WWC2019: Predictions & What-Not

Posted on June 6, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Scrambling to get these out there before kickoff tomorrow.

Remember, the top 2 teams from each group, plus the next 4, make the knockout rounds.

It’s hard for the key match to not just always be the clash between the team I see finishing 2nd and the team I see finishing 3rd, but it seemed worthwhile to highlight some individual games.

#GROUP A

France, Nigeria, Norway, South Korea.

France should win the group, but 2nd place could be quite a fight. Nigeria are a bit enigmatic, but I think 2nd place comes down to the battle between them and Norway.

Qualifying: France, Norway, Nigeria
Key Match: Norway v Nigeria on 6/8. The winner will have the inside track on 2nd position, but I believe the loser still has a good chance to qualify.

#GROUP B

China, Germany, South Africa, Spain.

Anyone but Germany would be a shock; the question is whether Spain are actually as good as I think they are.

Qualifying: Germany, Spain
Key Match: Spain v South Africa on 6/8. If Spain stumbles, the group opens up dramatically.

#GROUP C

Australia, Brazil, Italy, Jamaica

This is a rough group to figure out. Australia is clearly the class of the four, but Italy and Brazil are both teams full of talent located in countries where support for the women’s game is sketchy at best. That situation can lead to poor preparation, poor coaching, and poor performances. Or it can lead to a team bonding together and taking off. And then there’s narrative darling Jamaica.

Qualifying: Australia, Brazil, Jamaica
Key Match: Brazil v Jamaica on 6/9. I believe this game will provide the most information on how the group will shake out.

#GROUP D

Argentina, England, Japan, Scotland.

The question here is if Scotland can do enough to make the knockout round. I think they will.

Qualifying: England, Japan, Scotland
Key Match: Japan v Scotland on 6/14. Scotland should lose to England and beat Argentina: a win against Japan probably sees them through to the next round.

#GROUP E

Cameroon, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand.

This is the strongest group in my opinion, and should produce the best 3rd place team.

Qualifying: Netherlands, Canada, Cameroon
Key Match: Cameroon v New Zealand on 6/20. The final game of the group should decide 3rd place.

#GROUP F

Chile, Sweden, Thailand, USA.

Not much to say here: the USA is unlikely to be tested until the next round–against Spain if I’m correct above–at the earliest (I know, Sweden is good, but if they get a point against the USA, it will be a surprise).

Qualifying: USA, Sweden.
Key Match: Chile v Sweden on 6/11. If Chile has a shot at qualifying, they need to win their opening game.

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WWC2019: It’s Almost Time

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Gosh, it feels like 1200 days since we were here last …

I’m not sure what I plan to write about the World Cup about to kick off in France, but I’m sure I’ll probably match my output for WWC2015.

Somewhat random notes:

  • My player of the tournament from 2015, Norway’s Ada Hegerberg–who is probably the best player in the women’s game right now–will not be in France this summer due to an ongoing conflict with her country’s federation. I’ve heard two versions of the story, one where Hegerberg is making a principled stand about equality in Norway (a view that is complicated by the fact that it is one of the few countries where male and female players are paid equally); and the other where she is being selfish due to personal disagreements with the current coaching staff. Whatever the case, the tournament will be poorer for her absence.
    • A plug here for the team previews over at All White Kit, who note that Hegerberg’s absence is unlikely to really damage Norway, as their problems are more defensive than offensive. That said, I will miss seeing her run rampant.
  • My Under 23 Team from 2015 looks pretty good if I do say so myself. Of the countries that made it back to the 2019 tournament, every player I named made the squad, other than China’s Tang Jiali. From that group, I would look to Japan’s Mana Iwabuchi, Australia’s Samantha Kerr, and Canada’s Kadeisha Buchanan to star this year. Those three names are pretty obvious, though, so it’s not like that’s the product of shocking insight in any way.

If you read this last time around, you know I focus a lot on the talent that is moving into the full national team from the youth ranks. If you’re looking for under 23 talent likely to star this summer, I would look to

  • France’s Delphine Cascarino and Grace Geyoro. I expect Cascarino to see more of the field, but I love Geyoro as a midfield engine for France over the next dacade.
  • Nigeria has its usual parade of teenagers, but I would especially look for Rasheedat Ajibade to see time and find some success up front.
  • Norway’s Frida Maanum is an impressive midfield talent, and seems to have earned some trust from the national team, with 20 caps, meaning she has more caps than birthdays.
  • If I had to pick one youth player to breakout in France, it would be Germany’s Giulia Gwinn, who has dominated the youth competitions over the past few years. That said, Germany is–as always–stacked with talent, so I don’t know how much time Gwinn or fellow teens Lena Oberdorf and Klara Bühl will see.
  • South Africa’s Linda Motlhalo is still only 20. Yowzah.
  • Emerging from decades of neglect, the Spanish national team leans toward the younger side. I’ve always been a huge fan of Patricia Guijarro, Aitana Bonmati, and Nahikari Garcia, but 2023 may be their year to shine.
  • Mary Fowler will get a ton of press-and at 16, she should–but Ellie Carpenter, at all of 19, is more likely to make an impact. I am not the only player surprised at the exclusion of Alex Chidiac from the Australia squad.
  • Jamaica is a very hip pick this summer, and they will be led up front by Jody Brown (17) and Bunny Shaw, a veteran at the ripe old age of 22.
  • England has a very strong team, with its core firmly in their prime. This may limit the amount of time Georgia Stanway sees, but she will be around for a long time at this level.
  • 20 year old Erin Cuthbert is probably the key player for Scotland, and it’s exciting to see the national team willing to build around her.
  • Cameroon’s Raïssa Feudjio is still only 23, and a true force in midfield.
  • Canada continues to hand opportunities to youth, with the most exciting of them being Deanne Rose and Jordyn Huitema up front and Jessie Fleming in midfield.
  • Vivianne Miedema has 75 caps at 22 years of age, and she should pair with Jill Roord for Holland for a long, long time.

There are lots of other under-23 players on the rosters, with the usual dearth of information, especially on the non-European sides, and I would expect (like Jiali did in 2015) at least a few of those to impress, as well as a few of these to not see the field and/or be overmatched.

As an example, I am a big fan of Motlhalo from her season with the Dash, but she remains so much slighter of build than most players she faces, and sometimes her skill cannot overcome that difference. I can’t see her, for example, winning many balls from Lindsey Horan.

That feels like plenty for now! Group predictions coming up on Thursday!

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Reading Graphically: Five Graphic Novels & One Comic

Posted on May 31, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Another interlude between the novels …

Paul Kirchner‘s Hieronymus & Bosch is an amusing distraction, detailing the torments of a medieval ne’er do well (Hieronymus) and his toy duck (Bosch). While some of the inspiration is obvious from the names, there is significant comic inventiveness throughout. This is more a series of comics than it is a novel. Fun.

Renée Nault‘s adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale is gorgeous, and highly successful. The former is a testament to the richness of the painted tableaus and the use of color throughout. The latter speaks to a level of fidelity to the source material that is highly effective: it does–as it must–deviate from Atwood’s novel, but never by so much as to question its status. That is, this is not really an original work, it’s one artist’s translation of a great work into another medium. Still, it’s lovely and a shorter trip than re-reading the original novel.

Tillie Walden is one of the emerging stars of the form, and the attention paid to Spinning and The End of Summer is well deserved. This review covers two of her smaller works: i love this part (2015) and A City Inside (2016). Both are “one-shots:” thin explorations of a single theme or moment. While A City Inside is a strong exploration of the relationship we have to specific places, i love this part is amazing, a poignant and telling story of young love and discovery.

Every few years, a wordless story about dinosaurs emerges. Tadd Galusha‘s Cretaceous (2019) is the latest entry in the genre. It’s solid, and as they all are, well-researched and clearly also intended to increase our understanding of what these creatures were, according to best current research. So, feathers!

Finally, a recommendation for an ongoing comic: Garth Ennis‘ A Walk Through Hell is easily the best new comic I’ve come across in a long, long time. Terrifying, nightmarish, humanly compelling … it is a gripping and emotional roller coaster, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. The first five issues are available in a collection.

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Reading Well: Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Posted on May 25, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Lisa Halliday‘s Asymmetry arrived to much acclaim in 2018. It’s a novel in three parts, really two parts and a coda. The first part details a relationship between a young woman who works at a publishing house and an older writer of great significance; the second focuses on an Iraqi-American who is detained upon entry to England; and the third is a short interview with the author from the first part.

Much of the response to the novel has focused on the degree to which the first section is a thinly veiled retelling of Halliday’s own affair with Philip Roth, and then on the revelations–both explicit and more hinted at–in the final short coda.

That’s interesting to me, as it immediately forces consideration of the novel to expand beyond the words on the page: to what degree is the enjoyment of the opening, novella length chapter–and it is mightily enjoyable–due to the salacious sense of peering in on a (not so?) hidden side of a great American writing icon? To what degree are our reactions to the novel modified (enhanced or degraded) by our belief in its reality? And what does that mean for the other parts of the book?

At its core, Asymmetry is about, well, asymmetry: imbalances of power and attention in many contexts. The spring/winter love affair has some obvious dimensions (the economic differences, the differences in social and political power between them), but the young woman’s perspective holds the center as well: her agency is never, at least from her view, compromised in the relationship. As importantly, the writing–throughout, but especially in this first section–is delightful, lyrical, and surprising.

In the second section, the massive control of the immigration system overwhelms the individual being detained. But this part is as much about the detainee’s history–the moments in his life where he did and did not have agency, the choices that led him to leave one career for another, the seemingly random chance that determined life and death in Baghdad during wartime–as it is about his resignation to his lack of control over his fate at the airport.

If you follow the popular interpretation of the final section–which I’m trying hard not to spoil here–then the novel expands to also encompass questions of asymmetry between author and reader, and the work and its readers and critics.

An intriguing, engaging, and deeply nuanced novel. Strongly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The thematic echoes are never, ever “on the nose” in Asymmetry, yet they are present, and survive deeper exploration and thought. To the degree that is intentional, it is brilliant; to the degree it is innate, it reveals a wellspring of talent. Either is enviable.

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Reading Well: The Power by Naomi Alderman

Posted on May 17, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2016, Naomi Alderman‘s The Power attempts to answer a fundamental what-if: what if something happened to give women a physical advantage over men?

In this case, it’s a chemical added to the water supply in WWII that, over a generation or so, creates power in women similar to that in electric eels: the ability to generate an electric charge at will.

There is a framing device of a future several thousand years down the road, where an inverted society has evolved–one where women’s role in the birth process is a rationale for the increased violence and aggression of women over men, while men’s comparative weakness (turns out shooting lightning from your hands trumps brawn every time) makes them natural nurturers.

But the core of the novel covers the time from the first emergence of the ability through its impacts, focused on three primary characters: a young girl who emerges as the prophet of the movement, another whose abilities are stronger than anyone else’s, and a male journalist who covers the global events spawned by these abilities.

These characters–and others–are well constructed, and their fates matter, making the book successful as a page-turner. There are some issues with simplicity–for example, a women’s revolution in an Arab state is conceivable, but certainly neither simple nor inevitable, given the book’s assumptions–and the envisioned future could be more nuanced.

Perhaps the most creative details involve how the archaeology of the future misinterprets the relics of the past: the novel does a great job at underscoring how arbitrary our assumptions around sex and gender are and how easy a different frame leads to a different interpretation.

It’s all very neatly done, and given the attention the book got, probably in pre-production as a major motion picture as well.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Alderman does a really good job simplifying a narrative that is explicitly global to a story told through the eyes of small handful of characters. That’s necessary if you don’t want to write many thousand pages, labyrinthine fiction and, even if–as I do–you lean that way, remembering that there are more direct, concise alternatives is quite important.

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Reading Well: Silence is My Mother Tongue by Sulaiman Addonia

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{This post published early by mistake, so some of you may have seen it before. Apologies for the misclick.}

Sulaiman Addonia‘s Silence is My Mother Tongue (2018) tells the story of Eritrean refugees displaced into a camp in the Sudan. The novel is hard to categorize: it’s not a love story, despite it being a story of several loves, and its focus is far more on how life evolves in the refugee camp than on any part of the conflict that brought people there.

There is a lot of misdirection in the narrative: it opens with a chapter focused on what turns out to be a minor character, but one who observes life in the camp as if it were a movie being projected on a white sheet behind his hut, which is a pretty inventive and neat image/framing device. The true focus of the story are two siblings who have, in essence, traded their culturally approved gender roles. The sister is brilliant, strong-willed, and–before being sent to the camp–on her way to a level of academic success pointing towards medical school, an almost unheard of height for young Eritrean girls, even in the capital city of Asmara. Her brother is mute, delicate, and happiest in the strongly coded feminine cultural roles.

The success of this reverse mirroring is highest when Addonia is writing about the young woman, capturing at different points of the narrative, her insight, intelligence, and motivations with a clarity that is compelling and impressive. It is, predictably perhaps, at its weakest when he calls outright attention to their roles, sliding too far towards the tell side of the classic show, don’t tell dictum.

The gendered critique of the social order of the camp, and Eritrean/Ethiopian culture in general, is pointed and biting: the struggle of the sister to be more than an object of exchange, a thing to be moved around between men, dictates most of the major plot points. Her future is mirrored between the comparative behavior of a conservative midwife (conservative in the sense of traditional, seeking to preserve cultural traditions–including a thwarted attempt at genital cutting) and a prostitute in the camp are, which drift, again, perhaps towards being a bit too “on the nose.”

Still, there are images in Silence is My Mother Tongue that will stay with the reader for quite some time, and the voice of the young woman refuses to be silenced. Additionally, the sketch of the refugee camp, as a place of normalcy, of social structure, of conflicts that are solved through established community processes, is very much worth the read, especially as a counterweight to the usual media presentation of such spaces.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I love the sister’s voice, and think Addonia’s ability to inhabit a precocious teenage perspective is quite compelling. She is never trivialized or dumbed-down, while still retaining some of the age-appropriate impulsive recklessness.

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Reading Well: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Posted on April 28, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I had never heard of Shirley Jackson before, yes, Marlon James mentioned her (this is the last of the books I bought from James’ interview). But, evidently, many of us have read her, as the introduction claims that her short story, The Lottery, was at one point the most anthologized short story in the United States. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a short novel–probably properly a novella–from 1962.

This is one of the best written creepy, vaguely supernatural stories you’ll ever read … until the very end. Without giving much away, the setup is relatively clean: an aristocratic family lives on the outskirts of a town. The parents were poisoned under fairly suspicious circumstances, reducing the inhabitants of the “castle” to two young daughters and their paralyzed, addled uncle.

The daughters are the heroines of the story, and their relationship is amazingly sweet, even if it holds some very odd nooks and crannies. Their world is magical, in the best sense: meaning is held in everyday objects and in the natural world that surrounds the house, and it is all described with lyrically rich, highly evocative language.

On the other side, we have the villagers, a uniformly brutish and cruel lot who harass the daughters when they go into town, and who even delight at disasters that befall their family.

The story lost energy for me in its denouement, but the journey to get to that point is pretty fantastic: simultaneously heart-warming and deeply disturbed, sinister and sweet. Recommended.

{ It turns out (a) Haunting of Hill House, which I have not seen, was based on a Shirley Jackson story and (b) We Have Always Lived in the Castle is coming out as a film: here is the trailer. Knew neither of these things when I read the book. }

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There is a fluidity to Jackson’s writing that is astounding, an ability to ride the line between the fantastical and the mundane that continually surprises and engages the reader. It’s something attempt to emulate.

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Reading Well: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I think As Meat Loves Salt (2001) is another book that found its way into my life via an interview with Marlon James. He described Maria McCann‘s debut novel as compelling as a study in how to maintain sympathy for a protagonist that acts in some horrible ways.

As such, I expected the complexity of the main character, an imposing specimen of a man with, shall we say, ongoing anger issues. I didn’t expect it to be so meticulous in its historical recreation of 16th century England and, in some ways, As Meat Loves Salt could be read as a companion piece to Hillary Mantel‘s Wolf Hall (read before I started Reading Well). Wolf Hall is a better book, overall, but the two novels can certainly be seen as in conversation with each other: As Meat Loves Salt traces the life of a man caught up in the wars of the time, and then in an attempt to repossess land from the nobles resisting the monarchy.

The setting is incredibly fully realized, both in scope and detail, and maintains fidelity its epoch. Two examples: one, being slightly swarthy and dark-haired, the main character is often referred to as black or even Ethiopian, locating the novel shortly before the ideological notion of race had been fully created; and, two, there is a great minor discussion about a fossilized snail found in the middle of England, with theories of how the snail got there and how it turned to rock all based on Biblical foundations. Those examples are small, but they speak to how richly thick the narrative is.

And then there is the protagonist. It’s not rare in contemporary fiction to find examples of morally grey or unreliable narrators; what strikes me as a rarer accomplishment by McCann is creating a protagonist whose level of self-knowledge remains remarkably limited. You can, as a reader, see the internal conversation going off the rails, and long for the character to obtain the level of self-awareness needed to change their behavior … mostly to no avail.

It’s an interesting experience, as it fills the book with both hope and dread in equal measure, leaving it until the end to reveal which wins out.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The challenge of recreating a historical–or a totally fictional–setting is so, so difficult. McCann consistently makes such smart choices as to what to highlight and what to let be filled in by the reader’s imagination. It’s this magical mix of the smallest detail and the broadest brushstrokes, but when it’s done well, it’s so seamless and the process of slipping into the world goes unnoticed as it happens.

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Reading Well: Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Half-Blood Blues (2011) is Esi Edugyan‘s second novel. The bleakness of her debut, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne in no way prepared me for this book, which is as full of life as anything I’ve read in the past few years.

Moving between Germany and France in World War II and the early 1990s, the novel tells the story of a small ensemble of jazz musicians: the protagonist is a serviceable bass player and his childhood best friend an excellent drummer. And then there is the kid, a trumpet playing prodigy who is the propulsive force behind both the music and the action.

The earlier plot centers around attempts to escape the encroaching Nazi threat: first to find a way from Berlin to Paris, then, as France joins the conflict with disastrous results, from Paris to anywhere. The situation is complicated by the trumpet players German nationality, by a love interest, and by their being on the edge of recording some truly transformative music. The more contemporary scenes are driven by a journey to Germany for the debut of a documentary about the trumpet player, and a surprise trip to Poland.

There are two notable accomplishments in the writing. First, Edugyan captures a specifically male camaraderie in an utterly fantastic way: the slang, the rhythms, the flow between teasing and support, it is all simultaneously oblique and accessible and highly believable. It’s remarkably impressive.

Second, there is the music itself, which is the subject of the most lyrical moments in the novel. You may not hear Louis Armstrong or the kid the way Edugyan describes him, but you’ll see how the characters in the book do indeed hear it and, perhaps as importantly, you’ll see how that hearing impacts them throughout the novel.

After The Second Life of Samuel Tynes, I was unsure what Half-Blood Blues would hold. I was terrifically surprised, and Edugyan’s second novel is very highly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Two things. First, the conversational language, which is just fabulous. It is so hard to create a slang system and speech rhythm that is convincing and immediately comprehensible. I suspect Edugyan’s accomplishment is a mix of reasearch and inventive skill on her side, and I am left thinking about how to integrate that into my characters.

Second, I think the way she handles the primary love interest is really deft. The woman is not classically beautiful, the love is never fully reciprocal, and they remain in each other’s orbit throughout. Each part of that is handled with a clean, light, significantly mature touch.

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Reading Well: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I think I found Skippy Dies (2010), Paul Murray‘s second novel, through an interview with Marlon James.

The title describes the action of the opening chapter, which is an interesting structure: we know, immediately, that Skippy–the erstwhile protagonist–does indeed die. But we don’t know why or what led up to it, and the rest of the novel traces the intertwined narratives leading up to and following Skippy’s demise.

Skippy is a boarder at a moderately wealthy private school in Dublin; other major characters include his fellow classmates, a few teachers, and some young women from the neighboring girls’ school.

The themes are fairly predictable from the setting: the competitive, aggressive, and occasionally surprisingly sweet relationships of teenagers; moments when high school debauchery threatens to spill over into more serious criminality; the confusions and manipulations between love and lust; the disillusions of some teachers and the passions of others.

The story is all well done, and occasionally quite memorable. The cadre of teenage boys are especially well managed, as is the initial relationship between the lead teacher and his American girlfriend. Ultimately, though, what sets the novel apart is the revealed structure. This is not Dead Poets Society: there is no conquering moment here, no teenage triumphalism, no endearing life lesson. After all, Skippy dies.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Murray pulls together a lot of themes related to courage, truth, and conviction, ranging from moments of individual bravery and cowardice to the relationship of the generations in the novel to those that came before to the importance of the sins of the past for characters in the present. It’s all skillfully presented, without being overly obvious or didactic.

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