I Was at the Beach

Days 167 through 173 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I was at the beach, where the basic answer to the "Why?" question is "because I wanted something to read at the beach." But there was great variety in what people were reading.

I saw everything from a MAD Magazine cartoon book to The Passion of the Western Mind, with Oprah and Michael Crichton in between. Oprah was represented by the biography by Kitty Kelley, and the Crichton was there via Next, which I have determined from the illustration, not from being able to read the title from my beach chair. Yes, I did scrutinize and eavesdrop. No, I did not intrude on people's reading, conversations, or family groups.

I saw more hardcovers than I expected to see, and one was a library book, right down at the water's edge. Egad! (My husband took a library book, too, but he left it back at the house when he was at the beach. It's still Last Call.)

One energetic girl swam and played the whole time, then, packing up, dropped her brand new clean hardcover with pristine dust jacket (as they say) on the sand. "Oops," she said, then quietly kept brushing it off with a corner of her towel, while keeping an eye on her dad, who never noticed.

I saw sudoku and crossword books, and many magazines. One woman studied an issue of Handyman for a long while, then turned to Star Magazine. A threesome brought a huge stack of magazines, with various titles, including Traveler.

I saw The Nine Rooms of Happiness, happily set aside by a mother when her young daughter wanted her to come dig in the sand with her. Digging in the sand at the beach has got to be the No. 1 room of happiness!

Overheard conversations included a reference to Nietzsche, a mock scolding--"You ought to be reading better literature than that, like what your husband is reading"--and, from the literary husband, "I'm going to meet this guy next week in Cincinnati at a book signing, not for this book, for another one. They're all short stories about himself...," and then, as if he sensed someone eavesdropping, he leaned over to whisper the rest into another man's ear. I have determined that this was a book by Tucker Max. Beach reading, indeed.

But I did have mini-conversations with a few individuals, including some family members and friends:

Kristi is reading Last Night in Twisted River "because John Irving is my favorite. It takes me a long time to get through books, though, because I read them in bed at night."

"Me, I stay up till one," said Maggie, who, in the summer, sleeps till noon. "I'm trying to read Othello." Maggie, a great reader, who, nonetheless, actually brought no books to the beach, has already read two things on her summer reading list: 1984 and Brave New World.

Judy is reading Blood Orange, by Drusilla Campbell, about an art historian (and Judy herself has a degree in art history) in a midlife crisis (don't know about that) who goes to Italy and then comes home to her husband and child, who goes missing.

Alex is reading Hannibal, by Thomas Harris, and reads Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett over and over in the summer, when he's not teaching.

My dad is reading Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro, not because all the women in his family enjoy Alice Munro, but because he read and discussed her story "Boys and Girls," which is included in a Great Books Foundation anthology, and thought he'd like to read more.

Also brought to the beach, but already read by my mom, was Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Munro, which I have read and enjoyed, despite its awkward title. My mom was reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which she finished early in the week, moving on to Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. "I can't believe this is written by a Japanese man," she said, then read a little about the author, and it made more sense, as he had moved to England as a child. She has the movie tie-in cover, and we had all seen the movie when it came out.

She was in the mood for To Kill a Mockingbird because of its 50th anniversary and because she hadn't read it for years, after teaching it to high schoolers for many. She had snapped up Remains of the Day and The Lovely Bones because there they were on the Select New Arrivals shelf by the door of Babbitt's when she was looking for 1) 1984 and Brave New World (which are always stored there and always hard to come by, as always popular) and 2) looking for beach reading. She's halfway through The Lovely Bones now, which my sister enjoyed (despite the difficult subject matter) for its sustained "realism" ("Realism?" asked my mom) in an imagined voice. None of us has seen the movie. I told them about Lucky, the author's memoir, and hearing about (and then reading) both books in an NPR interview, after having many college students recommend to me The Lovely Bones. I have not yet read The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold's second novel.

My sister Chris was reading Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell, because they did not have Cloud Atlas at the bookstore when she went, and she thought it would be good to read his first novel, anyway. She was loving it, all week, stopping to read sentences to me. She knew she was interested at the very first sentence, "Who was breathing on the nape of my neck?" Then she noticed that each new voice somehow used the phrase "nape of the neck" and soon she was hooked and admiring. I will "inherit" the book when she goes back to Ohio after her high school reunion, in our hometown.

And I was reading Barbara Pym! I read Excellent Women and then started re-reading Some Tame Gazelle, both about funny church women involved in the life of the vicarage. There's much more than that going on, including a kind of wry, subtle feminism that co-exists with the prevailing values of a culture that is sort of pre-feminism, but is therefore a quiet and radical feminism in which, by all appearances, women are happily subservient to men. But not really.

I also finished Level Green, a book of poems by Judith Vollmer, with a more "out there" feminist impulse, and Houdini Pie, a novel by Paul Michel, who is a wonderful storyteller. There is more to say about these, but I will say it 1) tomorrow and/or 2) elsewhere as 3) my hair is sandy.

Still Random

Day 35 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and if you survived the Ides of March, here we all are again!

First, whoa! Mike Peterson, this is for you! Did you know there was an opera based on Sophie's Choice, the novel by William Styron and the movie you love? There was, and there is! It's by Nicolas Maw, this adaptation into opera, and the film is directed by Trevor Nunn. And now you can pre-order the DVD at Amazon.

Second, Douglas, who was reading The Lovely Bones, is now reading Lucky, the memoir by Alice Sebold, about the real-life violence she experienced. The damage that is done when we do violence to one another has lasting consequences, as this book demonstrates. It is awful to contemplate, but if we don't contemplate it, how will we ever stop doing it?

This resonates with me daily, and very recently after a kitchen conversation last night with my husband, who was disappointed to learn that violence against women is happening even now in Haiti, during the earthquake aftermath, with girls and women made all the more vulnerable by the disruption and homelessness and nitty gritty realities like outside toilets, etc. I tried to remind him that it happens during every war...but "that's war," he said, almost excusing it, in the boys-will-be-boys way that gets me and Catharine A. MacKinnon all riled up...and so I did not, at that time, try to remind him that it is also happening daily in our towns, schools, cities, private homes, etc. We were cooking, and it is dangerous for us all if I get riled up while cooking. Or have to walk away for any reason. (Evidence: mildly melted microwave exterior on microwave mounted over stovetop.) And by setting us in the kitchen and offering parenthetical comedy, I do not mean to trivialize this. I mean to say it is with us daily. Daily. Every single day.

For a crash course in the legal complexities of it all, take a look at Sex Equality, a set of case studies. There are no reader reviews of this at Amazon, because this is for law students. But it gives you a sense of the relentlessness of it all, and the difficulties of combatting it legally. So I try to combat it in my own heart, and with well-timed conversations, and even in poetry. Sigh.... And by standing up to it when I see it. Woman naked in snow, man beating her with branch. Offer her help, call the police, and tell him "No!"

Whew! So this is when I will say that Douglas is also reading The Violent Bear it Away, by Flannery O'Connor, herself capable of getting riled up and using ironic humor at the same time. Thank you, Flannery O'Connor. Douglas is reading this for the umpteenth time because he is writing about the "holy children" in Flannery O'Connor. Not that O'Connor is saying at all the same thing that I am here, or that Catharine MacKinnon is. I would like to read your chapter, Douglas, on the holy children.

And Sonja is reading And the Shofar Blew, by Francine Rivers, about a young minister who has to confront the evil at hand on the way to the kingdom of Heaven, also at hand. A shofar is a ram's horn that calls us to action.

And so this is not so random after all.

Lovely Bones

Day 26 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Doug is reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. (He read it concurrently with another book, which I hope to tell you about tomorrow.)

It's not surprising that people are reading The Lovely Bones again, with the movie out, and it went through surges of popularity when it first came out. That's when my college students told me to read it, so I did, to better understand them and what they found appealing.

I didn't realize Sebold had another novel out, The Almost Moon, which one of the Amazon blurbs actually tells people to skip because of its dark subject matter! So it's OK to write about a sicko man killing an innocent girl, but not OK to write about a worn-out emotionally-abused caregiver acting out her pain by killing her mother. They are both fiction!! Sigh....

I read Alice Sebold's Lucky: A Memoir, about her own experience of violence and its lasting effects, after hearing an interview with her on NPR. One thing I really appreciated about that book was that she didn't try to make the experience redemptive in any way, nor herself look like any kind of great suffering heroine made better by what she went through. She was made worse, and said so, showed it, and showed how hard it is to recover from such a thing, if one can recover it all.

(I saw the movie Brothers yesterday, also open-ended on whether one can fully recover from some experiences of violence. Whether we do them, witness them, or have them done to us.)

I appreciate writing that goes to this dark place and doesn't make it turn out OK. But I know some people will avoid such subject matter, not wishing to face what violence really does in the world--whether in war or in peace. I have seen men get terribly upset over the writing, legal work, and reporting of Catherine MacKinnon--for instance, telling it like it is about soldiers raping women in Bosnia.

It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps I heard MacKinnon speak at Kenyon, when Linda Boreman, aka "Linda Lovelace," of Deep Throat, came to Gambier to speak about her experience of making that film and others with her then husband. Maybe Doug remembers this. The film star was certainly accompanied by a feminist speaker, and MacKinnon was someone who was interested in Boreman's situation and in opposing pornography as a civil rights issue, due to the complexities of women's involvement in such films and sex-work professions.

And now we come to choice. I have no problem with people avoiding a film like The Lovely Bones because they don't want to have that kind of mental/emotional experience in the theatre. It's understandable that we might not want to witness violence or emotional trauma of that sort.

Likewise, people can easily avoid pornography! We have a choice of what to read or what to see in a theatre.

But people do not always have the choice to avoid or escape violence, or sexual harrassment or abuse. Even, as in Linda Boreman's case, if they work in a field they seem to have chosen. In many cases, people who work in those fields have not had a plain and simple "chosen" career path at all. Early abuse, often mixed with economic and emotional deprivations, have led many that way. So I am troubled by easy judgements and dismissals in these areas.

And I am troubled by anyone taking away somebody else's choice. Puts me in a sort of spiderweb, sticky and icky, vulnerable whether I'm the spider or the fly.

It's true, I would like us to look harder at the things hard to look at. So would my husband, who paints agony. Down to the lovely bones.