“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

Essentially, reading Refuge has been a highly bipolar reading experience thus far.  One minute, I’m tempted to skim through her musings on burrowing owls and the next I’m having an existential crisis, worrying and dreading ever having to handle nursing my own mother through a battle with cancer.  So as soon as I reach these highly emotional passages, I feel like a terrible person for skimming through Tempest’s Great Salk Lake narrative and wishing she would just get on with it.

I am very interested in tracing Tempest’s commentary on mother-daughter relationships.  I’ve already noted a few passages, including the one when she asks her mother if she should have children.  I find her insights on the relationship between a mother and a daughter somewhat more relatable than her ways of dealing with her mother’s cancer because (Thank God!!) I have never, and hope to never, have to deal with such an experience.

In this passage, I experimented writing about myself in the third person.  I actually wrote the beginning of it in class and only started it because I couldn’t think of anything to write about, so these are my musing about how frustrating it can be injected with my larger project surrounding my Nanny:

The white template stares and the cursor blinks rhythmically, waiting to be moved steadily across the screen.  She thinks of cartoon characters eating corn on the cob accompanied by the clicking of type writer keys and the small ring of a bell when Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse have to rotate the corn and begin on the next row of popping, sweet kernels.  Maybe it was easier on a typewriter, that little bell congratulating you every time you’ve written another line.  Manually, a writer moved the paper, continued the process, and devoured the next row of kernels.  Now, thanks to Mr. Gates, she composes prose on a simulation of paper, the click muffled by flat, lap-top keys, the relief not coming until the printer groans out a few pages.  Spelling and grammar checked, margins aligned, double-spaced, size twelve Times New Roman, every time. Perhaps a few splotches of white out and some ink spots from misaligned keys would be refreshing, less mass-produced.  She imagines pages and pages of writing, size twelve Times New Roman, rolling down a conveyor belt, being stapled precisely in the upper left corner by women in uniforms, complete with strange goggles and hairnets that would really have no practical use in such a factory, but seem standard for anonymous assembly line workers all the same.  That night, having gone to bed without accomplishing writing of any sort (not counting what fell victim to the backspace key), the image of the factory swirls around the recesses of her consciousness as the line between awake and asleep remains penetrable by even the slightest deviation in the rhythmic night sounds that lull her to sleep.  The slam of a door, the twitch of a muscle, a slight increase in the volume of the buzz coming from the idle laptop on her desk will cause the image to disappear, swirl down the drain of dozing and be lost. This time, the anonymous staplers on the assembly line have faces and the factory itself looks oddly like the local wholesale store.  The workers are all women with wrinkled faces whose veined hands dutifully move the stapler to the papers, over and over.  With the utmost synchronicity, the sound of the staples piercing the papers echoes throughout the high ceilings and exposed pipes.   One woman is familiar; her white curls stick out from under her hairnet sporadically, her round glasses sit in their carved indents on the bridge of her long nose, her papery skin, long fingers and knobby knuckles, could not be more recognizable, even in a twilight state as part of an image that only circles consciousness.

Something about this time of year makes me even more forgetful than normal, so while I had every intention to post on  Thursday… it just hit me right now that I forgot.  I hope this semester ends soon, before Alzheimer’s really sets in.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading the end of Running in the Family because as I get closer I find I like what I’m reading more and more.  Thus far, the passages/chapters that have really stuck with me have been Ondaatje’s descriptions of how he experiences things, because I truly believe that great writers actually have a different sense of perception.  Their attention to detail is heightened, it becomes second nature to create interesting comparisons… it’s almost as if a writer is looking at life with a camera with a wide angle, telescopic lens while everyone else just has a piece of crap disposable Kodak.

Ondaatje exemplifies these sensitibilities in this passage on page 136, when he speaks about playing the sounds of the animals he recorded in Ceylon when he is back in Canada:
“Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of the cassette to hear not just the peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them-inaudible then because they were always there like breath.  In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings, the whistle of other births brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocused by the brain-nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.”

Ondaatje, as a poet, continues to change my opinions of autobiographical writing over and over.

I find my reaction to Running in the Family quite similar to the rest of the autobiographical writing we’ve read that has impressed me in the sense that the highly sensory and descriptive details that I love about fiction writing are incorporated seamlessly into Ondaatje’s narrative.  I feel as if the misconception that non-fiction/autobiographical writing has to be devoid of such richness has caused me for most of my academic life to stray away from such genres, but I feel as if I have been deprived.

I have no doubt that Ondaatje’s background in poetry lends to his ability to use unique descriptive details in his non-fiction writing.  A lot of his prose feel more like poetry.  I am fascinated by the way he often leaves some words out of his sentences.  For example, he leaves out a few pronouns and such on page 72: “After twenty minutes, with sun burning just the right side of our faces and bodies, climbing up and down the dunes, we are exhausted, feel drunk.  One of my children talking about some dream she had before leaving Canada.  Spray breaking and blazing white. Mad dog heat.”  His sentences become increasingly sparing until they are only fragments.  Ondaatje creates a strange amalgam of prose and poetry and I’m still not quite sure why or how enhances his narrative.  Also. I’m undecided on how or if this mixture relates directly to Ondaatje’s attempt to chronicle his family history.   It seems to create this strange, dream-like, hazy description of a land that seems already foreign, even alien, I would assume to most western readers, where giant lizards sunbathe on shores and groups of people pull over on the side of the road and drink champagne, eat oysters and dance.

I have a tendency to catalog quotes from books and have numerous Microsoft Word documents saved with pages of passages from some of my favorite novels.  I’m adding this one from pages 70-71:
“I witnessed everything.  One morning I would wake up and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses.  And still everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of a coconut falling on someone’s head, like the Jaffna train, like the fan at low speed, like the necessary sleep in the afternoon with dreams blinded by toddy.”

Now that I am quiet close to finishing Liars’ Club, I finally have gotten over my feeling of “When is this book going to start?”. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else, but I find when I’m reading that in the beginning you almost trudge though a lot of the introductory material to get to the good stuff, and for some reason, Karr’s writing made that feeling extend through the majority of the book for me. Maybe it’s her makeshift chronology that is difficult to follow at times or maybe it’s the periods of memory that she sometimes leaves blacked out, often referring to points when memories “get cloudy” or “pick up”.

Whatever it is, I feel like perhaps Liars’ Club is one of those books that is better the second time you read it, or maybe once I finish it everything will come together. I’m having a hard time forming a definite opinion. I certainly haven’t disliked reading it, but I almost feel at times like the absolute extremes with which Karr describes people and memories is somewhat off-putting or hard to handle at times. You almost feel like the people she is writing about may accuse the two of you of talking bad about them. This must be a tremendous gift as a writer, to be able to make a reader feel as if you are talking directly to them, but that gift combined with such a highly personal subject matter sometimes makes the narrative feel invasive, almost as if you’re reading someone’s diary. I have yet to decide whether this is a blessing or whether I simply may not have the stomach for such blatant prose.

I had my wisdom teeth pulled on Monday so since then, when I haven’t been sleeping, I’ve had a lot of free time to do… well.. nothing.  So The Liars’ Club has gotten a fair amount of attention.

I can’t shake the feeling that Mary Karr’s writing is very fragmented.  It feels as if each of her chapters is almost like and independent essay.  I’m not sure how I feel about it, I don’t dislike it but it doesn’t thrill me either.  Her stories are clearly entertaining and she is able to paint a picture of a pretty bizarre childhood that is still able to bring to mind images of my own comparatively tame experiences growing up.  But I have yet to decide whether this series of somewhat unorganized recollections fits together in a way that ultimately proves a larger point.

Also, I think Mary Karr has an amazing memory.  If I were able to remember half the things she does about her childhood, I’d be floored.  Maybe it’s just me, but this ability to recall such details from being younger than 10 years old seems almost unreal.  But this fact leads me to connect Mary Karr’s narrative to her tales of her father and the Liars’ Club.  I am still waiting for her to further connect the role the Liars’ Club had in her life growing up in order to be the namesake of her novel.

Overall, I feel as if there is a lot still to be discovered by Karr’s memoir before I pass my judgment.  One thing I’m sure about is that I have never read anything like it before, and singularity and experimentation are never bad.

Blogger jailed for their internet insults toward Islam

Because of the glorious cancellation of classes due to Senior Writing Sample day, I went home late last Tuesday and stayed for the weekend, missing Computer Science on Thursday (hope that wasn’t important…….just kidding, I don’t really care).  I’m from Eastern Long Island and it’s at least a 4 hour drive so I try to take up any opportunity I have to go home since I can’t really go unless I have a substantial amount of time off, as traveling takes up half the day.  I was very much looking forward to this trip home.  My boyfriend Joe goes to RPI and he skipped some classes to come with me, much to his insistance, so that we could spend Valentine’s day together.

This is only my first year at college and I find that I have very mixed feelings about going home.  I always look forward to it, I have an amazing family and they always make a big deal about me coming home, my mom makes me any dinner I want and my little sisters make me welcome home signs.  However, since I’ve been taking trips home after spending time away, I’m beginning to realize that it’s not specifically going home that I look forward to.  Of course I like sleeping in my own bed and taking a nice shower and seeing my family, but I think I’ve been expecting to go back to the home that I left over the summer, and clearly that is impossible.  My friends have changed, some of us don’t talk anymore, my house itself has been somewhat renovated, I don’t have the same schedule and I haven’t worked since August… it’s all somewhat overwhelming.  I found this trip particularly difficult since none of my friends were home from school because I sort of created my own holiday, so it was just me and Joe passing the time.  I guess I had a lot of time to sit around and think about how different things have become in such a short time.  There are things that have changed for the better also, but I can’t help but feeling like I would have spent my last few months of what was essentially a sort of late-stage childhood differently if I had known things truly would never be the same again.

It’s odd because last year I was absolutely dying to go away to school and couldn’t wait to experience new things.  I was even looking forward to trips home, thinking that all the petty aspects of high school would be left behind and my friends and I would have a new found appreciation for each other.  However, now, after my initial departure in August, all I’ve wanted to do is go back.  And it’s not possible.  I feel trapped in a strange loophole or paradox: I appreciate my life at school but I miss the way things used to be.  I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one who feels this way and I hate to sound so Andrew Largeman from “Garden State” (even though I’m a big fan of that movie, check it out if you haven’t seen it) but I think he sums it up quite well:

“You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place. “

I love to read and be completely absorbed. For me, a good book will stay with me long after I’ve put it down, and I will be itching to return to it. It’s almost as if the scenes from a good book can run through my mind after I’ve stopped reading as if I’ve just turned off a movie, I can still see the things I’ve read and it is almost hard to believe they weren’t happening in reality. I love when a writer is able to explain something that I didn’t even know about myself. There are a few writers who can express with better accuracy than I even know possible some of my deepest desires, worries, fears, joys etc. I wonder if other people feel the same way.

I am not a person who experiences life only through books. I have a great appreciation for fiction, but I do not exist in fiction. My real life experiences enhance my appreciation for certain works, and I am not completely reliant on the accounts of other writers, I have stories of my own to tell. I think it is easy for some people to fall into the trap of relying only on stories and not seeking out their own adventures. I am determined not to allow that to happen.

My most prized possession relating to my personal passion is my old, weathered, scribbled in copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I initially borrowed it from my high school library but fell so much in love with it because of it’s aged, simple qualities, as well as all the notations I made in the margians, I lied to the librarian and told her I lost the book and payed the $4 to replace it. I never go anywhere for any extended period of time without it, because I find myself frequently flipping to one of the many passages I’ve noted for inspiration or simply because I’m craving it.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that anyone willing can enjoy it.  Everyone has to, at one point or another, read a book and thoroughly enjoyed it, not necessarily because it was profound or life changing, just a pleasant way to pass the time.

When most people think about reading, they probably dread it.  I know there are a lot of people who think they don’t have the patience to sit down and enjoy a book, but I am sure they underestimate themselves or simply haven’t found the right author/genre.

I added an avatar (or tried to) of a cropped image of me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art standing in front of a Chuck Close painting called “Mark”. It’s really an awesome piece to see in person, it looks almost computer generated but it’s all done by hand..and even though I’m sort of mocking it by sticking my finger up his nose, you should really look in Chuck Close’s work.

Hopefully, here’s the picture itself..