, just on top of Louis Armstrong's biography. I don't fear for its safety, though. Satchmo can carry that burden quite well.  Sometimes, but  not too often, it is a Wonderful World.