[reposted from Sept 27, 2007]
Are we ready for the Big One?
Sacred Heart Schools, Atherton launched its first all-school evacuation in living memory on Tuesday. In a festive spirit, more than one-thousand children and adults gathered under a clear blue late-September sky to demonstrate their readiness to face whatever life throws at them.
Emergency response director Sandy Dubinsky praised the community’s walk to the football field as “a remarkable job.” What impressed me was the diversity of responses to simulated catastrophe:When the long-anticipated fire alarm went off, Senior Seena Amid-Houzor leaped to his feet and hurried to pack his bag. Seena ignored his teacher’s instructions to leave the bag until classmate Maria Gibbs counseled him, “It’s not worth dying for.”
In the crowded hallway, students, confused by the closing of the fire doors, walked away from the exits until English teacher James Hughes, with bold strides and arms akimbo, guided them safely out of the building. Once out in the warm morning air, students regained their sense of normalcy and talked quietly about their lives.
Nora: “Do we have espacio next?”
Madelyn: “You mean we’re going to miss espacio?”
Nora: “ I hope so.”
The Dean of Students set up a portable amplifier. “I appreciate your cooperation. Please move to the football field.”
Drama teacher John Loschman, with his fine sense of the choreography of events, said, “They’re supposed to go to the field two ways. He didn’t say that. I read my instructions.”
Students did as they were told, but none was able to simulate the seriousness that one imagines will accompany a real emergency.For some, the practice lacked verisimilitude:
“How many times in your life will your school burn down?”
“No, dude. It’s about hostages. I’d just get the hell out.”
“That is different thing.”
Others were still focused on smaller, more immediate traumas:
“I wanted to kill Whitlow during that test. He kept sniffling, and he wouldn’t get a tissue.”
At the field, a group of senior boys circled around a pair of MacBook Pros to listen to music and snap pictures of themselves in their digital PhotoBooth.
“We should start a mass printing to all the printers on campus!”
“How sick would that be?”
One boy dispensed test-taking advice: “A short answer is supposed to be three sentences, tops.”
Many talked merely for the pleasure of hearing their own voices:
"Who was I talking about when I compared him to Java the Hut?"
"How good of an idea is a spider army?"
"Are those pants linen? That is legit!"
"Are you writing poetry about what you see?"
"Up yours, man. We're listening to Halo 3!"
The Dean of Faculty discovered astroturf: “Oh, my god! It’s fake grass.”
At the other end of the field, I picked out my fourth-grade daughter sitting happily with her classmates. I wanted to run to her and say hello. In a real emergency I would have.
When the faculty and staff were dismissed, history teacher Stuart Morris staggered to his feet in a daze. “Oh, man. That was a head-rush.”
Strolling back to the buildings, two teachers chatted about education and class warfare. The drill took less time than expected, and everyone was grateful for the long break—a real espacio in the day. When the class bell rang an hour later, poor Seena had still not returned for his book-bag.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Sunday, December 9, 2007
The Nature of Our World Today
The nature of our world today demands global unity and cooperation. With growing technology and an increase in communication, nations of the world should be in harmony with each other; but are not. These issues only seem to tear us apart. The developing world allows for the possibility of global unity and interconnectedness. To combat issues like global warming, hunger, and AIDS, understanding and cooperation are needed. Reality is we are all linked; what one of us does affects the other and once we understand that, we can move forward. Michael Ondaatje, through the unique style of pluralism, sends that message to his readers in both The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion. In his novels, there are scarce if no religious references. However, there is not a lack of religion or spirituality because the form and messages of the two novels are almost like gospels themselves, preaching a sense of connectedness and universality. The epigraph that precedes both In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient reads “Never again will a single story be told as thought it were the only one.” Ondaatje makes that promise to his readers. His stories are not about one person; they are about multiple people and how their lives are woven together, a lot like the blockbuster movies Crash and Rendition.
These are award winning movies because they reflect our culture today. In Crash, the lives of nine complete strangers, living in Los Angeles, all converge in one day, in some tragic event. The movie begins with snap shots into each person’s separate and independent life. Through the metaphor of cars and accidents, these character’s worlds collide. The powerful message reverberates through your entire being: we are all linked no matter how far apart we may seem. Rendition holds the same message but is portrayed through different circumstances. The lives of seven people of different ethnicities and homelands are severely affected by one suicide bombing explosion in Egypt. As the story is played out, every character is dragged in by this event which acts as vortex. The innocent Egyptian American engineer is tortured. The American rookie C.I.A. agent has to witness the atrocity. The Egyptian high ranking official investigates the bombing and institutes the torture while his daughter has gone missing. She has been hiding with her lover, a member of a secret religious terrorist sect, who, as the story unfolds, is responsible for the explosion. Once again, even though these characters are from different countries and have no relation to the other characters, they are drawn together. This global coincidence is like a magnet. However instead of an Egyptian market place being the junction point, an Italian villa is convergence point in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.
Tracing the experiences of four random people, who coincidentally all end up in an abandoned and shell shocked Italian villa, The English Patient portrays World War II and the effects of war on these people in an incoherent manner. The story line bounces from present to future to past all within a few pages, never making a clear distinction between the time changes. Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian author, centers his novel around a severe burn victim, unable to survive on his own and suffers extensive memory loss except for dream-like sequences where he recounts his dangerous and lustful past. Always by his side, Hana, a nurse who chose to stay with the English Patient despite advice not to, fosters to his every need either by peeling plums for him or by reading to him. Two characters arrive upon this serene Italian villa unexpected: Caravaggio, Hana’s Canadian thief for an uncle, whom she grew up with, and Kip, an Indian bomb disabler, whom she has a physical love affair with. Through these characters, the novel addresses the issues of universality, war, and identity. Ondaatje leaves his readers with a sense of interconnectedness. Even though they are miles apart, “[Hana’s] shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpals’s left hand swoops down and gently catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind the spectacles” (302). Ondaatje has somehow found a way to weave beautiful descriptions by just using actions. His descriptions are not flowery and verbose. They are simple and yet intricately beautiful. The love scenes are blunt. By putting forth these un-stereotypical intimate moments, like when Katherine, the English patient’s former lover “sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder…As lovers they have offered parts of their body to each other, like this” Ondaatje almost makes sex and the sensual a little less awkward and more real (156). Because the language is so simple, the coherence of the story is very complex. Instead of a panorama, snap shots are given. Ondaatje does not just tell one story, but multiple stories through different lenses. It is never one person’s life, it is never one persons story because lives and stories are made up of relationships between people and their experiences. The life of one person is dependent upon another. Ondaajte first addresses this issue in his novel, In the Skin of a Lion.
This story revolves around the life and relationships of Patrick Lewis, a Canadian farm boy who keeps manual labor as his livelihood for years to come. Most importantly it traces the relationships he has with two women lovers, three unrelated men, and a young girl. It is hard not to fall in love with or at least pity Patrick Lewis, this hardworking, unsure, and compassionate figure. While there are subplots interspersed, the storyline is not quite as complex or as hard to follow as the English Patient storyline. The bulk of the novel deals with the passionate love affairs between first Patrick and Clara and then Patrick and Alice, Clara’s actress friend. Small details make up these relationships, like
“the eroticism of [Clara’s] history, the knowledge of where she sat in classrooms, her favorite brand of pencil at the age of nine” (69). Infatuation relied on details. One night, while lying in bed, Alice, his second lover, whispered to him her favorite lines “I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal…let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects” (135). All parts of the world are living and each of those parts flows and coexists with the other. This statement deems true because the end of the novel brought Caravaggio, a thief Patrick met in prison, Mr. Harris, a big wig who was the funding behind the waterworks project that Patrick worked on, and Patrick himself all together in one grand scheme bombing attempt. All their lives were mentioned separately and described apart from each other in the beginning; yet they all come together in the climax. Never would one have guessed that the lives of these characters would cross paths. That is the beauty in Ondaatje’s writing. He finds ways to bring the lives of his seeming separate and unrelated characters together. On a larger scale, Patrick resides in the middle of a giant ethnic melting pot. Immigrants of all kinds: Macedonian, Greek, Finnish, Serbian, call this place home. They have migrated from thousands of miles away to all fatefully end up in this one Canadian city of “many languages” (115). The world and its people are not disconnected, but are bound eternally. Sometimes it’s just a little hard to see. Ondaatje in both his novels shines light on the interconnectedness of the human family.
English Patient is too translucent; there are far too many tangents to fully grasp in one read. In the Skin of the Lion also has these interspersed tangents but they are not as complex or intangible. If the English Patient is a giant web of dreams then In the Skin of a Lion is a sweet day dream. A single beam of light hits a mirror, but yet is reflected in millions of beams of rainbow color. Michael Ondaajte’s writing style parallels the qualities of a prism. There may be a single story, but that single story has an infinite number of sub-stories that branch off of it. Ondaajte is right a single story cannot be told as if it were the only one because in our world today that would bear false witness against reality.
This theme will become more apparent in all forms of expression, books, movies, plays, music because it has become a fact of life. As we become more aware of the world around us, it is impossible not to notice the qualities that connect us all. Michael Ondaatje proves that no matter how separated two lives seem; there is a way in which they are connected.
These are award winning movies because they reflect our culture today. In Crash, the lives of nine complete strangers, living in Los Angeles, all converge in one day, in some tragic event. The movie begins with snap shots into each person’s separate and independent life. Through the metaphor of cars and accidents, these character’s worlds collide. The powerful message reverberates through your entire being: we are all linked no matter how far apart we may seem. Rendition holds the same message but is portrayed through different circumstances. The lives of seven people of different ethnicities and homelands are severely affected by one suicide bombing explosion in Egypt. As the story is played out, every character is dragged in by this event which acts as vortex. The innocent Egyptian American engineer is tortured. The American rookie C.I.A. agent has to witness the atrocity. The Egyptian high ranking official investigates the bombing and institutes the torture while his daughter has gone missing. She has been hiding with her lover, a member of a secret religious terrorist sect, who, as the story unfolds, is responsible for the explosion. Once again, even though these characters are from different countries and have no relation to the other characters, they are drawn together. This global coincidence is like a magnet. However instead of an Egyptian market place being the junction point, an Italian villa is convergence point in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.
Tracing the experiences of four random people, who coincidentally all end up in an abandoned and shell shocked Italian villa, The English Patient portrays World War II and the effects of war on these people in an incoherent manner. The story line bounces from present to future to past all within a few pages, never making a clear distinction between the time changes. Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian author, centers his novel around a severe burn victim, unable to survive on his own and suffers extensive memory loss except for dream-like sequences where he recounts his dangerous and lustful past. Always by his side, Hana, a nurse who chose to stay with the English Patient despite advice not to, fosters to his every need either by peeling plums for him or by reading to him. Two characters arrive upon this serene Italian villa unexpected: Caravaggio, Hana’s Canadian thief for an uncle, whom she grew up with, and Kip, an Indian bomb disabler, whom she has a physical love affair with. Through these characters, the novel addresses the issues of universality, war, and identity. Ondaatje leaves his readers with a sense of interconnectedness. Even though they are miles apart, “[Hana’s] shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpals’s left hand swoops down and gently catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind the spectacles” (302). Ondaatje has somehow found a way to weave beautiful descriptions by just using actions. His descriptions are not flowery and verbose. They are simple and yet intricately beautiful. The love scenes are blunt. By putting forth these un-stereotypical intimate moments, like when Katherine, the English patient’s former lover “sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder…As lovers they have offered parts of their body to each other, like this” Ondaatje almost makes sex and the sensual a little less awkward and more real (156). Because the language is so simple, the coherence of the story is very complex. Instead of a panorama, snap shots are given. Ondaatje does not just tell one story, but multiple stories through different lenses. It is never one person’s life, it is never one persons story because lives and stories are made up of relationships between people and their experiences. The life of one person is dependent upon another. Ondaajte first addresses this issue in his novel, In the Skin of a Lion.
This story revolves around the life and relationships of Patrick Lewis, a Canadian farm boy who keeps manual labor as his livelihood for years to come. Most importantly it traces the relationships he has with two women lovers, three unrelated men, and a young girl. It is hard not to fall in love with or at least pity Patrick Lewis, this hardworking, unsure, and compassionate figure. While there are subplots interspersed, the storyline is not quite as complex or as hard to follow as the English Patient storyline. The bulk of the novel deals with the passionate love affairs between first Patrick and Clara and then Patrick and Alice, Clara’s actress friend. Small details make up these relationships, like
“the eroticism of [Clara’s] history, the knowledge of where she sat in classrooms, her favorite brand of pencil at the age of nine” (69). Infatuation relied on details. One night, while lying in bed, Alice, his second lover, whispered to him her favorite lines “I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal…let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects” (135). All parts of the world are living and each of those parts flows and coexists with the other. This statement deems true because the end of the novel brought Caravaggio, a thief Patrick met in prison, Mr. Harris, a big wig who was the funding behind the waterworks project that Patrick worked on, and Patrick himself all together in one grand scheme bombing attempt. All their lives were mentioned separately and described apart from each other in the beginning; yet they all come together in the climax. Never would one have guessed that the lives of these characters would cross paths. That is the beauty in Ondaatje’s writing. He finds ways to bring the lives of his seeming separate and unrelated characters together. On a larger scale, Patrick resides in the middle of a giant ethnic melting pot. Immigrants of all kinds: Macedonian, Greek, Finnish, Serbian, call this place home. They have migrated from thousands of miles away to all fatefully end up in this one Canadian city of “many languages” (115). The world and its people are not disconnected, but are bound eternally. Sometimes it’s just a little hard to see. Ondaatje in both his novels shines light on the interconnectedness of the human family.
English Patient is too translucent; there are far too many tangents to fully grasp in one read. In the Skin of the Lion also has these interspersed tangents but they are not as complex or intangible. If the English Patient is a giant web of dreams then In the Skin of a Lion is a sweet day dream. A single beam of light hits a mirror, but yet is reflected in millions of beams of rainbow color. Michael Ondaajte’s writing style parallels the qualities of a prism. There may be a single story, but that single story has an infinite number of sub-stories that branch off of it. Ondaajte is right a single story cannot be told as if it were the only one because in our world today that would bear false witness against reality.
This theme will become more apparent in all forms of expression, books, movies, plays, music because it has become a fact of life. As we become more aware of the world around us, it is impossible not to notice the qualities that connect us all. Michael Ondaatje proves that no matter how separated two lives seem; there is a way in which they are connected.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Letter from my gums
Dear Jade,
I hate you, too
Do you know what its like to stand next to such white specimens?
I'm know I'm purple
But I've grown to love myself
Even with all the probing and scrubbing
I've done my job without complaints
Not once did I cry when that damn toothbrush made me bleed
Not once did I complain when the Listerine singed my being
Why can't you accept me
I am your sense of diversity
I set you apart from every other person
When you smile, they see me
Your pretty PURPLE gums
With hatred,
Your gums
I hate you, too
Do you know what its like to stand next to such white specimens?
I'm know I'm purple
But I've grown to love myself
Even with all the probing and scrubbing
I've done my job without complaints
Not once did I cry when that damn toothbrush made me bleed
Not once did I complain when the Listerine singed my being
Why can't you accept me
I am your sense of diversity
I set you apart from every other person
When you smile, they see me
Your pretty PURPLE gums
With hatred,
Your gums
Letter to my gums
Dear Gums,
I hate you.
Why can't you be pink like everyone else's
That diseased look is not attractive
I did nothing to you but clean the teeth you hold
Tell me why then must you look like I've harmed you
I never attacked you with nicotine
I never bombarded you with foreign alcoholic substances
I kept you clean
Oral B can't scrub away your permanent filth
Listerine can't bleach your undeviating stain
I hate you
With hatred,
Jade
I hate you.
Why can't you be pink like everyone else's
That diseased look is not attractive
I did nothing to you but clean the teeth you hold
Tell me why then must you look like I've harmed you
I never attacked you with nicotine
I never bombarded you with foreign alcoholic substances
I kept you clean
Oral B can't scrub away your permanent filth
Listerine can't bleach your undeviating stain
I hate you
With hatred,
Jade
He, She, It
Gender barriers hinder the ability for men and women to fully understand each other. The role society impresses upon its inhabitants forms distinct differences between the races. Interconnectivity is nearly impossible because of these socially enforced rules and values. Because of the social intimidation and innate ignorance, men and women are unable to cross the barrier the separates them sexually. Jeffrey Eugenides delves into the world of obsession and adolescence in his voyeuristic novel, The Virgin Suicides. The spellbinding novel follows the story of five mysterious sisters, and the boys whose lives they forever change. The narrative voice is a collective voice, an infatuated group of boys who can only report on what they see or find or remnants from the oral information they gather. The story is built around a failed investigation in which the boys gather mounds of “evidence” only to realize they never understood the Lisbon girls.
Eugenides creates two parallel experiences. It is the men who return to the era of their teenage obsession and girls that changed their lives versus with the tragic lives of the very girls they admired. These men recall a time before they fully understood themselves, let alone the opposite sex. They return to a time when experience was shared and communal. The central belief is that the Lisbon sisters are the feminine ideal in how they are shrouded in mystery and unattainable. Their obsession is tangible through the “evidence” they collected, “[they] tried to arrange the photographs chronologically” (4). Their devotion lasts even into adulthood (a lost romantic ideal they can cling to). The men keep in touch with each other to continue to be the custodians of the girls' lives. Lisbon sisters are the mystery that is the opposite sex personified. Equally, the girls, through wildly different, constantly return to being seen as one entity, “the Lisbon sisters.” On one of the few occasions when they boys have physical interaction with the sisters, “their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again the boys weren’t even sure which girl was which” (122). The sisters also see themselves as a unit, “Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It's often difficult to identify which sister she's talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader's mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads” (42). Eugenides vaguely makes distinctions within the collective sexual units, filtering their lives into a shared understanding and experience.
The Virgin Suicides tell the story of familial, cult-like suicides. The novel encircle this time period, beginning and ending with the last suicide. No one seems more intrigued and haunted by these girls and their deaths than their male counterparts. The men collect “evidence” from the girls (Exhibits 1-98), but despite being inanimate, their connection with the girls is magical, obtaining fetish-like qualities. In their attempt to understand who the Lisbon girls were and why they committed suicide, they never find a truly satisfying answer. Each action they took to understand the girls was a step further into confusion. Like Sirens, this female entity lured the boys in, only to leave them wanting more. The group of young boys is unable to understand the inner workings of the Lisbon sisters, the motive behind their collective suicides. The unrelenting factor keeping them from complete discernment of the Lisbon girls is the gender barrier that separates them. Eugenides re-establishes the sexual obstruction by never giving insight into the minds of the opposite sex. The Lisbon girls represent the epitomized gender enigma, the unsolved mystery of the opposite sex. Contrarily, Eugenides takes a different approach with his second novel, the comedic epic, Middlesex.
Middlesex, reaching across generations, continents, and genders, traces the path of a mutant gene to one Calliope Stephanides. In Cal, our storyteller, that gene finds expression. Eugenides explains, “I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence.” While the boys in The Virgin Suicides have the gender gap that cannot be bridge, Calliope lies on that bridge. In many ways, the book looks at how we are all an I before a he or a she. By creating this I narration, Eugenides leaves the reader close to Cal’s metamorphosis. Because of its epic nature, the I narration needed to have third person qualities to be able to relay the tale that led to the actual ability to do so. Cal, straddling the gender gap, falls easily into the minds and thoughts of both sexes. With uncanny fluidity, Eugenides creates a character that becomes the omnipotent lens to the past. Calliope reveals the way his grandparents fell in love in before they fled from the Turkish invasion of Asia Minor; how “at first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hugs began to change” (39). Cal can explain with unrivalled certainty, the way Desdemona blushed when Lefty, her brother and third cousin, looked at her. Cal delves into the way his parents, second cousins, could not deny the love that flowed within them. Cal acknowledges with clarity how Tessie, his mother, allowed Milton, his father, “to press his clarinet against her skin and fill her body with music” (176). Because of the condition, Cal transcends the gender biases and dwells within the gender gap.
Eugenides mentions how Ovid’s Metamorphosis address Tiresias, the mythical hermaphrodite and the character Calliope plays in her high school play. He was drawn the incredible utility of Tiresias, this person that knew more than a normal person. That is what makes a good novelists, the capability to know people better than the average people, to be an understander of both sexes. It seemed to me that a novelist has to have a hermaphroditic imagination, since you should be able to go into the heads of men and women if you want to write books. What better vehicle for that than a hermaphrodite narrator? It's sort of like the dream novelist himself, or herself, or itself. However, in opposition to the portrayal of hermaphrodites in literature, like Tiresias, Eugenides write about a real hermaphrodite. Cal is one of the most unique narrators in modern literature because of every person can relate to this character. At heart, Middlesex is modern myth about adolescence. People hear that Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite, and sometimes that repels them from reading it. But I see it as a family story. Eugenides uses a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for sexual confusion and the uncertainty of identity that accompanies adolescence. Eugenides uses Cal's double-visioned life experience as an opportunity to display a generous, good-humored empathy toward all of his novel's characters, male and female. Cal serves readers not only as a lens on the hermaphroditic, but also as a prism of the humane. One reviewer refers to the book as “a cleverly post-modernized successor to the likes of Howard Fast's THE IMMIGRANTS series, engrossing multi-generational bestsellers that were popular in the Nixon era, when Cal Stephanides and Jeffrey Eugenides were growing up.” Since genetics play a prominent role, the book is a novelistic genome; containing some of the oldest traits of writing and storytelling. It begins with epic events, old fashioned, almost Homeric ideas and, as it progresses, it becomes a more deeply psychological, more modern novel. Eugenides manages to tuck this strange personal tale into the generocity of the traditional epic, much as Cal's pseudo-penis is hidden away in his labial folds.
Both novels tell of the internal world of the familial unit, differing tragically from the norm. These families are statements about the American suburb in what seems like easier times. In The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides makes it difficult to place the entire blame on the parents. The pressure to conform plays a major role. Every detail is a criticism against the world in which the Lisbon sisters and Calliope lived. In the Grosse Pointe, Detroit of the Lisbons, each home mimics its neighbors. Every autumn, the families rake and burn their leaves in a primitive yet respected and expected ritual, all in an attempt to keep their lawns clear on discolored blemishes. When, like the trees of this area, the sanctity of the town becomes diseased, the city moves to extricate the infection. Mr. Lisbon is asked to relieve his duties as teacher at the high school. But like their infected counterparts, the Lisbon girls are relentless in restraining against the suburban conformity. In Middlesex, Cal's life story is grounded in the context of the sprawling Stephanides family history, a Greek-American immigrant saga that brings Cal's paternal grandparents to urban Detroit in the wake of the burning of Smyrna by the Turks in 1922 and leads all the way to the present day Germany. Four decades of Stephanides roams the pages: from entrepreneurs to charlatans, housewives to hippies, homosexuals to religious leaders, all linked by matrimony and genetics and love. Even the most eccentric subplots of Middlesex, whether it is a Muslim temple scam, a tension-fraught car chase, or the invention of hot dogs that flex like biceps, are imbued with tender, familial warmth. Bypassing in-your-face gender politics, Eugenides focuses on undeniable in-your-bloodline realities, the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” Even though genetics sets the stage, American history is the backdrop. Key moments in the Stephanides family are marked by significant moment on American history. When Grandfather Lefty arrives in Detroit he is briefly employed at the Ford Motor Company, where Eugenides deftly etches the dehumanizing aspect of assembly line work. The Detroit race riots of 1967, white flight to the suburbs, the social divisiveness of the Nixon era, and the so-called sexual revolution all feed into the Stephanides story. There are moments as well when Eugenides captures the pulse of an era in his dialogue, such as Chapter 11's explanation of his refusal to use deodorant during his hippie phase: “I'm a human…This is what humans smell like.”Eugenides wrote two novels that comically comment on two societal taboos: teenage suicide and hermaphrodites. The first looks into the world of shattered female idealism seen through aging eyes of once-young men. Obsession and voyeurism mix with anti-conformist undertones to construct the gender study that is The Virgin Suicides. Eugenides takes it a step further with his second novel. Appealing to every type of person, Cal is the perfect narrator, making his hermaphrodite book, the perfect crossover novel.
Eugenides creates two parallel experiences. It is the men who return to the era of their teenage obsession and girls that changed their lives versus with the tragic lives of the very girls they admired. These men recall a time before they fully understood themselves, let alone the opposite sex. They return to a time when experience was shared and communal. The central belief is that the Lisbon sisters are the feminine ideal in how they are shrouded in mystery and unattainable. Their obsession is tangible through the “evidence” they collected, “[they] tried to arrange the photographs chronologically” (4). Their devotion lasts even into adulthood (a lost romantic ideal they can cling to). The men keep in touch with each other to continue to be the custodians of the girls' lives. Lisbon sisters are the mystery that is the opposite sex personified. Equally, the girls, through wildly different, constantly return to being seen as one entity, “the Lisbon sisters.” On one of the few occasions when they boys have physical interaction with the sisters, “their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again the boys weren’t even sure which girl was which” (122). The sisters also see themselves as a unit, “Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It's often difficult to identify which sister she's talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader's mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads” (42). Eugenides vaguely makes distinctions within the collective sexual units, filtering their lives into a shared understanding and experience.
The Virgin Suicides tell the story of familial, cult-like suicides. The novel encircle this time period, beginning and ending with the last suicide. No one seems more intrigued and haunted by these girls and their deaths than their male counterparts. The men collect “evidence” from the girls (Exhibits 1-98), but despite being inanimate, their connection with the girls is magical, obtaining fetish-like qualities. In their attempt to understand who the Lisbon girls were and why they committed suicide, they never find a truly satisfying answer. Each action they took to understand the girls was a step further into confusion. Like Sirens, this female entity lured the boys in, only to leave them wanting more. The group of young boys is unable to understand the inner workings of the Lisbon sisters, the motive behind their collective suicides. The unrelenting factor keeping them from complete discernment of the Lisbon girls is the gender barrier that separates them. Eugenides re-establishes the sexual obstruction by never giving insight into the minds of the opposite sex. The Lisbon girls represent the epitomized gender enigma, the unsolved mystery of the opposite sex. Contrarily, Eugenides takes a different approach with his second novel, the comedic epic, Middlesex.
Middlesex, reaching across generations, continents, and genders, traces the path of a mutant gene to one Calliope Stephanides. In Cal, our storyteller, that gene finds expression. Eugenides explains, “I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence.” While the boys in The Virgin Suicides have the gender gap that cannot be bridge, Calliope lies on that bridge. In many ways, the book looks at how we are all an I before a he or a she. By creating this I narration, Eugenides leaves the reader close to Cal’s metamorphosis. Because of its epic nature, the I narration needed to have third person qualities to be able to relay the tale that led to the actual ability to do so. Cal, straddling the gender gap, falls easily into the minds and thoughts of both sexes. With uncanny fluidity, Eugenides creates a character that becomes the omnipotent lens to the past. Calliope reveals the way his grandparents fell in love in before they fled from the Turkish invasion of Asia Minor; how “at first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hugs began to change” (39). Cal can explain with unrivalled certainty, the way Desdemona blushed when Lefty, her brother and third cousin, looked at her. Cal delves into the way his parents, second cousins, could not deny the love that flowed within them. Cal acknowledges with clarity how Tessie, his mother, allowed Milton, his father, “to press his clarinet against her skin and fill her body with music” (176). Because of the condition, Cal transcends the gender biases and dwells within the gender gap.
Eugenides mentions how Ovid’s Metamorphosis address Tiresias, the mythical hermaphrodite and the character Calliope plays in her high school play. He was drawn the incredible utility of Tiresias, this person that knew more than a normal person. That is what makes a good novelists, the capability to know people better than the average people, to be an understander of both sexes. It seemed to me that a novelist has to have a hermaphroditic imagination, since you should be able to go into the heads of men and women if you want to write books. What better vehicle for that than a hermaphrodite narrator? It's sort of like the dream novelist himself, or herself, or itself. However, in opposition to the portrayal of hermaphrodites in literature, like Tiresias, Eugenides write about a real hermaphrodite. Cal is one of the most unique narrators in modern literature because of every person can relate to this character. At heart, Middlesex is modern myth about adolescence. People hear that Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite, and sometimes that repels them from reading it. But I see it as a family story. Eugenides uses a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for sexual confusion and the uncertainty of identity that accompanies adolescence. Eugenides uses Cal's double-visioned life experience as an opportunity to display a generous, good-humored empathy toward all of his novel's characters, male and female. Cal serves readers not only as a lens on the hermaphroditic, but also as a prism of the humane. One reviewer refers to the book as “a cleverly post-modernized successor to the likes of Howard Fast's THE IMMIGRANTS series, engrossing multi-generational bestsellers that were popular in the Nixon era, when Cal Stephanides and Jeffrey Eugenides were growing up.” Since genetics play a prominent role, the book is a novelistic genome; containing some of the oldest traits of writing and storytelling. It begins with epic events, old fashioned, almost Homeric ideas and, as it progresses, it becomes a more deeply psychological, more modern novel. Eugenides manages to tuck this strange personal tale into the generocity of the traditional epic, much as Cal's pseudo-penis is hidden away in his labial folds.
Both novels tell of the internal world of the familial unit, differing tragically from the norm. These families are statements about the American suburb in what seems like easier times. In The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides makes it difficult to place the entire blame on the parents. The pressure to conform plays a major role. Every detail is a criticism against the world in which the Lisbon sisters and Calliope lived. In the Grosse Pointe, Detroit of the Lisbons, each home mimics its neighbors. Every autumn, the families rake and burn their leaves in a primitive yet respected and expected ritual, all in an attempt to keep their lawns clear on discolored blemishes. When, like the trees of this area, the sanctity of the town becomes diseased, the city moves to extricate the infection. Mr. Lisbon is asked to relieve his duties as teacher at the high school. But like their infected counterparts, the Lisbon girls are relentless in restraining against the suburban conformity. In Middlesex, Cal's life story is grounded in the context of the sprawling Stephanides family history, a Greek-American immigrant saga that brings Cal's paternal grandparents to urban Detroit in the wake of the burning of Smyrna by the Turks in 1922 and leads all the way to the present day Germany. Four decades of Stephanides roams the pages: from entrepreneurs to charlatans, housewives to hippies, homosexuals to religious leaders, all linked by matrimony and genetics and love. Even the most eccentric subplots of Middlesex, whether it is a Muslim temple scam, a tension-fraught car chase, or the invention of hot dogs that flex like biceps, are imbued with tender, familial warmth. Bypassing in-your-face gender politics, Eugenides focuses on undeniable in-your-bloodline realities, the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” Even though genetics sets the stage, American history is the backdrop. Key moments in the Stephanides family are marked by significant moment on American history. When Grandfather Lefty arrives in Detroit he is briefly employed at the Ford Motor Company, where Eugenides deftly etches the dehumanizing aspect of assembly line work. The Detroit race riots of 1967, white flight to the suburbs, the social divisiveness of the Nixon era, and the so-called sexual revolution all feed into the Stephanides story. There are moments as well when Eugenides captures the pulse of an era in his dialogue, such as Chapter 11's explanation of his refusal to use deodorant during his hippie phase: “I'm a human…This is what humans smell like.”Eugenides wrote two novels that comically comment on two societal taboos: teenage suicide and hermaphrodites. The first looks into the world of shattered female idealism seen through aging eyes of once-young men. Obsession and voyeurism mix with anti-conformist undertones to construct the gender study that is The Virgin Suicides. Eugenides takes it a step further with his second novel. Appealing to every type of person, Cal is the perfect narrator, making his hermaphrodite book, the perfect crossover novel.
the poem to my HAND-BODY
To hands-
Dirty, filthy, muddy, haven’t been clean for three days hands
Why aren’t you clean?
I wash you and wash you and you never become what you were before
I remember when you were clean, it seems like a long time ago
I look at the creases between my figures, the lines in my palms and the winkles in my skin and all I see is dirt, dust and grim.
Under my nails there is a streak of grit and ick and that I brought home with me from Hollister
You do so much for me hands but why wont you just become clean.
To body-
Its not my fault! You’re the one who neglects to wash me.
Instead you go off and have fun without thinking about the dirt you left behind,
What can I do, you’re the one who decides to wash me or not,
I want to be clean, I yearn to be clean, you could almost say it’s my goal in life.
Yet I fail each time you walk away from your sink and I FEEL SO DIRTY!
Dirty, filthy, muddy, haven’t been clean for three days hands
Why aren’t you clean?
I wash you and wash you and you never become what you were before
I remember when you were clean, it seems like a long time ago
I look at the creases between my figures, the lines in my palms and the winkles in my skin and all I see is dirt, dust and grim.
Under my nails there is a streak of grit and ick and that I brought home with me from Hollister
You do so much for me hands but why wont you just become clean.
To body-
Its not my fault! You’re the one who neglects to wash me.
Instead you go off and have fun without thinking about the dirt you left behind,
What can I do, you’re the one who decides to wash me or not,
I want to be clean, I yearn to be clean, you could almost say it’s my goal in life.
Yet I fail each time you walk away from your sink and I FEEL SO DIRTY!
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