The Road, The Old Man and The Sea

[Director's/Producer's cut 12/27/12:

I wrote this mid-2012. There's a somewhat different version elsewhere. These are the initial thoughts I had before I published the 2nd version.]

The other day I was listening to the audible preview of Old Man and the Sea (a 21st century poor man's pastime  and the mood/tone of the story quickly brought to mind for me Cormac McCarthy's The Road, you know, except a bit more chipper. So I took to Google to see if anyone else agreed and it seems that abby (linked below) sees a connection as well. She talks about in her English essay perseverance in both works and finding that reason to persevere through adversity.


abby's road



The essay is interesting because I was just talking about Frida Kahlo and thinking about perseverance, though the thought was not the full formed idea of perseverance and before Frida I was talking (rather badly) about death. Using abby's essay--particularly the parts about The Road--we can understand that Perseverance is the will to live, to keep going despite everything reason not to. Frida Kahlo's reason to live probably was her painting. In the movie (Frida) it was something she did for herself. At the time she was less famous than her muralist husband Diego Rivera and in the movie, and I think a some point in the book (The Lacuna), it's emphasized that her paintings were something she did for herself mostly*. Nothing that was really commissioned and selling something here and there to pay bills. It was later in her time as a painter that her work was put on exhibition. I don't think, or at least it was never mention in either rendering of her life I've been exposed to, that Frida Kahlo grappled with suicide like "the man" from The Road and though she had initial misgivings about her art neither rendering highlights any point where her insecurity as an artist is out of the ordinary...

***
In the movie (Frida), Kahlo is show as a young woman in school. She's in a trolley accident and spends most of her life, the rest of her life, in pain. Her boyfriend at the time leaves. She has to learn how to walk over again. But through it all she fought. That's clearly perseverance. She kept fighting in life the darkest moment shown in the movie, one where she looks like she actually might have started openly feeling sorry for herself, is after Diego Rivera cheats with her sister, which is only hinted at/rumored in the novel (The Lacuna). For the most part she's strong throughout. I say "for the most part" because it seems though she rarely openly felt sorry for herself she seemed to be one of those stereotypical troubled and lost souls, losing herself in booze and babes. Living life one lover at a time, it seems, not because she wants to, but because the husband she would be be with solely, can't keep it in his pants. I guess what I'm asking here is, Can you persevere or be counted as someone who persevered if you

The Road, The Old Man and The Sea, (and Frida again)

Audible

The other day I was listening to the audible preview of Old Man and the Sea (a 21st century, poor man's pasttime) and the mood/tone of the story quickly brought to mind for me Cormac McCarthy's The Road, you know, except a bit more chipper. So I took to Google to see if anyone else agreed and it seems that abby (linked below this paragraph) sees a connection as well. She talks about, in her English essay, perseverance in both works and also talks about finding a reason to persevere through adversity.

abby's road



The essay is interesting because I was just talking about Frida Kahlo and thinking about perseverance, though the thought was not the fully formed idea of perseverance, and before Frida I was talking (rather badly) about death. Using abby's essay--particularly the parts about The Road--we can understand that Perseverance is the will to live, to keep going despite every reason not to. In a way Frida Kahlo had that. 

In the movie (Frida), Kahlo is shown as a young woman in school. She's in a trolley accident and spends most of her life, the rest of her life, in pain. Her boyfriend at the time leaves her. She has to learn how to walk over again. But through it all she fought. That's clearly perseverance. I learned reading abby's essay and through the Frida media that we might not actually fear life and death like I said in that essay, maybe we're just fighting against both. Also, maybe when we persevere it's a battle won against both. 

Who's winning the war though, is a whole other story all together. 


[I almost forgot, news about the Old Man and the Sea and HIV (rhymes, he-he): Hemingway’s Old Man Inspires Shark Oil for HIV Vaccine | Smart News]

American Gods v The Lacuna

One of the "everything else's" I was referring to in my last post is the novel American Gods. I like this novel for the same reason The Lacuna holds my attention. Both books have passive main characters*.



I know that sounds the opposite of interesting--there are other things about the writing styles employed in both novels that go along with the passive mc's--but it really isn't. Having things happen to both protagonists rather than because of them has interesting effects. I think sympathy is one of the effects, that is, if you're not already disgusted or turned off by the passive thing. The characters could come off whiny, which doesn't or at least hasn't happened in either of these narratives. The character can come off dazed and confused which actually does happen in both of these narratives, but in different ways, to different extents. (Shadow (American Gods) is a bit more confused than Harry Shepherd (The Lacuna), but that's probably only because what's happening to him is supernatural; it skews his sense of reality.






I love the fact that they are really just observers right now. The detachment helps to process what's going on a bit easier, something especially needed in The Lacuna. Seeing as it's a novel about a historical period the reader has to travel not only through space but time, add on to that the character perspective (The Lacuna would mostly be a first person narrative written in journals**.) you have to be glad for the extra buffer of partial detachment from it's narrator. But it might not last the whole novel, although I've been led to doubt that. 





American Gods is the book The Lacuna has to compete with for reading time though. It's an easier read because it's a genre novel that plays to type a little bit. It has its high points. It promises action in the coming pages, has delivered on some of its other promises, so I can trust it. Kingsolver's book hasn't promised much on action, but it has delivered this steady and clever character voice. Harry isn't a strong character, but he can be entertaining. It's not really a pros and cons thing for me. I'll just see what happens in the coming weeks and let you all know...



* I don't think there's anything wrong with passive main characters at all. It doesn't sacrifice character development automatically as some believe and it could be more interesting to see action unfold through someone else's eyes rather than to be in the middle of the fray yourself. 

**While American Gods is a straightforward third. 

Today: Frida (2002) y The Lacuna (2009)

Guess what I did today?

I watched the movie Frida. The one with Selma Hayek as Frida Kahlo--just in case there are others, or maybe it's just me being redundant. I watched on Hulu since I saw the movie was open for a couple more days. And you guys already know I'm reading Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna, so I read a chunk of that while I watched. Twenty pages, to be exact. It's about 37 more pages till I get to,

 Part 4 Asheville, North Carolina 1941-1947 (VB).

It was fun taking in the story of Frida Kahlo from both mediums. Of course they were very different. The movie is solely about the life of Frida and the turmoil she went through in her marriage, and with her health, while the novel is a third party narration of that era, the politics, the artists' (Frida and Diego) lives, and some mixed in narrations of personal ficciones from the novel's protagonist. You get a descent hint of la Revolucion from both media, but obviously moreso from the novel. 

I'm still only on page 187 in the novel, but I think I'll be on Part 4 by the end of the day tomorrow and done in a couple of weeks. If I really delve into the book maybe I'll be done within the week, but I don't know if I'm going to shut down everything else to focus only on completing this project. 

I might though, I just might. 

From Frida Kahlo: Complete Works
http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org/

A Poem: Inventing Aladdin by Neil Gaiman

In Neil Gaiman's collection of short stories and poems, Fragile Things, there's a poem called "Inventing Aladdin" (I guess I already mentioned that in the title). It's the story of Scheherazade told in abridgment with in emphasis on story telling. Probably needless to say, I enjoyed it.



It's an echo and addition to something I read before from Stephen King. I think it was in one afterward or another, maybe it was the one where he talks about being a sin eater... Anyway. This poem is also like Stephen King the way he talks about how he came about his ideas in his story introductions. 

The poem is about just what I stated above. It's about Scheherazade, her stories, and her evil, yet thankfully placatable king and about storytellers in general. Because that's what Scheherazade is, though her situation is life-threatening (but maybe not that much more dire than many people who still tell stories today). 




I had to write about this poem cause a couple of particular references toward the story of Scheherazade kept firing off in head as I read. One of them was the King explanation* of the story and I'm going to close this triangle with the other, one more degree of reference. Joe Hill and his short "Scheherazade's Typewriter", a story about a writer that kept writing despite rejection from publishers and the subsequent fatigue he gathered with the rejection slips. He stopped submitting, but didn't stop writing, not even in death. He had to keep telling his stories, like Scheherazade, like all storytellers. (I think I told you about Joe Hill before.)

* I actually can't remember what this reference point was suppose to be. Me, dunce...

[Oh, and while I was looking up "Scheherazade's Typewriter" on Google--instead of looking in 20^th Century Ghosts where the bonus story is located (just being lazy really)--I found a 2005 interview on The Mumpsimus that's worth a read for new writers and people who are fans of Joe Hill's writing.]

Reading Update

reading book by pear83
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1368361

[I just realized I haven't told you yet my place in any of the books I'm reading in any of the reading updates. So let's just start with where I'm at currently and track the rest with the subsequent updates.]

• I'm on Part Two--Ainsel  of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. (About 39% complete says Amazon.)

• Reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver I haven't made much progress since the last update I was at about page 149 then and that's where I'm reading currently. 

• Riders of the Purple Sage is moving along: Chapter VI The Mill-Wheel of Steers

• William Gibson's Spook Country is still at a stand still. (I've been on Chapter 7 Buenos Aires for some weeks now.) 

There are a couple of other reading projects going on here and there (like the non-fiction book How We Decide, I think I've mention somewhere on this blog), but these are the main reads, the Four Pillars that make up my reading life now.

Sunday's Essays: Death Is a Lonely Business

[Back by not much demand at all (really no demand at all) is that series that you probably had no idea I use to do. Here goes...]

Sunset. by BeverlyLR
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1391179

Did you notice the subtitle of this post? It's the title, most popularly it seems if the Google search is any indication, of a Ray Bradbury story. I've never read it, but from what I have read of Bradbury I believe I'm in for something transcendent in it's own unique way. That's what I got from the Martian Chronicles when I read it a couple of years back, as I slogged through a bit of a rough-patch in my life (I'm not slogging any more, but the patch is still as rough as it's ever been.). I started reading the stories one and two a day for a week or so and it was one of the best times I've ever had reading. 

When I was thinking of doing another blog post and doing that post in the Sunday's Essays format death seemed to be the subject I wanted to explore. The Bradbury inspired subtitle is the first quote on death that came to mind when I settled on doing an essay on death. That's because his death is recent news--he only passed away a few weeks ago-- I've only read the title of said book in eulogies, though I've heard the saying of death being lonely many times before.

Honestly I don't know where to go with this. Death is such a big and complex subject even today when you can find the majority of enlightened people believe we go out like a soggy candle, never to be relighted again. I don't believe that, or at least I don't allow myself to believe that, but the thing about it is I don't think it matters anyway because the scary part about dying is always the going, not really what happens afterward. Don't you think? I believe, if passing into death is like wetting, or soaking a candle until it's useless, then all the fanfare about the hereafter would only be a reaction to what we know of death in the here-and-now.

You know what trying to write about death makes me think of? Stephen King. And it works in this piece too because I was introduced to Ray Bradbury by reading Stephen King stories and reading about King himself. One of the main subjects in King's oeuvre is death. I'm not going to go into the body of work and try to analyze this time, that's for another post, but I do want to talk about one novel in particular for a paragraph or two--I don't want to keep you here too long. Right about now I want to get outta here myself. The novel's The Green Mile. You may have heard of it.

Some back story first: Basically it is the recounting of life on the Green Mile, the holding cells before prisoners go to the electric chair, and one summer in particular when they got a special inmate, by a now very elderly former prison guard*. All this, life on the Mile and the summer incident, is used to meditate on a wide range of things, judgement holds its own steadily throughout, but to me, death probably looms a bit larger.

Again I don't want to go too deep into this (so it will probably help if you have read some of the book), read: I don't feel like, and am not, going deep at all into this, but I think it's significant that there are several large deaths throughout the novel. Delacroix is a violent and bright (but of course not in the happy sense of the word) death in the novel, the little girls are violent deaths, and not only that, their deaths were long standing in comparison to all the others--meaning as the book talks about Coffey the two girls' death stay in the narrative**, plus a few more deaths. They feel different too, from other King novels, by which I mean in most of them the body count is high but more for plotting sake rather than narrative sake. The deaths seem to say more about living as well as dying.

I guess with this novel, and all the various deaths we hear about in the news everyday, and our own personal deaths always waiting, generally just outside the range of our vision, but at some awful times it's all to visible to us, I see the last sentence of The Green Mile as a strong, if a bit homely, tie-off to the whole work and life in general, "We each owe a death, there is no exception, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long."

So, I don't know. If I was to tie all I implied from this post together I guess my point would be, we fear both life and death. But sometimes it's the biblical type of fear, a reverence of both life and death.



* I think I got that generally right and I apologize if I didn't.
**I really got to go into this some other time.

[Note: Okay people, if this didn't all tie together beautifully--It did not--don't worry, I know. I'm coming back from a hiatus to these essays. I'm going to get the knack back, then get better. I think I'll fix this sucker up later though.]

[Note 2 -- From the series I talked about  earlier

 Links to something like an essay(s): Link 1; Link 2]

Random Fact

I just learned this today and I enjoyed it for no particular reason. Reading through the Rock Bottom Remainders band member bios, I found out Amy Tan, an author I unfortunately only know by name and not work, wrote a children's book The Siamese Chinese Cat that was adapted to Sagwa, The Siamese Chinese Cat a show on PBS (a show that I probably should be embarrassed to say I watched a number of episodes of, and maybe even enjoyed a few, but I actually have little to no remorse about*).

It's just a random thing I didn't know until now.

*Oh yeah, I was pretty old watching this show (early and late teens), and watching Cailou, and Between the Lions, and Krats Kreatures (was it double KKs or double CCs or KC for the initial letters?), and, and... Errthang I set eyes to, cause I don't discriminate when it comes to aesthetics.

P.S. I think I also watched some of The Joy Luck Club is high school once toward the end of that year...You know how teachers do in school sometimes when they don't feel like doing a lesson plan--this, especially at the end of the year.

The Giver Cont. Part 2 of 2

[Here there be spoylers. Don't go any further if you haven't read The Giver and you don't "do" spoilers. I'm going to see if I can cut to the chase in this part 2.]

So the setting of The Giver is strange compared to the world we live in today. Jonas and his community have "rules" that they follow that don't match up completely with the laws that exist in an ordinary modern society. They're collective consciousness work on a different plane; one where the noun "pilot" becomes a proper noun, "Pilot," for a reason that isn't fully specified at first. These clues, including a sundry list of other weirdisms, make the novel's community a bit different from the real world, but in what ways do these differences correlate with the sociological undertones I mentioned in the first post?






[Spoiler Warning] Jonas is an individual railing against the society he thought he knew. Though of course not at first. At first, Jonas is a product of that very society. And that's not an overstatement; he and everyone in the community are wholly manufactured by the society they live in. The world they live in is gray and boring, "safe". It's like Pleasantville. 

Everything in the community is done on schedule, in the time it is ordered. They don't move through life's stages as individuals, rather everyone born at the same time, in the same class, move through the stages en masse: "newchildren" get a "comfort object" (what we call a toy or stuffed animal), when they become "Nines" they are assigned a bicycle, and as a "Twelve" a child is assigned an apprenticeship to what ever career they'll be working in until they become one of "the Old".

The system this community has created to guide its citizens to adulthood and beyond is extremely simple at first glance. Jonas believes he's got most everything figured out about it. The only thing he thought he had to worry about is becoming a Twelve (adulthood). This is a pretty big statement by Lowry that I'll try to explore later in this part.

The novel is centered around Jonas's passage into the adult world through the "Ceremony of Twelve". He's nervous and scared. As anxious as any other real kid in the real world would be when going through an important right of passage. But when the time comes for him to receive his assignment, just as he got a hold of his nerves, the community leaders throws him for a loop and he's presented with something he knows nothing a about. After jarring the ceremony by not calling on Jonas and not explaining why his name wasn't called, the Chief Elder* calls Jonas to the stage and tells him he's receiving an assignment that he's never even heard of before the ceremony. He's going to be trained as the people's new "Receiver". 

Jonas becomes the Receiver--the full title is "Receiver of Memory". The Receiver is someone who will be the repository for all the memories and feelings that would make the town less gray. The Giver--or the former Receiver--transmits these memories through touch and they can be as "insignificant" as the feel of sunlight on ones skin, or as powerful as a scene depicting the worst of what war is like. Once he becomes the Receiver the questions on what does it mean to be a human being, and not only that, but how does being a human affect the institutions that make, as the saying goes, the world go around have become essential as Jonas navigates the area between the life he thought he was inheriting and the life that was thrust unto him.  

In The Giver's world many of modern societies pesky problems have been eliminated. The question of Overpopulation is solved, no pollution--the people (young and adult) ride bikes, everyone eats even though there are no animals in the community, everyone has a job to sustain the community and preoccupy themselves, and so on and so forth. 

I think part of Lowry's thesis with this novel is the fact that catch-alls can create just as many problems as they solve. Though some of the things seem pretty full-proof, like biking helping to control pollution (though this is never explicitly stated in the text), other things have gone horribly wrong. For example, people are now assigned children to take care of, no more than two assignments. These children are not their biological children but are birthed by mothers assigned to the job of birthing (a lesser job in the community), and when a citizen gets old enough, after being assigned to a Mate, they put in a request for a first child, and if they want, later they can request a second. This, along side a lack of pleasant and negative memories/feeling, have led to Jonas's, and most likely other parents, to unknowingly be cold toward their children. At one point, toward the end of the novel, Jonas, after experiencing one of the most pleasant memories he'd ever had in his sessions with the Giver (a scene of a warm fire and a family, including the Old, at Christmas time), asks his parents if they loved him. In response, they deride him for his imprecise use of language, and his mother explains, "Your father means you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete."(p.127)

By the end of the novel we learn that the people in the community, a long time ago, made a decision to get rid of all the memories and feelings that cause problems in the world. They created a society that lives off the bare minimum of what society has to offer. People have jobs, the society reproduces, there's even a bit of fun, but in the end Jonas decides that the bad out weighed the good in his community. He'd take loss and pain, alongside happiness over just living--uncaringly, unthinkingly, unfeelingly. Jonas's decision was far from easy though.

Sociology is the study of what makes up a society, how that society affects the individual, and how the individual view itself within the realm of society. It's in short a way for us to understand the world apart from our immediate lives. In example is instead of picking up a newspaper today you might, like me--like a continually growing number of people, hop on the internet and check out your favorite online news content provider (io9, the Atlantic, TMZ, etc.). If you've ever wondered why is that the case, outside of you wanting to know the news and having an internet connection--(the "Green" movement, AOL's huge junk mail marketing move, idk, et. al), you'd have been questing outside of your immediate world and into the sociological one. If, like I ventured above, Lowry's answer is, "catch-alls can create just as many problems as they solve," then I'd like to presume further, or probably more accurately presume backward--Jepordy-style, that the question would be: What would happen if we became obsessed with solving all societal problems at once? 


*The community is something like an aristocracy, but the first book in Lowry's series doesn't go into how any are chosen outside of becoming a Giver.

The Giver Cont. Part 2

[Dir. Cut 12/2: More stuff I scraped before going a different route. This from the time I wrote about The Giver.]





[Here there be spoylers. Don't go any further if you haven't read The Giver and you don't "do" spoilers.]

So the setting of The Giver is strange compared to the world we live in today. Jonas and his community have "rules" that they follow that don't match up completely with the laws that exist in an ordinary modern society. They're collective consciousness work on a different plane; one where the noun "pilot" becomes a pronoun, "Pilot," for a reason that isn't fully specified at first. These clues, including a sundry list of other weirdisms, make the novel's community a bit different from the real world, but in what ways do these differences correlate with the sociological undertones I mentioned in the first post?





First I'll start with the psychology of Jonas, the main character, since that's where Lowry starts in the book. The story begins with our narrator introducing us to the contemplations of this main character. Jonas is afraid of something and it seems that it may be an event that is approaching soon. The following pages quickly ease our mind about the mystery of what Jonas is "frightened" about. First we learn that Jonas actually isn't frightened at all, he's "apprehensive". Second his apprehension is about something called the "Ceremony of Twelve". As we get to these facts we gain a wealth of information about the community and it's looking more and more estranged from what we are use to in our own communities, but that's not the most important thing we learn at the beginning of the novel. The most important thing we learn is that Jonas is okay with all of it. In fact, everyone okay with all the strange things they do in the neighborhood; the "Ceremony of Twelve", "precision of language", "sharing of feelings"--it's all good in the neighborhood because that's just how they live. 

[Spoilers] And let me give you a better overview of exactly how they do live. This is a future community in a world not much different from the gray washout of Pleasantville. Everyone seems happy and everything around them feels bland (we'll learn later that everything around them actually is bland). 

Reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I won't go into how great the Gat is, others can do far better, but I will tell you that this will be my second tango with the "classic" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first time I read it I was sitting at the bottom of a deep valley. That hasn't changed much, but I'm different in some ways now than I was back then.

For one, I'm older, though only by a couple of years. The second is that I think differently. Those years don't belay how far I've come mentally in that time frame and I believe the way a person thinks is a far more important characteristic than how old they've gotten; age is just a mental shortcut we use to gauge wisdom--it's an understandable gauge, but much of the time it's useless. The third thing is I wasn't reading The Great Gatsby with a purpose then. I didn't know much about The Great Gatsby, hadn't read it in school. I heard about from my cousin. He'd read it in school I think. It seemed like he was kind of into the book and I wanted to read it ever since hearing about it from him. This had to be about five or six years ago. I got around to it and the "recommendation" from him was really the only think in my mind at the time*. I read it and loved the book, had no idea what the deal was with these people, but I enjoyed reading the book and reading in general at the time, so it didn't matter.

I'm not really reading it with a purpose now, but I have grown a lot since I first read the book so I won't be reading it in the same light. Or maybe I will. Like I said up there ↑ time passing doesn't necessarily equate to anything but a change in time. So only time'll tell what my perception of the story is now. (Confusing?)

I read the first page and came to the conclusion that I don't like the narrator much. He's a liar with weak morals...Actually, tone wise I'm kidding here, but he is a liar, the narrator. I think I even read an article once by Chuck Palahniuk that said as much about Nick's unreliability as a narrator. "Submerging the "I"" 

I can't wait to read this novel again. 

Did you know there's a Great Gatsby movie coming out soon? It's a buzz flick with Leo, Carrie Mulligan, and Toby McGuire. seems cool.

* I think I also read a comic adaptation of the story online, but I'm not sure if it was before or after reading the novel. 

The Giver Cont. Part 1 of 2

[The chances of spoilers are much higher in this post than my last because I'm trying to play academic and analyze the text. So if you haven't read The Giver by Lois Lowry and are irked by spoilers, don't read any further.]














I reviewed The Giver, a YA novel by Lois Lowry, last month, but I didn't feel completely finished with the book--the sociological undertones in this award winning novel were too intriguing for me to let go of. For instance, How much affect do society have on politics, politics have on community, community have on family, family have on the individual? After reading The Giver, I'm sure the answer to this question is extensive amounts. The book is kind of on the extreme side of "What if?" but it highlights sociological connections well--from the bigger spheres to the smaller, which I'm finding out is rather important.

Introduction

Lowry's society in The Giver is much different from our own, but she doesn't let her readers know this completely at it's outset. The first sentence of the novel is, "It was almost December and Jonas was beginning to be frightened." This sentence alone isn't out of the ordinary. Most kids (people) who read this novel will understand fully two of the three key words in the sentence, "December" and "frightened". The only word that is a mystery to the reader is "Jonas". The reader can assume Jonas is a proper noun like "December", due to the rules for uppercase letters in english grammar, and further assume with less evidence that Jonas is a person, or possess sentience to a similar effect as a person. This all leaves us with two questions: who is "Jonas" and why is he "beginning to be frightened" as the calender reaches "December"? Nothing too much out of the ordinary in this and the first paragraph continues on with this normalcy, adding questions, but never really making Jonas's world seem different from any regular 20^th century modern society.

It isn't until paragraph two that something is a little out of the ordinary. We learn that it's, "against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community." I think we can agree that this revelation about Jonas's community in and of itself isn't too crazy and out of bounds from the way a "20^th century modern society" operates--you may have heard at one time or another (in one movie or another) about "No Fly Zones"--but there are components in the statement that can direct us, even if subtly, toward a society that is nothing like the world we live in.

At this point we're not sure why there's a No Fly Zone over the community, and that would probably help us determine how weird this edict is, but we do have a couple other clues as to how far outside our realm of experience this community lives. The first is the fact that Jonas uses the word "rules" to describe something that seems to be an important law in the community. Now, this can be chalked up to the fact that Jonas is a kid or maybe he's just misusing a word, making a minor understatement, when referring to something that seems somewhat serious, but I'm led to believe Jonas didn't make a mistake. The very fact that the flyover was, we learn only paragraphs later, a punishable offense and, farther along in the chapter, we learn that precision of language is important to Jonas's community seem to attest to the high possibility of his intentious use of the word "rules". The second clue in the statement is the capitalization of the letter "p" in the word "Pilot". Again, we go back to capitalization in the english language. Proper nouns are capitalized*, but in english grammar pilot usually isn't capitalized; it's usually not a proper noun. Therefore we can minimalistically assume Lowry's characters think of the word pilot in this way because it's important. We don't know why it's important, but it's important.

This place we find out quickly is not like the world we live in. It's The Giver's extremes that are utilized to explore what connects human beings together in the world that we actually live in.

[Wow! I didn't realize how long this would take. I just spent all this time establishing that, Yes, these people are different. Part 2 next.]

* There's more nuance to the capitalization rules. I just thought going too deep into that was too big for what I'm trying to accomplish here.

[Part 2 of 2]

Found it

Earlier today, I got brain tied. I was reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer--Its a book about how we...make decisions--and when I came to the part where he explains an experiment carried out by noble laureate Daniel Kahneman things started looking familiar to me, starting with a quote about the experiment. The beginning of the quote goes, " The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease,"(Lehrer, 75)* and that confused me because I was sure that quote came from an article I read before about a book I really wanted to read. And it turns out it was in the very article I was thinking of:

The New Yorker: Is Self Knowledge Overrated by Jonah Lehrer

I thought, Did I somehow start reading a book I wanted to read unbeknownst to my own self (Yeah, I know. Crazy people ish.), then I started cross-checking bylines and titles to make sure I wasn't tripping and leading people astray when I posted about it on Google+ a "minute" ago about this phantom book. Turns out, anticlimactically, I was not leading anyone astray. 

The simple situation worked like this: I wanted to read Think, Fast and Slow by Kahneman due to reading the article/review, "Is Self Knowledge.." by Lehrer; later, after "stealing a little shortbread out of Nana's purse," I bought the book How We Decide written by Lehrer; both books, evidently, mention the experiment (quoted, in part, above) when unraveling for us the way human beings think. 

I guess the point of me reiterating this string of prosy events at all in a blog post is 1. because I'm happy I didn't mess up and 2. just because I like writing. 

(I hope you don't mind riding my boring train of thoughts--I was going to say "at length," but I don't think this particular post was that long at all. If there was some useful information, something like a book or article you didn't know about, in there somewhere, well, maybe you didn't walk away from my gripe and grumble all bad, eh?)

*I got the page number from Google, the print and ebook edition numbers don't correspond, I'm sure. I guess that's for the print edition, mines the e.


[Edit/add: This is pretty cool I was just talking about this guy: Repeating Yourself Again: Journalist In Trouble For Self-Plagiarizing | LitReactor. Just to clarify the fact that he's in trouble is not cool, the coincidence is. 6/21]

Reading Update

My reading life is a bit very much fluid. I don't make plans as to what I'm going to read because it really wouldn't do much good for me to do so--the plans I make are extremely subject to change. In me, qualms are few when it comes to dropping a "boring"* book for a more interesting one. Life's too short and if that's not the case, I can always come back to the book later, most of the time I do. Anyway due to the fluid nature of my reading life an update might be helpful to get anyone that's interested oriented as to where I am in relation to my reading schedule. 

• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman has been completed. 
• There's still work left to do on The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• Riders of the Purple Sage is being consumed most delicately (what ever word is the opposite of devour, that's what's being done to the Zane Grey western). 
• Progress stalled on the William Gibson novel Spook Country--good story, not it's fault progress stalled. 
• I want to recommence with American Gods (Neil Gaiman)--another good story. It kind of feels like I took a break from its awesome awesomeness, lest its exceptional shine diminish my ocularity (more?). 

There's a bit a lot more, but these are the major strides I'm making/trying to make/have made in terms of 2012 reading. 

reading book by pear83
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1368361

* I don't really believe in boring books. "There are no such things as boring books. There are only bored people." Somebody great must have said something like that before. 

The Shiz on the Shorts: Jennifer Egan, "Black Box"

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

A couple of months ago I watched the Google Talks (authors edition) video of Jennifer Egan talking about writing, winning a Pulitzer, and the future of books on Youtube. It's an intriguing, informative, and inspired video--I became a fan of Jennifer Egan without reading a word of A Visit From the Goon Squad* (which I plan to do soon) or anything else she's written (which I plan to do until she stops writing). Imagine my delight when I found out she was writing a short story that was to be published in 140-or-less characters installments for the The New Yorker. [Cue Twitter.] I didn't get a chance to experience how the short story reads at a tweet a minute for an hour because I read the story after each hour was published on the The New Yorker fiction web page.

There's an article at full-stop.net by Katie Disabato that commends Egan on her exemplary use of the 2nd person. I have to agree with Disabato's sentiment."Black Box" stands quite solidly in a point of view that most people usually find muddled and irksome. Both she and Egan sees an inherent connection in dispersing the story using Twitter and the stylistics of the story itself.

"Black Box" is about a woman from the universe of her book A Visit From the Goon Squad being enlisted in a program that turns ordinary people into special super secret-agent spies. My description--"special super secr..."--makes the story sound a little bit more trivial than it is. It's not trivial. It's good y'all. Egan writes well and she can definitely write for her audience's enjoyment. It's James Bond, Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man and... I don't know... A Visit From the Goon Squad all rolled up into a nice, thrilling, at times wise, and at other times just plain 'ol aesthetic, compact package.

Boxee by jhnri4
http://openclipart.org/detail/97231/boxee-by-jhnri4

* I did watch the slideshow posted on her website after watching her Google Talks interview and thought it resonantly constructed. It's easy to see everything she talked about regarding its creation when going through the slides, how it could have easily been just another sappy family story, how the stripped down business format of a power point relieves some of that sap, but also it's easy to see how the stripped down format adds a certain something to the story. I believe that "something" is audience participation--because the emotion in the narrative is stripped we as readers have to fill in the emotional blanks with our own variation of what the author presents.

The Shiz on the Shorts: Jennifer Egan, "Black Box"

[Producer's Cut--Unfinished Thoughts On Jennifer Egan's "Black Box":
These are some thoughts I was having before I opted to post this version instead.]


Last week Jennifer Egan's Twitter short story "Black Box" the opposite of commenced.
I'd been keeping up with the story at the The New Yorker website. I haven't finished it yet.
I read about the completion at full-stop.net, which I love to visit for some exhilarating thought provocation and book news.

Black Box is poetry. News at Jennifer Egan's website has info on it.

I actually didn't realize the story was being tweeted ahead of the updates on the website.

In the full-stop article a point about Egan's exemplary use of the second person was brought up and I have to agree with the sentiment. Like the author of the author I'm not fond of the reading through a story narrated in 2nd person--though I don't believe my reaction is too "visceral". I believe the 2nd person is far to tedious a read for an audience. The novelty of being told what "you" are doing wear thin quickly, but reading the Black Box wasn't tedious at all. This could be attributed to the fact that I and other initial readers were reading the story on the installment plan, but I believe if that was the case it only factored in small part because I was reading in larger chunks than the ten installments posted on The New Yorker website, let along following Twitter postings tweet by tweet. It just works. But I still wonder why...

'Submerging the "I"' an article by Chuck Palahniuk was free to look at for awhile a few weeks back on The Cult, Palahniuk's official website. It makes me wonder if there's an equivalent to 'hiding the "I"' in the 2nd person point of view. Hiding the "You", if you will. I don't remember the article word for word because I don't have that kind of mind and I can't access it now because my money's even shorter than my memory, but the gist of the article I believe was don't bombard your audience with the pronoun "I". Keep it out of the narrative as long as you can and when it has to come up use it sparingly. It, the story, sounds narcissistic and whiny otherwise.

Riders of the Purple Sage: Update 1

I'm on Chapter 5 The Masked Rider.

The ball's rolling on this one and I don't think it's going to stop--not completely at least--until I'm finished.

*The highlights reading [this] western(s) so far is the descriptions of the landscape. Setting as place is thick in this novel.

Another highlight is the word "presently". I've never read/heard it used so much before¹. I believe it means something a little different from, "right now."





1. Actually, a few months back, I started reading some of Philip K. Dick's earlier stories and he used "presently" in a frequency similar to that of Grey. I found it amusing then too.