Finished The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger a few days ago. Its really good. Really really. Haha, its kind of one of those pointless books without a story, but it doesn’t make you feel that way. Go read it. And I love how Holden Caulfield narrates, the language and slang he uses -apparently its completely accurate (historically).

I went Christmas shopping today. And I went to the National Geographic museum/store in Vivo City, it is really awesome! They have super cool stuff. I’m so going to buy one of their big duffel bags one day and pretend I’m some 19th century traveller exploring the world. Haha. My brother picked up some photo frames wanting to buy them and change the photos, then I showed him the sign:

[These photos have rested unchanged in these frames for the past 150 years ....]

I’m not even sure they were for sale. Anyway, I want to go again and explore for a longer time.

I’m halfway done with a parole I’m making with my helper. Heehee. I’ll post a picture of it when I’m done. Whooo. I realise, if I do decorate my house hardcore (which I WILL) this year, then I should be like having friends over more so we can bask in the yuletidey glow. Hahaha.

Does anyone have those Audio-Technica ONTO headphones? Are they good? I’m tired of sticking things into my ear, and I’m thinking of getting them.

J’avais finis ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ par J.D. Salinger, il y a quelques jours. C’est superbe. Réellement,  c’est superbe. Le livre est le type qui n’ont rien point/histoire, mais il ne te frustre pas. Allez-y, lire-le! Et j’aime comment Holden Caulfield raconte…la langue/lingo qu’il s’emploie -apparemment, c’est exact, historiquement.

Je faisais mon shopping pour Noel aujourd’hui. Et je suis allé au National Geographic magasin/musée en Vivo City, c’est tellement génial! Je vais acheter un de ces sacs grands et faire voyager comme je suis un explorateur dans le 19ieme siècle. Mon frere, il voulait acheter des cadres et remplacer les photos, puis, je l’ai montre le signe qui dit:

[Ces photos ont rester dans ces cadres pour plus de 150 ans...]

Haha je pense qu’il n’était pas pour vendre. Alors, je veux y retourner!

Je suis en train de faire une lanterne philippine pour Noel, avec ma bonne. Heehee. Je vais poster un picture! Woouah.

Est-ce que quelq’un ont des Audio Techinca ONTOs? Sont-ils bonnes? Je deteste placer des chose dans mes oreilles, et je pense que je vais (peut-être) acheter ces ONTOs.

Mr. O'brien

I’m in the mood for ambitious fiction. Earlier this year I was blessed with a run of incredible reads,  topped off by Yvegeny Zamiatin’s masterpiece, We.

Mr. Zamiatin

Since then I’ve taken on more projects that inevitably have eaten into my reading time, and I am becoming more zealous in my quest for inspired reads. Ambition is the only flavor my literary palate wants to taste right now. I’m hungry for books that make me break out the booksdarts and re-read for pure pleasure. I want prose and plots that cause reactions, page turners that remind me how lucky I am to know how to read.

I’m compiling a list (in no particular order) of ambitiously written books and additions are requested in the comments section! I’d love suggestions for a 2010 reading list…

Mr. Baldwin

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

The Inferno by Dante

Morvagine by Blaise Cendrars

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

Candide by Voltaire

The Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Black Boy by Richard Wright

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? by Edward Albee

Bowl of Cherries by Milliard Kauffman

The Whapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (as well as many of his shorter works)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The Iliad by Homer

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Peanuts by Charles Schultz

Mr. Abbey

more:

Bluebeard/Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

His Dark Materials Series by Phillip Pullman

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’brien

White Noise by Don Delillo

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Watchmen by Alan Moore

More..?

What do you do if you spend too much time playing video games? Get an outside social life or, at the very least, develop a bit of willpower? No, you sue the company responsible – which is just what a Californian man is doing. What’s more, he’s ordered Martin Gore from Depeche Mode to testify in his case. Isn’t that amazing?

Erik Estavillo is taking legal action against Activision Blizzard, claiming that not only does their World of Warcraft game have an unfair monthly charge of $14.99, but that it has also wreaked havoc upon his health.

Depression, OCD, panic attacks, Crohn’s disease…all of these are caused by making a picture of an orc run around on a computer screen with other mystical creatures, apparently. Hey, it could be worse; he could be this guy:

So where does the Depeche Mode guitarist come into all of this?  Well, Estavillo claims that he “relies on videogames heavily for the little ongoing happiness he can achieve in this life”. So basically he’s a very lonely man. And Martin Gore is an expert in this field.

Yes, really. Martin Gore has been subpoenated as an “expert witness on melancholy” in a court case against World of Warcraft.

I’ve heard of musicians being blamed for depression, for rousing people to violence – but being cited as expert witnesses in feeling “sad, lonely, and alienated”? This has got to be a legal precedent, I’m sure.

Given, though, that Estavillo has also summonsed Winona Ryder to give evidence about how her love of The Catcher in the Rye has led her to understand the ties between alienation in fiction and in real life, I’m not convinced that he really thinks that these are going to lend weight to his legal argument. I reckon he just wanted an excuse to meet his heroes. Kudos.

Are you talking to me?

“Damn, I must remember things like that.” Travis Bickle is Holden Caulfield. The realization just came when I watched Scorsese’s Taxi Driver the second time.

Bot protagonists have psychological hitch, and the language is so Holden. Second viewing could make a timeless cinema a popcorn movie in the sense that enjoyment tops analysis.

There are lots of epiphanies when we watched our darling films the second time around, there are microscopic stories that stand out that gave us another cinematic orgasm. Until we learn those lines by heart.

Betsy: You know what you remind me of? 
Travis Bickle: What? 
Betsy: That song by Kris Kristofferson. 
Travis Bickle: Who’s that? 
Betsy: A songwriter. ‘He’s a prophet… he’s a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction.’ 
Travis Bickle: [uneasily] You sayin’ that about me? 
Betsy: Who else would I be talkin’ about? 

Like Salinger’s troubled 16 year old teenager in the infamous novel Catcher in the Rye, 26 year old Bickle is an optimistic person; both characters believes in redemption. Holden knows that he will find the meaning of life, and Travis has faith that one day a strong rain will clean the “dirty sewers” of New York. Only the latter is a bothered recluse and a misanthrope who have a strong desire to save Iris, a 12 year old hooker played by Jodie Foster.

Catcher in the Rye and Taxi Driver teaches us one lesson in life: Happiness could be find within ourselves.

And you can see the details in an atomic way if you watch it slow. The nuances of De Niro’s acting, the urbanized narration and the dying dream of the anti-hero Bickle will become more vibrant.

“Are you talking to me?” Yes! I am talking to you. Watch your favorite films over and over like your favorite books and its a guarantee that you will discover those subplots that will hit you a wonder.

Holden Caulfield: I know you like a movie, Travis.

Travis Bickle: Huh! Huh? Faster than you, fucking scum. Saw you coming you fucking… shitheel. I’m standing here; you make the move. You make the move. It’s your move… Don’t try it you fuck. You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking… you talking to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? OK. 

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”-The Catcher in the Rye

But I will tell you a little true story which happened to me recently.

I was sitting and minding my own business idly watching the baby crawl around on a beautiful Montana afternoon, enjoying the sunshine whilst talking on my cell phone to my bff, when I heard squawking. I glance up and see our other rooster (not Ayla–he’s a banty and i think he’s still a virgin, poor thing, because all the hens are larger breeds and he just. can’t. reach. ughhhh. it’s very pathetic to watch, and you don’t WANT to watch but can’t help but watch, like some macabre-slow-motion scene of doom until he finally falls off the back of the hen–they hang on with their talons you know–tears the hens’ backs right up, tears feathers off, leaves their backs bloody, etc. not pretty)…………..

Anyway! Where was I? Oh yeah, our other rooster, Shorty, was right at the crucial moment on his hen and….lemme stress this point…..I USUALLY look away because seeing animals mating right in front of me in my front yard is pretty weird, to say the least, like, between the two roosters and their large brood of 17 hens, you can see chicken porn all day long. but anyway, before I realized it was just another rooster and hen going at it, and before I could look away, I saw shorty–er, ejaculate! I’m sorry to be so gross, but I have to share my misery with you guys. I have never noticed–or I’ve probably noticed and blocked it out–that roosters have semen and I saw several little drops splatter around in the grass where the baby crawls.

Yeah. That’s what I do during my day. Watch chickens mate. What do you do?

I’ll admit I’ve been slacking a bit with the job hunt again this week. I have found and applied for a couple, but not as many as I should’ve. At this point, I’ve been pretty busy for various reasons for about 2 weeks straight. As you might be able to guess, it’s wearing me down.

The biggest thing that happened for me since my last post is that my grandma died in her sleep this past Friday night. RIP Natalie Lerner – I’m going to miss her a lot. I remember making hamantashen (triangle-shaped jam-filled cookies) with her almost every year while I was growing up. I tried making them without her twice while I was in grad school, but they didn’t come out right either time. The first time I know it was because I used a butter-cookie recipe instead of sugar and they fell flat. The second time, I did find a sugar cookie recipe, but it wasn’t the right kind. I think Nana was the secret ingredient or something, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to make them again even though I found a cookbook from 12 years ago that I think has the correct cookie recipe. Again, RIP Nana.

In other news, I did finish reading Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Maybe it’s because I’m a product of the ’80s, was a teenager in the ’90s and started college in the early ’00s, but I don’t quite get what the big deal was that got the book banned. Yes, I recognize that Holden was kicked out of school for the I’m-not-sure-how-many’th time for not doing his work and was drinking, smoking, bumming around NYC and thinking about getting laid, but I still don’t get it. Like I said, it might be because I grew up when I did. Also, technical theatre (my undergraduate major and still a big interest) is one of those professions where you can just be talking shop and it sounds all sorts of dirty because of the professional lingo.

Anyway, it’s time for me to go. At the moment I’m pretty much a functionally brain-dead zombie with books and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s new album “Night Castle” floating around what passes for my mind.

I hate getting onto a band bandwagon. It is not an authenticity thing, but simply, I don’t want to seem like I like a group because a few choice cool kids do already. Well, fuck it, because The XX sound really good. I just bought their CD today (I buy my CD’s), and it is so fitting for the weather and in my room it makes it feel a little more enclosed (the way I like it to be).

On other news, I went to the United Way Book Sale at school, and though I didn’t walk away with many books that I will never read last year, I made a select few wise choices I can be proud of. I found some really great contemporary works like Middlesex, 100 Years of Solitude, The Deep End of the Ocean, some classics like Catcher in the Rye (which I’m giving away to Sasha P.) a collection of H.G. Wells shorts, and a couple other presents. Books are the best presents.

Highlights of my day: the books, chit chatting/laughing with Sasha P. and Dani T.S. (shout out!), getting advice from a major thread and a major motion picture, and listening to rap music for class.

What happened to you today?

10. 1984
George Orwell

Orwell’s dystopian novel of a world controlled by Big Brother has become the quintessential cautionary tale for the far-reaching arm of government and the dangers of totalitarianism. Orwell has designed every corner of this futuristic world and transports us to a place where we may not want to be, yet cannot tear ourselves away from. It is a strong message about uniformity vs. individualism and makes us question what freedom really means while at the same time frightening us by showing that freedom may be slipping away from us as we speak.

9. To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird is a tale of racism and bigotry seen through the eyes of a child. At first, the novel works as a story of what it is to be young and free. Then the novel moves into issues of social justice as Scout and Jem have their eyes open to the larger world. Atticus Finch is a hero of morals and values who fights to do what is right even when he knows he will lose. The novel is rich with themes and characters which are almost impossible to forget once you have read it.

8. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of this century, and this semi-autobiography led Joyce’s movement into modernist literature. This novel outlines the main characters journey to grow in his intellect, philosophy and spirituality. Joyce’s style here is inventive and thought-provoking and has made this one of the best novels of the last one hundred years.

7. The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

A tale told from the viewpoint of multiple characters, The Sound and the Fury is a masterpiece at describing the thought processes of humans. Faulkner damn-near perfected the stream-of-consciousness thinking. Faulkner moves us with his tale of the decline of a southern family and their struggle to maintain honour.

6. The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

Teen angst has never been so literary. Catcher in the Rye is one of the most popular books in the world. Its biting satire and well-constructed anti-hero have made this an exceptionally brilliant novel, definitely worthy in its inclusion as one of the greatest ever written.

5. The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

There may be no better written recording of the Great Depression than Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath. It tells the tale of the Joad family on a quest for a better life in California and it is a tale of adversity and perseverance on a scale which sets the bar for all other American novels.

4. The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings has become a cultural phenomenon in the latter half of the twentieth century, a masterpiece of high fantasy on an epic scale in both scope and depth. Lord of the Rings is not a simple fantasy tale but is in fact a story rich in themes; loyalty, friendship, fate, duty, corruption, etc. Tolkien has created a world so full and complex you are immediately transported into it and become engrossed with every detail. Literary critics often dismiss The Lord of the Rings because of its genre, not able to look further to see that it is the masterpiece of its genre and is a work of genius.

3. Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

Perhaps the greatest piece of post-modern literature, Pynchon’s masterpiece is a story about post-war Europe and the production of the V2 rocket. Pynchon’s novel is complex in its plot and structure. Gravity’s Rainbow also uses a lot of science and mathematics in its story, adding a level of sophistication and even greater complexity. Many critics argue that this may be the greatest literary work on the last one hundred years, while other claim it is far too difficult to be read. Nonetheless it is a massive achievement in writing and storytelling.

2. The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is often called “the great American novel”. Jay Gatsby is living the dream; riches, women, high society lifestyle. Everything seems to be going his way. Fitzgerald uses this character and situation to explore they areas of morality, materialism, and what it means to have wealth and worth. It is a true classic that was never recognized in its time, but grew into one of the most acclaimed novels of the modern era.

1. Ulysses
James Joyce

As almost any literary scholar what the work of the century is and you will almost get a unanimous decision: Ulysses. It seems to almost be a given that Ulysses is the best novel of the 20th century. Ulysses has strong characters, humour, technique, style; it is perhaps the most important piece of modernist literature. James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the modern age and he has given us the greatest novel of the century.

It’s been a long week already, and it’s only Thursday. I have applied for a few more library jobs, both academic and government, though I’l admit this has been another week where I let myself get distracted a bit and didn’t do as much search-and-apply as I should have. I think I heard recently that the economy’s starting to bounce back a little, but it’s still in a place where libraries are either having hiring freezes or are being extremely picky about who they interview. I’m just hoping something comes through soon.

In other news, I’ve been getting (back) into reading sci-fi and fantasy. I finally read Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land last week. I don’t grok the fullness, but I’ve heard it takes a few readings to do so. I’ve also started reading J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye for the first time. It’s a classic banned book, and I don’t know why I’ve waited until now to read it. It was never assigned for any of my English classes – I don’t know if it was because my schools banned it, the teachers I had didn’t think it appropriate for their curriculi/lesson plans, or what. I’m a bit over halfway through, and I don’t quite get why there was such a fuss over it, unless it was over Holden’s cussing, drinking, smoking, and talking/thinking about getting laid. Maybe I’ve just been desensitized to that kind of stuff because I read a lot of Clive Cussler, John Ringo and Shakespeare before getting to Catcher in the Rye.

When I was younger Kurt Cobain was every teenager’s god. His fate printed every shirt and his song’s played in every room like he was a prophet. And when he killed himself, he became immortal. Hearing him sing was a form of nirvana to the world of pop culture.

To be depressed for caring and not caring too much to other people is an emotion shown by Holden Caulfield, the protagonist and the antagonist of the book entitled the Catcher in the Rye. The supposedly adult book that became the most widely read published novel in high school and college students faced controversies in the year 1961 to 1982. The depression presented in the book was believed to motivate negative emotions to its readers. The shooting of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman, the assassination attempt of John Hinckley on Ronal Reagan and other famous murder cases by that time were all associated with the novel.

If only Cobain did not spend too much time thinking about being sad for other people’s form of entertainment, dreams of hitting more records and more cash by just playing music, then he would have been performing by now. And then on weekends, he’ll be having barbecue parties with his Krist Novoselic and other bandmates who would also buy their own barbecue grills next week. Now, why am I talking about barbecue parties here? Well, for the simple reason that normal people love barbecues. That’s the point.

If only Cobain was a regular father, he would have spent enough time and then learn to develop a personal attachment to his daughter. They would enjoyed shopping for barbecue grills and use them during weekends like any other regular father-daughter who love to shop together. He would have loved spending more time with his little girl and then he’ll forget ever pulling the trigger on his head.

If only Courtney Love was a stereotypical wife who would be a bit sweeter towards Cobain, everything might have changed and Cobain would see a positive influence in Love. They would have been sitting on some park by now watching movies, the normal things normal people would do.

After reading his suicide letter addressed to a childhood imaginary friend, named Boddha, I felt as if the depression started to corrupt me, the same depression I felt after getting emotionally attached to Holden Caulfield in the Catcher in the Rye. Cobain’s suicide letter presents some conclusions about Kurt Cobain: 1. Kurt Cobain saw himself hating almost every human being at the age of seven; 2. Kurt Cobain was no longer having fun performing on stage; 3. Kurt Cobain found himself slowly losing the real Kurt Cobain; and 4. Kurt Cobain wanted to be just like Holden Caulfield, they were both trying to be catchers in the rye. And I am just another Nirvana fan who feels depressed for Kurt Cobain and Holden Caulfield. I’m doe thinking about Kurt Cobain having a nice BBQ grill. Totally awful.

And then, DEPRESSION.

My Life in France

By Julia Childs

Such a great story from one of the most influential women in food world. Follow up with watching Julie & Julia and you’re deep into mastering French cooking on your own!

The Sharper Your Knives, the Less You Cry

By Kathleen Flinn

Another influential story from the food world—an American journalist ventures into French cooking and chronicles her struggles of adjusting in Paris. The story looks up for her when she finds love and marries in the romantic City of Lights.

Sarah’s Key

By Tatiana de Rosnay

Centered around the Paris deportations in the 1940s, an American-born journalist finds herself researching secrets of her French husband’s Jewish relatives who were deported 60 years before—a truly absorbing story.

Next up on our list:

Half Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls (the author of The Glass Castle)

Firstly, I don’t know what I have to write will add a lot more to what has already been written about this cult classic. It’s simply one of those books one must read in their lifetime.

The story begins when Holden Caufield is expelled from yet another prep school, Pencey. Before he leaves, Holden narrates his school life and some of his fellow students, none of whom he particular likes. Phoniness and superficiality is something that really ticks Holden off and he believes that the majority of people he meets is insincere except himself.

After having some sort of minor mental break down after he writes a composition about his dead younger brother’s baseball glove, which was scribbled all over with poetry, for his roommate he leaves the school to wander around New York and to wait for news of his expulsion to reach his parents. The rest of the story follows his stumbling about New York looking for truth and companionship. Growing up and the changes in adolescence also subconsciously concerns Holden who decides that the one thing he would like to do in life is to be the catcher in the rye. It is an idea he got from hearing a child mis-quote singing a Robert Burns poem, ‘Comin’ through the rye’. Holden would like to place himself on a cliff and be ready to catch any children who falls out through the rye and prevent them from plummeting off the cliff which would save the children from having to go through adolescence and confront the difficulty of growing up and losing the innocence of childhood.

Holden Caulfield is a likeable character and very funny but he is consumed by depression that, while he’ll admit to now and then, he fails to acknowledge. It is startling clear that Holden is desperately lonely. Out of life, he wants nothing but to see genuineness and truth from his fellow human citizens. One of the most endearing characteristics of Holden is his constant noticing of the underdogs or the background characters. In plays, movies, books and in life, the secondary characters always catches Holden’s attention and it’s quite moving. Another particularly endearing trait is his love and kindness to his younger siblings – his younger brother, Allie, with the baseball glove who died of leukemia and a sister, Phoebe, to who he eventually goes home to see. As the story unfolds, it is clear that Allie’s death still affects Holden and is unresolved grief. Another incident towards the end of the story also suggests that he may have been molested at some stage during his time at school which would explain Holden’s insistence of continually getting expelled. Holden’s troubled and repressed feelings eventually catches up with him.

I first read this book when I was 16 and I really didn’t like it. Perhaps choosing a book with such a strong, male, anti-hero protagonist was not really the type of material 16 year old girls naturally gravitate towards not to mention that the historical context was quite unfamiliar to me. On re-reading, I have enjoyed it quite a lot and I think growing up has everything to do with it. I empathise with Holden and understand his contempt for the superficiality of fellow humans. I don’t think of him as a rebel, as most criticism has labelled him as, but one who has precociously seen and desire the truth.

Hello. Elk here.

This past weekend was a pretty swell one. I got to go to a kick-ass party with some of my friends and my two brothers. I think they enjoyed it as well. The next day, I decide to go drive around town with my brothers to get a lanyard or chain for my flash drive (because I almost lost it before). At the local mall, I got a set of  50 chains which never even got to fit into the damn drive. Eventually, my dad made me a lanyard (because he’s crafty). Also at the mall, I went to pick up Animal Collective’s album ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’ because there were a couple of songs I liked from there. Turns out I really love the album! After that, I drove into a second-hand store to check out any books people might have thrown away donated, and found two I had been looking for: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Granted, none of these I’ll be reading anytime soon as I have a list of other books I plan to read (more on that later).

Then, my wonderful weekend decided to jump off a cliff into some jagged rocks. I got an e-mail from a club where I was to be heading to a Venetian Snares and Wisp concert saying they canceled the stop to Phoenix. Eventually, I found out it was the club’s fault as they wouldn’t accomodate the stage for a proper performance.

To Club Mardi Gras in Scottsdale, Arizona: Fuck you.

/

So I was invited to try out Google’s new “revolutionary” communication platform codename: Wave. At first, I was indifferent, but then I started begging for an invite because I had to be one of those cool geeks who can flaunt his invite in the air to those inferior to me. After the invitation, I started to understand the purpose of Wave; it’s a communication tool good for conferences and such. I guess, in the end, it’s not a big a deal as I would’ve hoped for. Maybe I just wanted a Google Voice invite instead?

/

As of October 26, I finished JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I loved the novel and don’t understand why so many of my friends didn’t like it. I loved the writing behind it and the development of Holden Caulfield. That marks book #3 in my series of books to finish before 2010. In my list, there are five books of which I told myself I would finish as a means of reading more (I had to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for a history report last semester, didn’t finish until three months after, then read Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Before that, nothing much in reading). The list is as follows:

• George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four (May – September)
• Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five (Sept. 18 – 30)
• JD Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye (Oct. 1 – 26)
• Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale (Starting today)
• Joseph Heller – Catch-22

I think I’ve been reading very good books; have not been disappointed with any of my selections and recommendations (or maybe I’m just very tolerant). More on my previous books in another blog post, though.

/

I love Twitter. It has many good uses. I joined Twitter August 2008, just a few months before the big Twitter explosion. I didn’t officially start using it until October of that year to post random crap to remind myself of. Then it became an addiction in January where I would post crap like every hour on the hour. Somehow, I convinced most of my friends to join Twitter, especially when one of them cut off his phone bill and needed a means to communicate. Now, I’m sure I’m not as hooked on the website as much as I was back then, but now some people use it way too much and to post some seriously crap.

Twitter has become this tool for stupid people to post random crap, spam, and Gostse in mini-URL form. Every time I read the Trending Topics, most of the people just post gibberish and troll. Sometimes, I just wish I could quit Twitter for a more sophisticated form of micro-blogging…but nothing much is out there for the time being.

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My set-up for this blog isn’t really going anywhere but ranting. I promise to come up with more ideas soon.

-Freezing Elk

(It should not be 50F in Arizona this time of the year!)

I was thinking that I have not mad any good lists lately.  So, I thought I would ponder a while and make a good one.

Books that Changed My Life

This is a list of books that I feel really had a profound effect on me in one way or another.  Now this is a good list, not a cliche list so books like the Bible and the books that I learned to read with are not on here though the Bible is a big influence in my life and I would not have learned to read had it not been for the I See Sam books.  This is a good list.  It is in no order, so they are not numbered.

East of Eden
I had all but given up on American literature when I met John Steinbeck.  We had a run in a few times in high school: Of Mice and Men and then The Grapes of Wrath.  Both were for class so I felt like spending time with him was an obligation, so I never really got to know him.  I don’t remember what motivated me to pick up EoE three summers ago, but I did.  I could not put it down.  The picture above is one that I took at the lake while my friends were swimming and I was on the shore, glued to my book.  Sam Hamilton is a storehouse of wisdom that I gleaned a lot from.

The Wringer
I read this book when I was in about 7th grade.  I am a firm believer that there is a perfect time to read every book.  I think there are some books that you can’t understand until you are a certain age or at a certain place in your life.  The Wringer was that for me.  I think that 7th grade is where I started really thinking and working on some things of my own.  In the book, there is a pigeon festival in the boy’s town where everyone wrings the neck of a pigeon. The boy, in front of his whole town, refuses to do it.  He is also found later to be hiding a pigeon in his room as a pet.  This flies in the face of everything he is supposed to be doing, but he does what he feels right anyway.

Blue Like Jazz
Again, another book found at just the right time.  I was a sophomore in college, I had just finished a summer camp where a lot of my thinking was shaped and challenged.  I was just kind of afloat spiritually not liking what I was seeing, but not having any ideas for what I thought spirituality should look like. Then I was talking to my youth minister and he said he had just read Blue Like Jazz.  I laughed and said I wasn’t reading it because it was just trendy at the time, but he assured me that this was worth the read, so I picked it up.  Then the picture began coming in clearer for what I was looking for in my faith: something that cared about people, something that was built off Christ instead of what people had told me, a church that was active.  This is what faith was supposed to look like.  I have now progressed past the level of thought and moved into action, but BLJ was a huge push in that direction.

Hatchet
I cannot talk about how much I love books without mentioning the first book I ever loved.  In 5th grade I had Ken Stamatis as a reading teacher.  I wasn’t really into reading, I liked football.  But he wasn’t going to let a single kid leave that class without a joy for reading, and he didn’t.  He asked me what I liked I told him I like being outside and I like watching nature shows on television, so he handed me Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.  So, I gave it a try.  Holy crap!  This book is awesome.  I read it super fast and told Mr Stamatis how much I loved it.  He told me there was another book and another.  There were even two more coming out.  I devoured them like a fat kid does candy.  Then I started reading other books by Paulsen.  Eventually Mr. Stamatis recommended I branch out giving me some Roald Dahl, Avi, Mark Twain and others a try.  Each time he was spot on. 

Nickel and Dimed
I read this book a few years ago and I believe it put me on a track for better poverty awareness and understanding.  Though my own up-bringing wasn’t particularly affluent this book better helped me to understand the cycle of poverty.  In it, the author goes from city to city putting herself in low-wage jobs to try to work out of that position, but realizes time after time that she cannot pay rent, gas and food with a minimum-wage job. 

Blink
If nothing else, this book was an introduction to many things including the psychology of marketing and design.  In this book, along with the others by Malcom Gladwell, deep psychological studies are put into easily understandable and applicable terms for the common person.  This book is much to credit for my young interest in psychology, sociology and other people-based sciences. 

Catcher in the Rye
This book is one that I come back to very often for wisdom on my own life.  I remember reading it when I was in high school and talking to my friend Sarah Walker about it.  I said, “I hate Holden.  What a waste of potential.  He’s smart and all, but just doesn’t care to work at anything to show people he’s worth anything.”  To which my friend Sarah replied, “You’re Holden.”   This book really is a lot about me.    A coming of age book about a guy who spends all of his time wishing he could be somewhere else and never really using where he is to its fullest potential.   He also finds out in his journey that you can never really go back home, that even the most basic of places are not the same anymore.

Editor’s Note: This is Part III of a III part series.

For Part I, scroll down or click here.

For Part II, scroll down or click here.

Holden is not exempt from social artifice, and directly following his distasteful response to the interaction of Sally and George, Holden again returns to making grandiose and unrealistic claims aimed at Sally.  After relating to Sally the extreme levels of hatred that he feels for school, Holden excitedly suggests that the two of them run away to Massachusetts or Vermont to live together and get married.  Despite his adamant suggestion – “Wuddaya say? C’mon!  Wuddaya say?  Will you do it with me?  Please!” (132) – Holden later admits that “I probably wouldn’t’ve taken her even if she’d wanted to go with me.  She wouldn’t have been anybody to go with.  The terrible part, though, is that I meant it when I asked her.  That’s the terrible part.  I swear to God I’m a madman” (134).  Once again, Holden emphatically makes a claim that he “means” at the time of its utterance, but upon retrospection, admits that his claims were ultimately false.  For Holden, true connection becomes impossible, for human beings are always interacting in a “phony” way, whether the phoniness comes from impulsive emotion or unctuous social custom.

Sally responds to Holden’s hysterical marriage proposal with the telling words, “we’re both practically children” (132).  These words exemplify another underlying problem with Holden’s inability to connect with people: he makes decisions like a child, but has the awareness of an adult.  This disconnect is showcased by Holden’s description at the beginning of the novel of his fluctuating displays of (im)maturity and his gray hair:

I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen.  It’s really ironical, because I’m six foot two and a half and I have gray hair.  I really do.  The one side of my head – the right side – is full of millions of gray hairs.  I’ve had them ever since I was a kid.  And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve.  Everybody says that, especially my father.  It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true.  People always think something’s all true.  I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age.  Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it.  (9)

The erratic behavior that Holden describes in the above passage is showcased with his impulsive declarations of love to Sally as well as his proposal of marriage.  Holden’s gray hair works to symbolize the disconnect between his actions and his retrospective interpretation of his actions.  Constantly second-guessing the actions and sentiments of himself and others, Holden is never able to develop a lasting connection with another, besides Phoebe, in the entirety of The Catcher in the Rye.  It is not uncommon for teenagers to act impulsively and make “phony” statements, but to Holden, in his position between child and adult, this phoniness becomes indicative to him of the underlying phoniness of all human interaction.  Holden’s “madman” behavior can be interpreted as the awkward transition of childhood to manhood; as this young man attempts to come to terms with “adult” knowledge and adult perception, he finds himself continually making the decisions of a child.

Holden’s behavior with Sally is one of many ways in the novel by which he attempts to forge a deeper human connection.  While Sally rejects Holden’s marriage proposal and invitation to run away with him, her rejection is not devastating to him, for Holden’s words were “phony”.  In this sense, Holden Caulfield fits into DeMarr and Bakerman’s description of the typical response of adolescent males to female rejection.  Holden does not define himself based upon the rejection of others like the males that DeMarr and Bakerman are referring to, for in Holden’s case, human connection is preemptively eliminated to begin with.  When the world is filled with a “bunch of actors”, real human connection of the non-phony variety is all but impossible to come by.

Dear Franny and Zooey,

Where, oh where, are you?

Come home to me. I miss you– your plain white stripey cover, your beautifully absurd high-brow conversations in the bathtub, your chain-smoking pages.

Used bookstores have thousands of used copies of Catcher in the Rye– but you, oh dear Franny, dear Zooey, are such a rare find.

Light an SOS fire (made not of your pages) so I might find you.

Come home, come home, love,

MM

Edited: Ok, people, we can all calm down. Franny and Zooey has been located. Thanks for your quick response to the situation. Franny, Zooey, welcome back. I’m sorry to have put you under a much larger book that I don’t even like very much so you were obscured from my view. Please forgive me. Everyone else, go about your business. Nothing to see here….

In the year 1980, after Mark Chapman shot John Lennon dead, he sat on the sidewalk, took out a book from the pocket of his overcoat and started reading it until the police arrived. The book was “Catcher in the Rye” written by J.D. Salinger. This book has always been the subject of controversies since it was first published in the US. So, being the way I am, I absolutely had to buy this book.

The book is about a 16 yr old boy – Holden Caulfield, who has just been expelled from his school for non-achievement. Understandably, he is no particular hurry to meet his parents. So he takes all the money he has and departs for New York, where he decides to spend a small vacation before going home to face his parents’ inevitable wrath, and thus ensues a series of events where he – spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and runs away from the house of a former teacher when he makes a flitty move for him. But this book is not about these events. It’s more about the character, what he says, thinks and how he extrapolates. Uninterested in the fake nature of the world, Holden is a teller of what is real.

The book is all about the perception of a boy of all events around him. He is lonely, confused, observant, perceptive, angry and frustrated at the way people act the way they do. He hates phonies. He would rather live all alone in a cabin on a mountain than being around the phonies. Holden is smart, intelligent but he wants something that the environment around him cannot supply. He wants to be able to protect children from falling off the cliff – prevent them from losing their innocence and become a part of this fake world. The best thing about the book – it is written in the form of Holden’s first person narrative – that kind of lends a distinct appeal to the way his reminiscences and perceptions have been presented and, the language has a good mixture of the underlying humor, slang, profanity, repetitions and moral reflections.

This is one of those books, if you start reading it, it kind of gets a grip on you, blocks out your peripheral vision – you know you can predict the end but you want to be able read every word of every page.

Jeg kunne vel ikke forvente noe annet, men alike vel det er ikke direkte morsomt å bli syk… Kjennes ut som jeg svelger barberblader og føler meg slapp, kunne helt klart vært mye verre da så skal ikke klage for mye om det. Greide jo å faktisk å trene så kan ikke på stå at jeg holder på å dø eller noe i den duren!

Nå er jeg faktisk ferdig med å lese 1984 er bok som jeg må lese til Politikk og menneskerettighets-klassen. Trengte ikke å være ferdig før i desember, men da skal vi også skrive en eller annen oppgave om boka så litt greit å ligge litt forand. Om boka kan jeg vel ikke si annet enn at den var helt ok, den siste linja eller hva det nå blir i boken fikk meg faktisk til å bli litt mer positiv enn jeg var på alle de andre 269 sidene av boken så det er jo noe. 

Skal også begynne å finne problem stilling til særemne mitt i norsken. Har et bra et som læreren liker veldig godt, men mangler liksom den ene boken å sliter med å finne en som kan passe. Jeg skal bruke Catcher in the Rye fra 9151 som handler om en samfunnskritisk ungdom og som har et konfliktperspektiv på det meste som skjer rundt han. Jeg vil da finne en bok som ikke er for forskjellig, men som har et harmoniskperspeltiv på livet for å diskutere forskjellene i disse to måtene å se på livet. Det er bare her problemet kommer, hvem er det som skriver en bok der hvor alt er greit og fint og som ikke er for forskjellig fra Catcher in the Rye?? Noen som har noen gode ideer, for jeg trenger virkelig hjelp!!!

Nå er det kun 11 dager til bursdagen min, og jeg endelig blir myndig og kan kjøpe min egen drikke, dra på byen og egentlig gjøre akuratt som jeg vil. Gleder meg sykt til å dra på byen med jente gjengen og bare være 18år rett og slett. Alle sier alltid at man ikke kjenner forskjell fra man er et år til et annet, men jeg har stor tro på at jegh kommer til å våkne opp som et helt nytt menneske å bare våre 18! Det eneste stresse med det hele, er ta nå spør alle hva jeg ønsker meg. Det er ikke like lett alltid, kan ikke si noe for dyrt og vil jo også gjerne ønske meg noe ordetlig ikke noe piss så dette må jeg grubble mye på!

Men nå er det natta natta, så blogges<3

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of a III part series.

For Part I, scroll down or click here.

The idea from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, as brought up in my previous post, of human interaction as performance is highlighted in the paragraph directly following Holden’s declaration of love to Sally.  In this paragraph, Holden critiques the play that he and Sally watch, a play that features similarities to Holden’s courtship of Sally.  Holden explains that the play “starts out when [a couple is] young and all, and the girl’s parents don’t want her to marry the boy, but she marry him anyway” (125).  This detail mirrors Holden’s courtship of Sally, for at different points in the narrative, Holden reveals that neither of Sally’s parents approve of Holden’s interactions with their daughter.  On page 60, Holden reveals that Sally’s mother “once told Sally [he] was wild”, claiming “[s]he said I was wild and that I had no direction in life.”  Similarly, on page 134, Holden reveals that Sally’s father considers him “too goddam noisy.”  With the plot of the play mirroring Holden’s courtship of Sally, it is telling when Holden states: “I couldn’t get very interested [in the play].  I mean I didn’t care too much when anybody in the family died or anything.  They were all just a bunch of actors” (125 – 126).  From Holden’s perspective on human interaction, it becomes nearly impossible for him to forge interpersonal bonds of any sort, for humans are “just a bunch of actors” performing their social roles with very little substance beneath the poses that are adopted.

Holden’s self-admittedly artificial declaration of love is followed by his critique of the “bunch of actors on the stage”.  This critique is then directly followed by his experience of the play’s intermission, where Holden claims “[y]ou never saw so many phonies in all your life” (126).  In this passage, Holden offers his judgments regarding his fellow audience members, and then relates the “phoniest conversation you ever heard in your life” (127).  This conversation takes place between Sally Hayes and a former acquaintance of hers named “George something” and acts to illustrate the artifice that Holden finds to be inherent to human interaction.  Holden states:

You should’ve seen the way they said hello.  You’d have thought they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.  You’d have thought they’d taken baths in the same bathtub or something when they were little kids.  Old buddyroos.  It was nauseating.  They funny part was, they probably met each other once, at some phony party.  (127)

For Holden, Sally and George’s dramatic performance of false intimacy is emblematic of human social interaction in general.  This aspect of social custom is deplorable to Holden and can be seen to add to his feelings of loneliness throughout the novel.  While Holden is constantly attempting to forge bonds with others, he is not willing to capitulate to social customs that others seem to have no problem adhering to.  DeMarr and Bakerman claim that rejection often leads the young males in the novels that they studied to “feelings of loneliness”, but for Holden, his feelings of loneliness are most often due to his own rejection of others and his rejection of the customs of social behavior that others in the novel participate in as a means of finding companionship.

Upcoming: The third and final part in this series of postings on social interaction as performance in The Catcher in the Rye.

I was at La Tortas with a friend, who is an amazing artist hands down. You say his name in animation and they all know him. We decided to go out because it was Friday and also a long week, plus I haven’t seen this guy he’s been so busy. It’s also yummy food – basically the Mexican Subway, a taco but in a sub instead of a shell.

We were unwinding telling each other strange happenings of the week, but also talking about this art school pretentiousness my blog seems to be about. I said to him, simply because he is my best friend and an amazing artist:

“I think the really good artists are too busy learning new things to be running around demanding attention and telling people how good they are, like all the people who really annoy me at this school. You work super hard on your animations and it shows through, your talent is carried by word of mouth, so it proves how good it is.”

It’s that whole Catcher in the Rye quote. I can’t remember it from verbatim, but it goes along the lines of: “The mark of an immature man is he wants to die nobley for a humble cause. The mark of a mature man is he wants to live humbly for a noble cause.”

And if it’s one thing I learnt from my friend and how/why he’s so good is genius really is patience and practice. Patience to sit infront of a computer and draw for thirty hours, patience to take critique and better it after the fact, patience to inspire instead of critique, patience to watch other artists work and incorporate it in his own. It certainly does not lie in extravagance and theory, as some profs would like us to believe. Those are afterthoughts. He and other gems at our school are living proof.

Phineas William Walsh is on a mission.  He’s going to save the world one endangered species at a time – and he’s depending on the Green Channel to help him do it.  That is until things go terribly, horribly wrong… as they only can in the life of a fourth grader.

Carla Gunn’s first novel, Amphibian, is both entertaining and engaging.  Written in the first person, it’s greatest strength may be it’s  narrator -  who owes a significant debt to Holden Caulfield (the hero and narrator of Catcher in the Rye).  And I mean that in the best possible way.  Because there’s more going on in Phin’s life than meets the eye – and he has a lot on his mind other than the planet.   His grandfather just passed away and his grandmother is sad.  His parents are separated and his Mom is dating a guy Phin doesn’t like. Not that he likes the idea of her dating. Period.  His father is out of the country 80% of the time and doesn’t know what’s going on.  He’s also the class bully’s favorite target.

And then (if that wasn’t enough!) there is the issue of the Gorachs from the planet Reull.  They’re destroying the planet and the other creatures of Reull need to figure out what to do before it is too late:

When my mom went to do some work in her study, I went upstairs and wrote about Reull and drew some pictures of them.  I drew the Jingleworm, who is red and white and has a part on the end of its body that jingles like a bell wherever it goes.  The Jingleworm’s predator is the Three-clawed Wren and it jingles so much that the Wren doesn’t have any problem finding it to eat.

But then the Jingleworms started to hide in the coat of the Green-tailed Squirrel, which didn’t mind because the loud jingling noise of the Jingleworm scared away its predator, the Electric Cat.  The Electric Cat’s ears are very sensitive to the jingling noise.  To it the Jingleworm sounds like somebody scraping their nails on a chalkboard sounds to us.  Sot the Jingleworm and the Green-tailed Squirrel have a symbiotic relationship.

The problem again is the Gorachs.  They are starting to collect Jingleworm tails for jingly bracelets, which they give to their Gorach children.  The Gorachs are parasites, so many of the animals are working on making more symbiotic relationships.  The Gorachs are in for a surprise.

Sure, it has become a cliché to compare novels narrated by juveniles to Catcher in the Rye, but in the case of Amphibian it works.  I’ve always believed that readers tend to miss the whole point of what Salinger was trying to do, – not surprising since his novel has mainly been defined by controversy.  The focus has always been on Salinger’s creation of a smart ass kid doing scandalous things, at least by 1950’s standards.  (You can just imagine what the reaction would have been to Gossip Girl)!

Subsequently, the story Salinger was trying  to tell is too often overlooked.  It is about a young boy, whose even younger brother has just died of leukemia.  Catcher in the Rye, at its heart, is about Holden attempting to deal with his grief.  And doing so in the absence of (I’d even go so far as to say his abandonment by) the adults who should be comforting him.  All the rest, the celebrated language and famous scene with the prostitute, is just so much white noise put up by Holden between himself and his emotions.

I do not want to misrepresent Amphibian as being a heavy novel, though it does touch on some surprisingly heavy material.  Phin is dealing with kinds of grief (and accompanying feelings of helplessness) that he’s too young to put a name to.  Or, like Holden, to even recognize.  But to Gunn’s credit, she chose to tell her story through the eyes of a 9-year old boy – which gives it a very different flavor than if it had been told by, let’s say, that boy’s mother or teacher.  Gunn reveals what’s going on with Phin in a way that perfectly captures a young child’s lack of perspective.   Divorce, bully, species extinction and permission to watch the Green Channel all carry equal weight and importance in Phin’s world.  Because everything is the end of the world – nothing is.  And Phin is a really funny kid.  His humor moves the book along quickly and, thankfully, saves it from becoming the angst-fest it might have been.

This morning I woke up to an awful sound – it was like a wolf trying to howl after swallowing one of those birthday-party noisemakers.  And it was standing over me.

I was a little worried about what I might see – maybe a pack of wolves having a birthday party and the cake just happened to be me – but I took a chance and opened my eyes.  My mother was standing there and that awful noise was coming from her.  She was smiling so I figured she wasn’t choking or something, so I asked her what the heck she was doing.

“I’m yodeling, Phin,” she said.

“But you’re not on a mountain,” I said.  “You’re standing over me making that awful sound.  I thought you were a wolf with something caught in its throat.  If you were a wolf, you’d have to be the alpha because if you were a submissive, the others would attack you for making a sound like that.”

Overall, Amphibian tells a good story about an average child working his way through a world where very little is under his control.  Carla Gunn allows us to smile at his tribulations knowing, even if he doesn’t, that Phin is one of the lucky ones.  Unlike Holden he has grown-ups around who love him and have his best interests at heart.  In the end, that makes all the difference.

Note:  Amphibian is Carla Gunn’s first novel.  While I’ve no knowledge of it being marketed as a YA, it is definitely  straddling the line between categories.  It does not rank high on the BookSexy scale, but it shouldn’t be dismissed.  Think of it as enviro-lit made more palatable by added sugar.

The book, itself, is more attractive than your average paperback  – with bright glossy covers.  The front end paper is a full page bleed b&w photo of a South America Red-eyed frog (the same little guy who made the cover).  The pages are nice and thick with a slightly corrugated texture.  The publisher is Coach House Books, out of Canada.

Written by Thuy Dinh, contributing writer

My children, ages 11, 8, and 6, are discovering the Beatles for the first time. Not only do they listen to the songs endlessly during the rides to and from school, but they also play some of the Beatles’ simpler melodies on their piano keyboard almost 24/7.

It might have been a simple case of osmosis, then, or it could have been just a quirky coincidence that I heard the whole message of Lorrie Moore’s most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, summed up in “All You Need is Love,” but with double negative lyrics:

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be UNdone

Nothing you can sing that can’t be UNsung

Nothing you can say but you can’t UNlearn how to play the game

It’s NOT easy….

There’s nothing you can make that can’t be UNmade

No one you can save that can’t be UNsaved.

Nothing you can do but you can’t UNlearn how to be you

in time…

Though the message is unflinching, it’s affirming in that it holds the reader in high regard and tries to portray the world in a complex way. Told in the voice of Tessie Keltjin, a 20-year old college student, Stairs begins in the fall of 2001, shortly after 9/11. Right away, Moore sets the stage for the polarizing forces of her novel: faith versus faithlessness, love versus the absence of love, life versus death.

Tessie comes from the rural town of Dellacrosse (of the cross) and she goes to college in Troy (like its Greek antecedent, a liberal, cosmopolitan town somewhere in the Midwest). Soon, Tessie is hired to be the nanny of a mixed-race child adopted by the Thornwood-Brinks, a white, upper-middle class, progressive couple who live and work in Troy.

While working as a nanny, Tessie becomes involved with a darkly handsome but vaguely dangerous classmate in her Introduction to Sufism class. The man may or may not be Brazilian and only speaks or sings in Italian. The third plot strand is Tessie’s relationship with her family, most notably her close connection with her younger brother Robert, who plans to join the U.S. Army after high school. Moore takes her time getting to the heart of the story so at first it’s challenging, but once it speeds up, she covers impressive ground in a take-no-prisoners way.

The title of Moore’s novel is both literal and elusive. A Gate at the Stairs may simply mean a baby gate to prevent Tessie’s 2-year old charge, Mary-Emma, from reaching the stairs, or it could mean Babygate, Watergate, or even…Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (The novel, which was clearly written before Professor Gates’ July 2009 incident with the Boston police, has a character in a consciousness-raising group casually mentioning a story about a black  youth being accidentally shot by the police in his own home). A gate, therefore, can be something shameful and secretive, an impediment to progress, barring the stairway to heaven, blocking the path to true understanding.

Stairs is streamlined and layered, more like a Chinese shadow box, or a Vidalia onion as opposed to a messy head of radicchio (vegetables are also prominent in Moore’s novel, as Tessie’s father is a gentleman farmer who cultivates organic “pearl” fingerlings for yuppie consumers). The various gates in Moore’s novel are variations on the same theme: love and/or the lack of, and loss of love. Her characters are either recklessly in love or reckless with love. Lust, hunger, lack of faith, neglect and/or mistreatment of children, and racism are simply manifestations of love’s absence. Tessie poetically compares a decadent meal to an empty experience that leaves “the spirit…untouched,” “a condition of prayerless worship,” or an “endless communion” that offers no grace or salvation.

Moore’s cast of passionate yet lonely characters, like her punning/cunning use of language, have names that aptly describe them, yet at the same time may not represent who they really are. Like doomed figures in a Greek tragedy, Moore’s characters misinterpret events, or misinform each other, to escape from their oppressive fates. Tessie always complains of “not hearing things right” or “not believing what she hears.” Language in Moore’s universe is itself a shape-shifting, subversive character. In church, Tessie thinks she hears “Our Father” as follows:

Our father who art a heathen

Hollow be thigh name

Thigh king is dumb

Thigh will is dun

on earth as it is

at birth.

Stairs is the feminine, and feminist, answer to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. (Incidentally, Holden Caulfield’s yearning to save the young children who run too close to the cliff of a rye field is also a deliberate misreading of a literary source. Robert Burns’ 18^th century poem, “Coming Thro’ the Rye,” is sexually provocative and has nothing to do with saving children.)

At the end of the novel, after undergoing many forms of personal losses, Tessie becomes “nobody’s sister” who literally stares death in the eye. Wiser, sadder, but still at heart a romantic, Tessie concludes, “Love is the answer…It was OK…as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn’t really an answer, just a reply.”

Just a reply, but it was way moore than enough for me.