Six Words
This is fun. I heard about it in
Time Out New York. The assignment is to come up with a story in six words. When Ernest Hemingway was presented with the challenge years ago he came up with "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." Smith magazine hosted a contest of this sort with a twist: sum up your life story in six words. A memoir, if you will. The winner was "Barrister, barista, what's the diff, Mom?"
Based on my life in and out of the theatre, surviving from this survival job to that, mine would be: "Talent--a blessing or a curse?"
What would yours be?
Labels: Literature, Pop Culture
Read Any Good Books Lately?
These are two books I haven’t read “lately” but rather, within the last six months or so. They have some similarities in that both books deal with themes of families redefined and both writers use a distinctly comic tone to tell their sometimes tragic stories.
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster is a funny, often touching account of Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman, divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter, who moves to Brooklyn “to die.” While there decides to pen “The Book of Human Folly,” which contains every colossally stupid blunder he has ever committed in his life. But in his new environs he meets an unlikely cast of characters who become his new family: a long-lost, underachieving nephew, a flamboyant used-book salesman, an HIV positive Jamaican drag queen, a hard-boiled Italian widow and a silent little girl who shows up on his doorstep unannounced.
Perhaps as penance for his own “human folly” he helps each one of these characters with their own struggles and quests. The plot twists, turns and intertwines, leading from Brooklyn to Vermont to “Carolina, Carolina.” Auster explores the concept of sanctuary in literature with allusions to Thoreau, Whitman and Hawthorne but with a distinctly urban tone reminiscent of Damon Runyon. Told in the first person, Nathan’s delicious New York accent practically leaps off the page. I read this book about six months ago, but the characters continue to haunt.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a memoir by Dave Eggers and begins with an account of the author’s parents dying of cancer within six months of each other. They leave behind four children ranging in age from 10 years to early 20s. The author himself is a college student at the time. Left with only each other, the siblings begin to redefine their family, assuming parental roles to their younger brother, selling off all the family possessions and moving west to Berkley, CA.
I began loving this book with its tongue-in-cheek tone, self-deprecating humor and false bravado. But Eggers would have been well served by a good editor. He falls into the trap of the self-indulgent memoirist with a too-long, two person scene in the middle of the book in which he recounts in maudlin detail everything we just read. This scene is set as a casting interview for MTV’s The Real World. Following this, the book trails off into seemingly unrelated anecdotes of the struggling young writer’s attempt to create a fledgling magazine and his coming of age as an adult. This overwritten work seems to diminish the potentially“heartbreaking” story the author is trying to tell. Nevertheless, it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
So how about you? Read any good books lately?
Labels: Books, Literature
Read Any Good Books Lately?
I've seen
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold on the table of reader's favorites at Barnes and Noble for years now. But I was never compelled to read it. Why? Because of the cover. Yes, I admit I was judging this book by its cover. It looked like a chick book to me.
The Lovely Bones, with a charm bracelet and a little house on the cover. I thought it was about some suburban woman who wanted to be skinny because she has lovely bones or something. Well, I was wrong. It's nothing like that.
I finally decided to read it because Scott has been recommending it to me for about a year now. I was delighted to find it's a very thoughtful and moving story that centers around the murder of a 14 year-old girl namd Susie. It's told from Susie's point of view from her heaven. (Apparently everyone's is different.) She hovers above her family and friends and watches as they deal with her death and their grief and eventually come apart at the seams. Her sister, closest to her in age, still carrying the burden of sibling rivalry with a dead girl. Her father who becomes so obsessed with finding his daughter's killer he becomes known as something of a neighborhood loon. Her mother who becomes increasingly distant and cold to the rest of her family. The brother who was so young at the time of his sister's murder he was shielded from the reality of it and grows increasingly resentful with age for not being allowed to feel the loss. And finally, a once flighty and alcoholic grandmother who moves into the dead girl's room and attempts to pull the family back together.
The characters are very human and don't always behave as you would want them to or think they should. But therein lies the beauty of it. The painful humanity of the survivors who, like the dismembered bones of the murdered girl, separate, each in his own turmoil, but finally come together to form the body that was her life.
I found the device of using Susie to tell the story original and fascinating. I also applaud Sebold for not trying to turn the story into a suspense thriller with the characters in hot pursuit of a killer. It deals with the much stronger force to reckon with: their grief. That said, I found the pacing a bit plodding at times, but Sebold's beautiful prose is a pleasure to read.
So how about you? Read any good books lately?
Labels: Literature
Don't Tell Mama--I'm for Obama
During my travels on the New York City subway system over the last week or so, I have noticed that here in Hillary country one of the most popular books being read by straphangers is Barack Obama's
The Audacity of Hope.
On further examination and in the informal poll being tallied in my head, it is more often than not being read by young men ages 28 to 35. If I may take my observation one step further, they all happen to be, without exception, adorably cute young men as well. Seriously--I've seen one like every day this week. You know the type--you're not quite sure if he's a bookish gay guy or just a really cool, sensitive straight guy. The tousled hair, the earnest expression, perhaps wearing glasses but certainly the type who has no idea how cute he is or that he is made all the more attractive by his idealistic liberal politics. *sigh*
Anyway, it has led me to the conclusion that
The Audacity of Hope must be number one on the Adorably-Cute-Guy Best Seller List. I wonder if they have a book club.
Labels: Gay Culture, Humor, Literature, Politics
Tranny Tuesday
Left with an unexpected night to myself, I ventured out to check the movie times at Lowe's 84th Street. Having missed the time for the only film I was interested in seeing, I wandered across the street to the Barnes and Noble. I stumbled upon a book signing, reading and talk in progress upstairs. An author named Cris Beam has written a wonderfully touching and funny memoir called
Transparent about teaching and mentoring a group of transgendered teenagers. She was a delight. Her audience was mostly neighborhood folk, the type who turn out for almost every discussion and book signing they have there. A Lesbian writer discussing transgendered teens to a bunch of very well-read Jewish senior citizens. Only in New York.
Labels: Gay Culture, Literature, Only In New York
