Here is week 27 of Sam's reading journey, the metrics and first week can be found here

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest(Millennium #3)by Stieg Larsson, Reg Keeland (Translator)
 

1. Intrigue:
   1. Don’t read this book if you haven’t read the second one of the series. While you could infer much from the first novel and therefore read the second one without having even picked up The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, you can’t do that with the third installment of Millennium. 
   2. However, if you have read The Girl who Played with Fire then chances are you already want to read this book. It’s excellent crime-fiction. It’s excellent fiction. 
2. Writing Style:
   1. Beautiful sentences still abound in this book. The translation is excellent. It’s never too on the nose. You really cannot complain about Larsson’s prose or Keeland’s translations. Only, in this case,  the plot structure (more to come).
   2. Juicy quote: 
      1. “Nobody can avoid falling in love. They might want to deny it, but friendship is probably the most common form of love.”
3. Flow of storytelling:
   1. The best and coolest part of this book is that Lisbeth Salander, the girl from this series titles, gets to shrug off the victim complex that Larsson has given her. She doesn’t wait for something to happen, she happens. The rest of the book is fine. All the parts with journalist Mikael Blomkvist - the other protagonist of this series - feel well within character, but a bit boring. It’s not formulaic, but it’s almost there. 
4. Re-readability:
   1. The other books feel extremely re-readable. This one, less so. It comes down to the fact that the book feels more predictable than any of the others. 
5. T.E.S.S.
   1. Does not qualify.
   2. 
      

Final rating: ★★★ = Give it a go. It’s good! It didn’t quite make it into the For Sure Absolutely Read This category, but hey, it’s all subjective. ​

News travels fast in Phoenix. I'm not even in Phoenix proper anymore, barely Maricopa County. But word came to me this morning that Bernard Schober had passed Monday morning during a hike. He'd had heart issues a while, so this was not surprising albeit still very upsetting. I remember how bleak things had felt in his last hospital stay, to the point where my son Ace sent a video saying "I love you" just to be safe. 

Klute, as he was known in our circles, was someone Ace and I frequently ran into around town. I had met him after being booked on the same live talk show at a theatre called Space 55. From there, I'd run into him stopping into the Nile in Mesa for a vegan goodie, finding him at breakfast with friends. Or Ace and I would see him at one of a number of comic cons, library cons, book festivals, or zine fests. In fact, I had helped organize PHX Zine Fest in its first years, and Charissa Lucille from Wasted Ink Zine Distro was one of the first people I shared the bad news with. They asked me for some thoughts to place on the PZF site, right around the same time I was talking with J. Bradley about doing the same for Meow Meow Pow Pow.

Jesse hadn't known that I was friends with Klute, nor did I know the same about Jesse, until this morning. That's how far the man's reach has. 

And how deep an impact, that we all want to use the power of our words to honor someone who was so skilled with words himself. His sense of humor and his sense of right and wrong went hand in hand, often used to challenge politically abhorrent people online, or advocating for what was most important to him. He was as funny as he was passionate, and he could use that to eviscerate someone rhetorically, or champion the people and causes he cared about. He was a vocal defender of the environment, the ocean, and sharks in particular, and he backed his talk up by going out to explore, document, and report on everything happening on those fronts.

He never stopped believing in the power of words, and more importantly, the power of a person who gives a damn and shows up to do something about it.

The small print and zine scene, the slam poetry and spoken word community, the scuba diver and shark conservationist and environmentalist movements, these are all tight knit groups and Klute was an important part of each of them. I think he would be humbled at the outpour of emotion for him today, and tributes which will certainly continue for years to come.

Klute had seen a man die in a grisly boat accident during one of his last dives. The experience shook him, and his account of it had shook me. He wrote about it in the last poem published on his blog, which I'll reprint here, and leave as his last testament - although the friends and people who loved him that he has left behind will be testifying to his kindness and goodness for ages to come.

When a sailor dies at sea
some of your kind
say they become dolphins.
The human belief
that dolphins are beneficent
is based on their smile
but when you see it
you are not caught in a gleaming beacon of friendship
the cetacean is no Lisa Frank rainbow swimmer;
they are the grinning monster under the bed,
and you are staring down the Joker’s knife.
They joyously ride the bowplanes of a ship
the way a siren uses a tuning fork to test their voice.
Every boat that leaves the harbor has an escort,
a pilot to guide you through the treacherous waters, 
because once free, you belong to them.
And they know.
They can echo heft of an iceberg,
smell the intensity of flame,
count the grains of gunpowder that can
dance upon a pinhead. 
Why they do it, we don’t know,
a rumor’d bargain struck long ago
to enrich Neptune with a chain of souls
they carry men to the Reef of Tolls.
Their smile knowing,
a permanent smirk
knowing that a death at sea is not a joyous moment
for a future of surf and a seafood smorgasbord.
It is the grief of widows and orphans,
lawyer’s pens scratching paper
the tick-tack of typing out press releases
telling everyone the search will end
at sunset.
While dolphins play,
we toil.
Despite all our teeth,
we have no grin.
Vilified for honesty,
our mouths are open to enrich us –
food for the body
or food for the blood.
In this Blue Eternal,
these heavenly waters,
there is nourishment
but it is work,
no deals with decrepit Gods
who died long ago.

We are all Old Salts
having passed in the sea
from one form 
to another.
This one now that I borrow,
will return spiraling to the trenches and claws,
is a scale held by Neptune’s sister Themis
with each of my eyes as far away from the other
that seaworthiness allows.
I see all.
I sense all.
The justice of Gods and evolution
flowing through me
So when you saw me speeding along
I was racing towards to dying.
While you hovered,
exhaling nitrogen in miniature bubbles,
tragedy enflamed my every synapse in
already knowing the outcome.
By the time you had arrived,
die was cast,
red and unflinching.
I was there to take the tally,
So if a dolphin must ferry a man’s soul
as part of the Trident holder’s take,
decoration for the god whose skeleton
fringes the shore of the World Ocean,
know we were there to see it transform
faster than the smilers can carry it away.
The body hauled on board
I continued on currents,
always moving.
Mourning is for living of the land.
For me, death simply is.
It was unfair,
unjust,
Crane’s Open Boat
on Winslow’s Gulf Stream.
Unlike most sharks
who either believe in only the infinite chance of Evolution
or the benevolent grace of a violent Sea,
I believe in your God and
your Devil.
This tempest of blue is just another of their tables
In the hold of a pirate’s bark that will never reach its destination
until the Sun has flared and my home has evaporated into stellar mist.
Each of them cheating at Liar’s Dice,
playing for souls.
Whether as solitary glimpses under a blaring star
or in great packs that create shadowplay,
we will always swim to a dying ship,
there to witness.
If Judgement is to come,
our heads will tip
port, starboard,
good, evil
let the gods, both living and dead, know
that a soul was there,
and if it needs to be carried
we will do it
as neutral as we can balance
in the uncertainty of a shipwreck
when death comes at sea.

When a sailor dies at sea
some of your kind
say they become dolphins.
Our kind believes
they become something more.   

I’d just gotten off work early and was driving home when I had the idea. It was a Thursday night, warm and wet. The bar I worked at was dead—a combination of it being Thursday and a record-breaking season of rain hammering the Portland, Oregon streets in early June. I’d stopped for a cocktail and fried chicken sandwich at Basilisk before driving back home to my wife and two daughters (secretly hoping they would be in bed by the time I made it home). It felt like the first moment I had to myself in over two weeks. I was sitting there at the bar, scrolling through my phone, making some notes on writing projects to tackle, when a random idea struck:
 
The idea? I should watch Mr. Mom.  I should watch Mr. Mom and write an essay about Mr. Mom as a stay-at-home-dad in the year 2022. For lately, whenever I mentioned to someone that I was a stay-at-home-dad, (or was out and about in public with my two young girls), someone, generally older, would make a comment about me being “Mr. Mom.”
 
“Ah, look at Mr. Mom!” they might say. Or, “You’re a stay-at-home-dad? Mr. Mom huh? Ha!”
 
They would chuckle. I would chuckle. But lately it had begun to bother me. The term felt condescending, pejorative. Yes, I was currently a stay-at-home-dad, but I had also started a coffee roasting company, was a freelance writer, and even had a Master’s degree (albeit in “creative writing” which has never felt like a real Masters degree).
 
Anyways, I’d never seen Mr. Mom, but I somehow knew the film starred Michael Keaton. Right? I looked it up on IMDB. Right. Check. I could guess the plot based on the title. Would it be worth watching? Or so bad it was cringey/laughable? I had to find out, so I decided to rent the movie when I got home.
 
“Want to watch Mr. Mom?!” I excitedly asked my wife when I got home, throwing my rain jacket on the back of a metal dining chair and slipping off my black Bloodstones.
 
 “Um…okay? What is that?” I caught her up on my plan, to which she nonverbally agreed by shrugging her shoulders while scrolling through her phone. I poured myself a drink and sat down, my expectations low. I’ve always like Michael Keaton though (I mean, who doesn’t like Michael Keaton?)
 
Mr. Mom came out in 1983 and was Michael Keaton’s second feature film role after Night Shift. I have not seen Night Shift but after reading IMDB’s tagline for the film, I am pretty sure it’s type of sleazy, eighties comedy film would not be made today. Night Film is about *checks notes* a morgue attendant who runs a prostitution ring out of said morgue? Is that right? (I might have to bookmark that for the next essay.)
 
 
Anyways, directed by Stan Dragoti and written by John Hughes (the most prolific writer, director, and overall vibe setter for films of the eighties--Sixteen Candles, Ferries Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, etc.) Mr. Mom stars Michael Keaton as Jack Butler, an upper management employee at an auto manufacturing plant in Detroit. The film also stars Teri Garr as Keaton’s wife Caroline Butler, and a young Jeffrey Tambor and Christopher Lloyd as Keaton’s soon to be ex-coworkers.
 
Keaton soon loses his job in the automotive industry and both him and his wife apply for work. His wife lands a job first, however, at a Mad-Men-esque-ad-agency. It’s a boys club made up of men trying to sell products to housewives. It’s misogynistic and smoke-filled and belittling to Caroline. She soon proves herself though (in the first meeting!) by educating the men on how to appeal to housewives. The head of the company takes an interest in her and starts taking her everywhere and driving her to work (totally normal eighties behavior, right?)
 
Jack throws himself into the stay-at-home role, despite his comical ineptitude at first. The way Jack moves through the supermarket it would appear he has never stepped foot inside one. Perhaps men really didn’t shop for groceries in the eighties? More hijinx ensue. With vacuums, cooking, bath time, etc. Jack is soon watching daytime soap operas. Playing poker with coupons with the other stay-at-home-moms. This is a fish out of water story, made funny by the defamiliarization of a man, yes a man! taking care of his kids and staying home with them.
​

Still, Jack is no sitcom slacker Dad. He might do things his own way—as all stay-at-home-parents should—but there doesn’t seem to be any begrudging resentment of him staying home as you might expect from such a film—although it is admittedly, a slapstick, lighthearted comedy not interested in going too deep beneath the surface of the characters psychology.
 
What I found particularly interesting was the way in which Jack occasionally feels the need to prove his “manliness” (especially to his wife’s boss who has taken an interest in her). In one scene, Jack enters the house with a chainsaw (who knows why) and offers the boss a beer.
 
Boss to Jack: “It’s eight o’clock in the morning.”
 
Jack: “Scotch?”
 
The need to prove oneself as still masculine is especially true for the stay-at-home-dad, a role that has historically been “feminine.” For years, decades even, the domestic labor of the stay-at-home-parent (one that is still predominantly made up of women) has been under-appreciated, overlooked, and taken for granted by society.
 
Mr. Mom is also a movie about the dynamics between partners—the working parent vs. the stay-at-home-parent, the inherent tension between two parties trying to raise children and have a career. Jack wants Caroline at home more. Caroline likes her job, but the hours are long and the demands stressful. One evening, Jack cooks Caroline a big meal only to come home late while he ends up asleep on the couch. Eventually, they find a balance that works and soon Jack is re-hired at his company and Caroline keeps her job. It’s a happy ending all around with some life lessons learned along the way.
 
The pandemic has recently brought some clarity to just how essential childcare is to a functioning society. When daycares closed—forcing parents to scramble to find childcare or need flexibility from their employers to work remotely and stay at home—we found out just how much we took childcare for granted. If parents must stay home with their kids, they can’t work either. Now two-three people are out of a job—the childcare workers, the parents, and the owners of the childcare. A ripple effect that continues to spread. It’s almost as if what society wants from parents is not more children, but productivity from the parents and more little workers for when they die.

Now, this might be an obvious statement, but I believe the decision to have kids is a personal choice. No one should be forced to have a child, and no one should be forced to apologize for not having one. I know that single people might not love the idea of having to support other people’s children and complain about child tax breaks and so on, but really this is the bare minimum our government in the United States seems to do for children.
​
The cost of childcare is already almost prohibitively expensive for parents, while childcare centers themselves are barely making a profit and child carers often make little enough to keep them there.  And that’s if you can even find a childcare center. The waitlist here in Portland for a daycare you feel good about sending your kids to is 6 months to two years. Society wants people to have kids, but they don’t want to feed or cloth or educate them. (I have a lot of thoughts and rage about this but I don’t want to lapse into a monologue that would bore you).
In this regard, as Jack and Caroline deal with an economic downturn of the auto industry in Detroit, it’s not too dissimilar from the pandemic and subsequent loss of jobs we found ourselves in in 2020. Add an increase of stay-at-home-dads to the mix and Mr. Mom is probably more relevant than at any other time.
 
Has society changed much since Mr. Mom came out? Of course. There are more stay-at-home-dads than ever before and more women in the workplace. Still, equality and pay in the workplace is still lacking for women as is the normalization of the stay-at-home role for fathers.
 
I think Mr. Mom needs a reboot. Mr. Mom 2? Mr. Mom 2(022)? Or something. That could be an interesting movie … I’ll have to ask my movie making cousin in L.A. if that’s an interesting idea.
 
So, does the movie hold up? More or less. It’s pretty funny, decently well-written and acted, but it’s not classic or timeless in the same way that many other John Hughes or Michael Keaton movies are. Still, I will take it as less of a dig next time someone calls me Mr. Mom. I might even take it as a compliment.