His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem. rating= 5

His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem. I give it a 5.

I have no idea how I've been able to read this thing in snips and snatches like I've done. you can read Things Fall Apart like that because the language is very simple, economical. the plot is not terribly complicated. etc. His Master's Voice is the same length, 200 pages, but it seemed much longer. this is due mostly because of how many ideas Lem packed into this book. is there anything he did not comment on or discuss here? also it seems a bit longer because the vocabulary is not "economical"; it is the vocabulary of a somewhat-genius mathematics professor (the character through which the story is told). the translator did a smashing job (see now I'm British)--- all the words seem exactly right. the language of the book is quite precise and powerful, as are the ideas presented and discussed. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

though it was written in 1968, it still comes across as original and thought-provoking with interesting social commentary thrown in for free. I can't help but like the main character, even if he is probably somebody I might not want to share a room with... although, we might get along supremely well; I guess it depends how we hit it off at first. maybe if I were really quiet he wouldn't call me an idiot behind my back. ;)

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. Rating = 5

from the back cover, which says it best:

A simple story of a 'strong man' whose life is dominated by fear and anger, Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.

The title is from W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

this is an amazing book. it is very simply told but the characters and the setting are very vivid. the ending is possibly one of the best endings of a book that I've ever read. it's only 200 pages, and you should read it. heck, it first published in the US in 1959 and still sells more than one hundred thousand copies a year---for good reason!

I give it a 5.

fun quote for those of us who are fond of translators ;) :

When they had all gathered, the white man began to speak to them. He spoke through an interpreter who was an Ibo man, though his dialect was different and harsh to the ears of Mbanta. Many people laughed at his dialect and the way he used words strangely. Instead of saying "myself" he always said "my buttocks." But he was a man of commanding presence and the clansmen listened to him. (pg. 144)

too funny :)

love, man'chi, and all that jazz---emotions and C.J.Cherryhs' Foreigner

-->StartFragment -->human and atevi relations --- an ill-fated continuous misunderstanding of behavior caused by the difference between love and man'chi?

I would say, not necessarily so.

(hey, some people document and study the "alien language" Ragi, some make Bren Cameron paperdolls complete with vintage wardrobe, and some make incredibly ornate message cylinders in order to be in compliance with tradition and the guild. me, I have no crafty abilities so I must rely on nerdiness alone! lol)

given: love is not man'chi, and man'chi is not love. and the Mospheirans might not understand what man'chi is or how it influences behavior, and the atevi in general might not understand love or how it influences behavior.

but ask the atevi to explain man'chi, or the humans to explain love, and who can answer? even those who experience the emotion have a hard time understanding it. recently I have been thinking more about emotions and what they are, really.

and here is something that I was not really aware of before: the idea that not even all *human* peoples experience the same emotions.

quote:My third predilection is a bias toward history. Not only do I think the history of thinking about emotions is fascinating and revealing, but I believe that the emotions themselves are historical. This means, first of all, that they are processes, not discrete forms of momentary experience. But it also means that emotions change over time, that the emotional experiences of one generation or one epoch or one culture are not necessarily the same as those of another. /quote

[source] [readings]
he actually says "let me finesse the question"

I can give an example, but for the moment suffice it to say that not all human cultures have all the same emotions (as identified by their emotional experiences) as the rest. sometimes a word from another language might be translated as "joy" but mean something more specific that just doesn't translate because we don't have that word or concept. rather like "schadenfreude". there's no word for that in English, although in this instance we do indeed understand that feeling, once you point it out. we just didn't have a name for it. but sometimes we don't have a name for an emotion because we don't experience it.

and even if we do have the same basic word "grief" or "anger" etc, that doesn't indicate that it means the same thing or implies the same feelings or experiences. this varies from culture to culture.

my point basically is that human beings are the same, physically, to a great extent: we don't have incredibly various brains from one to the next. and yet, based on culture, we can have profoundly different recognized emotions and/or awareness of emotional experiences.

these differences are learned, not innate.

based on that basic idea, if a human child were raised in atevi fashion by atevi, he'd probably turn out much more ateva-like. I'm not saying that he would automatically have man'chi or anything---and this is because maybe there is some fundamental unsurmountable difference in the ... er... working of atevi brains or glands or etc compared to human? this, I leave as unknowable---but I'm saying that by being enculturated by the atevi, the child would have emotional experiences shaped by atevi understanding, and therefore would understand and identify with the Ragi culture *and therefore the Ragi emotional experiences*.

and if an ateva child were raised by Mospheiran fashion by humans, vice versa.

now of course that implies that nobody would treat the said child as an outsider and therefore not part of the culture etc etc... it assumes a great deal, actually. but *if* it could be done, then the result would be that the child would not be completely confounded by the society they grew up in.

meaning that the misunderstandings between mospheiran humans and ragi atevi are primarily cultural, and have actually little to do with emotional differences by themselves, biological or no.

if humans adopted ragi culture, or if atevi adopted mospheiran culture, the differences between them would not seem so glaring. not that either side is ever likely to just up and forget their own culture to absorb an alien one... but perhaps over time if the two societies learn more about the other's culture, and if music/art/fashion and other cultural influences continue to flow back and forth across the strait, then the misunderstandings will be less and less.

so, the situation is not fated or doomed to eternal mind-boggling conflict.

(of course neither is any cross-cultural situation on our planet, and yet look how well we handle things here.

this is along the same lines, what I mean: http://www.sil.org:8090/silebr/2004/silebr2004-009

the point I was relying on is the emotional experiences of one generation or one epoch or one culture are not necessarily the same as those of another.


I was rather pushing one point of view on the whole emotion debate, but there is actually plenty of biological and/or neurological evidence that the more basic and more universally cross-cultural human emotions *are* innate, and not based on culture (except for how you deal with them). Paul Ekman esp has pushed this idea and the research behind it. http://www.paulekman.com/


I was kind of waiting for someone to bring that up. the entire field of the study of emotions has really picked up pace in recent times. affective science is the new cognitive science, they say. people have their ideas, their theses, their hypotheses, but the matter has not been settled yet, by any means.


people still argue over what an emtion is, much less how it comes about and if it varies from culture to culture or no.

in other words, I'm wishing I could spark any kind of conversation on the matter, but it seems hopeless lol

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. December 2006. rating: 5 (other stories in collection = 3,4)

I almost typed in "the yellow wallaby". hmm this should be very interesting.

first off, you must read The Yellow Wallpaper. it's only 20 pages and it's online here, very accessible. and it's about (a probably irretrievable) descent into madness. what more could you want?

I find myself comparing it to The Bell Jar. it's much shorter and even more swift and sure than The Bell Jar. also, TBJ ends with the character at least temporarily overcoming the problem (which might or might not be levenned out by the fact that everyone knows it's an autobiographical work and that Sylvia Plath did attempt suicide again, that time succeeding) while there is probably very little chance that the character in The Yellow Wallpaper, or the multiple characters that she becomes, ever manages to put things together again.

I like The Bell Jar, but I love The Yellow Wallpaper.

also I find myself comparing TYW to Fight Club. brill, that movie. primarily because it also handles the fracturing of the main character as sublty as the character himself perceives it. so, watch Fight Club, read The Yellow Wallpaper.

The Yellow Wallpaper = 5

ok. um. the other stories in the book are meant to be didactic pieces; ideas presented in the most palatable form. the utopian novel Herland is not meant to be 100% realistic (so don't give crap about the virgin births). it's just an avenue to display ideas. the other writings (treatises) including Women and Economics and Our Androcentric Culture are, basically, revolutionary feminism... or what was considered revolutionary feminism in the 1890s.

it's worth paying attention to the fact she wasn't necessarily pushing political emanicpation or sexual emacipation for women but rather economical emancipation. she makes very good sense and many of the changes that have come about between now and then in this quarter have been just that---women are more free to work and live and have families outside the then-traditional home; women are no longer absolutely dependent on their fathers/brothers/husbands for money and upkeep; women are outgrowing their role as manipulative seducers of men and as ravenous consumers of ridiculous petty pretty things such as feathered hats... although this has a long long way to go still. I rather agree with her on the old male-female economic relationship, in all ways, esp as encouraging materialism--- I have only one pair of shoes thank you; it's all I need! um if that made sense, let me know.

other writings are worth reading = 3, some more 4.

oh and she published her own magazine known as the Forerunner, which for some reason I kept thinking of as Foreigner... time to logoff now and go take a nap or something.

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol. November 2006. rating: 5

btw, Dead Souls = 5.

I commented about TBK saying that I wasn't used to authors directly addressing the reader, and wondered if that was Dostoevsky's style or that time period's style or what. well, Pushkin did it, and Gogol did it, so it wasn't just Dostoevsky. I'm not sure it is any better of a way to write a story, but I do tend to react to it. it's as if you start the book and it reads, "oh, there you are, dear reader; perhaps you have been mightily put upon in recent days that you are just now getting around to this humble text. no, no, don't let such trifling little things trouble your soul in the least. on the contrary, your kind attention has warmed the heart of this narrator overwhelmingly; why, where else on all of God's earth could there be found a more suitable, a more capable, a more endeavoring reader than yourself? come, come, let the two of us begin our adventure, quite as the two heroes in our story began theirs on such a wintry day..." [going on to tell a story about two heroes on a wintry day] ;)

Nikolai Gogol is grand at sarcasm, a marvel at satire, with a positively resplendent wit. of course he also wrote the play The Grand Inquisitor, and everyone's heard of that, and is quite aware of the nature of it, so I'm just pouring water into the ocean, I'm sure. one story of his I also have to track down is The Nose. about a lowly officer who wakes up missing his nose (no wound; it's just gone), and sets out looking for it, and when he finally does find it, it won't talk to him because even his own nose is of higher rank than he is. lol. this is my kind of author.

that nose story actually sounds about like a dream I had of my daughter... I dreamt I was helping her change her pants, and had to prompt her for every little motion. at one point I was lifting her leg up to help her step into her pants, and her leg just came off. no wound or anything. you know those cheap plastic babydolls whose arms and legs pop in and out? it was like that--- only it was a real leg, not plastic; it was actually her leg. it just popped out! I sat there staring at her leg, and she was apparently oblivious to the whole thing. in fact, she kept trying to walk off, and she kept falling over; and she didn't seem to notice anything as she just tried to walk off again. girl, you only have one leg! after I got my wits about me, I managed to pop it back in, and she walked off, oblivious, without her pants even. and I thought to myself, there is more going on with her than we know! lol

and that concludes my bookreport. :p

Xenos & Xenia in C.J.Cherryh's Foreigner series

this is really really basic, from Wikipedia. jotting it now because I want to discuss Foreigner re this concept later.

xenia (Greek) zen-ee-ah

Xenia (Greek ?e??a, xenía) is the Greek concept of hospitality and guest-host relations.

now that is from Wikipedia...

I am currently listening to

Iliad of Homer & Odyssey of Homer (Set)
(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 3000
Taught by Elizabeth Vandiver
Whitman College
Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin

which states (and I'm going with this definition, personally):

Xenia is usually translated "guest-host relationship." It is a reciprocal relationship between two xenoi—a word which means guest, host, stranger, friend, and foreigner. It is not based on friendship, but rather on obligation.

and it's interesting that when xenoi means friend, it does not infer affection or emotion, but more something rather like not-an-enemy...

re the Foreigner series? well, the atevi and humans are in a rather guest-host relationship there, aren't they? ;)

and our ever-eloquent and beguiling Bren is not unlike the masterful orator Odysseus, --> --> --> --> "Peer of Zeus in Counsel", while I'm at it... (but don't worry, I'm not going to start saying that Tatiseigi is Poseidon and Deana Hanks is Circe or anything! lol)

----

so if the greek Xenia (first vowel is schwah, so, zuh-NEE-ah) is a kind of guest-host relationship, and Xenos (zen-long O-s) means, guest, host, friend, stranger, and foreigner... well if you are a traveller and show up at a strange place for the night, you are a xenos. you are a stranger, a foreigner. but the person who lives in the house you stop at is also a xenos. he is a host. once you cross his threshold, you are a guest. and both of you are now friends; NOT in any kind of affectionate or fond way, not that at all. you are friends in the way that you are obligated to behave yourselves in proper manner as becomes guests and hosts and therefore are not enemies.

the host has an obligation to give the guest a meal and a bath and a bed for the night, and cannot even ask who they are until these basic needs are met. also, a guest has an obligation to the host; if the guest can, he is to give the host a gift. at the very least, the guest (or any of his relatives) is to provide the host (or any of his relatives) a place to stay if ever their roles are reversed. and the host also provides gifts to the guest when he leaves, including transportation and sustenance if necessary. very importantly, Xenia is reciprocal, generation after generation. once you enter into a guest-host relationship with someone, that relationship applies to all your relatives and descendants and all their relatives and descendants--- the benefits of Xenia are all the better reason to honor the code.

now, you could break the code of Xenia (see how Mr. Paris of Troy ran off with the wife of his host!), but if you do, then you've angered Zeus (and all the kin of the other side) and you are going to catch hell. or lightning bolts. or both. in short, there are consequences.

in the Odyssey, we see Penelope's suitors breaking (and spitting on) the codes of xenia, over and over this is stressed, and this is a justification given for Odysseus slaughtering them in the end. proper observance of xenia is shown by the Phaiakians (Nausicaa) towards Odysseus, by Nestor and by Menelaus to Telemachos. etc.

in Cherryh's Foreigner... humans show up, and with some would say reasonable excuse drop in on the atevi without so much as a "how do you do". however, this is not unlike the greek traveller who just appears on your doorstep and says "put me up for the night" with no explanation. the greek host is not all that upset by this behavior, and the atevi, while very puzzled, don't seem too alarmed either. the atevi agree to let the humans stay and even help them out a bit. that's pretty darn good xenia. you know if someone landed on our planet they'd end up at Abu Ghraib.

then the humans upset the balance, they go too far. part of it was a misunderstanding on the humans' part of what was expected of them. some of it was just wanton disregard (their use of machines to build and change the land). whatever the reason, it was a violation of xenia from the atevi point of view.

there ensued a war because of this violation of xenia.

it was resolved in the end by, very very generally speaking, humans vowing to be better xenoi. the humans got their own little place so as to avoid getting on their host's nerves (god knows we overstayed our initial welcome), and the humans promised to give gifts of technology etc not only to bring both societies to the same technological level and thus reduce tensions that way but also to honor the reciprocal relationship between guest and host.

thoughts?

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. November 2006. rating: 3.5

sorry I haven't read much lately. was listening to lectures on Russian literature. hard to read one book while actually studying others... and btw, Gogol finally got here, now that I'm done with the lectures. oh well. more on that later I'm sure lol.

"Heart of Darkness", Joseph Conrad. interesting.

Marlow is a seaman who, on an exploration impulse, secures captaincy of a fresh-water steamboat in the Congo, and embarks on a journey with the mission to find out what has happened to the Company Agent Kurtz, deep in the jungle interior.

it might sound familiar... Apocalypse Now.

based on the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates: "Coppola transformed 'Heart of Darkness' into a grotesque melodrama set in Vietnam in the waning years of the Vietnam War. In the role of Marlow, an American army officer is sent to Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret colonel who has set himself up, like Kurtz, as a murderous madman-god. Imaginative in concept and vivid in execution, Apocalypse Now is underminded by the ludicrous overacting of marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz, which neither he nor his director seems to have understood."

I had to do a college paper on Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, wish I still had that. dealt with assassins and everything ;)

but "Heart of Darkness" was written in 1902, based on Conrad's own 1890 trip up the Congo river, back when that part of Africa was personally owned by King Leopold II of Belgium. (and the character Kurtz was based on a man named Georges Antoine Klein, an employee of the Brussels-based trading company Societe Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo.)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

Leopold was eventually forced to hand over control of that land to the Belgian government because... well because out of all the atrocities being carried out on the African continent, the worst were in the "Congo Free State". a open letter about what was going on in the Congo Free State sparked one of the first ever international outcries on human rights in the world. conquering and colonial peoples were badly behaved all over Africa, but in the CFS this reached heights that even bothered other empirical sorts.

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

I'll leave Cambodia to Apocalypse Now, but the Congo Free State was definitely its own brand of hell.

this is the land (at that time, that piece of history so to speak) that Joseph Conrad apparently equates with the unknown regions of the human soul.

ouch... I mean, even I am not that jaded or cynical. I think I do have to agree with some of his critics that Conrad is an overly morbid fellow. I'm sure if I had seen what was going on and lived through that myself, I'd be quite macabre in my description of it as well. but I still don't think I'd equate it with the soul.

if it is a statement on the corruptibility of the human soul, then, yes. I agree completely.

if it is saying that in the unknown, untamed, unrealized parts of us, no matter who we are, in the heart of every man, lurks an overpowering and unredeemable evil... well then I'll have to be a dork and say, only the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men ;)

if it is a statement of the white empire-mongering soul or that element of humanity... eh well maybe I suppose; it still seems a bit dramatic to me. (and besides, if that bit I went on about re: Dostoevsky where all humanity is one soul were true, then that means if one human soul is like that, then all human souls are like that, because there's really just one soul anyway.)

it is strange to me that "Heart of Darkness" is famous for its symbolism (esp regarding the human soul), because when I read it I find it very heavy-handed with the symbolism, like trying to pound a square peg through a round hole, straight into our brains already. it doesn't seem to work for me.

maybe part of it is because I am not afraid of the dark. to me, darkness is not the place where monsters lurk, not even monsters who are really me in disguise. darkness is a quiet place, mostly, away from the judgement of society, where you can be yourself and not be condemned for it. that does not necessarily imply that what you really are is so hideous that you have to hide it away from the world. for me, it's closer to say that the world is so hideous that you have to hide yourself away from it.

(lol, now who's being dismal? well the truth is somewhere between the two extremes!)

now of course there has been (especially among pigment-impaired people from whose stock I am descended) a long-standing tradition of symbolism where white is purity and good and holy and black is evil and evil and evil. and dirtiness. so if you're going to be traditional about it, then okay I get it. but how many times are you going to mention it? it is the dominant theme of the book. not only darkness literally, but anything that is dark, which apparently includes every African alive. they are all evil. symbolically... okay. evil black people in an evil black dark in the evil black corners of your soul... hmmm.

the other dominant theme is Kurtz, who is also hammered into our brains. Marlon Brando might have overacted the part, but Willard (& any other characters) didn't go on and on and on and on about Kurtz all the way throughout the movie. so... Marlon might have overacted the role of Kurtz, but Marlow overnarrated the role of Kurtz. basically Kurtz is just a normal kind of guy ( and NOT the superhero genius poet whatever everyone thinks he is) who let power go to his head and then couldn't face the consequences.

I don't know if the prejudices (as well-formed and permanent as the strongest steel) in this book were Conrad's personally, or Marlow's as a representative of the time, but egads. white men are gods, black men are devils, and women are holy fools whose lives are constructed entirely of lies fed to them by men. some of it is symbolism, some not. some of it is reductionism, some not. and some of it might be a commentary against? his own society, but then again, maybe not.

I think it's interesting that the "Heart of Darkness" was told not from Marlow's perspective directly, but from the perspective of somebody listening to Marlow tell his tale. so this might possibly represent the author's removal from Marlow's character? I wonder if anyone ever asked him if Marlow's character in "Heart of Darkness" was meant to be him, or a another real person, or a combination of the two, or what...

really, Marlow (as well as all the other characters) was just as guilty and depraved as Kurtz--- Marlow might not have beaten anybody or killed anybody etc directly, but all around him was the starkest hell, and he never even questioned it. he never tried to help the dying or tried to ease the suffering of the enslaved... instead he cursed them and hated them and then worshipped the accountant who dressed neatly and wore cologne in all this chaos.

from my point of view, the dark, the black, was not the evil at all. quite the opposite, all the way through the book.*** more in next post

I wonder if he saw it that way, or meant it that way, even. eh probably not, but it is much more fitting.

Kurtz' mourning fiancee was really pathetic... this maybe is due to Conrad's views on women? or maybe he was making a statement about the absurdity of it all?

Marlow's "loyalty"... to this white devil, Kurtz . ironic, at least. when he sees Kurtz and hears Kurtz all around him in the civilized town, in the street, in the door, at the fiancee's house... fitting, in an ironic way. not disturbing the way that it seems to be meant though.

the horror, the horror. ;)

I guess it would be a 3.5? not sure. it's hard to rate such a novella. it is written in the style of the 1890's as well. I still think the imagery is entirely overdone and the wording is heavy-handed and grandiose. only 100 pages though.

----

from my point of view, the dark, the black, was not the evil at all. quite the opposite, all the way through the book.*** more in next post

regardless of how Conrad meant his symbolism (I'm pretty sure he meant it the way it seemed; dark=evil and all), this is a much more profound book if you read it

from a Transcendental point of view.

I will try to come back to this and fill it out more when possible; I wanted to get the idea down while I had the right words and before I left to buy bananas. ;)

but the main jist of it is--- read "Heart of Darkness" as a comment on the invertedness of the real order of things, an ironic judgement of the situation. see how all that darkness is emphasized as evil, and see men dying and degraded with not a thought, and see how the wildness of it all is portrayed as madness and chaos and terror, etc---- while keeping in your own mind an emphasis on the divine in nature and of the pristine beauty of untouched lands, on the value of the individual and the inherent worth of people and personal intuition, and on belief in a spiritual reality that might transcend one's own sensory experience to provide a more useful guide for daily living than is possible from purely empirical and logical reasoning.

in short, turn it on its head.

I can't help it. I grew up with Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Whalt Witman, Thoreau, Emerson, you get the idea.

I'm not sure we can classify Emily Dickinson as an optimist, per se... she surely wrote about Death an amazing lot, but when she did it, it was truer and not as dismally shrouded as Joseph Conrad's portrayals.

Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela (4) & No Future without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu... comment. Oct 2006.

(finally did a full review of No Future Without Forgiveness; please read)

also I finished Long Walk to Freedom (finally, after many many interruptions). I think I am going to read Desmond Tutu's book and a couple of others before I blog a review though. it's hard to review an autobiography, because it's almost like you're reviewing the man and his actions too. well, on one hand, you should, but as far as a literary review goes, you shouldn't. I want to try and avoid that if I can, so I'll put it off a while. I recommend it though. I will probably still end up giving it a 4 or 5. anybody could read this; very unpretentious and direct.

---

I think that Mandela's book is very readable, and without trying to deal with the actual subject matter of the book, I give it a 4.


I started Tutu's book but he is hard to read. and then the subject matter is confessions of torture. I had to forgo it--- it's still waiting on the bookshelf.

quite different in style from Mandela's work. you can tell that Mandela was/is a lawyer and Tutu was/is a clergyman. and then this book is about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after it became free, while the last book was about ANC's struggle before the country was free.

I am liking this idea of ubuntu. my humanity is inextricably bound up in your humanity. this makes a lot of sense to me, and may ultimately be the reason why I can't just bring myself to go live in a tree and let the world handle its own affairs. (for someone who is so independent of society, I sure do get upset by things that happen to other people. and just the fact that I've got a blog really gives me away I guess.)

I am also thinking that just coming forth and confessing to all your sins (or whatever you want to call them; transgressions, crimes, etc) is a kind of purgatory in itself. a class of hell all its own.

just think: if you actually had to come to terms with all the things you've done.. if you couldn't hide behind that image you have of yourself, but instead had to realize what you really are and what you really are capable of... who wouldn't break down? even if you hadn't murdered anyone or destroyed any villages or pillaged and plundered or anything like that... there would still be enough to break even the strongest sense of pride.

maybe the afterlife has its own Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. on the day of Judgement, you stand before God (and whoever else you believe in), and if you voluntarily confess all your sins in all their details, then you are immediately granted amnesty and allowed into heaven. if you try to hold anything back, or claim that you've done nothing wrong, or claim that what you did wasn't your fault, then instead of amnesty, you receive a trial. and omnipotent all-knowing judges have no derth of evidence to bring forth. you are therefore summarily convicted of your crimes and presented with whatever sentence God et al bestows upon you.

don't you like how I have that all worked out?

well I guess that would be one way of doing it, but don't think that I'm promoting Archbishop Tutu to god or anything. just the usual mulling things over and seeing if any interesting ideas come up.

time to go to bed

The 13-1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, Walter Moers. October 2006. rating: 3 or 4 or 5.

well, anyway. today arrived three books, including Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) and No Future Without Forgiveness (Desmond Tutu). I haven't picked either up yet. and really, it's only their bad luck to have shipped with The 13-1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear. I just had to read that one first!

"Equal parts J.K. Rowlings, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein"... how could I possibly resist that? is there a more powerful combination in the universe?

It really is quite easy to picture a square yard of multidimensional space--- provided you have seven brains.

Simply picture a train travelling through a black hole with a candle on its roof while you yourself, with a candle on your head, are standing on Mars and winding a clock precisely one yard in diameter, and while an owl, which also has a candle on its head and is travelling in the opposite direction to the train at the speed of light, is flying through a tunnel in the process of being swallowed by another black hole with a candle on its head [if you can imagine a black hole with a candle on its head, though for that you will require at least four brains]. Join up the four points at which the candles are burning, using a coloured pencil, and you'll have one square yard of multidimensional space. You will also, coincidentally, be able to tell the time on Mars by the clock, even in the dark, because---of course---you've got a candle on your head.

page 256

if I ever wrote my autobiography, it might sound a lot like The 13-1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear. not that it would start out with my first memory being in a nutshell floating in an ocean. (though that nutshell thing would explain a lot in my case.) but it would probably be just as nonsensical (one could only hope as entertaining).

Moers' writing style is indeed much like Douglas Adams', and employs abundant creative phrasing (woodpecker Morse) and analogy (I had eyesight as keen as an eagle looking through an electron microscope), and he does know how to go on about something for comedic effect (I thought poor Bluebear was trying to dig a hole in my yard instead of the Demerara Desert on page 309). one of my favorite pages is # 238, on which is only written the word

Boom!

I love this book.

however.

then I got to page 445. Atlantis. Bluebear's 12th life. well the first eleven were great. Atlantis lacked quite a lot in my opinion. perhaps it was when he started listing all the weird creatures that lived there. a short list is okay. a catalogue is too much. for me. and then when the narrative started up again, it was missing something. part of it was the same great stuff, but there was too much extrapolation and the whole congladiator thing was extremely overdone. yes, I get it, he was kind of parodying the book in the book. but it just wasn't done well, or maybe it only worked in German? or maybe I'm a killjoy. whatever. didn't work for me.

the rest of the book (after Atlantis, which was only one chapter, one life, but lasted almost 200 pages) managed to get back on track, but the rhythm was off and it wasn't the same as the beginning of the book up til Atlantis.

sigh.

I recommend skipping that middle part.

well, the first 445 pages are a flat-out 5. then the next 200ish pages are a 1. then the last 80 pages are a 3.

so overall that would be a 3. if you skipped Atlantis, then you get a rating of 4 (and it might be higher if your concentration has not lagged due to Atlantis, hard to tell).

all that said, it is an amazing book. I still do recommend it. but I'm a bit sillied out now and really ready for Nelson Mandela...

Brothers of Earth, C.J.Cherryh. September 2006. rating: 3

what have I been doing? well I don't remember. I recently read Brothers of Earth; one of the very first works by C. J. Cherryh back in 1976. it is definitely recognizable as C.J. Cherryh's work, and um it is also recognizable as an early work. her plot concepts and worldbuilding skills show right away, but her complex and brilliant character development is not there yet. at least not in the way that I have come to expect from C.J. Cherryh. and her characterization is what I love best about her work, so, while Brothers of Earth was still a good read, I'd give it a 3.

it was jerky and a bit hard to follow and goodness the human character seemed to be outraged or offended at everything, and I didn't know why. all this is, of course, not a problem in her later works. she was good to start with but she's gotten a lot better ;)

and hey, I went straight from reading The Brothers Karamazov to reading Brothers of Earth. hmmm maybe I should take a break and read something about Sisters too! :p

The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky. September 2006. rating: 5

I really don't remember much of Crime and Punishment, read so long ago in my senior year of high school I think... at the time I was also being tested on The Red Badge of Courage and The Ilyad and Hamlet and Treasure Island, all at the same time! so I only remember thinking how Crime and Punishment was in some way like Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart... and I'm not 100% sure where I was going with that...

I'll have to read it again.

in a way though, I guess you could say that TBK is my first real exposure to Dostoevsky. they say TBK is crowning achievement. he certainly is very skilled at novel-building... though, I've never read a story where the author addresses the reader in the same way. as if the author is telling you the story over a cup of tea or something: and so this character said this and you should have heard what was going on in that character's head which of course lead to the incredibly unexpected turn of events that I'll get to in the next chapter...

I don't know if that is trademark of only Dostoevsky, or 19th century writers, or Russian novelists... it works well though...

and yes he goes on about religion and the eternal questions of man, etc, which might get a little tedious seeing as how it could easily turn into philosophical drivel, but he has such passion and wit about him (or his characters do, I should say) and that draws me in even further. I don't know if it is my limited understanding of the Russian people, because obviously I've not been there yet and the Russian friends I had in college never sat me down and painted a picture for me, but knowing the history and from the literature I read, it does not seem at all uncommon for Russians to be long-suffering and yet passionate, intellectual and realistic and yet have a profound respect for the mysterious, strong and proud and yet just as eagerly generous and mild.

maybe I read too many novels.

maybe indeed it's just these idealized characters who are like that. well but I'm like that; I have that fugue in me. that is part of my interminable amorphousness, going from one side of the duality to the other, encompassing both extremes, often expressing them both at the same time or in sequence, and since there are of course more than two sides to things (don't know why people tend to think in terms of just duality), actually running the gamut of the entire spectrum, as I strive to express who I am and find out where the truth really lies. fuguing probably only means that when I use the word.

and yes I said maybe I read too many novels. ;) that sounded entirely too dramatic but hopefully you get the idea.

hmmm maybe I could blame it on being pisces or water element. or a Chinese fire dragon. or the fact that I'm both. lots of steam there lol. well I'm being rather silly now...

anyway I can follow these brothers, I know what it's like to talk like that or feel like that (to some extent--- I've never become a monk or fallen in love with the same person as my father!) and so that is one reason that I enjoyed the book.

but the characters are so very real (the men more than the women, but he is a male author and he actually did very well by not overstepping bounds there), the plot is fantastically complicated, the setting is real enough to me although ironically I kept having to remind myself that it was Russia and winter. the side stories or sub-stories are just as interesting and revealing as the main story. one of the reasons the characters are so real is that he worked himself into the story, in a way: the father is also named Fyodor, the servant Paul (Smerdyakov) is epileptic (like Dostoevsky), Dmitry (Mitya) faces hard labor in Siberia (as Dostoevsky actually *did*), Ivan is the realist that Dostoevsky was in his early life, Alexei (Alyosha) is the more religous person that Dostoevsky turned out to be later in life, etc... and the court scene, brief as it is (meaning, only one day? that is truly foreign lol) is ever so much more realistic than some I've read and certainly the outcome is more true (specifically thinking of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, where the plot just magically resolves itself the way the author wanted it to...) bravo all around!

I give it a 5.

it does help *Immensely* to know the history of that period (1890's) because this is the backdrop to the story, since it is a realistic portrayal of the times. you can get by without it, but it wouldn't have meant as much to me that way... I'd have missed too much...

and yes he is rather long-winded about some things, but in an engaging way. I have to quote some passages since I liked them so much:

"What I said was pretty stupid, but..." [Alyosha]
"Yes, that 'but' is just the thing!" Ivan cried. "I want you to know, novice, that absurdity is very much needed on this earth of ours. Indeed, the whole universe is founded on absurdity, and, perhaps, without absurdity there would be nothing at all..." - 293

I tell you, the old doctor who could cure you of every illness has all but vanished and you find nothing but specialists these days, and they even advertise in the newspapers. If you have something the matter with your nose, for instance, they'll send you to Paris, where, they say, is the foremost nose specialist in Europe. So you go to Paris. The specialist looks inside your nose and announces: "Well, all right, I'll take care of your right nostril, but I really don't handle left nostrils; for that you'll have to go to Vienna where there's a great left-nostril specialist. He'll look into it when we've finished here." -771

"But now we are either horrified at what we see or we pretend we are horrified, while in reality we relish the spectacle, as connoiseeurs of strong and ecentric sensations that rouse us from our cynical and lazy apathy; or else we are like little children who wave off frightening apparitions, bury their faces in their pillows, and wait until the frightening phantoms are gone, so that they can quickly forget them in their games and cheerful laughter." -- 836

[this last passage, spoken by the prosecutor, was belittled by the defense... but I think it has a lot of truth in it even today. I don't think it really applied to the case as much as the prosecutor thought, but it strikes me because of a personal issue.... and it is not as simple as that, there are not only the two or three sides to it--- cruelly enjoying the problem, hiding fearfully from the problem, or standing up bravely to the problem---but really people tend to act much like that when faced with a tough situation. blatant, uncaring, indifferent apathy is second only to pretend-everything-is-great denial which is its own kind of apathy because the problem is right there to see and people choose to ignore its existence. actually Doing Something about a problem seems to require a herculean bravado, or that's what people would have you think.]

and I'm sure that's all you want to hear about that.

okay, one more now to lighten the mood again:

"I'd greatly appreciate it, Kartashov, if you'd spare us your asinine remarks when no one has asked your opinion, or, for that matter, is even aware that you exist!" Kolya snapped at the boy, who turned beet-red but did not dare to answer. --- 933

yeah, you were probably thinking something much the same when I started to get up on my soapbox a couple of lines before lol.

again, I liked it... I'd like to study it again later. maybe on subsequent readings I could get a little more scholarly in my remarks/interpretations. but I just wanted to read it innocently at least once.

oh and in the back of the book, you know where the publishers conveniently list other books you can order, they mentioned The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman. I read that ages and ages ago, as a short story in the back of my... sophomore year? junior year?... high school literature book. it made quite an impression... at one point I jokingly wrote a story (long gone) involving a ship named The Yellow Wallpaper lol. I have to track down that book and see if I still like it after all this time...

How To Talk To Anyone, Leil Lowndes. September 2006. rating: 1

reading How to Talk to Anyone. although can I just say... the book seems to be designed to turn you into a people magnet, propelled to the top rungs of business and society by your mesmerized fans. or: it's got such a very strong western capitalist assumption there.

I do not want to be a business mogol or a pop idol of any kind. the very idea of throngs of people giving me their undivided attention and wanting to be as near to me as possible is enough to make me break into a cold sweat. no, no, no. I just want to be left alone. I'd like to be able to talk to people in such a way that conveys my interest in them as individuals, my validation of them so to speak, but clearly and politely defines my personal boundaries, and leaves us both feeling okay about that. does that make sense?

I don't want to meet loads and loads of people and surround myself with these new friends. I don't have that kind of energy--- I am an introvert, and draw energy from my (infrequent but precious) quiet times alone. crowds drain me, even crowds of friends, and how in the world would I ever be able to keep all the birthdays straight or who's interested in what? What I want is to be able to better relate to the people I *already* come into contact with, at the supermarket or on the airplane or whatever, the people that I'll probably never see again. I'd like there to be less awkward pauses and unfortunate misunderstandings.

Hell, I know that if you stand up straight and look people in the eye, etc, that helps. But I'd especially like to know how, when I'm so rundown and world-weary and would like nothing else better than to go back to bed but I have to buy diapers because we are completely out, when I can't possibly stand up straighter and there is no way I'm going to go around all chipper with a big 50s grin on my face and look everyone in the eye, how I could still manage to come across as just a tired person and not, as often seems to be the case, an addict or purposefully rude.

the book is obviously meant to cater to the aspiring socialite, but there do seem to be ideas in the book that I can use to my purpose. I esp like the idea of the whatzit. and I'm only 40 or so pages in, so I have hope. I guess maybe I'm reacting a bit because it seems part of the American cultural expectations for everyone to want to be the center of attention with large personal social networks (aka, an aspiring socialite) (esp women), and if you don't fit that, then there is something wrong with you. makes me feel a bit grumpy about the whole situation lol.

I need a book with mostly the same ideas, but presented in a different style. maybe: how an introvert can survive in an extroverted world. no, wait, I have a better title: Oh, Extroverted World!

---

When you arrive at the gathering, stop dramatically in the doorway. Then s-l-o-w-l-y survey the situation. Let your eyes travel back and forth like a SWAT team ready in a heartbeat to wipe out anything that moves.

page 273, How to Talk to Anyone, Leil Lowndes

ok, I have to backtrack here. there is an inescapable mindset to this book, and it's more than culture-expects-you-to-be-aspiring-socialite-extrovert.

it is culture-expects-you-to-be-pitiless-mercenary-tyrant.

so, you've made it to the party... is anything moving? WIPE IT OUT!!!

apparently all is fair in love and war, and that's all we are interested in anyway. everything is undercover, or forceful, or powerful, or strategic, or treacherous... you're scrutinizing the prospects, or tracking "the tiniest details of your conversation partners' lives." the idioms are all about grenades, bombs, artillery, weaponry, police chases, hunting, archery, heroes, jungles, giant jungle cats, claws, fangs, swords, criminal trials, etc, etc, etc, and let's not forget... The Great Scorecard in the Sky.

The penalty for not keeping your eye on The Great Scorecard in the Sky is to be thrown out of the game. Permanently. (p. 339)

and there are just too many eyeball references. not just eyes, or looking, or paying attention, or noticing, or gazing, (although plenty of what I would consider to be outright staring)... but eyeBalls and eyeballing. who talks about eyeballs that much? makes me think of how people put giant eyeballs in a movie (especially a close-up with freaky looking lashes) to make it scary or intense.

together with all the other imagery, I start to wonder if the woman is from Mordor.

seriously.

I didn't really learn anything new, but then again, I was already perfectly familiar with the rules of being an evil overlord. there are some good tips in there, mostly about appearing to be polite even when you are using someone for your own purposes, but I'm going to give her points for at least halfway encouraging common decency, even if it is as a deceptive ploy.

but then she turns right around and advocates lying to people in numerous ways, or pretending to befriend them so you can use them to do favors for you. I mean, the woman advocates acting like a politician lol. and the stories she tells about her "friends" in the book... geez, her concept of friend is not the same as mine! if anyone said things like that about me in a public venue, I would relieve them of said "friend" status once and for all. that is not how you treat a friend. (Now to illustrate how NOT to act in a certain situation, take the instance where my friend Jill completely flubbed up the most important corporate deal of her career. While I will not actually let Jill know where she made her mistakes, I will regale you with every embarassing detail...)

man, if I didn't already want to be a tree, this would more than do it.

>tangentThe 48 Laws of Power by Brian Greene. it is a historical perspective, looking at how people gained, lost, or used power, with stories. it is not saying that you should copy any of their ploys, however; it is just a review of sorts. >tangent<

not to deal too harshly with the author, she comes by it honestly. it seems everything in American culture is set up as some kind of fight or debate or opposing duality (black/white, beautiful/ugly, righteous/villanous) duking it out. recommended reading on the subject: The Argument Culture, Deborah Tannen, Ph.D. she also had an article about Fighting For Our Lives in Anthropology 06/07.

I *do* like the idea of the whatsit. and I do know that using "you" and "we" in certain ways does help relations. and I know that parroting works, if only because I knew someone who parroted in every single conversation we ever had. (I also know that that gets old ReaL quick, and you'll have to do better than that eventually! lol)

ah, I'm probably just old and jaded. that's my problem.

but, in any case--- this is NOT "how to talk to anyone". it's certainly not how you should talk to my grandmother or my next door neighbor etc. it's nothing like anything I could ever use in *MY* real life. therefore I give it a 1.

Wicked, Gregory Maguire. August 2006. comment on female characters by male authors.

by Gregory Maguire

I liked it, quite a lot. but it is nothing like the musical! the musical is much better.

(beware the spoilers)

but.

is it just me, really? I am getting to the point where I can't stand to read a book where the main character is a woman... if it's written by a man. I know that there are a lot of "themes" in this book and symbolism.. and it sounds like Oz is Britain in the Middle Ages, the thinking is very similar. but more than that... it's more than that.

what's this about men having hot temper and women having cold temper and the only way Elphaba had both was because she was some sort of hybrid freak? I'm sorry but I guess I'm a hybrid hermaphroditic freak too because my temper can be very hot and very cold, both. as can my daughter's and then of course I've seen it in my son too... am I just imagining things?

now I will never be able to really see the man's point of view in this universe, I mean, not completely, because I am not a man. but much of this story reads like a freakin sexual fantasy. women, do your 7 or 9 year old children fondly handle your nipples and regard them as pets? because mine sure as hell do not! what the fax is that all about? that is just wrong.

and I nursed each of my kids for two years so they know what those things are for ;)

women, do you get hot while you're working and therefore take all your clothes off? because I sure as hell do not! I don't do the gardening and the housework in the buff thank you. I don't know a single woman who would remove all her clothes because she is hot. men seem to think this is what a woman would do. they want to think this. but MEN are the ones who peel their shirts off when they get hot mowing the yard or um anything. When I get hot and oh darn I stay hot! I might roll up my sleeves, but that's all sorry no show here. I don't care if I'm the only person on the planet, I am not going to take all my clothes off and prance around just because I'm hot. when I'm done, I'll take a bath. that's it. problem solved.

do any of you women walk around naked or half-naked (topless) at all, unless it's on the way to/from the bath or bed or the laundry room? because all the male authors I've ever read think that we walk around nude ALL THE LIVELONG DAY.

and then there's the constant wanting sex. how delightful it must be to come back exhausted from working all morning in the fields to find a needy lover who won't let you resist him. MEN want to think this is what women want! I'll tell you what women want. they want the man to get off his lazy ass and go help work in the fields, and if she is in the mood later, then fine, but if she is exhausted, HELLO she is EXHAUSTED and she needs some sleep! she is not your property to do with however you please! she does not get a thrill thinking that you will disregard her or treat her like a slave. this is a man's fantasy. it is a woman's nightmare.

it's just not realistic, even for a green witch and the munchkins and other females in OZ.

I am so fed up with it. does no one else feel this way? am I a freak? is this really what all you other women are thinking all the time? because if so then I'm an alien and I want to go home.

It was a GREAT book other than that! there are a million great things to say about it. but I will not read it again, nor will I read the sequels or related books. I don't have the patience for this.

in fact I am just not going to read any more male-authored stories involving female heroines. I'm going to read everything else first. then and only then will I give someone else a try. surely I'll never get that desperate, right?

I have no patience for this, I really just don't. I always feel so FREAKED OUT. this is not supposed to be a romance novel. I know sex sells but at least make it realistic!

My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult. August 2006. comment

have you read this? it's been a year or so for me. somebody brought it up, so I thought I'd share a comment...

Review:
Adult/High School - Anna was genetically engineered to be a perfect match for her cancer-ridden older sister. Since birth, the 13-year-old has donated platelets, blood, her umbilical cord, and bone marrow as part of her family's struggle to lengthen Kate's life. Anna is now being considered as a kidney donor in a last-ditch attempt to save her 16-year-old sister. As this compelling story opens, Anna has hired a lawyer to represent her in a medical emancipation suit to allow her to have control over her own body. Picoult skillfully relates the ensuing drama from the points of view of the parents; Anna; Cambell, the self-absorbed lawyer; Julia, the court-appointed guardian ad litem; and Jesse, the troubled oldest child in the family. Everyone's quandary is explicated and each of the characters is fully developed. There seems to be no easy answer, and readers are likely to be sympathetic to all sides of the case. This is a real page-turner and frighteningly thought-provoking. The story shows evidence of thorough research and the unexpected twist at the end will surprise almost everyone. The novel does not answer many questions, but it sure raises some and will have teens thinking about possible answers long after they have finished the book. - Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA

I posted this once and it disappeared. :( I hope that was not indicative of its worthiness!

The ending of My Sister's Keeper... blah. really that just seemed too convenient for me. if that *hadn't* happened that way... things would have been a lot more complicated and harder to deal with. it also would have been more realistic. the right thing to do is often messy and strenuous and doesn't leave you feeling satisfied or even assured that you *have* done the right thing at all.

if it were a true story (which it is Not), then I could be inclined to accept the ending, since that's what really happened, as a kind of cosmic statement that Anna's purpose in life was to help Kate and you can't escape your fate. or something like that. but it is not a true story, it is a novel, and instead I am left thinking that Jodi Picoult just wanted to wrap things up already and start another project.

also I will never understand the mother in My Sister's Keeper. to me she seems obsessed to the point of heartlessness. it has gone beyond caring for her one daughter, to the point of forfeiting the well-being of her other daughter and son and even Kate herself, not to mention the family peace, just for the completely unrealistic hope of "fixing" what is wrong with Kate... assuming that if you fix that one problem, then everything (Jesse, Anna, Kate, the family dynamics) will heave a sigh of relief and fall back into proper order, and years of being pushed aside or used without permission or carrying a burden that is far too heavy will leave no trace whatsoever. I do not see this as a act of motherly love at all, although that is what it started out being.

quite frankly she risked Anna's life to save Kate's life--- but they both could have died from complications (surgery is not all magical as it is often portrayed), and then she would have been left with no daughters, a son who she doesn't even know and who doesn't feel like he has ever been important to her, and a husband who felt pushed out of the picture as well. in short, nothing.

she risked everything for her child, but really she risked her other children (who are just as important!) and her entire family as well.

obsession.

it is not about her love for her child anymore, it is about her thinking that she should be able to fix things, she should be able to make things all better because she is a mom, and losing all sight of what is important in trying to do so.

maybe it just strikes a nerve with me, because I know of mothers like this who are on a crusade to save their autistic child. they give up their jobs, their homes, their other children, their husbands, their friends and family, pursuing some off-chance that this new research has uncovered the miracle they've been looking for. and after years of this, living from one crisis, one miracle, to the next, they end up with nothing, alone with a grown child who is still very much autistic and never has been understood.

course autism is very different from cancer, but in this case what I mean is that every operation, every treatment was supposed to be The One. and when it isn't, then the *next* one will be. but none of them are Guaranteed to be. and this is a reality that the mother (in the book) could never accept. she's really damn lucky that she never had to, in the end.

sorry people, sometimes humans can't fix things and sometimes things don't work out in the end, no matter how hard you try.

ah but I am a very jaded soul ;)

but I thought the side story of Anna's defense lawyer was very interesting...

American Gods, Neil Gaiman. July 2006. rating: 4

As I read American Gods, I kept having this feeling... this seems *so* familiar... what does this remind me of?!? finally I could put my finger on it. David Brin!

David Brin has a book out called The River of Time, which is a collection of short stories. one is called The Loom of Thessaly, and features the three Fates of Greek/Roman mythology in a modern world. one story, I forget the name of it, runs with the unlikely conspiracy theory that the Nazis ran the death camps just to conjure up the gods of the past (via massive sacrifice of people and blood). they were apparently successful, and the Allied forces then had to fight not only Hitler but also Thor and the whole lot. well we did get Loki on our side. he's always the wildcard, isn't he? ;)

quite obviously, that is not the plot of American Gods! however, the premise (of mythology meets the modern world) is very similar, and--- it's been a while since I read the River of time, but I think still--- it's similar on more levels. maybe the style. Neil Gaiman is a talented writer.

some books I stop and stare at the pages for a moment, and read a particular sentence over and over, mouthing it in my head, and it's because I have to go look up words like cinereous and heterodyning (um, yeah, that would be from Grass!). some books, I stop and stare at the pages for a moment, and read a particular sentence over and over, mouthing it in my head, and it's because the writing is so... spot on. the words just resonate in a certain way... the sentence is not a scrabbling of marks on the page anymore; it's a spell. (spelling out the letters on the page, same root word as casting a spell). I found myself doing that several times with American Gods.

I enjoyed this book. it had some very nice twists and surprises (that actually surprised me a bit) in it. and I will probably read it again, and when I do, I expect that I will realize things I didn't realize this time, so I expect to enjoy it the second and maybe third time around. course there are things in the book that I could do without, but I am the human nerve ending. I'm the one who, as a child, when my mom asked why I couldn't sleep, replied, "The stars are making too much noise." and really, the parts I could do without, they are the most human parts of all.

I enjoyed the subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) mythology in American Gods. despite what one might have thought about the Big Fish/Life of Pi post (god myspace is so slow), I do love made-up or embellished stories. ---why else would I read so many novels? (I think that truth is just as rewarding and more mysterious, though.)--- I do have a soft spot for myths. primarily myths that are told as myths, and don't try to be something else, kernel of truth in them or no. myths are their own kind of story, their own kind of power. they are to be valued for what they are. --- (as truth is to be valued for what it is, and really, you should consider them separately... course we could get started about What is truth? and that would lead us to phenomenology etc but I'll save Merleau-Ponty for later.)[/tangent]

there are many ideas presented in the book, each to which I could dedicate a full post discussing. (perhaps later?) one of them (the most basic) is not unlike the premise of The Never Ending Story ;) people call things into being by believing in them, and loss of that belief means the loss of those conjured things (heroes, gods, etc) diminish and finally disappear. although American Gods goes further with the idea:

"People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do . They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen."
[page 536]

Gaiman manages to weave discussion and revelation of many aspects of human history and human nature (page 322 is one of my faves) into his story, without missing a beat. none of me, blinking, wondering what just happened here. and yet his story goes from being very real, to very surreal, and somewhere in between, and back around again... deftly.

I give it a 4.

oh! adding a reference, since I had to look it up:

Mike Ainsel, My Ainsel = http://www.white-works.com/ainsel.htm

Life of Pi, Yann Martel. posted July 2006. rating: 2

what I came on to say was just, quickly, this: regarding the movie Big Fish (and pertains also to the book Life of Pi). seemingly everyone cept the son believed that the embellished stories were better than the "boring" things that really happened.

not so, folks.

Life is amazing in and of itself. why do you have to make up a story so that the birth of your firstborn son sounds more entertaining? forget the fish, forget the ring, forget the analogy--- there is now a person in the world that was not here yesterday. a person that is part you and your wife. a person whose fate is not your own, yet is and always will be linked to your own. such is the story of every human born into this world, ourselves included. just because it happens all the time doesn't make it less remarkable. I regard my own entry to this strange planet much more interesting than any fish story you could conjure up, and my story is true.

Meeting the love of your life might not be exactly how romance authors pen it: a chance meeting of eyes across a crowded room, the rest of the world melting away, angels singing, all that. hell, love is nothing like romance or even realistic authors hardly ever portray it. and yet! love is still one of the most powerful and life-changing emotions humans experience. ones who have love know how precious it is, and will not let it go. love does not have to be froofed up to be remarkable. it is remarkable in and of itself. you met a woman at college and you spent the rest of your life with her. now I'd say that's pretty amazing. how often does that happen any more? we don't need embellishments to make it more interesting.

and for the love of all that's good--- you're on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean for over 200 freakin days and YOU SURVIVE. that is enough of a story right there! maybe you change your memory of that experience to smooth over some things that happened that you find it incredibly hard to handle, especially emotionally. but you don't need to make anything up to make it remarkable! and please, I don't think I give any of Pi's story away when I wonder out loud... life with God makes for a better story? now, I am responding directly to a statement in the book, Life of Pi. I'm not going to wax philosophical on the existence of God or religion in general. but all the same--- it doesn't make for a better story, actually. nothing else is needed but what is really there (meaning, you don't have to add in fire and brimstone when the world is mind-boggling enough, if you just stop and think about it, and stop taking it for granted!).

I keep seeing this theme (embellishment of reality is necessary and even beneficial), and it's so against my basic tenant (life is more than you can understand just the way it is) that I thought I'd jot that down. 'sall.

----

I realized that I have been talking about Life of Pi in the blog (just a bit), and that might be confusing since I mentioned The Joy of Pi under what books I like.

big difference :)

Life of Pi is a popular book right now. basically about a boy who is trapped in a lifeboat, in the Pacific Ocean, with a Bengal tiger. it was okay. if you like parables. I can't credit the author with doing anything astounding except for hitting on a common denominator and selling a lot of copies.

he lost me after the whole floating carnivorous island populated by meerkats. I almost didn't finish it after that, but I thought maybe there was something remarkable at the end to make up for it. there wasn't. I give it a 2.

5---unmissable
4---great stuff
3---worth reading
2---mind candy
1---waste of time
0---unfinishable

The Joy of Pi is actually about the number Pi (3.14159...). "No number has captured the attention and imagination of people throughout the ages as much as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Pi, or as it is symbolically known (symbol here), is infinite and, in The Joy of pi, it proves to be infinitely intriguing. With incisive historical insight and a refreshing sense of humor, David Blatner explores the many facets of pi and humankind's fascination with itfrom the ancient Egyptians and Archimedes to Leonardo da Vinci and the modern-day Chudnovsky brothers, who have calculated pi to eight billion digits with a homemade supercomputer."

it's definitely not the same ;) and The Joy of Pi was much better. I'd give it a 3.14... okay that was lame lol. ;)

The Murder of Helen Jewett, Patricia Cline Cohen. July 2006. rating: 4

ah, yes, still reading this one. usually, I read very quickly. I skim, what people call speed-reading, letting my brain fill in all the little details. that's what brains do--- fill in the gaps, even when you're not aware that you were ever missing information. [/tangent]

my most well-loved books and series, the ones I read over and over, are the ones that I'm actually *reading*--- for every time I read it, I've already saved part of the story in memory, so I am free to pick up on things that I hadn't noticed before. my favorite writers create works and worlds so complex that they can support multiple re-reads, with all the nuances and little jokes that only the talented can weave into a story in such a way that you always find something new and previously overlooked, even on the fourth or fifth read. [/tangent]

you can't skim The Murder of Helen Jewett. not in any kind of satisfying way. why not? for one thing, it's not fiction. it's historical nonfiction. continuing on that line of thought, it's a murder investigation (so the little details are important and shouldn't be inserted on whimsy by your subconscious), and furthermore, it's set in 1836 New York (a world so far removed from modern every-day experience that anything you take for granted about it is probably just plain wrong).

it reads like a documentary (a very well-done documentary, no grass-growing or paint-drying here), an expose, and of course a murder mystery all in one. kudos to the author for researching this information as immaculately as she has done, and presenting it as artfully and engagingly as she has done. she had quite the task and she has done it most commendably.

when I tell you that Helen Jewett was a prostitute who was killed by ax blows to the head... many things might come to mind. Prostitute probably makes one think of Pretty Woman or fishnet stockings and too much makeup etc etc. it is far less likely to make you think of Ninon de Lenclos, courtesans and salons, extravagantly decadent parlors, full formal dress theatre dates, independence from social constraints, and power play between women and men.

that changes things a bit. and as desensitized as we are these days, we might not pick up on the fact that premeditated murder was incredibly uncommon in those days (although death in general was not), with such cases numbering in the single digits for the entire year. add in the fact that the accused and the murdered had exchanged formal love letters and gifts and other affections for at least two years before hand, with his full knowledge of her station in life, and now you've got me wondering what brought about this brutal ending.

Patricia Cline Cohen (author) fleshes out the backgrounds of these people. what makes a girl a prostitute? how exactly did she fall from grace, so to say? what drives a man to murder? what about their families, their neighbors, their associates?

also very interesting to me, this is also the story of the beginnings of investigative reporting (as opposed to sitting at a desk and waiting for something printworthy to come your way), as well as, unavoidably, the tabloid press. how this movement changed not only how the public viewed such happenings (as the murder), but also how the public opinon began to affect criminal investigations and proceedings.

I'm on page 220 of this book filled with stories and people that I'd never wondered about before, but I'm enjoying hearing about them quite a bit. I never really cared all that much for the New York area either (apologies, but it's a bit far from home), and yet now I am aware of what exaclty makes it so interesting to some.

it's not a light read, as I mentioned. it's not a dark read (even with murder and all), but it's nothing you can skim through surrounded by distractions.

I'll give it a rating when I'm all the way done with it.

---

well I certainly had to spend more time with The Murder of Helen Jewett, for reasons already mentioned, and it was time well spent. I'll leave you with a couple of quotes and my rating of the book. I just finished it, and no I didn't really want it to end, but on the other hand, American Gods just came in the mail yesterday... and I really want to start that one!

so, meet the murder victim, alias Helen Jewett:

her own words, as she wrote them with ink-dipped quill on guilded stationary paper, from a letter to the accused:

"I love you Frank---ah! you know how I love you! but do you want to know how much I can hate you? Take care, I will show you."

meet the murder suspect, Richard P. Robinson, alias Frank Rivers:

his own words, again from a letter between them, though not in a direct reply to the above Jewett quote. no, in fact, this was rather common between them: an impassioned and bizarre relationship indeed:

"Nelly, Nelly, pause ere you go further; think of how we were once situated, and if you can convince yourself that you are acting a noble part in cutting my throat, go on, is all I have to say. My course will be short and sweet---no---bitter, bitter as well you know."

really I think maybe they both spent too much time attending the theatre; they certainly were accomplished in the dramatic! and ready to sting most anybody with sarcasm: "He has but two ideas in his head, and those two are not breeders." (Robinson, of a fellow apparently preferred over him by a certain girl.) "You are right; it is wrong in me to be hard upon so soft a subject---we never use diamonds to carve geese." (Jewett, to a man who said she was too hard on him, referring to how she refused his affection.)

I did slip earlier though; they hadn't known each other for over two years... one of the tabloidish pamphlets written about them in the years after the murder states they did, but it was not true. they began courting in the summer of 1835, and she was murdered in April of 1836, so they had known each other intimately for almost a year.

could we compare the life of a geisha to the life of Helen Jewett? could we discuss the amazingly lax and borderline-ridiculous legal proceedings? (I esp enjoyed the delicious quote on page 369, leading me to...) could we elaborate on power and priviledge as it pertains to class and gender? yes, and more, I'm sure. some other time perhaps ;)

a great read. I'll give it a 4. keep in mind however, it is not a book you can breeze through. you need time and proper attention for it. give it that, and if you have my interest in such things, then the book deserves a 4, I say. (if you read through the epilogue, Cohen presents an overview -summary -closing statement which is the short version of the book, I suppose, and a 4 as well.)

Grass, Sheri S. Tepper. July 2006. rating: 3.5

ETA: boo, boo, boo.

Sheri S. Tepper's premise for Grass (1998) sounds a whole hell of a lot like the basic premise of Rider at the Gate (1995)---"horses" and all! the two are very very dissimiliar in the writing styles etc, and the stories seem to be different too (at this point). but my god the basic premise of the planetary situation is not an original of Tepper's at all. boo on Tepper.

for more, see "Rider at the Gate, by C.J.Cherryh".

Grass by Sheri Tepper
Read Date: Saturday, July 08, 2006

no, not smoking any. I'm on about page 167 of Grass right now. It's a very interesting read though not for the faint-hearted. a bit too heavy on symbolism or manipulation of the reader, some might say, a bit artsy you know, but if you think of it as a French movie and just know that it's going to be that way, it's in that genre so to speak, then the story is quite enjoyable.

I spent waaaay too much time in high school focusing on "literary criticism". if I am reading an article or an essay, or my own writing, I find that I switch into Literary Critic mode without thinking. however, when I am reading for fun or diversion, as is often the case, I tend to think of the story as a dream somebody's had, and they're telling me about it. considering the dreams I have sometimes, pretty much anything goes with this method ;)

you can probably tell that I'm not critical of/ editing the blog as I go along either...

Tepper's writing style reminds me, of all people!, of Cordwainer Smith. if you enjoy Tepper, I bet you'll relish Cordwainer. His work is not so dark as this book. It's just as complicated, unexpected, and original--- perhaps even moreso--- and it is not a happy shiny kind of work either. but you're a little less likely to wake up dreaming something Cordwainer-related and classify the dream as a nightmare.

In Grass you have the parrot, for instance. that is quality nightmarish usage right there. not the plague, mind you, but that infernal parrot! that kind of detail is what will throw you off, and that's why Tepper put it in there.

she practically has Mary and Joseph riding a donkey too, but that seems more symbolic and social/religous commentary. her usage of that kind of symbolism puts her right up there with Gregory Maguire's Wicked. and yes, the book is MUCH different and darker than the musical. Wicked (the book) was a bit much for me... I found it immensely interesting, but cluttered with ridiculisms--- yes I'm just going to say "ridiculisms" and act like that's a word. why he put in half of what he put in is beyond me. it seemed like he was trying to say something, to make a point, only... with his mouth full.

*shrug*

so you can think of Tepper's Grass (at least the first 150 or so pages of it) as a kind of combination of Cordwainer Smith and Gregory Maguire.

I say if you loved Wicked, you'll love Grass, and if you loved Grass, you'll probably enjoy Wicked very much. And if you loved Grass, you'll love Norstrilia.

but just because you loved Norstrilia doesn't mean that Wicked and Grass will make the grade. I would still recommend you try them though.

back to Grass. I like it... Tepper's world-building skill is apparent, yet she is not as skilled in this area as Cherryh. that would be saying quite a lot, however, if she were, as I consider Cherryh the most talented in this dept (and also in character development).

Tepper's character-building skill falls *very* much short of Cherryh's... the main character in Grass is done well enough, but many if not all the other characters seem two-dimensional. I couldn't get behind any of them. I can read about them, and follow the story, but I don't feel for any of them, not even Marjorie. and I can identify with Marjorie on many levels (none of them having to do with mind control or plague).

Grass is more about the plot, the story, and the universe Tepper creates to place it in. She really did a fine job, especially compared to *most* other authors out there.

That being said... some things about the plot are obviously just there to manipulate the reader, including the religious references. the story seems to be making a point about religion... but that point is a tangent. I'm not saying that I disagree, or that she annoyed or offended me. I actually agree with most of it. -but- in the interests of being true to the writing... you don't need that sideline in order to have the story. you could take the religiony stuff out, and switch things from church to government, etc, and the story wouldn't change. it seems superfluous. especially when part of it (Marjorie's vision) gets in my way of the story---

very much like when Pi ends up on a floating carnivorous island populated by meerkats. ok, yes, yes, I get it, it's analagous, it's a fable, it's symbolic, it's giving me some information... but it wasn't necessary, any insight that gave me could have been given in a different format, and I thought I was reading a *novel*. Tepper, not Aesop. I can only suspend my disbelief for so many things at a time. even if this story, Grass, were a dream, and somebody's just telling me their dream, that specific part of the dream would throw me off, and I'd have to blink and try to remember what was going on. that is not what I call deft writing. you can have dreams and visions in your writing or whatever, or perhaps you could really end up on a carnivorous island for all anyone really knows. but Occam's razor, let's cut through the chaff, shall we?

just got a bit too artsy for me.

the thrilling conclusion to the plot was believable enough, I suppose, but it was all "discovered" so quickly and condensed into one or two dialogues in the story... I mean, one clue and you've suddenly translated the entire language? sorry, but I know too much about linguistics for that one, superdupercomputers or no. oh but you were overlooking the other clues that were staring you in the face all the time. goodness it's Congo all over again. people, if the cavewall is covered in heiroglyphics, and 90% those glyphs are eyes, then don't expect me to be surprised when you finally figure out it means "We are watching you".

and the bats. all of a sudden there were just bats. sure, out in the grasses, they were there all along. but nobody ever saw a living bat or experienced anything about a bat until Marjorie witnessed something even more spectacular. it was just odd and disjointed.

having said all that, I liked the story... I guess maybe I should rate it...

I'll say that Grass by Sheri Tepper is 3, leaning towards 4, so 3.5.

murder is the next one ;)