mediterranean thugs
I was off work for two days and back in Jersey for some family stuff, and I feel like I'm playing a lot of catchup now that I'm back. At home, too -- or more specifically with TV. It seems like there's a bunch of really good stuff on right now -- and there are so many season finales I'm excited for. I'm looking forward to the summer to give me a chance to catch my breath. (Oh, and to rent and watch all the episodes of The Wire, which I just started watching this week.)
I kind of psyched myself out a little on the slashfic25 front, when I realized that even if I turn out one story for it every two weeks (an unprecedented rate of production for me), it'd take me a year to finish. And then I started feeling overwhelmed, like I was frantically thinking of ideas for all the prompts at the same time. But then I realized that the sheer number of stories I have to write is practically license to make some of them incredibly self-indulgent, the kind of things you think about but don't ever really intend to follow through with because it seems kind of crazy. And then I thought, hey, there's no deadline, and I've been here a while already, I'll be here in a year. And as Dear Abby would say, how old would you be in a year if you didn't write 25 24 more dirty stories about Justin Timberlake? So that's my strategy: slow and self-indulgent. Watch this space next year for a story about Timberlake in Deadwood :)
And now have some books:
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope -- Really good Trollope, which means really good. Funny and sad and insightful - I really enjoyed it. I loved Lily Dale, and I've seen some people saying they thought she was annoying by the end, but I thought she was charming throughout, and a really believable girl of her age, too. The upstairs/downstairs contrast of Lily and Crosbie, and especially Crosbie at the DeCourcy's party, with Johnny and Amelia in the boarding house was great - I loved the boarding house scenes so much, and also the scenes at Johnny Eames' office were really funny. I have to say that this is the first book in a long time where I was really a little bothered by the lack of a happy ending. Not that it was a really sad ending, but I was rooting for Lily and Johnny Eames from about halfway through and as it started to look like there wasn't enough book left for them to get together, I was like, oh, come on - please? But even as I thought that, I knew it worked better and made more sense for Lily. The book made me think of Sense & Sensibility, though with a very different spin and style.
Longitudes and Attitudes by Thomas Friedman -- This was a collection of Friedman's columns from the week before 9/11 through about 2003, I think, along with a diary portion at the end detailing some of his travels in the Middle East. I don't really agree with Friedman that much, but he obviously knows a lot about the region and I learned a lot from reading him. It was also fascinating from almost a historical perspective, to read his "real-time" reactions (with a lot of thought and editing, but still, without the benefit of hindsight) about the events of 9/11 and the aftermath, Afghanistan and Iraq. It hasn't been that long but sometimes it seemed like reading something from a really long time ago. One of the really painful parts to read was Friedman - who supported going to war in Iraq, although not really because of WMD - laying out in column after column the way in which he thought the war needed to be prepared for and launched in order to make the war successful - building relationships with allies, preparing to be there for a long time, thinking carefully about the rebuilding efforts. Reading it, you feel as if someone on Bush's team tore it out and said, Hey, let's do exactly the opposite of this. I don't actually follow Friedman's column now (he's not in the Sunday NYTimes, which I get at home, and his weekly column is pay-only), but I'm very curious about his reactions to what's been going on recently. I think overall I preferred the diary portion at the end - it was just really interesting to read about his travels, and also the thing about reading a collection of columns all at once is you really get a strong sense of a writer's tricks, his preferred turns of phrase and the way in which he makes his arguments, and by the end it's a little repetitive. Also, you get kind of a magnified view of a writer's quirks - for instance, Friedman really came off to me as a man of a certain age who didn't grow up with computers and then was totally enchanted and blown away by the dot-com boom and is just completely wowed by any sort of technology (there was that guy who used to write for the New Yorker who had a similar thing going on, and then I think he wrote a book about how he day traded all his money away). He loves to use computer metaphors for things that maybe don't really need computer metaphors, and in two or three columns written right before 9/11 he's obsessed with the idea that we're all going to become cyborgs or something in the next two years. There's this one part written in 2001 where he's like, in the next five years everyone's appliances in their homes will be wired to the Internet, your toaster (I don't know why) and your refrigerator, and your refrigerator will be able to reorder milk automatically when you're out. And here I am in 2006, still going to the grocery store myself like a sucker.
The Red Letter Plays (In the Blood and Fucking A) - Both In the Blood and Fucking A are two (very) different, modernized takes on The Scarlet Letter.) I saw a production of In the Blood a year or two ago and it was just awful. I mean, it was well-produced, the acting was good, but the thinking behind it was so incoherent and sloppy and smug that I wanted to shoot someone. One of the problems was that there was a Q&A afterwards, and I don't know why I haven't learned by now that Q&As + me = death, but the actors and directors were so pleased with themselves and so smug about how they were enlightening all of us suckers in the audience. And then this older white guy stood up and thanked them for doing this brave thing (because there's nothing brave like taking a paying acting job in a big suburban theatre in a liberal area) and how until he saw this play, he never really knew that there were people who were homeless and poor. And I had to be physically kept back from standing up and asking the next question, which I would address to that man and would be: Do you live in a cave? And this was the first thing in 60 years they've let you out to see? Dude, I'm so sorry. Anyway. I know I have kind of a dog in this fight, because the work I do would definitely put me under Welfare (although, God, one of the things that killed me was that if she wanted to satirize the self-righteousness and the attitudes toward poor women who have sex in social workers/the welfare bureaucracy - she picked exactly the wrong thing to put in her play! There's definitely tons of stuff she could have used, and instead she picked this sloppy weird thing that doesn't even key into the problematic attitudes that are there. And the problem, the problem with doing that is that it lets everybody who watches say, oh, man, that's not me and we can all shake our heads in sorrow for poor women and in anger at the welfare bureaucracy and feel not at all implicated in the problem.) Anyway. Also - ALSO - here's the thing: I understand the doubling of the roles of people like the preacher, Welfare, Chilli, etc. with the kids, but having grown actors play the kids is a copout and here's why: there's no way you'd actually put or would want to put an actual 2-year-old who gets one bad meal a day and lives under a bridge onstage so people can see what that actually looks like, but if you had an actual kid then it might be easier for people to make the connection in their minds, instead of an attractive, fully grown and well-fed actor playing a kid. Because I'm thinking that it might be a little harder to sympathize with some of the choices that Hester makes if you had to look at and listen to what the real world consequences of refusing to take children to even the crappiest shelter as opposed to living out and starving. I feel like Ann Coulter writing this, and I'm not. It's precisely because I think there is so much to criticize and satirize and engage us about in the way in which we treat the poor, and poor women in particular, that seeing it done in this crappy haphazard way that lets EVERYONE WHO'S LIKELY TO COME ACROSS IT let themselves off the hook that makes me angry.
So, one might ask, having seen and hated the play, why might I have chosen to read it? One thing Parks is good at is creating language - especially spoken in unison or shared lines but also in monologues - that really has a compelling rhythm. The weakest parts are the parts meant to be most realistic -- when people talk to each other it doesn't sound anything like the way people talk to each other - but in the less realistic pieces, the chants or songs or monologues, you really get drawn in by the cool way the language works. The problem is, about five seconds later you think, what the hell? That makes no sense! And no human being in the world has ever reacted that way! But the language is cool, and it was interesting to look at how she does it. In the Blood is much more successful on that level. Unfortunately, Fucking A, while less infuriating than In the Blood, doesn’t have the same compelling language. I mean, some of it is, but some of it is now. I may be doing it somewhat of a disservice as I've only read this one, and there's a made-up language in it that may come across much better on stage than on the page, but that's not really going to save it for me. Also, I understand the idea of influence and homage and have liked many things that wore their influences very obviously, but the thing is, when you do that you have to be careful no one's going to watch it and think, hey, this reminds me a lot of Mother Courage. Man, I wish I were watching Mother Courage. Anyway, I know there are lots of people who love these plays, so maybe it's just me. If anybody's read Top Dog Underdog and thinks it's worth it, let me know.
Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall -- I picked this book up because of (what turned out to be) a partial description of the plot -- a woman with synaesthesia, who sees people and events as colors. I was really intrigued by the idea, and it is very fascinating in the book, although it ended up being for me a very low key part of the book. Really the book is about a woman dealing with a series of losses in her life, and the language and experience of loss is drawn very compellingly here. I loved the style of the writing, which was plain but at the same time vivid. It's also a really fascinating portrait of a family that becomes at the same time more unusual and more familiar as you keep reading and more and more secrets and layers of emotion are revealed.
The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol -- This was a wonderful, interesting, infuriating and deeply sad book. A look at the de facto segregation of American public schools, particularly urban ones, written by someone who has been a teacher and a writer about schools for years, it's both an in-depth look at what current educational policies, like No Child Left Behind, actually feel like to teachers and students inside failing schools, and a call for attention and action to a problem that seems like it's on the front pages of the paper all the time yet with no new solutions at hand. The most fascinating and depressing parts of the book for me were the descriptions of rote, militaristic (and based on military regimens) "learning programs" where each day -- each minute -- is broken down and scripted for teachers, and there's no room for so many of the things I remember from my own education, and that taught me to love reading and learning. Kozol describes the catch-22 of these programs -- they're designed so that anyone can teach them, with the assumption that the inner-city classrooms they'll be taught in will attract the least competent teachers, while at the same time making teaching so soul-deadening that good teachers can barely stand them. Also incredibly interesting and depressing were the description of (often corporate-sponsored) school-to-work programs, where from the earliest grades kids are taught to think about their future lives as workers and to think about their education only in terms of their future lives as workers, and not in the 'if you can dream it you can be it' sense but in the 'let's make you the most efficient McDonald's employee you can be' sense. He also thinks about what it means that the overwhelming majority (is there a word for more than overwhelming) of the children who receive this education are African American and Hispanic, and contrasts it with the education received in majority-white suburban and wealthier urban schools. Kozol is a great writer and great at listening to and capturing the way kids talk. He comes at his topic from a liberal point of view and has a definite agenda, which he openly acknowledges, but I think even if you end up coming to an opposing opinion about what should be done about the problem, I think this book would be worth reading for a glimpse into the classrooms of the schools he describes.
The Warden by Anthony Trollope -- All right, you win, Trollope. I was an idiot when I was in school. This is a good book. I was especially touched by the relationship between the Warden and his younger daughter, and I just flat out really liked the Warden and was interested in his plight. And I can understand why someone would pick this if you were only going to reach one Trollope -- it's short (I couldn't believe how short it was compared to most of his other books), you get a good snapshot of Church life, there's meaty "issues" to talk about (idealism vs. pragmatism, the role of charity), and you can talk about Dickens vs. Trollope because after all, Trollope starts it with his discussion of Mr. Public Sentiment. Still and all, if you're only going to read one Trollope -- well, first I'd protest, because you should read more, at least three or four, but if you were stubborn, I don't think I'd give you The Warden. But still, it was a good book and I enjoyed it a lot, enough to be embarking on the rest of the Barchester series.
I kind of psyched myself out a little on the slashfic25 front, when I realized that even if I turn out one story for it every two weeks (an unprecedented rate of production for me), it'd take me a year to finish. And then I started feeling overwhelmed, like I was frantically thinking of ideas for all the prompts at the same time. But then I realized that the sheer number of stories I have to write is practically license to make some of them incredibly self-indulgent, the kind of things you think about but don't ever really intend to follow through with because it seems kind of crazy. And then I thought, hey, there's no deadline, and I've been here a while already, I'll be here in a year. And as Dear Abby would say, how old would you be in a year if you didn't write 25 24 more dirty stories about Justin Timberlake? So that's my strategy: slow and self-indulgent. Watch this space next year for a story about Timberlake in Deadwood :)
And now have some books:
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope -- Really good Trollope, which means really good. Funny and sad and insightful - I really enjoyed it. I loved Lily Dale, and I've seen some people saying they thought she was annoying by the end, but I thought she was charming throughout, and a really believable girl of her age, too. The upstairs/downstairs contrast of Lily and Crosbie, and especially Crosbie at the DeCourcy's party, with Johnny and Amelia in the boarding house was great - I loved the boarding house scenes so much, and also the scenes at Johnny Eames' office were really funny. I have to say that this is the first book in a long time where I was really a little bothered by the lack of a happy ending. Not that it was a really sad ending, but I was rooting for Lily and Johnny Eames from about halfway through and as it started to look like there wasn't enough book left for them to get together, I was like, oh, come on - please? But even as I thought that, I knew it worked better and made more sense for Lily. The book made me think of Sense & Sensibility, though with a very different spin and style.
Longitudes and Attitudes by Thomas Friedman -- This was a collection of Friedman's columns from the week before 9/11 through about 2003, I think, along with a diary portion at the end detailing some of his travels in the Middle East. I don't really agree with Friedman that much, but he obviously knows a lot about the region and I learned a lot from reading him. It was also fascinating from almost a historical perspective, to read his "real-time" reactions (with a lot of thought and editing, but still, without the benefit of hindsight) about the events of 9/11 and the aftermath, Afghanistan and Iraq. It hasn't been that long but sometimes it seemed like reading something from a really long time ago. One of the really painful parts to read was Friedman - who supported going to war in Iraq, although not really because of WMD - laying out in column after column the way in which he thought the war needed to be prepared for and launched in order to make the war successful - building relationships with allies, preparing to be there for a long time, thinking carefully about the rebuilding efforts. Reading it, you feel as if someone on Bush's team tore it out and said, Hey, let's do exactly the opposite of this. I don't actually follow Friedman's column now (he's not in the Sunday NYTimes, which I get at home, and his weekly column is pay-only), but I'm very curious about his reactions to what's been going on recently. I think overall I preferred the diary portion at the end - it was just really interesting to read about his travels, and also the thing about reading a collection of columns all at once is you really get a strong sense of a writer's tricks, his preferred turns of phrase and the way in which he makes his arguments, and by the end it's a little repetitive. Also, you get kind of a magnified view of a writer's quirks - for instance, Friedman really came off to me as a man of a certain age who didn't grow up with computers and then was totally enchanted and blown away by the dot-com boom and is just completely wowed by any sort of technology (there was that guy who used to write for the New Yorker who had a similar thing going on, and then I think he wrote a book about how he day traded all his money away). He loves to use computer metaphors for things that maybe don't really need computer metaphors, and in two or three columns written right before 9/11 he's obsessed with the idea that we're all going to become cyborgs or something in the next two years. There's this one part written in 2001 where he's like, in the next five years everyone's appliances in their homes will be wired to the Internet, your toaster (I don't know why) and your refrigerator, and your refrigerator will be able to reorder milk automatically when you're out. And here I am in 2006, still going to the grocery store myself like a sucker.
The Red Letter Plays (In the Blood and Fucking A) - Both In the Blood and Fucking A are two (very) different, modernized takes on The Scarlet Letter.) I saw a production of In the Blood a year or two ago and it was just awful. I mean, it was well-produced, the acting was good, but the thinking behind it was so incoherent and sloppy and smug that I wanted to shoot someone. One of the problems was that there was a Q&A afterwards, and I don't know why I haven't learned by now that Q&As + me = death, but the actors and directors were so pleased with themselves and so smug about how they were enlightening all of us suckers in the audience. And then this older white guy stood up and thanked them for doing this brave thing (because there's nothing brave like taking a paying acting job in a big suburban theatre in a liberal area) and how until he saw this play, he never really knew that there were people who were homeless and poor. And I had to be physically kept back from standing up and asking the next question, which I would address to that man and would be: Do you live in a cave? And this was the first thing in 60 years they've let you out to see? Dude, I'm so sorry. Anyway. I know I have kind of a dog in this fight, because the work I do would definitely put me under Welfare (although, God, one of the things that killed me was that if she wanted to satirize the self-righteousness and the attitudes toward poor women who have sex in social workers/the welfare bureaucracy - she picked exactly the wrong thing to put in her play! There's definitely tons of stuff she could have used, and instead she picked this sloppy weird thing that doesn't even key into the problematic attitudes that are there. And the problem, the problem with doing that is that it lets everybody who watches say, oh, man, that's not me and we can all shake our heads in sorrow for poor women and in anger at the welfare bureaucracy and feel not at all implicated in the problem.) Anyway. Also - ALSO - here's the thing: I understand the doubling of the roles of people like the preacher, Welfare, Chilli, etc. with the kids, but having grown actors play the kids is a copout and here's why: there's no way you'd actually put or would want to put an actual 2-year-old who gets one bad meal a day and lives under a bridge onstage so people can see what that actually looks like, but if you had an actual kid then it might be easier for people to make the connection in their minds, instead of an attractive, fully grown and well-fed actor playing a kid. Because I'm thinking that it might be a little harder to sympathize with some of the choices that Hester makes if you had to look at and listen to what the real world consequences of refusing to take children to even the crappiest shelter as opposed to living out and starving. I feel like Ann Coulter writing this, and I'm not. It's precisely because I think there is so much to criticize and satirize and engage us about in the way in which we treat the poor, and poor women in particular, that seeing it done in this crappy haphazard way that lets EVERYONE WHO'S LIKELY TO COME ACROSS IT let themselves off the hook that makes me angry.
So, one might ask, having seen and hated the play, why might I have chosen to read it? One thing Parks is good at is creating language - especially spoken in unison or shared lines but also in monologues - that really has a compelling rhythm. The weakest parts are the parts meant to be most realistic -- when people talk to each other it doesn't sound anything like the way people talk to each other - but in the less realistic pieces, the chants or songs or monologues, you really get drawn in by the cool way the language works. The problem is, about five seconds later you think, what the hell? That makes no sense! And no human being in the world has ever reacted that way! But the language is cool, and it was interesting to look at how she does it. In the Blood is much more successful on that level. Unfortunately, Fucking A, while less infuriating than In the Blood, doesn’t have the same compelling language. I mean, some of it is, but some of it is now. I may be doing it somewhat of a disservice as I've only read this one, and there's a made-up language in it that may come across much better on stage than on the page, but that's not really going to save it for me. Also, I understand the idea of influence and homage and have liked many things that wore their influences very obviously, but the thing is, when you do that you have to be careful no one's going to watch it and think, hey, this reminds me a lot of Mother Courage. Man, I wish I were watching Mother Courage. Anyway, I know there are lots of people who love these plays, so maybe it's just me. If anybody's read Top Dog Underdog and thinks it's worth it, let me know.
Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall -- I picked this book up because of (what turned out to be) a partial description of the plot -- a woman with synaesthesia, who sees people and events as colors. I was really intrigued by the idea, and it is very fascinating in the book, although it ended up being for me a very low key part of the book. Really the book is about a woman dealing with a series of losses in her life, and the language and experience of loss is drawn very compellingly here. I loved the style of the writing, which was plain but at the same time vivid. It's also a really fascinating portrait of a family that becomes at the same time more unusual and more familiar as you keep reading and more and more secrets and layers of emotion are revealed.
The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol -- This was a wonderful, interesting, infuriating and deeply sad book. A look at the de facto segregation of American public schools, particularly urban ones, written by someone who has been a teacher and a writer about schools for years, it's both an in-depth look at what current educational policies, like No Child Left Behind, actually feel like to teachers and students inside failing schools, and a call for attention and action to a problem that seems like it's on the front pages of the paper all the time yet with no new solutions at hand. The most fascinating and depressing parts of the book for me were the descriptions of rote, militaristic (and based on military regimens) "learning programs" where each day -- each minute -- is broken down and scripted for teachers, and there's no room for so many of the things I remember from my own education, and that taught me to love reading and learning. Kozol describes the catch-22 of these programs -- they're designed so that anyone can teach them, with the assumption that the inner-city classrooms they'll be taught in will attract the least competent teachers, while at the same time making teaching so soul-deadening that good teachers can barely stand them. Also incredibly interesting and depressing were the description of (often corporate-sponsored) school-to-work programs, where from the earliest grades kids are taught to think about their future lives as workers and to think about their education only in terms of their future lives as workers, and not in the 'if you can dream it you can be it' sense but in the 'let's make you the most efficient McDonald's employee you can be' sense. He also thinks about what it means that the overwhelming majority (is there a word for more than overwhelming) of the children who receive this education are African American and Hispanic, and contrasts it with the education received in majority-white suburban and wealthier urban schools. Kozol is a great writer and great at listening to and capturing the way kids talk. He comes at his topic from a liberal point of view and has a definite agenda, which he openly acknowledges, but I think even if you end up coming to an opposing opinion about what should be done about the problem, I think this book would be worth reading for a glimpse into the classrooms of the schools he describes.
The Warden by Anthony Trollope -- All right, you win, Trollope. I was an idiot when I was in school. This is a good book. I was especially touched by the relationship between the Warden and his younger daughter, and I just flat out really liked the Warden and was interested in his plight. And I can understand why someone would pick this if you were only going to reach one Trollope -- it's short (I couldn't believe how short it was compared to most of his other books), you get a good snapshot of Church life, there's meaty "issues" to talk about (idealism vs. pragmatism, the role of charity), and you can talk about Dickens vs. Trollope because after all, Trollope starts it with his discussion of Mr. Public Sentiment. Still and all, if you're only going to read one Trollope -- well, first I'd protest, because you should read more, at least three or four, but if you were stubborn, I don't think I'd give you The Warden. But still, it was a good book and I enjoyed it a lot, enough to be embarking on the rest of the Barchester series.