Go Ask Alice

21 February 2011
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In an effort to be well rounded in my reading, I picked up the 1971 classic “Go Ask Alice” (it was $6 at Target). I never read this as a teenager, the drugs and sex part of the caption turned me off. Now, I’m glad I didn’t. I like to think I (thankfully) remained somewhat naïve in high school because I didn’t know what all the other kids were doing. It is marketed as a “true story” and the author is listed as Anonymous, but a little bit of research revealed that it has been listed as fiction since the mid-80’s and is thought to be authored by Beatrice Sparks.

Now that I’ve read it, I better understand the diary format that is very popular in angsty Young Adult Fiction. It is fairly easy to see how “Alice” must have been a catalyst for this.

Go_Ask_Alice_by_abandoned_echoes“Go Ask Alice”, read today, is a fairly standard cautionary tale about the path of habitual drug use. In the span of a summer, the author of the diary (we never know her name), goes from being a typical self-conscious, diet/boy obsessed teenager, to a habitual drug user who will do anything for her next fix. The protagonist experiences everything a teenager could possibly experience on the dark side of drugs, running away from home, dealing drugs, being arrested, prostitution, and homelessness.

While I appreciated the insight into the character’s mind, the pace is far too fast for the nature of the material. It is too difficult to get a sense for what she is experiencing before she is onto the next chapter of her miserable story. Part of that maybe be due to the graphic nature of some of the material, and the author thought it would be best to make it choppy so as not to give young readers to much time to dwell.
It is extremely explicit and graphic, so it is absolutely not for young or sensitive readers (I shouldn’t have even read it). But, it is an amazing insight into the thoughts and mentality of a teenager, so I would highly recommend it to parents looking to better understand the kind of dangers their child could face (please read “could” not necessarily “will”).
Grade: C
Rated: R
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Richard III

27 January 2011
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I love English syllabuses. I practically collect them. I like to analyze them and think about what the theme of that class is going to be. I like to critique their choices, I like to collect new titles for my reading list. I am obsessed with my brother-in-law’s high school English reading lists, and I think it creeps him out a bit. I love it when bookstores put out local school summer reading lists. For me, those are equivalent to Fall Fashion Week for a fashionista, or the Sunday Wall Street Journal for a stock-aholic. This all stems from my obsession with all things I read in high school. This is discussed in a soon-to-be classic scene from the recent film “Easy A”. Basically the angst of our reading material seems to mimic that time of our life. I even had a friend who practically became half the characters we read about. I had to stop him at Gatsby, because that bordered on sacrilege for me.

This brings us to the oft overlooked (in high school that is) Shakespeare play “Richard III”. This is in fact my favorite Shakespeare play, and it could be because it comes from that adored high school reading period of my life, or because there is a fantastic version with Ian McKellan. Either way, it is amazing, and though one of his earlier works, it is considered one of Shakespeare’s best.

The most important question to ask yourself about this play : is Richard insane?

I don’t think he is at first. In the beginning, he has his act together. Richard is disfigured and ugly, but his is the evil Odysseus of his generation. With his silver tongue, he convinces anyone of anything, despite the fact they all know not to trust, trust him they do. In a pivotal scene, early in the play, Richard convinces Anne, whose husband and brother he has murdered, and she knows this, to marry him. In McKellan’s chilling portrayal, this is done in the morgue over Anne’s husband’s body. In the play, it’s implied in the text that the husband is in fact, barely cold.

Richard is a fantastic villain, who schemes his way to the top.  He plots, plans, and executes. And he works his way right up to the crown. But the play does not rest solely on Richard’s shoulders. The crux of the action lies in his interaction with other characters. The secondary characters are complex and have amazing plots in their own right. Anne is feisty and smart, until she is rendered impotent by falling for Richard’s act. Margaret is not so trusting, and she launches a string of curses that ring in the ears long after the play is over.

But my favorite character is dear Buckingham, and my favorite Buckingham was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in Al Pacino’s film “Looking for Richard.” Buckingham is in fact Richard’s downfall. Just as Richard has acomplished everything he wants, he pushes Buckingham one step too far, and Buckingham hesitates. And in ding so, he sends his dear King Richard into a tailspin that ultimately leads to his death. It is with Buckingham’s “betrayal” that Richard begins his descent into insanity.

I highly recommend reading it and seeing it.

Richard III: A


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Blast from the Past: Lord of the Rings

13 January 2011
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Whenever it’s cold and snowy outside, not here in California but you know, in the rest of the civilized world, I am taken back to a little experience that my friends and I fondly call “Lotr” (pronounded “Loh-ter”). When I was in high school and college, for 3 consecutive years, during the holiday season, director Peter Jackson released his stellar adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy. For three consecutive years, a large (like 30 or so) group of friends from my high school got together, purchased a mass block of tickets, and took over a good chunk of a theatre in the Loew’s Boston Commons Theatre to watch the films. We laughed, we cried, we cheered, we were ridiculous. I even came home from college for the express purpose of this fantastic experience. And almost every single one of us had read the book.
Lord of the RingsNow, as the years have passed, everyone agrees that Jackson’s films are art. But, I haven’t seen so many copies of the massive tome gracing anyone’s coffee table or bookshelves. It hasn’t been a feature table at any of my local bookstores. Yet, I have seen a lot of copies of the DVD floating around. With the resurgence of intensely detailed massive fantasies, I wonder what keeps people from reading the “face that launched a thousand ships.”

The Lord of the Rings is intensely detailed, filled with complex characters, fascinating side plot, and above all, the dedication of the author to telling a really good story. Taking over a decade to write, and involving thousands of pages of notes, corrections, and seemingly inane details, Tolkien dedicated himself to this story. There is a legend that upon re-reading the manuscript, he discovered the moon phases were out of sync with the chronology. So, he went back and fixed it. That my friends is true attention to detail.

If you like fantasy or horror, if you sat through Justin Cronin’s “The Passage”, or if you just always wondered and never got around to it, I urge you to pick up the book. With all these blizzards abound, there is bound to be a few good snow days left.

One of my favorite passages:
“The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
Elrond. Book II, Chapter 2

Lord of the Rings: A+

Fellowship of the Ring Trailer – 2001

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Oprah & Dickens

14 December 2010
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Oprah has done it again, she has made her book club choices. ‘Tis the season for Dickens. I read an article on this called “Bad Expectations”, where the author criticizes Oprah, her book choices, and what she does to literature. I know we are all rolling our eyes over the fact that if Oprah recommends a book it is an instant best seller, but people let’s get serious here, in our media frenzied existence, how else do you expect to sell books?

So she doesn’t pick winners all the time, who does? You can honestly tell me you have loved every book you picked out for yourself? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Does it bother you that she is “reviving” classics? Really, that’s interesting, do you really think most Americans knew Charles Dickens had written anything besides Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol until her December 2 episode? I promise you, they hadn’t. I would be willing to wager that besides Cliff Notes, most Americans haven’t actually read Charles Dickens. Google “Tale of Two Cities” and you will find the top two sites are Wikipedia and Spark Notes, and don’t try to tell me that’s for research. And this isn’t surprising, his books are difficult to access, even to the most hardened of literary buffs.

Oprah is getting people to read! She is doing for adults what Harry Potter did for children, making people pick up a book and actually try to sit through it. So what if Charles Dickens isn’t really a “hot chocolate” kind of book? In his time, he was considered mass market trash, so please spare me your snobbish view of his place in the cannon. At least people are going to learn that he wrote much more fascinating characters than Ebenezer Scrooge (not a Jew).  I personally dislike most of Dickens, so I would require some kind of sugary treat to help me drag myself through it. Despite that, I think this is fantastic!

In the past few years, I have noticed a decline in Dickens’ popularity. His works are heavy, light on romance, and his world is not entirely relatable, so in typical high school and college syllabi, he has been overshadowed by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and “other” (minority, queer, and other ignored demographics) literature. So if Oprah wants to revive him, props to her! Oprah sells books my friends, so let her.  There are so many other classics out there, choosing Dickens was a brave choice, and however she wants to sell him is fine by me, maybe someone out there will actually even like him.

Oprah’s Picks:

Tales of Two Cities and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

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Blast From the Past: The Lottery

28 October 2010
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In honor of Halloween, for this week’s “Blast from the Past”, let me offer you “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. This chilling short story was first published in 1948 in the New Yorker. Much to the surprise of Jackson, it was greeted by an immediate uproar. The chilling nature of the story makes this fact quite understandable. If you have not read the story, I recommend you read it here before reading any further.  My article will spoil it for you.

Our setting is a small New England-like village. Everyone seems to know everyone and have intimate knowledge of the details of each other’s lives. The beginning of the story is that everyone is in a great rush to get to the town center. For what purpose, why the annual lottery of course. Everyone in town must take a slip of paper, from the wizened old man, to the youngest babe. In the background various people are picking up rocks, but the reader is not sure why. Then someone is picked. There is a rumble in the crowd. And the lucky winner is…stoned to death by the village!

That’s it, that’s all we know. There is no explanation, there are no more details. There is only this one strange excerpt of the day. The townsfolk know, and the unfortunate winner knows, but we the reader are never privy to the knowledge of what the lottery is for. We are led to believe this is something as old as time, maybe an ancient rite that insures a good year. The event is compared to the town “…square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program…”, in that it is all run by the same man. Just another annual event in town. Nothing so special to those inside the story. And they consider themselves civilized. Upon hearing that some villages have given up lotteries, Old Man Warner comments:

“Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly.

But to the reader, the impact of the ending is quite jarring.

What makes this story a classic? English teachers are always in favor of bold tales that make a stark contract from which the time they came from. “The Lottery” was published in the late 40s, World War II had just ended. The popular movies of the time were musicals, westerns, and detective stories. People were still listening to folk songs and gospel on the radio. From my perspective here in the 21st century, it seems a little surprising that Jackson didn’t expect this to cause some kind of stir. America wanted to forget the war and the violence it had wrought upon the world. So the senseless violence and gruesome images painted in “The Lottery” would have been striking to the average American reader. Despite the uproar, or maybe because of it, “The Lottery” is one of the most popular and memorable short stories in contemporary literature.

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Blast from the Past

21 October 2010
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A classic is something everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. – Mark Twain

Do you ever feel like if you were well versed in the classics, you would hold up your end of the conversation better? I hear that all the time from friends, but then they just don’t know where to start. For example, everyone knows they should read Ernest Hemingway, but where to start? Which one is the best, and most importantly, the easiest to read? Well dear reader, never fear! I am starting a new series on Thursdays called: Blast from the Past! In this series, we will explore the “classics”, in my humble opinion, that every cultured person should read. It will be a mix of novels and short stories, but I will try to introduce you to the “must reads” of the past few centuries. After all, the world of reading did not start with Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code.

The week we will begin with Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”. This story is the story that made me want to become a writer. You can read the full story here. It’s rather short, only 3 or 4 pages. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

“Hills Like White Elephants” is an excellent example of Hemingway’s style. It has lean prose and all the action takes place in the dialogue. Legend has it that he used to just read his work over and over again, looking to see what words he could eliminate from sentences. There are no wasted words in Hemingway, and every word counts.

The whole actions of this story takes place in maybe a matter of ten to fifteen minutes. A couple is making small talk as they wait for a train. And then the dialogue takes a turn. There is something about to happen, something “simple”, just to “let the air in.” Here is where an excellent question arises. If I don’t tell you, is it possible to discern what the couple is discussing. Do you need to know what the are discussing to understand the importance of the matter? Shall I spoil it for you…well all right then. They are discussing an abortion. Does that change things? Does it add a new gravity to the story? But wasn’t the gravity all ready there?

That’s the beautiful thing about this story, it is so clean and neat, that you don’t need to know what they are discussing to understand that it is something important, something life changing. That’s what makes this story a classic. It is a glimpse of a moment, a human moment, and in that moment, so many things are hidden and revealed. But despite the time period, the story speaks to readers across the generations. Everyone has had these kinds of conversation, the ones where we are making decisions, and trying to act carefree, even though we know the decision will change the course of our life.

“Hills Like White Elephants” is the very definition of what a short story should be. It contains plot, character insight, climax, and epiphany, and it creates a whole world in less than 1500 words. It is beautiful. In short, I believe this story is perfection. Go ahead, drop this baby into some small talk.

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House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

18 January 2010
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“She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. She could not hold herself much to blame for this ineffectiveness, and she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock.” The House of Mirth, page 486

Edith Wharton is one of the few female authors that I hold in high esteem and warm regard. It’s not that I am sexist. It just happens when I look back over my favorites, I seem to prefer male authors. I find that few female authors have completely captured me. These few include Jane Austen, Jodi Picoult, and Flannery O’Connor. Wharton has that uncanny ability to create characters and stories that stay with me, long after the book or story has been read. Her novel House of Mirth is this kind of novel.

Written in 1905 and set in about the same time, it is the tale of Lily Bart, a not so wealthy young woman who knows that she must make an advantageous marriage, or suffer the consequences. Her tragic flaw, is that she cannot allow herself to marry only for money, yet she will not allow herself to marry for love. She willingly passes up many opportunities at marriages that will provide her the luxury she so desperately desires. Enter Lawrence Selden, the wrench in her schemes. He is not wealthy, but he does love her. A naïve Lily finds herself in a series of situations that make her position more and more desperate, until finally, it is too late.

Wharton used the character of Lily, and her various exploits, to expose the darker side of American elite society. Make no mistake, Lily is no proto-type for a modern feminist type of character. Lily is an honest portrait of young women who face honestly difficult decisions about their futures. Lily is a tragically flawed character who knows her heart and mind too well to let herself settle for a mediocre happiness when the hope of fulfilling her dreams lingers before her. Lily does not seek love, she is no romantic, she is practical. She needs to be wealthy and cannot see herself being happy with only love. The complexity of this character and the constant source of frustration she creates in the reader is what make this book a wonderful read.

I recommend this book for Victorian fanatics who can’t get enough of the period, for readers who wants genuine and different aspect of Victorian society, and for readers who think they understand women and what women want. The character of Lily Bart is fantastic in its timelessness, you could transport this girl to New York today and tweak a character here and an outfit there and have the exact same story, and we would all relate to her, and maybe even have a few stories to tell about our own Lily Barts.

Grade: A

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Scars of the Past

21 December 2009
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“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.” Harry Crew

I have a lot of scars, literally and metaphorically speaking. My problem is I am a terrible klutz, my husband can attest to this as he has seen me fall while standing upright and absolutely still, flat on both feet (no, I do not have an inner ear inbalance). My favorite scar is on my shin and it came from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yes, the book left me actually scarred.

When I was twelve, my mother had this hankering to read The Great Gatsby, which she hadn’t read in years, and thought she might have a cupboard in her bedroom. So she sent me to fetch it. I tripped on the way, and fell against the corner of my parents’ metal bed frame. 1 trip to the hospital and like 10 stitches later, my mother found the book under the tv, nowhere near the cupboard in the bedroom in case you are wondering, and in plain site from where she sat when she asked me to go fetch it.

This is when my hatred of Gatsby was born.

I simply refused to read it. I would devour everything that sat within reach, for many years, and I wouldn’t touch that one. And I loved Hemingway and I loved the Jazz Age, and still, wouldn’t go near it. Just the mention of the title made me roll my eyes. And I told all of this to my junior year English teacher Mr. Cody, but he still made me read it. Thank you Mr. Cody!

This book turned out to be one of my favorite of all time. I’ve read it more than ten times, I quote it constantly, and one of my life goals is to properly adapt it into a film (don’t even get me started on the atrocity of films “based” upon it). I still have my original copy from high school, complete with notes from my friend Alison, that I add new thoughts to upon each new reading. It is a timeless classic after all, but how many of you readers out there have picked it up since high school? That’s what I thought.

To refresh your memory, the story takes place at the height of the Roaring Twenties in a place based on Long Island, New York. Told through the eyes of Nick, a Midwesterner come to make his fortune, it is the tale of Jay Gatsby and his pursuit (or obsession, depending on your point of view) with Daisy Buchanon, his lost love. Set against the back drop of indulgence, luxury, and unfulfilled dreams, the story is a tragic one.

Fitzgerald sets the tone for each character through an old fashioned method of “show, don’t tell” and the book is heavily laden with symbolism and social commentary. But the beauty of the entire piece, in my humble opinion, is in one line, which wraps up the entire theme of the book for me: “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” (Gatsby, Chapter 6).

We are all fooled by whispers of the past at some point in our life, and we struggle to capture them, hold onto them, make them come to life in our present. A feeling, a moment, a person, these things can haunt the life we make for ourselves our whole lives. Just as the past haunts poor Jay Gatsby, who has everything, it haunts us, whether we have everything or not. How can you not find this book remarkable, wherever you are in life.

Such a book is wasted in high school teenagers, this book should be required life reading.

Grade: A+

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