Parenting? What's parenting?

"Hahaha, oh, cousin, we're basically living in an apocalypse! Hahaha!"

The Secret Garden feels like it's got a hell of a lot more lessons for adults than it does for children. It seems to want to teach kids that it's good to explore and play and exercise. It seems to want to teach parents that they're fucking awful and their children run wild and believe in fairies and magic because they've got nothing else guiding them through life.

I had seen the movie but never read The Secret Garden before this week; it makes Mary's parents and Mr. Craven a lot more sympathetic than they are in the book while also making Mary and Colin out to be much bigger assholes than they actually are.

Mary and Colin are great characters, they just both start as scared, reactionary children. The Garden draws them out of their adult-imposed cages and they get to be free and happy and have some agency for once in their fucking lives. That's a really interesting contrast, by the way; both children are used to getting their way in a way that means essentially nothing by ordering around the hired help, but when they do work with their hands and make an actual effort at changing something they grow and change for the first times in their lives.

The language surrounding the Garden is marvelous, by the way. As are the descriptions of Dickon, a poor boy who tames animals and is instrumental in the taming of Colin and Mary. There's a wonderful, sweet magic in the beauty of the garden and the calm control of Dickon - that sweet magic is nearly destroyed when it is described overtly as magic by Colin as he attempts to heal himself; I think if I ever chose to read this book to my kids I might do some slight rewriting so that the wonder of these scenes speaks for itself instead of getting spelled out and thereby breaking its own spell.

Overall I enjoyed this book by I was somewhat frustrated by its flaws, which were so glaring in comparison to the rest of the story.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. Amazon Publishing. Seattle: Washington. 1911.

A warm family in a cold world

This book took a little while to get into (the first 15 pages or so were hard to push through for me) but once I was involved with the story I was glad that I'd made the effort.

Wole Soyinka does an amazing job of regressing the reader to his childish viewpoint while still telling his story in a way that adults can understand. As the book moves through itself, and as the narrator ages, the memoir moves from a more febrile, magical perspective to a touching recollection of his family during a very frightening time.

I loved experiencing the percolation of knowledge through the narrator as he grew up and began to recognize a world beyond the walls of his family compound and indeed beyond the borders of his country.

Every person described is interesting and complete and touching, even if they are described with dislike they're granted their humanity and the understanding that maybe they're an okay person, just someone with different motivations.

The book is transporting, the language is lush and beautiful and makes you see the streets where Wole walked as a child, and hear the sizzle of cooking and smell the rich foods he so desperately wanted to scrounge from the family pantry. It's a very sensory book for the first two thirds of the story, and then becomes a very intellectual book as Wole the baby becomes Wole the boy and starts to participate in the various intrigues and uprisings around him.

The tale of the Nigerian Women's Movement from this unique perspective is intensely moving and makes you want to charge up and take political actions of your own - makes you want to be something bigger and wholer than you are now.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Soyinka, Wole. Aké: the years of childhood. Vintage International. New York: New York.
     1989. (1981.)

Giants, supermodels, and fun, oh my!

I don't read much in the crime or mystery genres but JK Rowling's first outing as Robert Galbraith is making me reconsider that decision. The Cuckoo's Calling was tremendously fun to read but more nuanced than I'd expected and I thoroughly enjoyed dedicating my Saturday to getting through this book.

Cormoran Strike and Robin are very well constructed characters (the best of a good bunch of characters filling up the story) and their relationship is adorable and fun from the their first appearances all the way to the final page.

My sister has informed me that there's a second Cormoran Strike novel and I'm stoked because the biggest mystery of this first book wasn't what Strike was investigating but the detective himself. Seeing him slowly revealed and rounded out as the story progressed was intensely satisfying and a great deal of fun but now that I know more about him I want a chance to do some more admiring of the PI at work.

The story itself is fairly unremarkable so far as detective novels go; there are plenty of red herrings and a twist at the end but I guess those are only what I expected. What's great is the way that you're kept guessing constantly and examining the strange, busy, isolating life that the subject of the mystery lived; comparing notes with Cormoran and Robin as they try to reconcile conflicting reports and get to the bottom of the problem at hand is fun and tantalizing as it draws the reader in, skillfully encouraging you to form and then discard your own conclusions as the tale progresses.

So far its been three days and I've managed to keep myself from buying a copy of the next Galbraith novel, but I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out. I had a fantastic time with this book and am very excited to see more of this side of Rowling's writing.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Galbraith, Robert. The Cuckoo's Calling. Mulholland Books. New York: New York. 2013.

Movies always leave out the best parts

I remember being terrified of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland as a child - I rode it before I'd seen the movie, and then once I'd seen the movie I was REALLY terrified of weasels. I got over it and have seen the Disney film a few times, and once (sleep-deprived at 4AM and looking for anything to numb the insomnia) I watched a bizarre, frightening, confusing version of the story done by Terry Jones and what must have been a metric fuckton of acid.

But I'd never read the book until this week and now I'm not at all frightened by any of it, I'm simply charmed by the story and really curious as to why film interpretations of children's books leave out the best and most magical parts.

Everything I've seen has focused on horrible Mister Toad and ignored the sweet friendship of Ratty and Mole. Otter has never gotten his due on screen (that I've seen) and there are a dozen wonderful, not totally lucid, little side-stories that are wonderful to read but get skipped over in favor of motor-cars and Toad dressed as a washerwoman.

This is a lovely, serene little book and I wish I'd read it sooner. If I have kids I'm sure I'll be reading it to them because it's full of delightful little songs and descriptions of cozy holes and spooky woods without being idiotic or insipid the way that lots of children's novels can be.

Though perhaps calling this book a novel is misleading - it seems more like an aggregate of short stories interspersed with chapters of a novella. Mr. Toad's escapades ARE the main action, the greater part of the book, and that's why they've gotten so much attention, but the certainly aren't the best part of the book.

"Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is a fluffy little short story about a lost child and a loving benefactor that made me weep as I read and has established itself in my mind one of the most touching stories of familial love and care that I will ever read. Mole's longing for his hole, Ratty's encounter with a seafaring rat, and stumbling upon Mr. Badger's house in the wild wood are all fantastic moments that are overlooked in a lot of retellings. Not only do they make the book worth reading even if you HAVE seen the movie, it's moments like these that make the book worth reading at all.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. Amazon Kindle. Seattle: Washington. 1908.

Seriously, the gods kind of suck

I read Antigone in high school but somehow missed out on the rest of the Oedipus Trilogy until this week. I found all of the plays fascinating, and all of them were simple and arresting reads, but holy shit are the pantheon of Greek gods assholes.

I guess since the morality of the time was based around a system of fate, where sometimes you were up and sometimes you were down, the audiences of the era wouldn't be as put off by the idea that the most powerful beings in the universe were essentially saying "fuck this dude in particular, but everyone else is cool."

Oedipus Rex sets up the action - the titular character has already killed his dad and fucked his mom so the whole of the play is based on him discovering this fact. There's some great foreshadowing as he unwittingly curses his own head and it's really moving when he realizes exactly how much he's screwed himself over.

Oedipus at Colonus is the play that I knew the least about but found the most interesting - it completely revolves around the concept of the unsinning sinner, one who has done terrible things that, were they done by ANYONE else, would not be unforgivable but who never intended to do unforgivable things. Antigone is sympathetic in this play more than she is in the one that bears her name but it sets her up as a lady who gets things done and takes no shit, a theme that is later expanded upon. I am a bit perplexed by the changes in narrative - it seems like a lot of the things that happened in the first play are twisted in the second; at the end of Oedipus Rex I thought that Oedipus willingly left and beggared himself but in Oedipus at Colonus he accuses both Creon and Polynieces of banishing him and putting him in beggar's weeds. It seems like, since neither of them were the ones in the throne at the time, they couldn't have really been responsible. There are a couple of other deviations that are similar, but slighter, throughout the story.

Antigone is the story of a lady who is thoroughly sick of everyone's shit. I can't recommend it enough. Creon really shows himself to be an asshole, more so than in the other plays, and Antigone not only calls him on it but uses his own actions to destroy his life. It kicks ass and I approve.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Tans. F. Storr. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: Massachusetts. 1912.
Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Tans. F. Storr. Harvard University Press. Cambridge:
     Massachusetts. 1912. 
Sophocles. Antigone. Tans. F. Storr. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: Massachusetts. 1912.

Homoeroticism and racism abound

(Joe's Response: Oh well, let's go murder some brown people instead of talking about it.)

I only knew the name Zane Grey in association with westerns, so when I downloaded The Spirit of the Border on my Kindle I was expecting cowboys and maybe cattle rustlers (and yes, probably some offensive stuff about Native Americans). What I got was a book that was written by an erection for manifest destiny about racists with Disney princess hair attempting genocide in their spare time.

I've had some trouble extracting any kind of moral from this story. Clearly Grey is critical of genocide - which is always a plus - and makes sure to mention the abused Native Americans in his foreword, but only after he's talked about how this wouldn't be the great, big 'Murica we all know without men like Wetzel to murder those Native Americans. The story is just as undecided as the foreword: it seems to suggest that missionaries are sort of being dicks for trying to convert people (which I can get behind), but it also suggests that trying to convert Native Americans is a loser's game because savage is as savage does (which I can't get behind and is terrible), and also makes a point at the very end that humans are all different and people of all different races can be moral or immoral no matter how they were raised.

I just kind of can't get around the fact that everyone in this book is terrible. Everyone's awful and I can't fucking hang and get into the seriously awful bits so I'm just going to focus on the seriously (and I really have a lot of questions) homosexual bits.

Let's get this right out there: I just don't know what I'm looking at. I'm not trying to be insulting, I don't see homoeroticism in fiction as a bad thing, I'm just perplexed. The Spirit of the Border is chock-full of homosocial relationships and masculine admiration for masculinity. Zane Grey writes these dudes the way that Walt Whitman would if he was typing with one hand instead of carefully choosing his words. The weddings and heterosexual relationships in the book are less necessary to the story than the weddings at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest. I've done a preliminary search that doesn't turn up much queer theory commentary on Grey, but I think that may be because westerns aren't thought of as literary enough to merit that critical lens. The homosocial element here is MUCH more evident and more roundly discussed than anything you'll see between Sherlock and Watson but nobody seems to be suggesting that, yeah, these dudes probably want to bone.

Which it too bad, because it might make their utter disregard for women as anything beyond objects to be protected slightly more palatable. (Though not their desire to solve all their problems by killing non-whites: nothing could make that an easier pill to swallow.)

In short, I think this book has scared me off reading Grey for the foreseeable future. His descriptions of nature are charming but I don't really think that's enough to make up for the constant grimaces I had on my face when I was reading about missionaries, women, Native Americans, or basically anything else in the book.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Grey, Zane. The Spirit of the Border. Amazon Kindle Books. Seattle: Washington. 1906.

I drank what?

The problem with reading really bitchin-awesome philosophy as an adult is that you probably already know pretty much what's going on in the bitchin-awesome philosophy and therefore miss out on having your mind blown by the ancients.

That being said, it's never a bad thing to take a refresher course straight from the source and so that's why I was reading Plato writing about Socrates. Five Dialogues is the first actual writing of Plato's that I've read, and the first contemporary explanation of the Socratic method I've read, but all of it was very familiar because it's essentially the basis of formal logic, rationalism, and general truth seeking.

Plato writes a mean dialogue. These selections are easy to read and understand, the points being made are well made, and you can almost forget that these logicians predate science until they start talking about following oracles or the nature of bigness.

I don't want to take a shit on Plato and Socrates but it's very frustrating to read this from a modern perspective. When they're laying out proofs and doing math I'm right there with them, but pretty much all of "Phaedo" is about literal journeys to the underworld. It's a really jarring juxtaposition - Plato lays out some wonderful Socratic logic in simple speech "If A, then B, not if B, then A" kinds of stuff, the basis of understanding causation, and then suddenly you're reading about rivers of fire.

I guess books like these are worthwhile to read to get to the philosophy without the dilution added by fifteen centuries of follow-up philosophy, but the dilution doesn't hurt the ideas. So what I'm saying is that if your only exposure to Socrates or Plato is Sophie's World or a Freshman level Philosophy Lecture you're probably in okay shape, but read this stuff anyway because it's really fucking well-written and it's not hard to get through. And damn it if I didn't tear up a little reading the scene of Socrates' execution - it was powerful and inspiring and human in a way that a lot of Phil. 101 classes are never going to take the time to get into.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Plato. Five Dialogues. Translated by GMA Grube. Hackett Publishing. Indianapolis: Indiana. 1981.