[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!
Its amazing.
Its amazing. It so big, and new, clean, and huge! It is so big you could get lost in it, and then not worry since there is food everywhere. There is a Jamaba Juice and a sushi place inside its walls. I have not many poor words for the new Safeway besides it is not the old one and it is still new. Otherwise enjoy, explore and have fun in the new incredible Safeway.
I am a bag of Chips
I don't really know what this new Safeway is, last time i went to a Safeway was at Crystal Springs Shopping center last week in San Mateo (or Belmont, its kinda on the border so i don't know). It didn't seem any different to me, and i didn't see any pig heads or chickens hanging by the deli. I guess i don't really go grocery shopping and when i do it is for snacks, nothing out of the ordinary. The last thing I bought at a Safeway was a bag of sourcream and cheddar chips and some onion dip. I guess this shows that i am already complete on my own but still seek more things to hide myself in or fill my life with. I guess these material things act like dip to add more aspects to my being. Personally though, i do not believe that this has anything to do with my life except for the fact that i was hungry and wanted to eat.
Americans need Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Chuck Klosterman’s book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of thoughts of topics seemingly normal. He succeeds in stimulating his reader’s thoughts by finding the bizarre in extraordinarily ordinary topics. A lot of his observations seem to have been born in his college years. From his obsession with the “Real World” to his hate for soccer; his respect for Pamela Anderson to his criticism of the widely renowned Star-Wars films, he keeps readers not only turning pages but also so confused and amused that they can’t fully understand everything he says. The book opens with an essay on the impracticality of love and relationships because of the unrealistic conditions we see in movies. This sets the tone of pessimism with slightly humorous overtones throughout the book. Because we are not happy in real life we turn to something we can control, something that we feel safe in- video games. A prime example seen in the book is the collection of the computer game from Electronic Arts, The Sims. The Sims are people whose lives you control. This includes buying them appliances, feeding them, sleeping, etc, things a normal person would do everyday. We actually see a good response from Klosterman, ultimately, the Sims only care about materialistic ends. However, we are above that, no matter how much computers try, they can not completely grasp humanity. Thus, fears of robots taking over the world are grounded. Other subject areas move on to discuss the Celtic versus Laker rivalry and how the demographic of fans act as proof that the two teams can classify everyone in America. We then come to Porn and how it has made the internet what it is. Would the Internet have taken root as quickly as it did had it not provided endless pictures of so called “whores” and “sluts” on its pages? According to Klosterman, no, Porn has caused technology to flower and become applicable to everyone. He is emotionally involved with TV; a lot of his content is based on his viewing of at least 10-year-old TV shows. Interestingly, by commenting on them now he can include information on how the kid stars have turned out. These include commenting on how Elizabeth Berkley from “Saved by the Bell” has stared in soft-porn films, or the subtleties of budding relationships on “The Real World.” The book ends rather unceremoniously with views on religious individuals and how they annoy him.
This basically sums up the feel of his book. He finds something that has stuck in his mind, either because he drew an interesting explication that he wants to share or because it annoys him and he feels like ranting. Klosterman’s writings are quick-paced yet short-lived and are a bit overwhelming. He moves from subject to subject in relatively short twenty page intervals and some of the connections he makes seem only plausible to his mind. These chapters seem to remark on the average American’s short attention span just by being so diverse and short. They include observations from his childhood and through his life until now and it seems that many of his arguments have had time to fester. He is very personal in his writing, he constantly writes as if he is talking to the reader, and remarks on the time he has spent writing. This awareness of time is also somewhat humorous, for example his remarks on how he wrote an article on someone’s life based on a ten minute phone interview (in which he barely touched on his subject’s accomplishments); or how he realizes that he draws out an argument in thousands of words which he could have expressed in a few. Some words seemed overly used such as “unironically” or “pundits” and while his vocabulary is impressive, a more colloquial use of language would have served him better. Especially since his book seems to attract more young readers than the highly educated.
I neither liked nor disliked this book. At times, I found myself mildly interested, but was never completely satisfied at any point. While there was a lot of buzz going on about this book, I did not find it that great. There is no doubt in my mind that Klosterman could counter any criticism I could make and turn it into an issue of how my views of the world equate to those of a cartoon character’s-and that is exactly how it feels to read this book. He writes in a sort of roundabout way that is not very hard to grasp, but incredibly difficult to argue against. Some topics seem so esoteric or so essentially basic that no one else would have the mind, or even want to rebuke his thoughts. His ideas stem from the medium he chooses to use, the interpretive lens of criticisms are largely negative and therefore readers are constantly subjected to Klosterman’s assessment of the American culture. That is, one- we create fake characters that live fake lives. Two- we then escape to those characters, whether they are on the television or in a video game; and ultimately three- we are hiding from reality by doing so.
He was deemed the master of pop culture and is named so for a reason. Overall, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a good escape from the norm, and would be a good book on seeing other perspectives. While not a fictional piece or a textbook, this book still feels like it is lecturing you on subjects that are only figments of one’s imagination. Though many people will sympathize with the Trix Rabbit, how many will break down the psychological workings of Sonny the bird from the lesser known Cocoa Puff commercials? Though I did not fully enjoy this book, I do recommend that others decide on their experience of the book for themselves. Comical yet somehow profound sentences end many chapters and somehow tie this messy work together. These make the experience more bearable and we glimpse the effort in his writing. He really does put a lot of thinking into these analogies and is not just trying to be the funny guy he frequently makes himself out to be. He leaves us thinking with lines such as “Saved by the Bell wasn’t real, but neither is most of reality.” (147) Or “Neither one of us understands how the world works.” (185) By no means was this book boring, dull, or a waste of time.
This basically sums up the feel of his book. He finds something that has stuck in his mind, either because he drew an interesting explication that he wants to share or because it annoys him and he feels like ranting. Klosterman’s writings are quick-paced yet short-lived and are a bit overwhelming. He moves from subject to subject in relatively short twenty page intervals and some of the connections he makes seem only plausible to his mind. These chapters seem to remark on the average American’s short attention span just by being so diverse and short. They include observations from his childhood and through his life until now and it seems that many of his arguments have had time to fester. He is very personal in his writing, he constantly writes as if he is talking to the reader, and remarks on the time he has spent writing. This awareness of time is also somewhat humorous, for example his remarks on how he wrote an article on someone’s life based on a ten minute phone interview (in which he barely touched on his subject’s accomplishments); or how he realizes that he draws out an argument in thousands of words which he could have expressed in a few. Some words seemed overly used such as “unironically” or “pundits” and while his vocabulary is impressive, a more colloquial use of language would have served him better. Especially since his book seems to attract more young readers than the highly educated.
I neither liked nor disliked this book. At times, I found myself mildly interested, but was never completely satisfied at any point. While there was a lot of buzz going on about this book, I did not find it that great. There is no doubt in my mind that Klosterman could counter any criticism I could make and turn it into an issue of how my views of the world equate to those of a cartoon character’s-and that is exactly how it feels to read this book. He writes in a sort of roundabout way that is not very hard to grasp, but incredibly difficult to argue against. Some topics seem so esoteric or so essentially basic that no one else would have the mind, or even want to rebuke his thoughts. His ideas stem from the medium he chooses to use, the interpretive lens of criticisms are largely negative and therefore readers are constantly subjected to Klosterman’s assessment of the American culture. That is, one- we create fake characters that live fake lives. Two- we then escape to those characters, whether they are on the television or in a video game; and ultimately three- we are hiding from reality by doing so.
He was deemed the master of pop culture and is named so for a reason. Overall, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a good escape from the norm, and would be a good book on seeing other perspectives. While not a fictional piece or a textbook, this book still feels like it is lecturing you on subjects that are only figments of one’s imagination. Though many people will sympathize with the Trix Rabbit, how many will break down the psychological workings of Sonny the bird from the lesser known Cocoa Puff commercials? Though I did not fully enjoy this book, I do recommend that others decide on their experience of the book for themselves. Comical yet somehow profound sentences end many chapters and somehow tie this messy work together. These make the experience more bearable and we glimpse the effort in his writing. He really does put a lot of thinking into these analogies and is not just trying to be the funny guy he frequently makes himself out to be. He leaves us thinking with lines such as “Saved by the Bell wasn’t real, but neither is most of reality.” (147) Or “Neither one of us understands how the world works.” (185) By no means was this book boring, dull, or a waste of time.
"Answers" Poem
How is it going?
Great! Thing couldn't be better!
How is it going?
Life is an endless pit of shit and I am in that pit.
Do you like my recipe?
Spinach casserole is my favorite!
Do you like my recipe?
I rather eat dog food.
Why did you lie to me?
Me? Lie? Never!
Why did you lie to me?
Because I can.
Do you love me?
Your are my only love.
Do you love me?
A fat kid loves chocolate cake more than I love you.
Great! Thing couldn't be better!
How is it going?
Life is an endless pit of shit and I am in that pit.
Do you like my recipe?
Spinach casserole is my favorite!
Do you like my recipe?
I rather eat dog food.
Why did you lie to me?
Me? Lie? Never!
Why did you lie to me?
Because I can.
Do you love me?
Your are my only love.
Do you love me?
A fat kid loves chocolate cake more than I love you.
Safeway's Two Gems
I normally never go to the grocery store – no time, no interest. But there are definitely two items that I do not have each week, I go insane. First of all, I am a compulsive gum chewer and cannot live without my 7 packs of Sweet Mint Orbit Gum per week (yes, I chew a pack a day….better than cigarettes, I guess). Gum gets me through my typical school; if I’m not chewing, there is no stopping my heavy round head from falling down on my desk in a deep sleep. My second important item is Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Original Flavor. I’ve been attached to it since I was four, and it’s the one thing I can never screw up cooking. Boil water, drop pasta, drain, add butter, milk, and cheese sauce. Perfection created in under 15 minutes. Plus, that processed powdered cheese is one taste that no other food even comes close to comparing with. It’s the essential comfort food, the one thing that gets me though those moments when I’m about to crack. Without these two items, I would have probably quit at life long ago….
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Shopping for the Groceries
Believe it or not I am the one who gets the groceries for my family. At first I didn't consider a very appealing job, but now I have grown to love it. Let me explain how it all started. When I got my license my father said he would get me a car if I met some conditions. I said sure, his conditions were simple. Taxi my little brother when he needs to go somewhere, drive the family home on family gatherings for the holidays, pay for your own gas, and go get the groceries. Out of all those conditions, I started out hating getting the groceries. Normally it would be taking my brother around, but that kid is just to funny. So my first real grocery shopping occured the firt week I receieved my car August 14, 2006. I went to the Safeway at Seqouia station in Redwood City and went in confident with my list. I didn't know how hard shopping for the family was. I got all the right things just the wrong type. For instance, I brought home 2% milk instead of 1% milk, I thought it was just milk and I don't care if it is skim milk. Then my next trip to the grocery store was the Safeway on woodside road. I ended up getting a little extra food not on the list and was yelled at. By my third time I almost thought nothing could go wrong, only to figure out that I was supposed to bring home wheat bread and not the white wonder bread. I thought I was pathetic and was probably the only kid unable to by food. I love food, I love the taste, how it looks, the many combinations and I just love food. At this point in life I decided to get my food right because someday I would have to get my own food. So, I went to the big kahuna, Costco. I not only tried all the samples, but I couldn't go wrong because they had exactly what I wanted. That day opened my eyes and allowed me to fully appreciate grocery shopping. Now I know alot of the people at the safeways and costco. This is helpful especially when you want the hook up for the "good stuff" that I can't attain yet. But, that is besides the point,the point is go grocerie shopping because it could be so much fun.
Groceries Suck
One word to explain going to the grocery store, boring. I have never liked going and never will. My mom used to have to bring me when I was a little kid and I could not stand going. Now that I am older I do not have to tag along because I am brave enough to stay home and my mom does not worry about me. Unfortunately, I do get stuck going when my mom drives me somewhere and she says, “I need to pick a few things at the store. It will only take five minutes.” Yeah right. Never happens like that and we get stuck doing all this shopping and I do not even get to eat any of it while I am there. A lot of the food is really good and then there is all that other food that you want to eat, especially the ice cream. My mom will make me go to the frozen food section to get peas or something like that and I see all the ice cream and of course my mom is like, “we don’t need any of that.” The grocery store kills me because it is so boring to walk through and put food in your cart and the worst part is, all that awesome food you want right then and there, you cannot have it. I do not care about what type of selection a grocery store, they all are boring for me to walk through and if someone can get groceries for then I will be happy for the rest of my life.
p.s.
aya your not good looking
p.s.
aya your not good looking
Sexy Drugs and Coco Puffs
Eric Davila Bº
“Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs”
This book is a collaboration of essays by the precocious unknown yet known author named Chuck Klosterman. His essays examine contemporary controversies of Americans and events that have occurred. Not only are the essays a great comical read, but the way they are laid out and organized recommend that Klosterman sees it fit to view American culture as many soundtracks in a CD of life. As in any CD trying to be at the top of the charts, it must be filled with captivating rhythm and words able to capture the listeners attention and make them recognize the true intention of the song. In Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs, the true intentions are to make people aware of the issues regarding the media, pop icons, politics, race, clichés and morality. These ideas are found in his essays and are deeply analyzed; raising many questions that not only invite, but challenge the reader to decide a personal opinion. To criticize a man who criticizes for a living is no easy task, especially if the criticizer is Chuck Klosterman, what makes him so good? This is simple, the reason he is so awesomely entertaining is because you can pick up this book open it to any page and laugh out loud in any environment. Some people like Brian Houle, a writer for about.com, have found this to be untrue and state “Like most collections of short stories or essays, Chuck Klosterman struggles to maintain a consistent level of quality throughout the book.” This statement is his opinion and I respect it, but I disagree. In this novel he thoroughly presents the facts in an unnoticed strategically way that leads to an explosive taste of sweetness.
With Klosterman’s collaboration of essays packaged separately there is no apparent theme of the overall book. This is a random burst of explications of random everyday things that sometimes lack attention from us busy people or in some cases get too much attention. These random essays are what keep the reader on edge and eager to find out what witty comical thing Klosterman will say next. For example, in chapter 9, a clever title called Porn, gives the reader expectations or feelings about what the chapter will include. Yet, he doesn’t go off on experiences or explain dirty sexy things, but instead uses the facts of internet porn to show us Americans about how much time we spend on Porn. He states that “97 percent of the internet is porn” and also relates that we are so full of ourselves that we get into a harmful cycle of addiction. His analysis of a subject ends up really being an analysis of who we are and who we want to be. It tests the reader to judge them and have the option of changing or improving themselves. His literature puts the reader into a hypnotic state that allows the reader to secrete themselves into any place and leave into a different world. When you are in this world the only logical thing to do is to start analyzing the previous life settings and see where you want to be in the future.
Other chapters like “Toby over Moby” discuss country music and how people who say they like all genres of music except country to seem cool are fake and need to own up to the reality of country being the original song storytelling. Then there are chapters like
Then aside from music, he has a chapter called, “George Will vs. Nick Hornby” which discusses soccer the most popular sport in the world not catching on in America. Is it that we find ourselves in so much need to take the road less taken that we seclude ourselves from international joys? Then he has chapters like “When Happens When People Stop Being Polite” that talks about reality television and how it was the only thing that captured our viewing time for the year of 2005. This book is so random, comical, and deep witted that I feel like Klosterman just told stories about his conversations that he had when out with his buddies under the influence. Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs was a great read that I recommend to all curiously aroused by modern culture and where it is leading to.
“Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs”
This book is a collaboration of essays by the precocious unknown yet known author named Chuck Klosterman. His essays examine contemporary controversies of Americans and events that have occurred. Not only are the essays a great comical read, but the way they are laid out and organized recommend that Klosterman sees it fit to view American culture as many soundtracks in a CD of life. As in any CD trying to be at the top of the charts, it must be filled with captivating rhythm and words able to capture the listeners attention and make them recognize the true intention of the song. In Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs, the true intentions are to make people aware of the issues regarding the media, pop icons, politics, race, clichés and morality. These ideas are found in his essays and are deeply analyzed; raising many questions that not only invite, but challenge the reader to decide a personal opinion. To criticize a man who criticizes for a living is no easy task, especially if the criticizer is Chuck Klosterman, what makes him so good? This is simple, the reason he is so awesomely entertaining is because you can pick up this book open it to any page and laugh out loud in any environment. Some people like Brian Houle, a writer for about.com, have found this to be untrue and state “Like most collections of short stories or essays, Chuck Klosterman struggles to maintain a consistent level of quality throughout the book.” This statement is his opinion and I respect it, but I disagree. In this novel he thoroughly presents the facts in an unnoticed strategically way that leads to an explosive taste of sweetness.
With Klosterman’s collaboration of essays packaged separately there is no apparent theme of the overall book. This is a random burst of explications of random everyday things that sometimes lack attention from us busy people or in some cases get too much attention. These random essays are what keep the reader on edge and eager to find out what witty comical thing Klosterman will say next. For example, in chapter 9, a clever title called Porn, gives the reader expectations or feelings about what the chapter will include. Yet, he doesn’t go off on experiences or explain dirty sexy things, but instead uses the facts of internet porn to show us Americans about how much time we spend on Porn. He states that “97 percent of the internet is porn” and also relates that we are so full of ourselves that we get into a harmful cycle of addiction. His analysis of a subject ends up really being an analysis of who we are and who we want to be. It tests the reader to judge them and have the option of changing or improving themselves. His literature puts the reader into a hypnotic state that allows the reader to secrete themselves into any place and leave into a different world. When you are in this world the only logical thing to do is to start analyzing the previous life settings and see where you want to be in the future.
Other chapters like “Toby over Moby” discuss country music and how people who say they like all genres of music except country to seem cool are fake and need to own up to the reality of country being the original song storytelling. Then there are chapters like
Then aside from music, he has a chapter called, “George Will vs. Nick Hornby” which discusses soccer the most popular sport in the world not catching on in America. Is it that we find ourselves in so much need to take the road less taken that we seclude ourselves from international joys? Then he has chapters like “When Happens When People Stop Being Polite” that talks about reality television and how it was the only thing that captured our viewing time for the year of 2005. This book is so random, comical, and deep witted that I feel like Klosterman just told stories about his conversations that he had when out with his buddies under the influence. Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs was a great read that I recommend to all curiously aroused by modern culture and where it is leading to.
3rd post in a row. A record set on the blog by Aya Nakano
Dear earlob,
why are you so soft? I am sorry I cant put a fake diamond on you and make you look hella sick but Im afraid of needles. The sight of my blood coming from my ear terrifies me. If i did get a diamond on you, mother would have me killed. I would also like you to tell my washboard abs that i love them.
Dear Aya,
Its a shame that you wont get me a diamond on me. Am a not good enough for you? Are you seeing other earlobes? Do you not love me enough? Is your mom stopping us from expressing our love towards each other? If that is the case, never attempt to feel me again. Though i should i miss your gentle touch, my love for you has gone. Never speak to me again. This is the last time i shall write to you. I ask of you to burn all my letters and all the pictures i sent you. Delete my voicemails and everything that reminds you of me. I want you to be deleted from your memory forever. Your washboard abs say that they cannot express the love they have for being attached to possibly the best looking person alive.
Lov... From, your earlobe
all written by Aya Nakano
from christians blog name
why are you so soft? I am sorry I cant put a fake diamond on you and make you look hella sick but Im afraid of needles. The sight of my blood coming from my ear terrifies me. If i did get a diamond on you, mother would have me killed. I would also like you to tell my washboard abs that i love them.
Dear Aya,
Its a shame that you wont get me a diamond on me. Am a not good enough for you? Are you seeing other earlobes? Do you not love me enough? Is your mom stopping us from expressing our love towards each other? If that is the case, never attempt to feel me again. Though i should i miss your gentle touch, my love for you has gone. Never speak to me again. This is the last time i shall write to you. I ask of you to burn all my letters and all the pictures i sent you. Delete my voicemails and everything that reminds you of me. I want you to be deleted from your memory forever. Your washboard abs say that they cannot express the love they have for being attached to possibly the best looking person alive.
Lov... From, your earlobe
all written by Aya Nakano
from christians blog name
My Odyssey to Safeway
Last Friday with nothing to do, I went with a friend to the grand opening of the huge safeway somewhere around school. The friend, lets give him a name, lets just call him Ryan Wigley. We went to the new safeway just going to get dinner but what we stepped into was no ordinary safeway, it was the god of all safeways. Free samples of organic lemonade, new york steaks, some type of soup, chocolate chewy cookies, and some type of sugary nut were all around the store. So many samples that would pretty much could fill you up for the day. That is what ryan and i did. We ate all the samples around the store until we were full. To top it all off, santa clause gave me a candy cane. We also had a run in with a meat butcher or whatever, who tried to give us a life lesson. He told a friend of mine not to go to a school like USC or Lehigh but to go to California's great JC's such as Foothill and get a real education. He then went on a huge rant about drugs and he mentioned something about LSD or PCP. A friend of mine said "LSD.. that really messes you up". The meat guy quickly replied "no, the governent f***s you up". I walked away thinking "wtf?", what was the point of those 28 minutes of me standing there listening to this guy talk. I think he just wanted to believe he made a difference in someones life when he really just completely messed up his speech or whatever he was giving. I went on with my night going to a friends house and falling asleep while watching Fresh Prince of Bel Air on Nick at Nite. I remember what the meat guys name was. It was Frank. He was an idiot.
- Aya Nakano
The Cutest, Best Looking guy prolly in the whole world
- Aya Nakano
The Cutest, Best Looking guy prolly in the whole world
hella good book review. POSSIBLY the best book review in the universe
Aya Nakano
Lowney Book Review
The Road
For this novel review, I read a novel written by Cormac McCarthy titled “The Road”. The book is about a duo of a father and son that have been traveling constantly for months now in a world where most of civilization and life is destroyed already from a disaster. The mother, you find out later in the novel, has committed suicide. They remain unnamed throughout the whole novel. It takes place in the United States. The whole world is covered in ash and the father and his son wear masks to clean out the air they breathe. The human life that is left is made up of a collection of cannibals and refugees who search for any type of food possible. Everything, such as forests, rivers, all types of nature, is bare and empty. It is winter time and they are trying to survive by reaching another region with warmer weather. The father in the novel is described as well traveled and educated. He realizes that the will not be able to survive in the winter so they set out and follow highways. This is I believe the title “The Road” comes from, from the two main characters following a road and we see the journey they take. On their trip, they face events that they must pass to save their own lives. It made the book more exciting and interesting because it was two characters attempting to survive in a world where the only living human beings were cannibals and marauders. The reader can see that there is something wrong with the father since throughout the whole book he is coughing up blood once in awhile. He is dying and it seems as if he cannot protect his son anymore from the struggles they go through. The two are without food, tired, and attacked by cannibals. They travel the roads carrying a gun with two bullets that are meant for suicide. The son is told to kill himself before he can be captured by the cannibals or marauders. The dad does not want the son to be captured and experience what cannibals do to their prey. The dad is also afraid that he himself might have to kill his son to save him from a more horrible death. The thought of killing his own son haunts him through the novel. The bond between father and son are extremely strong since they only have each other to depend on. The end of the novel is pretty depressing as the father dies from his sickness he had after they reached the south where there is warmer climate. He leaves his son on the road. But then the boy comes across a man who has been following them through their journey. We find out the man has a wife and two kids, and they decide to adopt the boy as their own. The boy ends up with a new family which shows him the love and care that his father did show when he was alive. I usually hate reading books for any class, but this book did not bother me as much as others. It was a pretty easy read, only being 256 pages. In the beginning I was pretty interested in the novel because they were going through the highways and they had to watch out for cannibals and marauders. It was a fight for survival for them. Then towards the end I found it really boring, disappointing and depressing. It was boring because they weren’t being attacked and it was just them traveling most of the time. This was also a reason why it was disappointing because I was expecting a major encounter with a group of cannibals or marauders. Then the obvious depressing part of the book for me was seeing the father fall to his sickness after all the struggles they went through and finally making it to their goal. It was sad to see their strong bond being broken by his sickness. The bond was something you can appreciate in the book and you can see how the father- son bond was so strong. It was them against the world pretty much. As a closing thought, I do recommend the book to readers but I advise them not to expect much.
Lowney Book Review
The Road
For this novel review, I read a novel written by Cormac McCarthy titled “The Road”. The book is about a duo of a father and son that have been traveling constantly for months now in a world where most of civilization and life is destroyed already from a disaster. The mother, you find out later in the novel, has committed suicide. They remain unnamed throughout the whole novel. It takes place in the United States. The whole world is covered in ash and the father and his son wear masks to clean out the air they breathe. The human life that is left is made up of a collection of cannibals and refugees who search for any type of food possible. Everything, such as forests, rivers, all types of nature, is bare and empty. It is winter time and they are trying to survive by reaching another region with warmer weather. The father in the novel is described as well traveled and educated. He realizes that the will not be able to survive in the winter so they set out and follow highways. This is I believe the title “The Road” comes from, from the two main characters following a road and we see the journey they take. On their trip, they face events that they must pass to save their own lives. It made the book more exciting and interesting because it was two characters attempting to survive in a world where the only living human beings were cannibals and marauders. The reader can see that there is something wrong with the father since throughout the whole book he is coughing up blood once in awhile. He is dying and it seems as if he cannot protect his son anymore from the struggles they go through. The two are without food, tired, and attacked by cannibals. They travel the roads carrying a gun with two bullets that are meant for suicide. The son is told to kill himself before he can be captured by the cannibals or marauders. The dad does not want the son to be captured and experience what cannibals do to their prey. The dad is also afraid that he himself might have to kill his son to save him from a more horrible death. The thought of killing his own son haunts him through the novel. The bond between father and son are extremely strong since they only have each other to depend on. The end of the novel is pretty depressing as the father dies from his sickness he had after they reached the south where there is warmer climate. He leaves his son on the road. But then the boy comes across a man who has been following them through their journey. We find out the man has a wife and two kids, and they decide to adopt the boy as their own. The boy ends up with a new family which shows him the love and care that his father did show when he was alive. I usually hate reading books for any class, but this book did not bother me as much as others. It was a pretty easy read, only being 256 pages. In the beginning I was pretty interested in the novel because they were going through the highways and they had to watch out for cannibals and marauders. It was a fight for survival for them. Then towards the end I found it really boring, disappointing and depressing. It was boring because they weren’t being attacked and it was just them traveling most of the time. This was also a reason why it was disappointing because I was expecting a major encounter with a group of cannibals or marauders. Then the obvious depressing part of the book for me was seeing the father fall to his sickness after all the struggles they went through and finally making it to their goal. It was sad to see their strong bond being broken by his sickness. The bond was something you can appreciate in the book and you can see how the father- son bond was so strong. It was them against the world pretty much. As a closing thought, I do recommend the book to readers but I advise them not to expect much.
A REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF LOVE <3
Two different lives come together through their intricate quest for each other in this enchanting piece of fiction. Leopold Gursky is a lonely, old, Polish immigrant, living in New York. In his old age, the anticipation of death occupies his days while he reminisces the woman he let slip away, his beloved Alma. Despite his passion for Alma that he conveys so beautifully in his works of literature, he doesn’t consider himself a writer. Instead, convinces himself he is a coward for not connecting with his own son, who has no idea of his existence. He spent the majority of his life in remorse for not running after his love and confronting his son, decisions he regretted every day.
In the same city, Alma Singer (not to be confused with Leo’s one love), clings on to the memory of her dead father through her vague knowledge and a book he gave to her mother. Alma’s mother is bewildered without her husband and spends her days in books to escape the lingering memory of her late husband. Alma’s quirky brother, Bird, is a fascinating creature who is convinced he is the Messiah and builds an arc for their family. In Alma’s quest to get to know her father, whom she idolizes, she delves deep into a book he loved, The History of Love.
The tale of the History of Love (the novel in the story, mind you) has a confusing timeline of how it came to be created and then published. It turns out that Leo Gursky is the actual author of the story, who originally wrote it in Yiddish. He wrote it for his love Alma in Poland and after she left for America, he found no use for it, so he handed it off to his friend Zvi Litvinoff. Zvi figured that his old pal Leo had perished during the Holocaust, so he published the book, only he named himself as the author. Tisk tisk. The reader later learns that Zvi became famous for The History of Love as he lived a lie.
This novel reaches Alma Singer, who is fascinated by the character Alma, who he believed she is named after by her father. Alma does some research in order to find the real Alma which eventually leads her to the author, Leo Gursky. In the final scene of the novel, the two meet in an emotional encounter where they share a moment of remorse, each for someone they loved deeply. Leo for Alma and Alma for her father.
Nicole Kraus’ writing style is like nothing I have ever experienced before. Her unpredictable humor keeps the reader on their toes. Whether it is a scene with Leo, a true attention whore, who would drop his change on the floor, just so people would notice him, or in her description of Bird’s massive pile of cardboard and scrap medal for the ark, Krauss’ quirky intelligence kept me flipping pages. What captured me the most were her excerpts from her fictional novel, The History of Love. She speaks of a time before words, where humans communicated solely through their hands. Her depiction of life without words was truly amazing. (PG 72) Her captivating language and beautiful prose held my attention throughout my enjoying of the novel. Sometimes, when I taking a break from the novel, I would think about it, and I was immediately drawn back into it where I would stay for hours.
It is virtually impossible to summarize the book because there are so many small details that Krauss carefully weaves in that come together in the end. The book leads up to this amazing moment where these two characters, whose brains we have picked and examined for the past two hundred pages, finally come together in a beautiful, emotional scene.
In the same city, Alma Singer (not to be confused with Leo’s one love), clings on to the memory of her dead father through her vague knowledge and a book he gave to her mother. Alma’s mother is bewildered without her husband and spends her days in books to escape the lingering memory of her late husband. Alma’s quirky brother, Bird, is a fascinating creature who is convinced he is the Messiah and builds an arc for their family. In Alma’s quest to get to know her father, whom she idolizes, she delves deep into a book he loved, The History of Love.
The tale of the History of Love (the novel in the story, mind you) has a confusing timeline of how it came to be created and then published. It turns out that Leo Gursky is the actual author of the story, who originally wrote it in Yiddish. He wrote it for his love Alma in Poland and after she left for America, he found no use for it, so he handed it off to his friend Zvi Litvinoff. Zvi figured that his old pal Leo had perished during the Holocaust, so he published the book, only he named himself as the author. Tisk tisk. The reader later learns that Zvi became famous for The History of Love as he lived a lie.
This novel reaches Alma Singer, who is fascinated by the character Alma, who he believed she is named after by her father. Alma does some research in order to find the real Alma which eventually leads her to the author, Leo Gursky. In the final scene of the novel, the two meet in an emotional encounter where they share a moment of remorse, each for someone they loved deeply. Leo for Alma and Alma for her father.
Nicole Kraus’ writing style is like nothing I have ever experienced before. Her unpredictable humor keeps the reader on their toes. Whether it is a scene with Leo, a true attention whore, who would drop his change on the floor, just so people would notice him, or in her description of Bird’s massive pile of cardboard and scrap medal for the ark, Krauss’ quirky intelligence kept me flipping pages. What captured me the most were her excerpts from her fictional novel, The History of Love. She speaks of a time before words, where humans communicated solely through their hands. Her depiction of life without words was truly amazing. (PG 72) Her captivating language and beautiful prose held my attention throughout my enjoying of the novel. Sometimes, when I taking a break from the novel, I would think about it, and I was immediately drawn back into it where I would stay for hours.
It is virtually impossible to summarize the book because there are so many small details that Krauss carefully weaves in that come together in the end. The book leads up to this amazing moment where these two characters, whose brains we have picked and examined for the past two hundred pages, finally come together in a beautiful, emotional scene.
you know you love me, gossip girl
Comparison Between the Book and the TV Series:
The Gossip Girl novel differs significantly from the Gossip Girl TV series. First off, the book has more of a story behind it. Whereas, the TV series skips through most the events of the book. Within the first few episodes of the show, Serena and Dan started dating. In the novel, this relationship did not happen until about the seventh or eighth book. Another difference between the book and the TV series is that in the book Jenny is described as not an attractive girl, brown curly hair, very skinny, but with massive breasts. In the TV series she is almost the opposite, blond hair, pretty, small breasts, and skinny. I feel that even though both the book and the series have the same name, characters, plot and setting, they are still very different. I personally like the book much better. In fact, after viewing the first two episodes of the series, I had no desire to watch it any longer. But in contrast, the book series is the only one that I have ever wanted to read.
Reality Exaggerated:
Gossip Girl, the books, I feel are an exaggerated version of reality. Some of the situations and events that happen in the books are close to what can happen in real life. But, this book series is trying to captivate an audience and so of course, all the situations are going to be dramatized in order to attract readers. One example of a situation in the book that I feel is somewhat close to reality is when Gossip Girl, herself, blogs on the “gossip” that happens every so often. I feel that in real life gossip is passed around regularly but not through an actual website, this is one of the many exaggerations in the book. So, Gossip Girl is based on reality but also attracts an audience at the same time.
In order to attract readers, the author also makes the issues that the characters have in the book series seems so extravagant. Because these issues are close to reality but yet so far, the issues that the characters have seem so much worse than the ones that I have myself. But, von Ziegesar “glamorizes” these issues to the point where I would trade the issues I have with the ones Serena and Blair have any day, even though theirs are far worse. Just like Gossip Girl says, “Our shit still stinks, but you can’t smell it because the bathroom is sprayed hourly by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers”. Even though their issues (their shit) are terrible, they are still so perfect at the same time.
Lifestyle for Criticism:
Some may take this book as criticism for the lifestyle that this book portrays. The characters in the book live in New York City’s Upper East Side. They “all live in huge apartments with (their) own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. (They) have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever these (they) want…(they’ve) inherited good looks, (they) wear fantastic clothes, and (they) know how to party.” So, basically, these kids have everything. One way that von Ziegesar may want you to see the book is in a way of critic for this lifestyle. The author may be exposing every part of this lifestyle so that others have a better view of it and can critic it more than they ever could. Cecily von Ziegesar lived the same lifestyle of the characters that she created in the book. I am uncertain if she lived through the same events in the book, but I have to believe that some of the events in the book are based on her own knowledge of this lifestyle. The message that she could be trying to portray by writing this series of books is that this lifestyle is absurd. She may ant readers to realize this message as they read. I feel, though, that some of the readers are going to think the exact opposite of this message and view the life of these characters as they way they should be living their life. I just feel that von Ziegesar needs to be careful with what she writes because some readers may take her writing seriously.
The Gossip Girl novel differs significantly from the Gossip Girl TV series. First off, the book has more of a story behind it. Whereas, the TV series skips through most the events of the book. Within the first few episodes of the show, Serena and Dan started dating. In the novel, this relationship did not happen until about the seventh or eighth book. Another difference between the book and the TV series is that in the book Jenny is described as not an attractive girl, brown curly hair, very skinny, but with massive breasts. In the TV series she is almost the opposite, blond hair, pretty, small breasts, and skinny. I feel that even though both the book and the series have the same name, characters, plot and setting, they are still very different. I personally like the book much better. In fact, after viewing the first two episodes of the series, I had no desire to watch it any longer. But in contrast, the book series is the only one that I have ever wanted to read.
Reality Exaggerated:
Gossip Girl, the books, I feel are an exaggerated version of reality. Some of the situations and events that happen in the books are close to what can happen in real life. But, this book series is trying to captivate an audience and so of course, all the situations are going to be dramatized in order to attract readers. One example of a situation in the book that I feel is somewhat close to reality is when Gossip Girl, herself, blogs on the “gossip” that happens every so often. I feel that in real life gossip is passed around regularly but not through an actual website, this is one of the many exaggerations in the book. So, Gossip Girl is based on reality but also attracts an audience at the same time.
In order to attract readers, the author also makes the issues that the characters have in the book series seems so extravagant. Because these issues are close to reality but yet so far, the issues that the characters have seem so much worse than the ones that I have myself. But, von Ziegesar “glamorizes” these issues to the point where I would trade the issues I have with the ones Serena and Blair have any day, even though theirs are far worse. Just like Gossip Girl says, “Our shit still stinks, but you can’t smell it because the bathroom is sprayed hourly by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers”. Even though their issues (their shit) are terrible, they are still so perfect at the same time.
Lifestyle for Criticism:
Some may take this book as criticism for the lifestyle that this book portrays. The characters in the book live in New York City’s Upper East Side. They “all live in huge apartments with (their) own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. (They) have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever these (they) want…(they’ve) inherited good looks, (they) wear fantastic clothes, and (they) know how to party.” So, basically, these kids have everything. One way that von Ziegesar may want you to see the book is in a way of critic for this lifestyle. The author may be exposing every part of this lifestyle so that others have a better view of it and can critic it more than they ever could. Cecily von Ziegesar lived the same lifestyle of the characters that she created in the book. I am uncertain if she lived through the same events in the book, but I have to believe that some of the events in the book are based on her own knowledge of this lifestyle. The message that she could be trying to portray by writing this series of books is that this lifestyle is absurd. She may ant readers to realize this message as they read. I feel, though, that some of the readers are going to think the exact opposite of this message and view the life of these characters as they way they should be living their life. I just feel that von Ziegesar needs to be careful with what she writes because some readers may take her writing seriously.
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