Yes, we have the resident people who think if the character had been brought up differently, she wouldn’t have wanted to be a man, wouldn’t have been sexually attracted to women. Despite the fact there is absolutely no supporting evidence in the reading for this opinion (and I’ve been asking classmates to support it with textual citations, because I’m a damn bitch).

But here’s what gets me most of all – those goddamned english majors who are just so sweet, they want to relate to everyone by effectively stripping every work of any bias or power it has and declaring it as just being about people.

No. This book is about a woman who is physically attracted to other women, a woman depressed by the defined role of women, a woman who longs to be a man. And people who say that sexuality has little or nothing to do with her struggles make me laugh because her sexuality is the only reason she struggles. That’s the whole point of the damned book.

Do these people sit down and read Toni Morrison, Beloved, and say that novel has little to do with race despite it being about slavery in America? Of course it has meaning beyond all that, but that novel would not exist without the constant awareness and pressure of race.

I think what pisses me off more than it being a cop-out (which it absolutely is because every single piece of art created by man is inherently about the state of man, why don’t you try thinking a little harder about what you just read?) is that it’s demeaning. Ask a lesbian how it would feel to plan her wedding to her partner today, see if it is anything like the idiots I hear going on and on about circular versus rectangular tables, about doilies or whatever the shit women do when they’re planning weddings. I respect that those women can plan their weddings, but if they think that the struggle for civil unions is in any way related to their stupid centerpiece planning ideas, they’re dead wrong.

In conclusion, we demean each other when we distill all of life down to “oh, we’re all the same”. We’re not, fuck you. A book written about a woman’s struggles against society due to her sexuality is not just about the struggles of all women.

Good god, I can’t wait ’til we are done with this book. My “peers” have been writing about how they’re not “homophobic but lesbian sex makes [them] uncomfortable.” It makes me uncomfortable, too in one of those hot and bothered ways. I am seriously considering trolling my classmates, posting a link to some pornography or similar such mischief, except I kinda need to stay in school. *sigh*

Well, the other day Ralph Nader was signing copies of his book, The Seventeen Traditions, at Union Station. It’s pretty much a book about how he grew up – a book he’s dedicated to young parents today. Michael bought a copy, asked him to sign it to me. Apparently Nader asked if we had kids, and when Michael answered in the negative, he signed it to me, “For the Children.” Cue me running around singing it to “4 da shorteez,” (an Aqua Teen reference, for the uninitiated). Nader also misspelled my name, although Michael spelled it for him. It will earn a place of honor in our library.

The book itself, while starting a bit slowly in the introduction, is actually pretty good. I pretty much tore threw it tonight, and a lot of it reminded me of the way I grew up, of the way my parents wanted me to grow up. All of that is on my mind lately, anyway. Holidays tend to bring all those thoughts bubbling to the surface. I’ve said before that I’m starting to get baby-crazy a little when I’m out, and maybe I’ve indulged in a private jealousy that people who are the same age as I am and married are having kids already. Then I take a look at my messy house, the quantity of booze in my fridge, my ability to decide randomly to do whatever I want and the fact that I am currently responsible for myself and my marriage, a big enough task for me to handle right now.

Of course, while Michael was getting Nader to sign his book and perusing it on his train ride home, I was volunteering at a local children’s after-school program during a holiday party. Twenty 10-14 year old kids, who were high on sugar and the fact that it was Friday and Christmas is less than a week away, are pretty much the best birth control there is. If you haven’t given your kids’ teachers or daycare personnel Thank You notes, please do so. Not everyone has extra money to give a gift, but a simple thank you is more than most of those people get, and good lord, do they need it after a day like the one I experienced. My friend has been organizing this mostly thankless after-school program for a few months now, and she cried when one of her children (and the child’s mother) presented her with a small gift.

In conclusion, Ralph Nader’s book is pretty good, but kids are way far away on the horizon personally (sorry Ralph). And charity starts close to home, by thanking the people around you, for service you may or may not think about.

I finally sat down this week with The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, a collection of short stories and a novel. I bought it for a little over ten dollars in order to buffer an Amazon purchase and get free shipping. Michael read through it and enjoyed it thoroughly. He’s begun amassing Wodehouse.

Michael and I have different philosophies on writing. We enjoy different styles. We have totally unique repertoires – minus the things every English major has to read: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton. He loves Agatha Christie, I can’t think of her without picturing Angela Lansbury. He’s much more well-read in terms of classic British Literature, I read crazy modern fiction that he’s not really inclined to read.

So, I took a shot on Wodehouse. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first. The writing didn’t seem that interesting, the characters were obnoxious. But first appearances are deceiving. The writing is fantastic, dry and witty, well constructed. His characters are obnoxious, but unfortunately they’re also painted so well that you sympathize with them and cheer for them. His stories are… well… sitcoms on television have pretty much stolen everything that redeems them from Wodehouse. He constructs these impossible situations and as a reader you sit on the edge of your seat because you know something awful and hilarious is going to happen.

He’s the first author who has made me laugh out loud in a long time. It will happen when you don’t expect it to. So I thought I’d give props to Wodehouse, who I never heard mentioned in an English class. Read him! Some works can be found at Project Gutenberg, but it’s not expensive to get The Most of on Amazon, and your library probably has some Wodehouse, too.

Michael and I, at my request, watched The Ice Storm this weekend. I had seen one of the strangest scenes from the film before, but not the film in its entirety. I’m not going to talk much about the movie – I think it suffered from its “artistic sensibility.” Sure, it was pretty, but did it mean anything? Did I feel anything? Did the snark make me laugh? Did the attempts at depth feel unassuming? Did I understand anything about the characters? No is my answer to all these questions. Plus the music really irritated me.

Without going off on a tangent about “indie” films, I’d like to point out that the only way to make a compelling film (or story) is to make compelling characters – not just craft a stereotype and then have a climax where that character makes one act in opposition to the stereotype they assume. That’s not depth, that’s lazy writing. Beauty of craft is not enough to make up for not having anything to say.

Well, there’s a scene (stupid, insubstansial scene to establish a character’s affection for a secondary character) of a roundtable discussion (presumably at a college) where they’re discussing Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Insert my inward groan here, as the secondary character goes on some discussion about religion and free will that’s trite, and in retrospect, pretty true to my collegiate experience in terms of the depth most students had to offer.

It reminded me that there are probably books we should all read. I think Notes from the Underground should be on that list. It’s on my list.

Dostoevsky is a difficult writer to read. At least, he was always difficult to me. His writing is complex and philosophical – he is less concerned with writing a compelling story and more concerned with writing about philosophy. But in order to write about philosophy, he crafts complicated, absorbing, often contradictory characters and delves into their minds (indie movie writers, take note). Dostoevsky’s writing is a beginning to psychology for me. He came before Freud, before psychoanalysis and yet he is absorbed in the content of mankind’s brains, the thought-processes that accompany people’s behaviors.

I could go on and on about Dostoevsky – about the contradictory nature of his work reflecting the contradictions in his life, about his faith in the redemptive qualities of mankind, most frequently represented by religion for him. But that’s not the point. Forget the intellectual tomfoolery surrounding the man and read him. Let yourself really drown in his characters and his unending attention to the mind of mankind. You don’t have to be a scholar, or a writer attempting to look smart by referencing the man’s work.

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a pretty short read, and is available for under $5 in Signet Classics paperback. Or you can read it online for free here (and plenty of other places, too). Since it’s free, you have no excuse not to read it.

Mark Twain has this absolutely divine way of making you laugh and making you think – without being direct or preach-y about it. It’s a skill very few people have, and one that it’s often difficult to find in a writer.

That being said, I never understood the hullabaloo about the book being taught in public schools. Okay, so he says some words that socially-conscious people don’t say anymore. It’s just funny to me that people can miss the point so entirely. He writes those words into his characters’ mouths, while at the same time decrying the words – in a softly prodding way. I guess the point is people who want to ban literature generally don’t read it. Or they’re too stupid to figure out what it means, or to even want to figure out what it means. Which is ridiculous, because when we read we should consider intent as well as content.

When I was in high school, my parents came back from a back to school night angry. Some group had left a flyer on their car about literature that should be banned from our schools. My father took extreme exception to the fact that every author on the list was a minority – either African American or Hispanic. His reaction was to go online and purchase every book on the list. He read them all. I read them all. We sat down and we talked about them.

The weird thing was – most of those books were banned for language or violence inflicted on the characters. For example – Maya Angelou describes a rape she suffered as a young child in detail in the autobiographical, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It seemed to me then that a society which inflicts violence and discrimination against people which it later regrets, but then attempts to stifle the expression of victims of that violence and discrimination, is not a society that actually cares about what those people have suffered. It’s a society that is not willing to look at the pain which is constantly present in their society. That’s true of all the pain people suffer from, whether it be due to ethnicity or economic status. And that is the most damning thing society can suffer from.

We can realize – as a culture, as a society – that we will always have people who will suffer for their differences. We can try to do our best to account for those differences.

I don’t mean after the fact by paying people some money. I mean, change our policies now to give people as much equal footing as possible. Like, say, by providing people with universal health coverage. Or paying for everyone to attend college or a technical school. Because anyone who is stupid enough to believe that two parents, both high school educated and working full-time, have time to take their children to a doctor or to save money for college when they have to pay for health insurance and child care – needs to get with the times. That is not America anymore, that’s not how most of us live. and when the unhappy minority slowly becomes the majority – there should be crazy revolution.

But, back to my reading. Before they start burning books.

K.

The contents of this blog entry may not reflect the views of the Webmaster of Doom, Michael.