In the Thick of It

I wonder if I should change the subheading of my blog title (escapisms from thesis writing). . . because sometimes I do indeed post about thesis writing or thesis-writing inspired things. I can’t help it! Thesis is like one of those amorphous bubble that hovers over all your thoughts when you have something you know you really have to do. Like how on the weekends you guiltily mentally run through your “to-do” list every time you catch yourself enjoying something not list-sanctioned (“I should be doing the laundry right now,” “I still have to go grocery shopping,” “the bathroom isn’t going to clean itself!”). Except thesis is not like cleaning the bathroom, although sometimes while editing I do wonder what all that yucky junk is (all over the page). The point is that it looms. Looms, I tell you! While reading, the act of typing/thinking is imminent, and then while typing/thinking, the act of reading/thinking is imminent, and do you see, it’s a vicious cycle! You finish one section only to realize that yet another section is waiting for you . . .See? It looms. Oh, I almost forgot what I was doing here. Mostly I am taking the opportunity to complain to no one in particular, because those close to me have already heard enough– their ears are no longer sympathetic. In case you couldn’t tell, I am in the thick of it right now, finishing up reading for section two of my literature review, which is on the psychosocial concerns for mixed-race people.

I did do something interesting and rather out of the ordinary last Friday. I am “assisting” one of my (ex?) professors with his current research project, which concerns tribal issues in a particular Northern California region. One of the things he asked me to do was to look at the front page of the local newspaper for everyday of 1970 and 1971, scanning for particular info, then print out relevant articles. I spent 6 hours and I made it through January – June of 1970, and my eyes were TIRED. Although tedious, it was an absolute trip seeing the front pages stories of the era. Here’s what some of them were:

Manson Killings

School Integration

Student Vietnam War Protests

Reds!! (Communists)

Methadone Treatment for Mental Illness

So, I sorta had fun on my little time-warp expedition in the California State History Room. I have to go back as I am only 1/4 done, but oh well…time travel is fun.

 

Update on Kitty

So, cat is not preggo, just fat.  No babies.  I am glad to know that our kitty’s sweet personality is real and not just pregnancy-induced.  She also let me sleep WITHOUT earplugs until 6:30 a.m. (at which point she cried for food, I put my earplugs in and went back to sleep until 9–I was TIRED!!).  Good kitty!

Here she is after getting her neck stuck in the handle of a paper bag, being completely freaked out that the bag kept following her as she tried to run away from it, and finally ripping the handle section off.  Slipping the dangling and tattered handle off her neck was a delicate endeavor, but I managed to get it off of her with minimal meowing.  Silly kitty.

 

My Cat is Weird, and Also Possibly a Dog

My vet told us that we should get a drinkwell system for our cat.  Apparently, it’s a water bowl thing that has a fountain so that it’s constantly running water.  This is more appealing for cats and helps them drink more water.  I think we will probably be investing in one of these things, if only to prevent our cat from engaging in some of the unconventional drinking methods I’ve observed her using in the past few days.  For your entertainment, I present:

Cup kitty

“What, it tastes better after you drank out of it!”

And now…toilet kitty

“YUM”

Also we discovered (and are confirming with vet today) that our sweet, toilet bowl-licking kitty that we adopted about a month ago is pregnant.  SPCA gave us a pregnant cat!  All this time we thought she was just the sweetest thing, licking us all the time because she loves us to pieces, come to find out she’s just practicing for her babies.  SIGH.

 

The Gargoyle=”Meh”

This book so was SO hyped for so long that I simply could not wait to read it, and when I tucked in late Friday night and started reading graphic burn descriptions, I thought “this is going to be awesome.” The sentiment did not last long, but I pushed through and finished the book up this afternoon, hoping for a “twist” of some sort to redeem the experience. Sadly, it never came. There are things I really liked and then things I really didn’t like.

Let’s start with things I really liked:

1. Descriptions. Davidson knows how to describe things in such vivid detail that you can really see and imagine what he is writing about. A couple examples that stand out are the car crash and burn descriptions, especially the excerpt in which he tells you burn yourself on a stove in varying degrees, the descriptions of debridement, and descriptions of what he looked like before and after the burns.

2. Short stories. The short stories sprinkled throughout reminded me of The Blood of Flowers, and I really enjoyed them; they are beautifully written and wonderfully creative.

3. Protagonist. I really appreciated the honesty of the protagonist, especially the unabashed details of his admittedly seedier days pre-burn. I felt I could trust him and I thought he was pretty good about keeping his head amidst falling in love with a crazy (?) person and dealing with drug addiction and disfigurement.

4. The Bitchsnake. I thought this element of the story was super clever, creative, and entertaining.

Now, the things I didn’t like:

1. The language. It felt contrived and as if Davidson was trying too hard to be casual/colloquial to notice that the language sometimes just felt sloppy and sappy. Overall, I found the writing pretty cheesy.

2. The “love story.” For two people who were supposedly destined for each other, what’s-his-face (why does protagonist have no name, anyway?) and Marianne Engel don’t really seem all that crazy about each other in the present time. There are no descriptions of passionate emotions, save protagonist’s excitement about Marianne’s body, and Marianne spends so much time carving gargoyles and telling stories that it doesn’t seem like she could really know anything about what’s-his-face.

3. Crazy Love. Is Marianne seriously mentally ill or does love just conquer all and she really is 700 yrs old? Is this a fantasy story or isn’t it? This doesn’t work for me, and I don’t feel like Davidson did a good job at convincing me that Marianne’s not really nuts. To me, over the top romanticism of the story just felt cheesy, and like I said before, they didn’t seem to be that into each other.

4. Inferno Insert. This part was really boring to me, didn’t make sense or add to the story, or clarify or reveal anything about Marianne or the love story. I got the feeling this was the climax of their grand love story, but to me it just seemed like Davidson really likes the Inferno and wanted to “cover” it. Definitely not as good as the real thing.

Overall, I thought the book was entertaining, had some really interesting and likeable characters (Sayuri, the psychologist, and Dr. Nan), some good stories within stories, with bouts of fine writing, but was overall cheesy and fell flat of the hype. At the end I still wanted to know what the real story was with Marianne, and it just wasn’t written in a way where not knowing worked as a clever “choose-your-own-ending” type closing. I also thought there were many simply unnecessary pages. I know a lot of you are going to click away from here and never come back, but I must be honest! I am glad I read the book, though, and I think I will definitely read Davidson’s next book—I think he has a lot of potential and I think he’ll clean things up and write a better book next time. Lastly, many thanks again to The Book Lady for facilitating my reading of The Gargoyle!

 

A Monk Jumped Over A Wall by Jay Nussbaum

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this book. When I was notified that I would recieve the book via LibraryThing Early Reviewers, it sounded kind of suspense-y and about a lawyer, so I (ignorantly) conjured up some image of your standard Grisham fare (or at least what I imagined Grisham is like; I’ve never actually read any of his work). The book opens in the midst of a meeting at the protagonist’s, J.J.’s, law firm, the first words are spoken by wh I instantly recognize as the cocky-wins-often-probably-partner lawyer, and I am immediately transported to much beloved Boston Legal episodes in which Denny Crane heartlessly and obliviously speaks down to whomever he is sitting across. Nussbaum throws J.J.’s “rock bottom” episode at us quickly, and I think the way he lets us into J.J.’s dark past vis-à-vis a drunken and overly emotional interchange in the bar scene is a little cheesy, but I quickly forgive this as I’m transported for real back into J.J.’s past. I really like the plot formatting of present/past, present/past; it made me feel like I was watching a movie instead of reading a book, which was surprising and really engaging—I read this book fast. Also surprising were the couple of laugh-out-loud funny moments, which I find very rare in the “serious literary” fiction I usually read. While there is certainly humor and the story is fast-paced, this is not what I would call a “light” read. J.J. goes through some serious spiritual, identity, and relational crises, and the resolutions Nussbaum provide illustrate his beliefs about what’s important/worth caring about and doing in life. Karate is a major element of the story, which I thought might turn me off, which pretty much acts as the vehicle to providing “answers” to J.J.’s crises; it sounds cheesy, but it works. The story behind the title of the book is very interesting, and is revealed pretty early on in the novel, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book; if you keep it in mind, it will help you understand J.J. and keep you from getting too frustrated with some of his actions. Overall, this was an enjoyable book that made me think about things we all grapple with on a daily basis (read existential questions) in a different way, which was refreshing. I’m sure you have all heard authors say “write about what you know,” and I think Nussbaum did an exemplary job at it—having read about him on his website, I kept wondering if/how much of the book was autobiographical, and that kept me intrigued. I will definitely be picking up Nussbaum’s “first” novel Blue Road to Atlantis.

 

Calling All Word Nerds

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher was a very quirky woman who loved words. It was sort of a funny kind of love affair she had going on with the English language, because she frequently misspelled words–pretty much on a daily basis. She was not as strange as my tenth grade English teacher, Mrs. Person (yes, that is her real name), who had a penchant for wearing coral-colored lipstick (and yes, that’s pretty much a euphemism for orange) and saying “the horror, the horror” when discussing tragic, bizarre, or just kind of disgusting literary works such as Things Fall Apart, A Modest Proposal, or Candide. Except she could not pronounce the last “r” in “horror,” so the word sounded like this: hoar-ah. Yes, interesting… Anyway, my senior year English teacher, Mrs. Stevenson (yes, she is in fact related to Adlai Stevenson, which is also interesting), loved words so much that she would start every class by showing us which word she had in her pocket that day. Yes, she kept a word in her pocket. Every day. She would pick a random word she was unfamiliar with out of the dictionary each morning, write in on a small piece of paper, fold it, and put it in her pocket. The idea behind this was to memorize the word in the morning and integrate it into your vocabulary by making an effort to use it in conversation throughout the day. Has anyone else ever heard of this/done this?

The first time she pulled a word out of her pocket and emphatically read us the definition, we all thought she was nuts. However, after a couple weeks, some of us started putting words in our pockets, and we took turns reading them and demonstrating their proper use in a sentence at the beginning of class. At first we did it to make fun of her word-craziness, but after a while, we really got into it. It became a competition to see who could find the most bizarre but at least moderately utilitarian word, and a flurry of hands would fly up at the beginning of class. Not since the third grade had I heard such “OOO, OOO, pick me’s.”

What sent me down this diction daydream, you ask? Well, yesterday during thesis research, I came across a word in an article about biracial women in therapy that I had never seen before. Now, I may stumble across words I’m not entirely familiar with, and I’m usually able to roll with them given the context of their usage, but rarely do I encounter a word I’ve just never even seen. The word was “heuristic.” The context was “We find the border identity to have tremendous heuristic value because it involves the creation of a new hybrid category of racial identification.” I re-read that sentence about five times, but could not guess the meaning of the word. I had to look it up on dictionary.com. Can you guess what it means? Definition below:

Heuristic:

–adjective

1.	serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.

2.	encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.

3.	of, pertaining to, or based on experimentation, evaluation, or trial-and-error methods.

4.	Computers, Mathematics. pertaining to a trial-and-error method of problem solving used when an algorithmic approach is impractical.

–noun

5.	a heuristic method of argument.

6.	the study of heuristic procedure.

---

[Origin: 1815–25; < NL heuristicus, equiv. to Gk heur(ískein) to find out, discover + L -isticus -istic]

“Ahhhh,” I think I have found my new smart word. I’ve been looking for a good alternative to “evidences,” “demonstrates,” and such related words. This word will be in my thesis, and will impress my thesis adviser. Yay for new words!

 

In the Trenches of Identity Politics

Barack Obama has two best-selling books, one of which (his autobiography Dreams From My Father) is specifically about his journey of racial and personal identity.  In interviews he has said that his biraciality puts him in a unique position to bring people together in this country.  Why is it then, that he is constantly touted as the first would-be black president, and not ever the first would-be biracial/multiracial/mixed-race president?  Clearly, he is open about his racial identity, so why is it hardly ever mentioned by the media?  I think there are a couple of reasons:

1)  The historical systematic oppression of black people in this country, from slavery to a botched attempt at Reconstruction, from Jim Crow laws to antimiscegenation laws, and finally the affirmative action fiasco, has all served to create and attach a stigma to blackness.

2)  Because race is itself socially created and maintained as the politics of each situation necessitates, and because Barack appears to be black (others identify him as black), it doesn’t matter how he self-identifies, he is black because is identified as such.

3)  Because racial identity has political implications, there are clearly benefits for the black community (and all people of color) in identifying Barack as the first black president.  That he is half white, and therefore representative of the majority culture, is not beneficial to blacks (or other people of color) who would claim him as one of their own.

4)  Because we live in a country that has been obsessed with racially classifying people since its inception, it is just easier for people to place him in whatever box makes the most sense.

Do I think it is wrong for black people to want to claim Barack?  No.  I claim him because I am biracial/mixed-race/multiracial/WHATEVER-people-want-to-call-it-it’s-all-made-up-anyway.  Do I think it is wrong for the media to ignore his multiraciality?  I’m not sure… I just find this all very interesting.  What I appreciate about him is that he is honest about his struggle with identity and his continued acknowledgment that our country has a problem with race (DUH).  Just because race is not biological, and therefore made-up (and changing all the time), doesn’t mean it’s not real.  This is the dangerous and tricky part.  So, if race isn’t real (biological/genetic), then why acknowledge it at all?  Why not just be “colorblind?”  The trouble is that colorblindness neglects to acknowledge the very real historical and current disadvantages people of color face in our society that was constructed as a racial hierarchy.  I’m not sure what the “where do we go from here” is, a solution seems hard to grasp (although many people have many ideas), but I do think it will have to include the giving up (and handing over) of power, from those who have to those who don’t.

I know this is supposed to be “escapisms from thesis-writing,” but sometimes I just have to get some words down, non-academic style.

Thoughts?

 

The Lace Reader: I Think I Need to be Debriefed or Something

I said I wasn’t going to post a review of The Lace Reader, and I’m not; if you haven’t already seen a billion reviews of this book, click here and here. What I will say about the book is that I just finished reading it, and I feel like I need to be debriefed or something. So, I am going to talk about stuff that happened in the book (if you haven’t read it and don’t want spoilers, then click away from this place…)Although Towner warned me that she is “a crazy woman” and “lies all the time,” I forgot about and became engrossed in the story. Looking back, there are definitely clues throughout, and I remember little questions like “now why would she feel that way/do that/etc? that can’t be right…” popping up in my mind, but I pushed them aside. I think Brunonia Barry did a splendid job writing a “psychological” piece of fiction; what I mean by that is she clearly did her research on dissociative disorder, PTSD, sexual abuse, and schizophrenia, especially the link between all of these things. That’s a lot of psychological elements to take on in one character, but the truth is that they are usually interrelated (save the schizophrenia, that’s not as common), so I like that she just went for it. I loved the foil of Cal for Towner; clearly the question is: so who’s really crazy here? To me, I think the reality that she brought to light was that no one in the story is crazy, but they are the product of life events, and they are seen and come to think of themselves as other see them. The backdrop of Salem, the story of the Puritans and witches, and how the same misunderstandings keep occurring because people are selfish and afraid of themselves…I don’t know, it’s still unfolding in my mind, and I think I want to read it again to figure stuff out…I would like to hear what others think: what did you like/dislike; what did you think the message/messages/morals of the book were, if any; what were the themes; what impressed you/was impressed upon you the most?

 

New Member of the Family and a Big “Thank You” to Readerville!

This morning, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to feed our new cat, Amelia Bones (10 points if you can tell me where I got that name from!), because she just would not shut the hell up. So, I fed her, shut our bedroom door and went back to sleep. At 6 a.m., Amelia decided she wanted to join us, so she pawed at our door for a few minutes while whining loudly. I opened the door to let her in, but as she has demonstrated thus far (and why we shut our door at night), she just continued to whine and jump all over the place. So…defeated and not wanting to disturb my husband’s first night of decent sleep in about four days, I grabbed my pillow and drug myself to the couch to tuck into The Lace Reader, which I picked up yesterday and am really enjoying so far. Of course, the cat lies down next to the couch and promptly goes to sleep. I have never had a cat before, but SHEESH….are they all this annoying? I can’t stay mad at her though, she’s too cute:

When I “finally” switched on my computer around 8:30 a.m., I found I had received an email from Rebecca of Readerville, entitled “You Won!” Well, it had her name there, so I wasn’t sure who it was from and what it was about until I opened it up and found out that I won her ARC contest for the Gargoyle!! Sure enough, I checked her blog, and there it was. SUPER STOKED!! I have already expressed my enthusiasm about reading this book on this blog, and I really was tempted to steal DevourerofBook’s copy while at her house, but I just couldn’t do that to her, not 3 days before her wedding, anyway. Maybe some other time, Jen. I must add as side note, thought, that with all the awesome reading I’ve been doing lately, and all the books that I keep adding to my Amazon wish list, and all the amazing bargain books I keep picking up at book sales (9 practically new books for $3, anyone?), I am SUPER BUMMED that school is starting in just about a month. And I really should be spending more time reading for my lit review. Stupid thesis and school, ruining all my pleasure reading. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to keep living vicariously through all the book blogs. Although I’m currently reading The Lace Reader, I will not post a review since it’s been reviewed many times by many people. I suggest the aforementioned blogs (Devourerofbooks and Readerville) for a good review.

 

What is the What by Dave Eggers

“When I came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. . . When I was finished talking to that person I would continue my stories, talking to the air, the sky, to all the people of the world and whoever might be listening in heaven. It is wrong to say that I used to tell these stories. I still do, and not only to those I feel have wronged me. The stories emanate from me all the time I am awake and breathing, and I want everyone to hear them. Written words are rare in small villages like mine, and it is my right and obligation to send my stories into the world, even if silently, even if utterly powerless.” –p. 29.

What is the What by Dave Eggers is the autobiography/biography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee, or “lost boy.” Although this is an autobiography/biography (I put the slash in there because although the book is written about Achak in first person, in his voice, it is nonetheless written by someone other than Valentino), it is technically a novel because since the book chronicles Achak’s life from the time he was about 6 yrs old, there are some instances that may be (admittedly) exaggerated/distorted/remembered slightly incorrectly. I recall reading on DevourerofBooks blog about a contest put on by Maw Books, which was basically a bribe to get her readers to read at least her book review of Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond by Don Cheadle. While, neither “Not on Our Watch” nor “What is the What” are works of fiction, I think What is the What could be a more approachable way to learn about the history and humanity of the conflict in Sudan because rather than look at the conflict all at once as a whole, you can instead follow one person, which seems a bit “safer.”

The story begins with our narrator being attacked and robbed in his Atlanta, Georgia apartment due to his naïveté about people’s intentions. What I love about the context of the book’s beginning is it demonstrates perfectly the unexpected optimism and faith in people that Achak possesses and is able to maintain, even after all the terrible things he’s seen and experienced in his life. Not that Achak doesn’t do his share of questioning God throughout the book, he certainly does, and when he does it marks his growth and strength. Another element of Egger’s writing is that he has Achak “tell” (he speaks internally) his story to people in his current life. He tells his story to the young boy his robbers leave to watch him in his apartment while he is gagged and bound, he tells it to the callous desk person at the hospital who makes him wait 10 hours to be treated, he tells it to various people at the gym, and he addresses them all by name at various points in the story-telling, as if to will the person to hear him. As if the person, if they could only hear him could not help but be touched by his life.

Achak does not withhold anything from his many terrifying experiences. If you want to take the journey with him, you have to commit to seeing everything, just as he did. You will feel his sadness, his confusion, his ambivalence, his joy, his hope, his disappointment, his fear, just as he did, first as a little boy, and later as a man. Egger’s descriptions are vivid, I could literally picture what Achak was seeing—and I did not always want to. I laughed, I cried, I got angry, I got sad, and often all of these in one sitting. If I had to choose one word to describe this book (the style, the diction, the tone, the everything) it would be simply: beautiful. This is a life-affirming book that makes you both glad to be alive and wonder why it is that you are (alive). There is no way to read this book without being affected and wanting to know more about what happens in Achak’s life—luckily, he has a website to satisfy your curiosity and to help you find out what you can do to help in Sudan.

When you come to the end, you become one of the people who Achak has told his story to, and you realize it is not because you have done him harm or could not possibly understand his life. I would love to put down the final paragraph of the book because it is so surprising and beautiful, but I won’t because that would ruin your experience of sad/happy tears at the end of a wonderful book.