Joan Didion's "The White Album"

It’s not often that I finish a book in one sitting these days. I don’t mean to whine, but I don’t have that luxury most of the time. Perhaps I should say I do make exceptions when the book is right. Joan Didion’s The White Album was right on (pardon the 60s jargon) and I gulped down her book in one day’s swallow.

The White Album, aside from being a famous Beatles’ album, is a collection of Joan Didion’s essays focused on her life in California during the 1960s. Didion was a thriving journalist back in those days and her life was surrounded by interesting people: Jim Morrison, The Mansons, Janis Joplin, The Black Panthers, Ronald & Nancy Reagan, to name a few. Didion writes about her encounters with this lively cast of characters, offers razor sharp observations while she explores a difficult time period, mentally, in her own life. As a whole, the book serves as a witty social commentary of the sixties, not only of the rock-n-roll and political scene, but also of the topography of the sixties: the moral, physical, and socio-economic landscape of California in one of history’s most seminal eras, and how this time period shook her ideas of narrative to the core. Didion says she "began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself."

Didion does what the father of the essay, Michael de Montaigne, prescribed: she enters a conversation—many, actually—and willingly offers her own life in all of its vulnerability to her readers for our own observation. And she does this with gripping tone and language. I think Montaigne would agree that hers is the kind of conversation one does not walk away from.

Review for Wicked by Gregory Maguire

I read to escape and I escape to read!

review by sbarranca

Wow!

This novel is so much more than a mere novel. Let me start by stating two things: 1) I have read many Maguire novels in the past, and this is by far the best, and 2) I love the "other side" of the story novels.

Wicked is about Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, from The Oz novels, or for most of us, from the Wizard of Oz film. I am fascinated when authors give us the "other side" of these novels. By playing with classics, these authors actually corrupt our prior knowledge of characters that are almost historic. By this I mean, that when you play with the Wizard of Oz, and make Dorothy the sub-plot and the Witch the main plot, it makes one realize the layers of all stories....like for instance, what we think of as history. Isn't history subjective also? We learn historic events through authors, and their bias and subjectivity are naturally captured in their writings, and Maguire puts his own spin on the wonderful world of Oz. Anyway, I digress.

Not only is this novel about the Witch, or Elphaba, but it is also about the fictional world of Oz. Again, what is reality and what is fiction? I cannot help but ponder these ideas because Maguire makes us think about society, prejudice, and oppression throughout this wonderful novel, and he presents his ideas so eloquently. I do not know what genre this novel gets classified into, probably fiction, but I think it is more of a science fiction novel. Not the Star Trek kind of science fiction, but the Ursula Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness type of science fiction. Wicked makes us think of utopian societies, and dysfunctional ones.

Maguire creates a fictional world for us in this novel. Or, does he? It is eerily reminiscent of the same oppressions and power struggles in our world......if you keep the Nazi's rise to power in the back of your mind, this novel is downright frightening at times. I could not help but compare the oppression of Maguire's Animals with the oppression of Jews in Hitler's Germany.

But again, I digress. Elphaba, the wicked witch, is not wicked at all in this tale. She is the "misunderstood rebel" fighting against the oppression of the...well, the oppressed. This is truly her story: how she was conceived, her childhood, her student years and her adulthood. She is not the caraciture of evil presented in the famous film: I must confess here that I have never read Braum's novels, but I think I may have to. I have a feeling the film did to his novels, what Disney did to Lewis Carroll's Looking Glass.

Please, Please please read Wicked. Even if you have read Mirror, Mirror and did not enjoy it (which I didn't), give this one a try. There are so many statements about society, family, and power relations throughout this novel, that it should be taught as a college course somewhere. It is incredibly insightful, but more importantly, it makes the reader think and wonder. Isn't that what our novels should be doing? So few novels do this anymore that it almost comes as a shock when one does.

So think and wonder and read Wicked. If only to read the sequel, A Son of a Witch. With a title like that, how can you not read it?

Keep on reading!

Holiday Book Idea for Writer Moms (Not to be Confused with Biker Chicks)

I type a sentence. My three-year-old daughter brings her princess dress over to me and asks me to put it on her. Happy in her gown, she saunters off to find a prince at the bottom of her toy box. I type another sentence. She’s back. This time she wants me to put a puzzle together with her.

“How about if you sit right there on the floor next to mommy and try to do it all by yourself. I’ll help you if you get stuck,” I tell her.

Parked at my feet, she works through her puzzle singing a song she learned at preschool. I stare blankly at my screen, filled with both annoyance at my inability to sustain my earlier sense of inspiration and guilt for not sitting on the floor next to her.

Adrienne Rich abandoned her poetry for a long time in the early years of her marriage, raising young children. Sylvia Plath suffered. Even Virginia Woolf, who never had children, struggled to find her place in art. I’m certainly not putting myself in league with these women, other than in a place of understanding. There are days that I envy women who seem enraptured by motherhood, to whom motherhood is an art—their only art. Their world spins around domesticity, not words. How nice it must feel, I often think, to be so focused.

There are essays I need to write, I tell myself almost daily, about this struggle I feel. I’ll get around to it one day and cause a revolution. Until that day arrives, luckily there are women who have already started to write their way out of bondage, and Mamaphonic is a collection of their words.

It’s not just a book about writers, but a collection of essays written by women attempting to balance (as if on a tight-rope) motherhood and art from a variety of fields, such as music, dance, and visual art.

In her essay, “Spaced Out,” Dewi Faulkner recalls her journey as a writer and mother from her beginning cramped in a tiny apartment, when “it made sense that I had to use the space under my desk if I needed to get in a little writing time.”

Later, after moving into a larger space where there are actual rooms she can retreat to in privacy, she says “I call myself a writer, even though secretly I fear I’m a spoiled housewife with an expensive hobby. I try to think like an artist, but I’m not very good at it. Sometimes thinking like an artist feels diametrically opposed to thinking like a mother.”

Rose Adams writes about being temporarily separated from her son while she takes a drawing class in Florence:

My lines that day shy,

My stomach and hand still moving in circles.

Later, alone, taking a cab north,

I discover the large playground

with a carousel spinning around

and around that my son searched for the whole week

when he was here.

Fiona Thompson admits “I didn’t get enough hours of work in for the day. I don’t have the energy to make dinner. The house is a fucking sty. I have dozens of phone calls to return. I just got a notice that I bounced another check. I think our house has rats again. I can’t find my date book so I have no idea if I missed any appointments today.”

Other women in the collection manage to blend their art with motherhood, such as Ayun Halliday, creator of The East Village Inky, a hand drawn and written magazine that captures mothering in her neighborhood. After an afternoon outing with her baby, she says, “I raced back to our 340-square-foot apartment, eager to reunite with the paper and marker. I scribbled furiously while she slept, as if the public was starving for want of our published adventures.”

After reading these women’s stories, I’m not sure I feel any better about the struggle that women like us face. It’s reassuring to know that I’m not alone out there, or in here, caved at my desk, yet I wish I could have found The Answer. By sheer design women are built to carry this burden, this diametric weight, if you’re a women who happens to need to create not only life, but art. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book. It’s a great read, chock full of humor, frustration, and love.

Review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling definately knows her characters, and she demonstrates that knowledge in the fifth book of this series.




The Order of the Phoenix is a continuation of the Goblet of Fire; the Goblet of Fire leaves the reader wondering what will happen now that Lord Voldemort is back. The Order of the Phoenix picks up on that thread and leaves us readers hanging once again for the sixth book.



In this novel, Rowling gives us a new character dimension in Harry. Harry now has anger and a more complex personality, like the teenager that he is. He is fed up with being the "Boy who Lived." He is fed up with the turmoil, the danger, the conflicts in his life. He is fed up with not being trusted to know the whole story behind his story; he is just fed up. He is also conflicted because of his age, not just because he is dealing with Lord Voldemort. He is experiencing all of the torment, confusion, and mixed-up feelings that 15 year old boys deal with. Rowling gives us a realistic teenager in this novel.



I have mentioned before, but will repeat myself here: One of the fundamental reasons that these novels work so well, is that if you take out the magic and the wizarding, you are left with realistic characters who experience and deal with life like the rest of us do. These characters deal with all of the issues that our own teenagers do: Harry trying to weed through the trials and tribulations of dating are as equally interesing as Harry weeding through the trials and tribulations of fighting the Death Eaters. Of course, if you take out the magic and wizarding, you are taking out all of the imagination and the "magical world" that Rowling creates for us.



Rowling knows what she is doing: with her imagination, her creativity and her knowledge of what makes a hero in the Western tradition of novels. If you have studied Western literature at all, you will know that the hero needs to be isolated from others while he is defeating evil. He needs to stand alone to win. Western tradition also requires the hero to defeat and replace his father while becoming the true hero.



Harry gets more isolated from his adult support system as these novels progress. He has already lost both parents, and the Dursleys (his Aunt and Uncle) are pretty much useless. In this novel, he also loses an important beloved and trusted adult. However, his support system of peers continues to grow and strengthen. The relationship he has with Hermione and Ron are not only necessary to his fight against evil, but it is necessary to the success of these novels. This relationship is the backbone of these novels.



If you are a Harry Potter fan, and if you are reading the 5th novel you are a fan, you will love this one. We get a more complex, realistic Harry. We get another villian to hate besides Lord Voldemort. We get some resolution and another action-packed ending. We also get to wait for the next installment of the series.



Keep on Reading!
reviewed by Sbarranca

To Have A Traditional Narrative Structure or Not to Have One? That is the Question.

In the opening lines to her collection of essays about life during the 1960s in California, Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The collection explores the ways in which this time era shifted her perspective of narrative, how stories were no longer following recognizable patterns for her. In the age of information, self-disclosure, and voyeurism, where anything is possible and everything accessible, are we ready for fiction that breaks away from traditional narrative structure? I’m a part of a book club and recently we read Carole Maso’s Ava, a story about a woman on her deathbed, recalling various memories from her life. Rather than a traditional narrative structure, with a beginning, middle, and end, we read scattered fragments of memories—pieces of stories in a collage arrangement, sometimes expanded upon at later points in the text, sometimes not. In her story, sentences often replace entire paragraphs and often there are no smooth transitions between ideas. The whole text contradicts anything we’ve ever been schooled with in terms of story and effective communication. Yet I find the story beautiful and challenging for that very reason. Reading this story makes me feel like a detective, an active participant, working along side the author to create meaning for the text.

Many of my fellow book club-ers did not agree with me. From the first two minutes of the book club discussion, it was apparent that I was marooned on my own little island of poetic, non-linear enjoyment. Most of the others were frustrated by the text, saying the text suffered from A.D.D., was pretentious, full of navel gazing. I enthusiastically pointed out beautiful language: “what about the poetry of this image”:

In my memory the white flower seems always to be in blossom.

There were swans there.

She wore blue shoes.

“Or this”: Sunstruck, drunk, lying with lizards. Eating earth. And how you fed me flowers. And sang to me. The cock crowing, the river for a bed.

Some of my fellow book club-ers could agree with the magic of some of Maso’s isolated language, yet still, more than one said, “I enjoyed our discussion about this book much more than the book itself.”

In an article about confessional poetry, poet Claudia Rankine says, “Is it fair to say there is, in the twenty-first century, a greater consensus toward the notion that true coherency is fragmented?” We can apply this question to experimental fiction too, and wonder if Maso’s style is not more of a reflection of our current reality and truth than the traditional narrative.

Our book club talked about what it is we seek in fiction. For some, escape was the answer, for others, a reflection of truth or to learn something new. I realized then that it is language itself that I seek when I read, that I was okay with tossing aside traditional narrative structure, for the enjoyment and challenge of the arrangement and sounds of words, and even the blank space between words and ideas—a place for me to play detective, or dreamer, and fill in the missing narrative.

Help....It's like the last chapter was ripped from a book.

I have been listening to books on CD lately.  I started about two years ago.  Never thought I would be the type to listen to a book when I could be reading one.  But, welcome to the world of being a mother of teenagers.  I am in my car so much driving them around and waiting for them to get out of practice that I started listening to books on CD.

I was listening to Riding Lessons by Sara Gruen.  I absolutely loved Water for Elephants ( I read that one) that when I saw this CD at the library I grabbed it. 

Like Water for Elephants, Gruen captured me right from the beginning of this new remarkable novel.  She has truly done it again.  It takes on a journey with Anne Marie after a riding accident.  Fast forward 15 years and we discover that she has never truly healed from this accident.  She ends up moving back home with her teenage daughter to discover her father's illness and the remnants of her old life.  She realizes she had been running away this whole time and she needs to reconcile herself with her past if she is to have a future.

Here's my problem though.  The last track of the CD is somehow ruined and I can't hear the last chapter of the novel.  Now I have to go to the library and get the book just so I can finish it.  I won't have time to do that for a couple of days!!!  Ack!!  All of you readers know that this is a new (Dante) circle of hell.  I was in love with this novel and was really enjoying it and now I am on hold.

I truly recommend this novel.  If you loved Water for Elephants, which I did, you will love Riding Lesssons too!

I really love this poem on youtube

Has anyone seen this youtube video yet?  I use it in the classes that I teach at HVCC.  It was created by a student for a  contest that AARP was running.  It so clearly illustrates the power of words and writing.  If my college students are awestruck and are riveted to it when I show it, that is saying something.  Believe me, these students are jaded when it comes to "cool things."  Give it a watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA